Looking forward to expand its coverage to SFO, that will be a game-changer.
Still not sure of it economics though. Its current price is on-par with Uber Comfort / a little bit over Uber X. How that can support the R&D or future capital-heavy expansion?
There you go - I would have said their operating cost is much lower. Paying the wages of the drivers for a year costs more than the car - even a car plus all those fancy LIDAR's.
Their development costs are a different story. I suspect only a company like Google could sustain it. But presumably it's one off, and if they spread it over 1 million taxi's in the USA it would only be a fraction of the revenue.
Those development costs have an upside too. It's a moat. If they pull if off they will have a monopoly. The will get away with being able to change just under the cost of a real driver for years. We may well be bitching here in a decades time at the obscene profits alphabet is making off us, and yet we have no obvious way out.
No, Cruise shared a few months ago that operating costs per mile is still higher than a car with a paid driver.
https://gmauthority.com/blog/2023/07/gms-cruise-operating-co...
If operating costs were below a human driver, they would be scaling as fast as possible to recoup the developmnent costs for the current level of tech, which have already been expended.
The page you link to says a) it (the entire operation?) is bleeding money, and b) it's operating costs are reducing, and c) quote efficiency improvements helping reduce the costs of simulation and machine learning used to test and improve AV performance.
I can't see where it explicitly says it's operating costs alone that exceed they call the magic threshold of $1/mile (which is presume is what a car + driver costs). And given they mention (c) above it seems unlikely they meant it was just operating costs.
That aside, they go onto say quote Operating costs per mile for Cruise autonomous vehicles or AVs has fallen by an average 15 percent monthly over the first half of 2023. That's an extraordinary rate for costs to fall. If indeed operating costs exceed that of a human driver it wouldn't have remained that way for long, had they continued.
I guess if it's showing enough promise to be profitable on its own (workout R&D and expansion costs), Google can probably spare a few more billions.