Hacker News Reader

Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

This is fascinating, obviously it makes a tonne of sense for uber as a platform to offer waymo's autonomous vehicles. The first question I had though was "who extracts value here". Does Waymo get to demand human-driver level prices and therefore capture loads of value or does Uber actually capture the value because they're where the customers are. But then I realised... it doesn't matter. Waymo is part of Alphabet, and Uber is sitting at around a $70Bn market cap, surely if this is starting to show signs of success Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber, vertically integrates, gets a great platform, great customer base, has all the customer service infra that google sucks at and they just slowly phase out the human drivers by rolling out autonomous vehicles as they're legalized in each jurisdiction.

View on HN

I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber obviously cannot spin up an org to replicate self driving vehicles in a few months. By that logic I would say Waymo has all of the power since they could develop their own app and undercut uber on pricing. The customers would instantly leave as it is a race to the bottom with ride share.

Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible.

And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing in general, and autonomous vehicles) onto an entity which is already "hated".

give me 3 good software developers and I can give you an Uber app maybe in 3-6 months? but what I can't give you is uber app being on every iPhone in the country.

No but if you're Google you can put it on literally every android phone quite quickly.

Not just that, but you can put it in front of every Google Maps user.

you can, but I am used to using uber app to call an uber.

> you can, but I am used to using uber app to call an uber.

yes, waze had 100M+ users and still failed to have a successful launch with waze carpool. part of the problem is Google is too successful. If a business makes USD 10M a year and takes up a month worth of attention every year from the Alphabet CEO, they will probably shut it down before we can say Google Product Graveyard.

When I worked at Google our team came up with a data product that would have been pure margin and $75m/yr with customers lined up -- and I couldn't find a VP interested in cashing the checks because it wasn't on their annual OKRs.

Google is a great company but it has never been truly hungry because it has never faced an existential threat.

It's not just OKRs. That $75m/year consumes attention all up and down and across Google. Lots of things that are slam dunks at a small or medium company are just more trouble than they're worth at most really large firms.

What's the product? Asking for a friend...

$75m seems like small fish, because it's a really poor monetization $/user, and opportunity cost. Thousands of ideas could generate that at Google.

Counterexample, Google Brain didn't make much money, but they still invested in it and spit out Transformers.

are you shouting "The Innovator's Dilemma"?

Hello, antitrust litigation! Before my time, but what you have just described is what got Microsoft in big trouble in the ‘90s.

Google photos? Google drive? Google Fi?

with those resources, you can give me the Uber app from 2010.

consumer expectations are much higher than 13 years ago and that's not going to cut it.

What's an example of something for consumers that Uber 2023 does a lot better than Uber 2010, if the drivers behave entirely cooperatively? (since we're talking autonomous vehicles here)

airport terminal maps and regulations for every major airport in the united states

That's a good one. I remember lots of shenanigans about putting pins next to airports & then contacting the driver to get picked up at the airport on early Uber.

Not sure this particular one would affect Waymo if they were going it alone, since their rollout to each service area would involve designation of pickup & drop off points at airports and collaboration with airports, which they'll have to do either way, but it's definitely a significant difference between Uber 2010 & 2023.

route planning / fleet management i think is a huge optimization problem. perhaps you can cut it for MVP but it would require having a big multiple of drivers to provide the same service

another big deal is gps accuracy in cities, which is a pretty non trivial problem but at this point a consumer expectation https://www.uber.com/blog/rethinking-gps/

Ahhh yep. I remember Uber 2010 unopinionatedly just setting the pin directly on whatever the reading was from GPS. Stale or inaccurate GPS readings led to so much confused communication between drivers & passengers.

If my ride-sharing app charges riders half the price, I think we’ll get quite a few riders in a short amount of time. Uber won’t be able to compete.

Uber is losing money and is frequently accused of undervaluing the deprecation and maintenance of the drivers' vehicles.

If Google was to enter a market at a loss in an effort to use its market dominance in Android to drive out a competitor that would potentially be something that would be considered anticompetitive and US regulators would likely be interested in it.

I don't believe that Google can compete with Uber losing money as it is nor that Google has an appetite for purchasing the necessary vehicles and maintaining them outside of a few test cities for a technology demo. Having driverless taxis also means that they would need to do a better job with end user support (compare the urgency of "help, I'm locked out of my email" and their current resolution time to "help, I'm locked in a car and can't get out!").

