Comment by harmmonica | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harmmonica | Hacker News Reader

Just trying to back into the economics...

A ride takes 15 minutes. Costs $20. 15 minutes, on average, of downtime between rides (late-night offsets shorter during day/evening)? So $20 per 30 minutes. 24 hours in a day. 48 rides per day. $960 per car per day. Holidays/weekends probably fewer riders so say 300 days per year to keep it conservative. $288,000 revenue per year. Car costs $150,000 per year (costs are going to drop dramatically as they scale up, I would think. And I'm assuming that after driving 300,000 or so miles per year that the car will be cooked, but that's probably overly conservative). Still, though, good gross margin (or at least the margin on the vehicle cost alone; maintenance is going to cost something but tires and a few other things are not going to be material relative to the cost of the car itself). Note that a quick Google (eh) search shows Google overall gross margin of 58% so this wouldn't be too far off of that. That is to say, pedal to the metal on the roll out if these numbers are even marginally accurate.

Please pick apart at your leisure. I'm most interested in knowing the truth, but just thinking through this and how it might look internally at Waymo/Google. If anyone has actual numbers (maybe they talked about on earnings call?) would love to hear them.

The issue is fleet utilisation, the fleet is not going to be fully utilised at night and will be capped out during rush hour. Compared to rush hour, daytime usage is about 50% of peak and it falls to below 10% or lower at nights[1]. There was an article or blog looking at what happened if Uber replaced all their drivers with robotaxis a few years ago, couldn't find it though, but conclusion seemed to think going asset heavy an owning cars/parking would be the same or worse than paying drivers more but drivers owning their cars

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/ehicle-use-by-time-of-da...

> Holidays/weekends probably fewer riders

I'm not convinced that's true, esp since Covid and WFH. Since they only travel within SF/LA/Phoenix, it doesn't follow typical suburban commuter patterns, nor totally Uber/Lyft ride patterns either since they can (currently) travel further.

What do you mean by the car costs $150,000 a year? The price of the Waymo is approximately 250,000 for each car, so if you’re trying to amortize that over 10 years, it would probably be closer to $25,000 a year.

Amortized over 1 year. Was trying to be super conservative. Zero chance a Waymo lasts 10 years. I mean maybe you could say the body will last 10 years, but would imagine quite a bit of the car, over the course of 300k miles driven, would need to be replaced? Not too many cars on the road with over 300k miles.

But still your point stands that maybe that $150k car cost would be spread out over a longer time frame, which makes the economics much better. Like I said was trying to be conservative.

As for the $250k price point, when I search for that most pundits think that figure is several years old and may have been overly high to begin with, but if it's true at $250k then obviously a lot of margin pressure there. Still think it's likely the car cost will drop precipitously and the $150k figure won't be far off.

How do you price engineering samples for an iPhone, Tesla Model 3, or a Chromebook, or an Xbox, or anything else? The $250k number includes a lot of custom engineering work amortized over a relatively small number, since, the build hasn't been mass productionized and they're not pumping out thousands of cars per week.

Hey, not sure I fully understand your question, but are you talking about the initial capital costs to get to a fully "productized" self-driving car? I would leave those out of the unit economics because (I think) those get treated differently financially/accounting-wise and also are not really representative of whether the future business is sustainable (it's more about whether the initial investors get the proper return on their investment).

Might not be addressing your question with that, but I think that's what you're asking. And I think you're assuming the opposite of me which is that they haven't yet productized their offering, but I think they actually have at this point. I definitely could be wrong about that. Just an opinion.

my point was that using $250k as the cost of the fully loaded waymo car, and then doing math based on that, is basing the math on what is essentiallu a made up number.

The last info from early 2021 is that it costs no more than a moderately-equipped Mercedes S-Class (so around $150k?). Good chance that the next car will be under $100k and $50k is possible in the long term.

The cars were estimated to cost 150k, based on information that's now a few years out of date. Given that they've had time to push down the costs I wouldn't be surprised if it's significantly less now. (Probably still over 100k since the Jaguars are not cheap vehicles.)

Car costs considerably more than your 150k figure. Probably by something like 2-3x

Like I said in another reply, there seems to be a good bit of debate about whether that cost, which was cited several years ago, is still accurate (or ever was).

That said if it is then 2x would drop the margin in half. Still a healthy margin and I do wonder what the Geely car cost will be. Note when I say "car" I mean everything for the car to drive itself, which is the car, the sensor suite, etc. I did not figure on the operational staffing as another comment pointed out.

edit: changed thread to reply in first sentence

The best source for the price is what the ex-CEO said in January 2021:

> Let me paraphrase it like this: If we equip a Chrysler Pacifica Van or a Jaguar I-Pace with our sensors and computers, it costs no more than a moderately equipped Mercedes S-Class. So for the entire package, including the car - today,

So I think the $150k is a good estimate.

Why would they pay retail for the car once it’s past the prototype stage.

They’d just make their own like zoox.

And how many people in operations center at what salaries?

Great point. I wonder how many people (i.e., what fraction of a person?) are required per trip.

watch that live stream of the depot to hey a feel for how few people it takes on the ground. And because customer support isn't remote driving the vehicles, but merely aiding the classifier, they don't need to be somewhere close enough that latency is totally minimized (aka cheaper than the Bay Area or an expensive part of socal).

Of course, however, your can't forget about the literally billions of dollars and decades of time that were plowed into R&D for them to get this far. All that wants to be recouped at some point.

Per one of their engineers it's probably in the ballpark of one intervention per 50 trips: https://x.com/brianwilt/status/1850667523781562534

But also, each intervention only makes up a fraction of the trip's duration. So one operator might be enough for hundreds of cars. That doesn't include operators for cleaning, charging, maintenance, and other downtime activities though.

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