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Comment by sundaeofshock | Hacker News Reader

You are missing a key factor: Waymo. Tesla has to deliver a product that is at least as good as Waymo. If they can’t do that, why would a person switch to Tesla?

Waymo has a multi-year head start; that’s going to be hard to overcome without a superior experience from Tesla.

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I don't think I'm missing it. I won't rehash a bunch of my comment history on Waymo, but if Tesla can actually do this, without the costs Waymo has, it'll be quite the coup. And as others have pointed out, Tesla already has all the manufacturing in place and though I'm super doubtful they'll offer a "hire your car out" service anytime soon (or ever!) having the whole vertical offering and using fewer sensors puts them at a distinct advantage from a margin standpoint so they could conceivably offer rides at a significantly lower price than Waymo.

Obviously the "if Tesla can actually do this" is doing a lot of work here! I would not surprise me if they had a crash sooner than later and that scuttles the whole thing. But it's also possible that doesn't happen and this works. Or at least I'm not smart enough to know for sure that it won't.

Is there that substantial of a difference in hardware and manufacturing cost?

I don't know the absolute answer to that, but there's a belief, based on commenters on HN, pundits online and even (one of) the Waymo CEO's stating that the current Jaguar is north of $100,000 per vehicle (that's equipped with the sensor suite for self-driving; note I've been in threads on HN where people are guessing that the current Waymo is minimum $150k up to $200k+). I think you can get a Model Y for $50-$60k. So I think the answer is yes to the cost of the hardware and manufacturing. That's of course not the full picture on the cost side as a sibling comment points out about in-person or remote drivers.

My info is only as good as what I've read and I'm trying to present that here as well as I understand it.

At current prices, Waymo may actually be generating operating profit with the current vehicle costs and opex. Driver 6 hardware and Ioniq 5 cars will cut the vehicle costs sharply. I don't think Waymo wants to make a big deal out of this because it would be disruptive, but they are either at the point or very near to it where they can undercut human powered ride hailing.

A big cost driver is invisible, at least once Tesla gets their safety monitor out of the vehicle, which is the ratio of safety monitors to vehicles. You need three shifts of safety monitors seven days a week. It adds up. Google wouldn't be expanding if they had to hire a building full of safety monitors.

Yep, I tend to think you're right about most of this. At some point we're going to find out how much a Waymo costs and that will be super telling because we don't really know how good or bad it looks financially because the cost of the car itself is (duh) so important to figuring that out.

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