The good old “I can build that in a weekend”.

>give me 3 good software developers and I can give you an Uber app maybe in 3-6 months

LOLOLOL

It's not like Waymo/Uber can roll in with autonomous taxis in every city just because Uber figured out the local regulation - many cities would have explicit regulation for anything driverless. I think it's the later point - they want to stay in the shadows until they are super confident. I wonder what will happen to Uber eventually though.

It'll be interesting if Cruise ends up partnering with/acquiring Lyft. Although Cruise seem to be still betting on their Origin vehicle.

> Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits

Is experience doing this with human drivers all that helpful for building a driverless service? I'd expect the legal and regulatory questions would be very different?

Don’t forget regulatory pressure of buying Uber. That might not be approved.

> Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible.

This is nonsense. Google has more than enough legal resources to handle this. So much so that it would be nothing more than a regular 3-6 month project that would be assigned a small team of lawyers inside their org. It's no different than any other regionally-regulated product launch at large companies.

Not only that but Google has enough money that they could just hire away some folks that work at Uber/Lyft to get a huge jumpstart on any such project. Even if they didn't need such expertise they'd probably still recruit and hire those people just to be safe; to get the perspective of people with experience.

Big companies have big legal organizations and they don't actually operate that differently from the IT orgs that so many of us on HN are used to. For example, they would probably divide up the task on state-by-state basis with lawyers certified to practice law in each respective state assigned as SMEs or to-be-SMEs. They would do their research and for bigger states they might even have county-level SME lawyers or at the very least paralegals that focus on that particular region. Big cities would probably be assigned their own teams of SME lawyers as well.

It's like any given complex programming task: Divide and conquer. Rolling out a new highly-regulated product across a large region is a highly parallelizeable procedure.

> Big companies have big legal organizations and they don't actually operate that differently from the IT orgs that so many of us on HN are used to.

Well, if you are referring to IT organizations in firms in the tech industry where that’s the core business (i.e., a value center) you are wrong, they are run more like IT orgs in non-tech firms (cost centers), vigorously minimized to be a bit smaller than they should be to handle routine day-to-day needs effectively, with new, emergent, and non-routine work outsourced.

Sure, technically that's correct. But it's google we're talking about. The company with a tremendous list of failures that should have been easy slam dunks.

Google has tons of legal resources for their current business. But that doesn’t mean they can spin up the legal docs and relationships needed to run an Uber-like business at the drop of a hat. The type of risk that Google’s lawyers are used to mitigating are simply not the same, and their lawyers are for the most part not the type of lawyers that you’d want to set up a transportation company with international operations. There are some relevant lawyers there, but the vast majority are specialized in software/cloud, not wheels-on-the-ground.

Of course, it would be easier to put together the necessary legal structure now that Uber and Lyft have already both done so. It’s easier to be a follower than a leader. But it would still be much harder for Google than building a mobile app like Uber, which would be right up Google’s alley.

Google's missing piece isn't the app.

And it isn't the lawyers.

It's the network of riders.

Waymo promised to 10x their scale this year.

Waymo could saturate the territory with empty vehicles waiting for riders on the Waymo app, or it can tap into a fraction of Uber's volume.

As others have pointed out, Google could scoop up tons of riders in a heartbeat, by announcing a ride share platform publicly (which would get tons of news coverage) and by advertising the feature within Google Maps, Waze, etc.

Google only needs to put together a one-sided marketplace, where Uber/Lyft had to build a two-sided marketplace. And Google already has a connection to billions (at least hundreds of millions) of potential riders.

It would also need to invest in the vehicles and the technology and the maintenance and the garage to store them in and pay the insurance on the vehicles.

All this to try to compete with Uber (which isn't profitable) in a few areas where the legal, political and climate ("we have cars in Chicago but they only run from March 1st to November 1st") options are favorable.

The marketplace is not the biggest issue that Google would need to overcome.

Imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth if Google started advertising its own taxi service on Google Maps.

FWIW I just checked that I can book a Lyft directly from the Google Maps app.

the hype of driverless taxis will explode a new app's customer base immediately. no need to tap in into the existing ecosystem.

I don’t think people’s brand loyalty for Uber is very high these days, is it?

