Bringing fully autonomous rides to Nashville, in partnership with Lyft
waymo.com
waymo.com
"Use the Waymo app instead, save 10%, and get a guaranteed Waymo!"
It's a way for Waymo to prepare to turn on the spigot, too, if they dump a bunch more cars into the market.
It's important for Waymo to do all 3: show they can run the service themselves in a market, and work with both Uber and Lyft, to be able to get fair terms and the option to expand rapidly.
> Or is the idea that Waymo becomes a hardware provider and uber / lyft become operators?
This is one natural way that things may shake out and a natural path to scale. But Waymo needs to have a fallback plan of A) other parties to work with, or B) just doing it themselves to get a good deal with Uber/Lyft in the long term.
Uber/Lyft would like Waymo to not the the sole provider of autonomous technology and to work with them; they can expect to receive rides at just a bit above marginal cost in that case.
Ha! Lyft doesn't own much of its fleet! There's a small fraction of vehicles that lyft rents through Flexdrive.
Just like Tesla Self self-driving, Waymo can ask people, if they want to offset related capital costs, to buy cars and rent them to Waymo to be reconfigured and run as autonomous vehicles on profit profit-sharing basis.
That is why vertically integrated businesses can peel away business from existing non vertically integrated businesses with lower prices (legal liability notwithstanding). Sometimes it pays to have the business with more to lose insulated from liability by having a layer without much to lose.
Feels very unlikely. I think they will need to bring car cost down to hit break even.
I suppose another wrinkle is that driverlessness isn't only a cost saving (aspirational or real), it's also a positive attraction eg. for anyone who worries about their safety with a rando taxi driver or Uber guy. There are also cost savings achievable by timeshifting antisocial-hours work to elsewhere in the world, though presumably a significant part of the savings will be simply be the result of outsourcing to lower-wage countries.
Although not, as far as I've been able to find, videos that actually show the control center. Just semi-animated videos of the advising process. The number of customer support people per vehicle is not disclosed.
Employee stats are available.[1] Unclear how accurate they are. According to Unify, Waymo has 2,406 employees. Headcount is up only 6.6% since last year, even though the number of vehicles deployed has reportedly tripled. So they seem to have a big fixed labor cost in engineering, and but a low variable cost per car. Which means this scales well and becomes profitable.
If the ratio of remote operators to vehicles is 1:10, and the fleet size is 2500, that's 1000 FTEs. That's more than 5X the headcount growth.
If all of the headcount growth goes to remote operations, it would be one seat for 50 vehicles. I'd guess it's more like one to 100.
That fits with the relative rarity of seeing Waymos stopped waiting for instructions.
One remote assistant per 50 or 100 vehicles would also seem to put Waymo now far ahead of where Cruise was in 2023, when according to the NYT's sources Cruise's remote assistance staff "intervened to assist the vehicles every two and a half to five miles", though I suppose it's not especially hard to believe that 2025 Waymo is beating 2023 Cruise handily.
> it's also a positive attraction eg. for anyone who worries about their safety with a rando taxi driver or Uber guy
Yes, this is the main reason to like it. I've had too many experiences with an Uber driver nearly falling asleep while transporting me.
> though presumably a significant part of the savings will be simply be the result of outsourcing to lower-wage countries.
Given how many Uber drivers are immigrants already, this is already happening if Waymo employs call center employees from the Philippines or not.
The 'few months' bit doesn't seem quite right - the cost to get a human to drive a car would maybe be $50k per year, so i'm not sure how a $200k vehicle can pay itself off in a few months vs a $50k car + $50k per year driver.
I'm aware that the cost / ride is higher for Waymo, but it doesn't sound like that would be enough to cover the extra $200k and not certain that scales to other geographies outside of SF.
I mean to pay off a $200k vehicle in a few months you would need each car to be clearing $3k a day in revenue or something like that.
It's probably a few years per car if they are at $200k. If they are 'in the black' or not will probably depend more about their accounting rules (i.e. depreciation) more than anything else.
"But saying, you know, picking an upper bound, $100,000 worth of equipment on it, you amortize it over, you know, the lifetime, call it, say, 400,000 (miles), 25 cents per mile. Right. And, you know, it gives you some margin compared to the cost of paying a human driver."
He also mentioned that the next generation would see a "drastic reduction in the cost".
