This morning my coworkers rode in together in a Waymo. One told me it was $16 while an Uber would have been $35.
The variable that differs is time to pickup. I've found Waymo is generally pretty good for me in off-peak times - perhaps on average 2-3 minutes further away on average. But I have got the odd "20 minutes away" and I then just order an Uber.
But I will always pick a Waymo over an Uber if they are the same distance away. I love playing my own music and just being in my own world without another human to consider. It is truly a relaxing commute.
Not to ruin your commute, do you know if there are interior-facing cameras monitoring the passengers?
It's possible, but I don't think it's something you can assume. Having to pay for a chauffeur isn't cheap, and that's what you're doing with Uber. A robotaxi avoids that cost since it drives itself.
Currently they have ~250 cars in SF, and 2,500 employees of which about 600 are engineers.
To break even I'd say they probably need at least 12,000 cars, assuming they don't hire any more engineers and the other 1,900 employees are costless. This also assumes that the cost of the Waymo is exactly the same as a regular car, which at least today, isn't even close. And that the server infrastructure is free, and that insurance is comparable. It's probably also too early to know what the maintenance cost of these systems is compared to a vanilla vehicle.
In fact, this is the way economics work for many forms of automation: you're replacing a large amount of labor time with a much smaller amount of engineering time. The engineering time is more expensive of course, but the much smaller amount more than makes up for the increased cost.