I don't know a lot of people who love Uber, but I know a lot of people who are only ever going to use one ride sharing app. If Waymo's app is limited to a 180 sq. mile territory and only half of their trips are in that territory, they won't bother. The first time the Waymo app tells them they're going outside their territory, it will be back to Uber forever.

I may have an unusually lazy social circle.

> This is nonsense. Google has more than enough legal resources to handle this.

I don't think this is even close to correct. Lawyers were hit especially hard in the January layoffs, way more than 6%, and many teams lost their dedicated lawyers entirely (e.g. my team had one lawyer laid off and the other was reassigned to a basket of products instead of just our own).

Google has enough resources to in theory thrive in any business they attempt. Yet, they fail in so many businesses they attempt to get into. https://killedbygoogle.com/

To be fair, most companies don't even bother trying.

At least we got FOSS chromium + FOSS android.

That said, things like Google Play Music -> Youtube Music was poorly handled and has permanently shook me. Have been leaving Google since.

Evidence suggests that none of this is true. Just look at how Google Fiber wasn't able to navigate the myriad regional regulatory roadblocks thrown up by local governments when lobbied by incumbent ISPs. It's reasonable to expect exactly the same scenario to play out if Google tries to make a competitive ride sharing service from scratch.

That's a pretty good example. But in the case of Fiber, part of the problem was that other ISPs own/control infrastructure (like poles) to which they're legally obligated to give competitors access...and they would just not comply, or drag their feet on it. Fiber physically couldn't execute because of this. Of course there was corruption involved, as you pointed out, but in the case of ride share apps I can't immediately think of anything analogous, where Uber could physically prevent Waymo from competing with them.

> figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore!

Hm. This is like --

It's not 1066 any more, there are property rights now.

The original regulatory capture.

Step 1: Ignore the law; establish a fait accompli.

Step 2: Sanctify the new status quo.

Sad for a rule-follower to figure out that this is how things work.

On the other hand, I guess rule-following is low risk. For each William the Conqueror there were thousands of warriors who just got killed on the battlefield. And I'm sure the guy had to work really hard, you know, like nights and weekends.

It’s not trivial at all. Do you work in the space at all?

Black Wolf [0] has been all over the news lately, and seems to be doing this.

[0] https://blackwolfapp.com/

Realistically though they don’t have to figure out the legal problems immediately, they could and likely would start in their own backyards and expand from there

>figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits

But this will be different for robots though. This is not a moat for Uber.

> Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits

They could follow Uber's startup model: ignore/break laws and provide false information to regulators.

> Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial.

Nonsense

It would be a huge job. Even for Google

> Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial.

as someone who has worked at Uber, this is a gross misstatement. It takes a lot to run Uber, far less even to run it at scale globally and with viable unit economics

... and as soon as it started losing money Google could cancel it (Uber has never made a profit - https://fourweekmba.com/is-uber-profitable/ ).

... and the government would (again) look into Google using anticompetitive tools to expand its market reach and stifle other companies in the area.

... having a "use Google/Waymo ride hailing" only in a few cities would lose a significant part of the network effect that Uber has (you can likely use Uber in any city - not just a limited few).

Yes, Google can copy Uber, but can they make it successful? Uber has a lot of users and drivers, and Google has to convince them to use their app instead of Uber or one of the other existing apps in this space.

Getting into a new market didn’t work for videos so they bought YouTube, it didn’t work for their social network, and it didn’t work for a ton of other cancelled projects.

Replicating Uber is hard because it's a 2 sided market - you need to convince both users and drivers to sign up and neither will if the other isn't there already. But that's not a problem for Waymo because they control the driving side. They simply need to get users to sign up.

When you have something unique and useful, people will sign up.

There are no drivers in self driving cars

I think you're underplaying the difficulty of what Uber has built. Uber is an operations-heavy business. Determining pricing strategies, handling incidents, and working with local governments is at the core of its service. Google has traditionally shied away from businesses that require big operational investments in real-world assets the way that, say, Amazon or Airbnb have. These take time to build properly, and is a big piece of the puzzle that I can't see Waymo wanting to take on. It makes sense for them to want to partner, especially now that Uber has spun out Aurora.

Waymo already has to deal with local governments.

Yes, in a couple of small geographies where the local governments have been particularly accommodating.

Can't you see why Google may not want to do this for dozens of places and handle customer service for rideshare, etc, at scale?

