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Comment by mechagodzilla | Hacker News Reader

There is absolutely no way they are remotely close to being revenue positive (unless you're asking strictly if they are charging more than the gas they're burning without counting anything else). They have like 700 very expensive taxis and a burn rate measured in billions of dollars per year.

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> (unless you're asking strictly if they are charging more than the gas they're burning without counting anything else).

Yes, I assume they're asking about the operating margin. That's the number everybody cares about. If it's positive, then Waymo can theoretically become revenue positive by adding more cars and regions to their fleet.

That number needs to include car depreciation + any remote 'safety drivers' + the maintenance depot overhead + fuel and insurance + any other costs that scale with the number of cars then.

Exactly. They have revenue in the low 6 figures per vehicle annually, so they probably need to get the number of operational employees per vehicle down to around 1/10. Seems feasible, but they're probably not anywhere close to that yet.

On the other hand, HN has consistently underestimated them for the last two years or so as they've begun to commercialize. Their trajectory has been 10x growth in rides served per year for a while now. At the current scale it's hard to imagine they could grow another 10x in the next year without being close to break even on operating cost.

10x growth would be ~$1B revenue, 7000 cars. Let's assume it requires doubling head count from 2500 to 5000. That's $130K/car, $250K/employee. sounds break-even-ish.

Bird scooters operating margins are very good if you only measure specific locations on specific times of the week.

It is risky to ignore total profit and loss of the entire company

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