Driver 6 hardware is probably built in batches of a few hundred each. Still a low volume CM job, but incrementally cheaper. Probably. If they start building in batches of thousands, that's going to drive costs down significantly.
Just switching to the Hyundai SUVs takes tens of thousands of dollars out of capex.
A real human driver needs to (vaguely) make a human salary, and cover things like gas, cleaning, car maintenance, car payments etc. That human salary is probably at least $50k if working full time in high end markets like SF. That “salary” also covers most OpEx costs for Uber like periodic cleaning and gas/charging of vehicles.
Lately, Uber has been $1.50-$3.00/mile in SF while Waymo has been $3.00+/m most times. Waymo also can drive 24/7/365 so should be able to command a higher per-car income.
I’ve heard rumors that a Waymo vehicle cost $200k to build with the sensors. Surely they’re aggressively lowering that cost now too. That’s 4-5 years of driving to pay off IF they’re making what Uber drivers make, but they’re almost certainly making much more.
Like Uber and Lyft before them, their biggest barrier to profitability is likely their HQ costs full of expensive engineering jobs - and they also have the R&D costs of training the car.
From https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2025/09/03/waymo-co...:
> “Each car, the amount of revenue it's making would be shocking to most people,” Panigrahi said, without elaborating. “Because it just continuously keeps delivering ride after ride. On a per asset basis, it’s doing really well. That’s making progress in terms of unit economics very, very positive.”
So much so that in busy markets like San Francisco, Waymo could soon move into the black. “Not making specific statements about if we’re positive or not, but what I can tell you is that yes, key markets are showing us that we are,” Panigrahi said.
Especially these days. Every scrap of news that could pump the stock price is publicized aggressively.
And this makes the absence of such actions suspicious.
Notice the weird language:
> That’s making progress in terms of unit economics very, very positive.
He says the "progress" is "very, very positive," but if you're not paying close enough attention you might come away thinking that the unit economics are what's very very positive.
All that said, what he's saying makes sense. They're able to charge more for their rides since they offer the convenience of not having to deal with a driver, and they're not paying the driver, who is the most expensive part, so yea, I'm bullish on them.
Autonomous buses will come, but only after the approach has fully taken over the taxi market first.
That would be much cheaper than a union bus driver who can clear 100k.
Safer too since bus drivers often go tons of overtime which isn't great for being alert.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30856522 (citations)
That's typically enough to stop most weird behavior like throwing trash on the ground.
This isn't exactly a direct source, but it's listing the hourly pay at 25.26$.
You wouldn't even need them to ride every single bus, just enough to deter weird behavior.
Even if hypothetically they cost as much as a real bus driver, this would be much safer. A bus driver doing overtime and possibly texting people isn't too hard to beat.
No amount of self-driving busses fixes that.
>The only people who say that are people who are justifying their not riding the bus
Is this supposed to be a tautology? Obviously people who justify it are people justifying it. I would bet real money that the vast majority of women will choose a private vehicle over a bus if they were the same price.
Given same price is false - a car is always more expensive, but many of the costs of a car are fixed, gas itself is cheap while you still have to make the car payment even if you ride the bus and let the car sit - so it seems like a car could be cheaper.
I believe that given transit is a reasonable option for most trips (not just getting to work) most women will decide over 5 years that transit is safe and will start using it. However there is no real way to know except to try it meaning your bet is not really possible - there are too many variables allowing me to say you didn't do enough.
people in NY and Chicago are fiercely defensive of their mass transit options. the bay area would be a terrible place without BART and Muni.
for all its problems, shared mass transit is a net good and there are millions of people in this country who prefer it.
Also, the 25 million figure is number of rides per month, not a measure of people who ride transit. Somebody might ride the bus to work 5 days a week, and that counts as 20 rides. The count of "people" that ride those transit methods drops to well below 1MM, factoring that in.
On rail I'm not as sure but on bus yes. Drivers are the largest cost associated with a bus line. There's also a whole set of downstream costs like bathroom breaks which requires that routes are aligned with bathroom stops and that bathrooms are kept in good working order. Breaks also decrease bus frequency (humans need breaks!) and running more buses is often limited by the number of drivers you can hire.
However bus drivers often play a dual role in US transit of discouraging anti-social behavior so it's unclear to me if you could even get rid of the bus driver and the associated inefficiencies or you'd just need to replace them with a police officer and deal with the exact same problems.