> Waymo already has to deal with local governments.

Which is one reason they want to tream up with Uber. They know how hard it is

The power of Uber doesn't lie in it's app, Google famously has been forever trying to have a chat app and we all know how many times it's failed. Then comes Google+, Google's attempt to get into social networking. Unless Google came up with something novel or something different from incumbents it never ever succeeded. Any SWE worth his salt can build a ride booking app in a month or two, but the traction and confidence in using that app both by riders and drivers is what drives its success.

> The power of Uber doesn't lie in it's app

I'm not sure what else Uber could possibly have. Name recognition? More people know Google than Uber. Install base? More people have Android phones than have the Uber app. Drivers? Uber is trying to eliminate its drivers, as this deal shows. Uber is defenseless against Google.

Name recognition and installed user base in a 2-sided marketplace. That's huuuge.

Google owns the action "to google something". Uber owns the action to "get an Uber".

Also, don't underestimate the value of a working business. Google has only ever been successful with a search engine and an ad platform. They've never been success in a consumer product/service. I don't think their corporate structure and business culture makes them likely to succeed in B2C.

Uber has it's flaws, but they've been very reliable as a consumer. And have responsive and helpful support. Imagine having to rely on Google to provide support to a stranded user or resolve a dispute.

The idea is to make it a 1-sided marketplace. Uber's entire business model is focused around squeezing vendors - now they think they can squeeze Google if Google becomes their vendor instead of a bunch of independent contractors who are legally inhibited from collective bargaining? Uber has no idea how to be successful when the seller side of their marketplace is organized and plays hardball at the negotiating table.

The car companies will do everything to prevent Google from having that monopoly. E.g. Google could be forced to license their software. Then, Uber gets their 2-sided marketplace back.

The 1-sided marketplace is a good point.

Tesla and Waymo are arguably pretty close in self-driving technology, so there's already another player. Uber could just buy a bunch of Tesla's once their tech is good enough for autonomous driving.

> Tesla and Waymo are arguably pretty close

No they aren't. The latest FSD betas have been widely panned.

And the lack of LiDAR sensors means Tesla still fails to accurately define the bounding boxes for scene objects.

If they kept GTalk they would have a chat app.

> I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year.

Like how they can "just spin up" a messaging app?

Building companies and customer bases is really, really hard. Microsoft tried like three times to build a Github competitor. They still have at least one of those attempts (Azure DevOps). They still bought Github. An interesting product technically, sure, but: its where the people are at. It was worth it.

Spinning up a messaging app without a compelling differentiation is hard. It's much easier with a compelling differentiation. Waymo could just set prices at half of Uber and boom instant market share.

Instant market share if they're willing to lose 2x the money that Uber is losing. It's not like drivers are going to be falling over themselves to sign up if it's a 50% paycut.

Waymo is about driverless cars aka robotaxis

Using Google's dominance to expand into other sectors (at a loss) is a perfect example of anticompetitive practices that regulators would likely take a keen interest in investigating.

Using robots to cut costs and thus prices is not anticompetitive.

Using Android's market share to push or encourage the use of a Waymo robot taxi booking application that is in competition with Uber and Lyft might be seen as anticompetitive.

Other comments elsewhere are "No but if you're Google you can put it on literally every android phone quite quickly." and "All Google would need to do is push a notification to every Android phone that has Google Maps (so, all of them) that says "book your next trip through Google maps and the first ten rides are free!" and they're in business."

That sort of approach would very likely be examined by regulators.

Followed by a slap on the wrist of a fine? How many tens of millions of dollars do you think the TAM of NYC taxi service is, vs a single digit million dollar fine from regulators?

Most days, fines are just the cost of doing business. They cut into your profits, sure, but as long as profits >> fine, just pay the fine and keep doing it.

You're pretty wrong. No organization can just spin up large international companies. I don't know where you'd get such an idea from. Even the technical parts of Uber alone would take years to replicate. The app frontend? Sure, with manpower you can get that out in a few months. The backend, supporting infra, legal systems, customer support, relationships with users, restaurants, etc? Years to decades. Google could never do it, they are too big to move fast. Think, when is the last time Google successfully launched a project of even a fraction of the scale of Uber?

Trivial compared with getting regulatory approval for self-driving, with which it has a lot of overlap.

Obligatory: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

The customer network is the hardest thing to replicate

There's no network effect from having the Uber app. All Google would need to do is push a notification to every Android phone that has Google Maps (so, all of them) that says "book your next trip through Google maps and the first ten rides are free!" and they're in business.

I mean, I use mostly Lyft in the US. And if there were another app or two that had a reputation for being cheaper or better service even if they didn't service everywhere, I'd be installing that in a minute. Brand has some value and I don't want to be installing one or more apps for every city I visit. But it mostly works when someone is as good or better for most purposes.

That would be an anti trust problem.

> I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year.

The app, sure. But Uber also has the aggression necessary to expand across the world and bulldoze/ignore/skirt/rewrite local taxi laws fairly successfully.

There is no way waymo/alphabet would manage that. They'd nicely ask permission, and in most cities permission would be denied by incumbent taxi operators and uber drivers who don't want their jobs taken.

Uber had to fight tooth and nail to get permission in numerous countries - Alphabet will not want that battle. Add to that battle they suddenly want to be autonomous too and they will really struggle rolling out. Also, would you trust an Alphabet Uber? It'd be torn down within a year like usual, based on precedent - looks at Stadia controller annoyed.

Uber is not just the app and the APIs. It's a more complex operation than that. It's like saying Google is a web scraper.

They tried this in Israel with RideWith, renamed Waze Rider; shut down in 2022.

That's what they thought about Google Video, but then Google decided to buy Youtube. Technical advantage (which Google has in strides) does not always translate to business advantage (which Uber has done remarkably well for itself).

I think you’re right here. You can recreate the technical aspects of YouTube relatively easily. You can’t recreate the brand.

Just because it’s big doesn’t mean Google will inevitably succeed. Look at Google+, Allo, Duo etc etc. to my mind there’s no guarantee a Google rideshare app would capture mindshare.

YT was relatively cheap and much stronger network effects. Uber does not.

Google is so much more integrated in to people's lives than 15+ years ago. Google Maps + Waymo or "Google Taxi" would have millions of customers immediately.

What Google did to Yelp is what might happen to Uber. I think the main point thing stopping is what others have pointed out. Is it worth the reputation? Instead of running their own service just take a nice cut from Uber and let them deal with bad headlines. Especially when the headlines will read Uber "fires" poor single parent uber drivers in favor of robot cars.

Y'all are talking as if the Waymo app doesn't already exist. https://waymo.com/waymo-one/

> I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app

Google has already done this. Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving customers already in Phoenix, AZ. Completely driverless - nobody but the passenger in the car.

The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor. It's why Uber sold its own self driving division and it's something Cruise has said in the past still needs to be figured out.

Uber has pivoted to doing partnerships with any self driving player that is looking for a customer base. Waymo doesn't have the tech nor the desire to figure out logistics to compete with Motional or Cartken in the delivery space, for example. None of these players can instantaneously ramp up to millions of vehicles on the road; they physically don't have enough hardware and the age of money burning for growth at all costs is behind us. I can't imagine Waymo has bigger utilization than Bolt, or even Alto.

The way I see it, Uber is more like McDonalds: "easy" to copy from conceptual perspective but also a globally recognizable brand with an undeniably strong customer acquisition arm.

Waymo still has a lot to prove to themselves in terms of ROI. Customer acquisition would be even more expenses on top of the already expensive tech, partnering with Uber to offload these costs to a proven customer acquisition player makes sense for them.

> The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor. It's why Uber sold its own self driving division and it's something Cruise has said in the past still needs to be figured out.

Uber sold their self driving division because they killed someone in Arizona due to negligence. And then Anthony Lewandowski happened. Those two incidents complete deflated Uber's hopes to have autonomous vehicle technology. I'm pretty sure they would still be pursuing self driving if not for those incidents.

I think the more likely here is that Uber sold self-driving group (alongside other "big bets" like flying taxi research group) because of existential threat to the business during the start of COVID-19 which made them focusing on the main business (+eats) and sell parts that have no profitability in sight.

That's exactly right. Uber self driving was burning through the tune of billions of dollars a year when covid reduced revenue by the tune of 70%. Not exactly sustainable w/ only a few billion dollars of cash on hand.

As terrible as a pedestrian death is, the reality is there's news about Tesla accidents and near-accidents on the news all the time and people still love the brand. Sometimes it's easy to forget that Uber/Amazon/M$/etc hating is not as widespread in the general population as it is among tech bros.

As for Otto, my understanding is Uber pivoted similarly on the freight side, with a partnership w/ Volvo Autonomous Solutions.

Did they even lose a civil suit for killing that person? They were not punished.

The self-driving division was done to attract investment because investors thought it sounded cool. It would have been bad for Uber's business to have them - Uber relies on not owning cars, which moves all the maintenance to the driver-owners. If you own a self-driving car you still have to maintain it.

> The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor.

They also don’t work. At least not by any sane definition. Sure, if you’ve mapped the area in advance, nothing changed,the weather is nice and nothing unusual happens all might be okay but otherwise it’s a shitshow.

Human drivers are cheaper and more versatile. There is no point in this other than trying to persuade the markets Google hasn’t spanked millions on a dead end.

I wouldn't even get in a self driving taxi if it was free because of how cheap human drivers are. For me, to use a self driving taxi it would have to be so safe that we would be moving towards banning human driving anyway.

Otherwise, it is about as bad of a risk to reward bet as I can think of compared to human drivers.

If no one steps up to challenge Waymo in this space in a reasonable timeframe, Waymo wins. If they do, Uber wins.

Uber's play is as a platform. They win if there are several SDC providers (with working autonomy). As an analogy, they're Android; they want to own the network and have multiple operators plug into the Uber app, while the hardware makers don't want to do the work to spin up an expensive 2-way marketplace. Waymo is playing at the iPhone game. They want to be the biggest market operator, and can get away with not owning the top of the funnel for the time being. If other operators fall far behind in progress, Waymo will spin up the investment to vertically integrate and try to siphon Uber customers off that way.

What does it mean for a SDC platform to "win"? They either drive safely or they don't.

We're setting up for the biggest "winner take all" product-market fit in history.

Besides, ~99.9% of people won't have the expertise to make an informed decision on which provider to use (if they even have a choice).

The only losing scenario is if one is particularly bad, leading to a ton of regulation (like a FAA for SDCs).

The game theory isn't really winner take all. In a two-sided market like Uber (drivers and passengers) it's nearly impossible to bootstrap competition, but with autonomous fleets it's just a matter of capital. You can dump 100 vehicles into a market and be a local player pretty quickly, and the between-city efficiencies aren't super important.

Developing the tech is getting cheaper too (sensing hardware improvements, ML improvements) so the first-mover advantage likely won't lead to stable moats. Competition will be more like Apple/Android where constant improvement (probably on cost) is necessary to maintain a lead.

If another company solves self driving after Waymo, they can still enter the market. I would usually give new, cheaper competitors a try. Who wouldn't?

Uber is kind of an exception, i don't use their services because i consider them scum.

> I would usually give new, cheaper competitors a try. Who wouldn't?

Just want to point out that the failure case of self driving (if this product fails I crash into another car while going 80 mph) makes the race to the bottom slightly less plausible.

Alphabet has a large stake in Uber. They don’t need to own it outright to realize huge returns.

Sure, but there's massive advantages to bringing it in house. The only reason I could see for them not doing it is that as autonomous vehicles are deployed widely there's going to be a massive backlash from current uber drivers and strategically it might be good for Alphabet to be able to use Uber as a heat shield.

Uber have always wanting to go autonomous cars. They poured a lot of money to try to develop them in-house and I think that they were too optimistic on how easy and quick that would be.

But if/when fully autonomous vehicles become a reality they will shed their drivers, same as everyone else.

How much of Uber does Alphabet own? They do not show up in the top 10 list here, so presumably 1% at most?

https://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=UBER

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/uber/holders/

Seems like pocket change compared to Alphabet’s other investments.

According to this they own part of it:

https://www.gv.com/portfolio

That is not surprising, or in question. The claim I am questioning is:

> Alphabet has a large stake in Uber.

Since Uber is a publicly listed company, its top owners are public information. Which show Alphabet to not have a significant portion of ownership in Uber.

I think google offloaded most of that stake when Uber went public

They owned 5% from 2013 to at least 2019: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/11/alphabet-uber-investment-sta...

I think they sold it in 2019 when their lockup expired, but I can only find "they're thinking of doing it" news (https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/ceo-david-krane-suggests-g...) and not an announcement.

I just want to chime in to say that it is ridiculous that such information is not so easy to come by. Billion-dollar corporations should not be allowed to keep their external investments so opaque! Especially businesses that are publicly-traded.

Also: I don't give a damn if the business isn't publicly traded either. If they're that big they have enough influence over any given market that the public should have the right to know what they're up to.

> Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber

Please no. We don’t need the ultimate “startup that was unprofitable and never could be profitable that was just trying to get bought by big tech” example to fuel more nonsense.

Does Waymo get to demand human-driver level prices and therefore capture loads of value

I'm pretty sure the Waymo Driver costs more than a human driver at this point. Obviously they want to make it cheaper eventually but who knows when that will happen.

This is an R&D cost thing and the right analogy is to the telephone operator. It obviously cost a lot more to build even the first electromechanical last mile exchanges (with Strowager / SXS switches) than to hire some young women to work as operators, let alone to design something like System X (a computerised telephone exchange used in most of the UK from the 1980s) but you don't have to keep paying for the R&D on an ongoing basis. The girls married, or got less boring jobs, or just left work, each time you must recruit and train replacements - but you design System X once and use it for forty years no problem.

There are still System X exchanges in the UK to this day, it works fine, so why not. Eventually as copper last miles are discontinued these exchanges will be virtualised, and in some sense System X is then banished to museums like the Strowager electro-mechanical systems I saw as a child.

No, I think the BOM cost of Waymo is higher.

By public accounts, the total hardware costs for one SDC is around $300k. If you amortize that over a 5 year lifespan & 50 rides a day, you get $3.28 of variable costs per ride.

$3.28 variable cost per ride is less than what Uber is paying its drivers (median pay is ~$10.88 per ride). I imagine it nets out significantly in SDC's favor after adding back in cost of gas, insurance, and maintenance. And, the $300k should decrease over time.

An SDC has many of the same operational costs (and maybe more) than a human-driven car. (Also garaging, cleaning, etc. As well as the support staff if a car gets in trouble somehow.) You can admittedly assume electric and assume operational costs may be lower than say a Prius today. But I don't consider it a given that a company which purchases and operates an SDC fleet from Waymo can operate profitably while undercutting rideshare as it exists today.

Consumer reports puts the cost per mile at $0.49 for a Prius ( https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/advice/best-cars-blog/20... ).

That includes electrical and maintenance. That's still less than a regular car, but it's still a larger number than most people consider.

It would be possible to say its less, though I'd tend to suggest it would be more than the Prius since there's no human custodian of the car to handle the "pull over, I've gotta puke" situations which can add unexpected expenses.

There's also things like fines when the car doesn't observe the laws (who gets the ticket if it causes a traffic jam, cuts off a bus, running over a fire hose, or fails to give way to a pedestrian in a crosswalk - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2018/03/29/first-a... https://sfist.com/2023/01/31/sf-regulators-have-had-it-with-... )

>surely if this is starting to show signs of success Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber

It's too late for that. The regulatory pendulum for mergers like this is swinging the other way. The public was indifferent to big tech gobbling up the competition when times were good. Now that money costs money again, people with normal (i.e., not overpaid tech) salaries are feeling the squeeze, which means politicians need a cause that makes their voters feel like they're fighting for them. The giants must be punished.

Uber is a very different market player. Waymo only does autonomous car rides. People pick one over the other for a variety of reasons. It’s why local taxi dispatches are still in business. It would be ignorance to think they are the same.

Uber opened up people to the freedom of going anywhere and getting a taxi. This took market from a lot of players. But there was always a market it could not take.

Waymo will have to do the same. Carve out a specific market share for itself, from a lot of transportation options.

To me, the HTR (hard to replicate) tech is FSD. Google could bang out a ride booking app in a weekend.

Or multiple on various places. Google Rides, Google Play Hail, Youtube Taxi and so on...

And a betting platform about shutdown order?

Seems like but then why the interest from Waymo in an Uber partnership? They already have the Waymo One app. I think it’s because getting users to switch or use multiple apps proves difficult.

Just like Google can bang out a messaging app in a weekend?

They have been. A new one every weekend.

>Google could bang out a ride booking app in a weekend.

Google's culture isn't really built around providing human support to users. I believe there is also lots of onboarding involved for restaurants so Google may struggle there.

With that said, I am constantly hit up by outsourced Google reps for Adwords + Firebase but I think the average customer has a much higher transaction volume with much better margins than a restaurant would.

To be fair, I don't think Uber has a lot of human to customer interaction either.

Maybe not, but a human at Uber responded within 15 minutes when a ride I had booked drove away from me just before pickup. They canceled the original booking with no fee, then sent another car to pick me up and gave me some Uber credits.

That's 1000% better customer service than I'd ever expect from big G. Google would probably charge me a cancellation fee for not taking the trip, shut down my account for having the temerity to complain I'd been stranded, and then followed up with automated email confirming they made the right decision after review.

According to Linkedin 54% of Uber employees (48,000) are in operations roles.[0]

I suppose some of these could be drivers, but I believe Uber's biggest department is operations, which is one of the reasons it's so expensive to enter new markets. Can't scale operations in the same way you can scale development.

Google would have to do something similar to launch their own ride-share app powered by Waymo, so could make sense to just keep Uber in the middle.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/uber-com/insights/

Yes they do. especially in the delivery area they need tons of ops people to deal with the restaurants.

Agreed. I’m not sure an acquisition makes sense for Waymo/Alphabet. Operating a robotaxi is technologically quite different from an Uber vehicle — mapping is different, routing is different, customer service is different (a Waymo is stuck and needs remote assistance), maintenance is different (charging, cleaning in depots). Uber’s platform wouldn’t help with any of that.

This seems like a play to attract users from the most popular ridehail platform and eventually funnel them to the Waymo app. I don’t believe users are loyal to ridehail apps like they are to social networks (I don’t use Uber because my friends use it) and would jump to a service that is cost competitive and autonomous. Or, as I said another comment, maybe they are setting the stage to be just a technology provider to ridehail companies and let them deal with all the operational overhead.

They couldn't bang out a social network over the last decade(s), I hardly believe they could bang out anything than keep extracting more money from the dying ad industry

They can and have (Google Plus) but just scrapped it straight after in typical Google style.

Very different. Social networks value derives from network effect - every additional user adds additional value to the ecosystem. Google simply started too late.

Taxis compete on price, safety, quality of service. Virtually all of this value derives from the quality of the FSD implementation. Of course, this will extend to all forms of road transportation eventually. It is going to very much be a winner takes all situation for a number of years (perhaps a decade). The next phase will be a period of high fragmentation as the technology becomes commoditized and a race to the bottom will ensue. The final phase will be consolidation with a few players being best at execution, cost control and finance operations.

Or put it in Google Maps if they had any sense. They should know when to recommend ride hailing with high accuracy to those who enable location history, and they can skip the clunky app switching that other ride hailing services require.

> has all the customer service infra

Have you used Uber? It's impossible to speak to someone

> The first question I had though was "who extracts value here".

Uber can't be profitable without autonomous vehicles, so the answer IMHO here is simple.

For Alphabet, the answer is similarly simple - they'll partner with literally anyone to get distribution.

Just because uber is not profitable with human drivers doesn't mean it'll be the opposite without them.

This is a win-win for Google.

If the self-driving and/or roll-out is a disaster - blame Uber.

Uber has a terrible reputation. I don't think too many people will think twice about Uber taking the blame.

You say the answer is simple, but I can't tell what your answer is.

The first half of your comment implies that Uber has a really bad negotiating position, so Waymo must be extracting most of the value.

The second half says that Alphabet (the majority owner of Waymo) will "partner with literally anyone" which would presumably mean Uber is extracting most of the value.

So which is it?

No contradiction.

The second half said that Alphabet had choices on who to partner with, so they could play them against each other, so Waymo had the upper hand in negotiations.

Got it. Maybe I was reading too much into the tone. I read "they'll partner with literally anyone to get distribution" as them being desperate to get distribution and therefore willing to take a bad deal.

They also can't be profitable with autonomous vehicles either.

> Uber can't be profitable without autonomous vehicles, so the answer IMHO here is simple.

says who?

They can be and very soon will be. Just look at their financials.

For me the question is who is liable in an accident

This is America. When a "self driving" car kills someone, we blame the someone for daring to not pay due respect to the magic machine. They shouldn't have crossed the road in the dark! They should have been more visible! They should have been in their own big self driving box!

If it's the fault of the car, it has to be Waymo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com