Many bus drivers are unhappy having to play this role, so that's also a factor.
In the cities I've lived, it's not quite that.
Building rail is a lot of dollars, but politicians are often happy to throw money at that problem. It's good for a dozen industries, like construction.
But that money cannot then be used to operate the rail long-term. That burden is on the city entirely.
I've lived in two cities that turned down millions of dollars in federal transit grants because they didn't have the money for maintenance and operation.
Putting maintenance into that capital bucket though is accounting fraud and illegal. If you have a rail line the largest cost is regular maintenance which is based on time not wear until you have a very large number of trains running. So my point stands even if you separate the buckets.
https://www.trains.com/pro/passenger/pennsylvania-governor-a...
Someone should let the governor of Pennsylvania know he's committing "accounting fraud."
If buses ran more often, they hopefully would become attractive to a lot more people. Anecdotally, I think most issues happen later at night where there are a handful of people on the bus. Having more people all the time would hopefully discourage anti-social behavior even if it wouldn't prevent incidents.
In terms of bathroom breaks, I've seen the driver pull over to use the mcdonalds or grocery store bathrooms so that is probably "free." There are only a few places in LA metro system where there is a purpose built layover facility where one might imagine there being a metro maintained bathroom facility. Most layover facilities are just dedicated street parking for busses to queue, such as the one at the end of Western blvd and franklin where I've seen the drivers utilize the Lazy Acres grocery store facilities.
If we take the same $ and get rid of the drivers we can run twice as many buses and that increased service will get a lot of riders who previously thought the service was too bad. Though you will need to run the additional service for a few years before people figure out service is no longer bad and start using it.
Now we do have to assume some intelligence in bus routing. There are a lot of bad bus routes in cities that will never get more riders because of how stupid they are.
Of course you are right that politics gets in the picture. Rail gets far too much attention for projects where the lowly bus is cheaper for otherwise identical service (and where rail is needed it is often done wrong). As already pointed out unions will hate this plan and they have power to screw the rest of the population (who because they don't ride now don't think they would if this plan happened) and the environment (they care about the environment only after their own self interests.
Still the numbers work on paper: self driving buses should get a lot more riders on yoru bus system because you can afford to run more service.
It's usually that $transit_company needs $xxx,xxx,xxx to do a good job.
Politicians will only give it $yy,yyy,yyy to do the job.
The Abundance movement has put a good moniker to this concept: Everything Bagel Liberalism.
[1]: https://sf.streetsblog.org/2017/03/06/lets-talk-seriously-ab...
We're now at San Francisco, SFO airport, Austin, Nashville, and NYC, is that right?
I will say as someone who is suspicious of self driving cars...they are not really worse than Atlanta drivers as a typical pedestrian. They are dangerous in different ways...but not necessarily more or less.
List of cities here: https://waymo.com/rides/
- Waymo has the advantage of launching sooner but has much more expensive vehicles which will eat into margins.
- Tesla has the advantage of full vertical integration owns their hardware and cheaper cars but also trying to do this with vision only.
- Zoox has the advantage of building purpose-built autonomous vehicles from the ground up with Amazon's deep pockets behind them, but faces the challenge of manufacturing at scale for a novel vehicle.
Tesla also seems to have the 'advantage' of ruthlessly exploiting labour; I very much hope they do not succeed.
Zoox being owned by Amazon also makes me deeply suspicious of their business practices.
there is a huge economic impact
Also, the problem of storing something like 10k taxis pales in comparison to storing 100k+ cars. Some large cities have millions of cars. When was the last time you drove to a stadium concert or ball game? It takes hours to get something like 30k cars in and out of those parking lots when everyone is trying to use the same roads at the same time. It's absolute gridlock.
So to implement anything like what you're talking about you'd need a network of garages and lots in the periphery of a large city, and the road infrastructure that can handle 100k cars driving from outside the city to your home all in time to whisk you away on your morning commute.
For that kind of civic planning & engineering complexity you could just build public transportation based on trains, light rail and busses.
Covid taught us that we don’t really have enough space to park all aircraft: we expect them to “park” in the sky.
I wonder how downtimes will go when one of the inevitable duopoly players has a system downtime.
Maybe in the future they could also travel closer together!
Not to say this isn’t a worthy problem to solve or that cars have no use. They’re great for rural life. But maybe 80% of the use-case for self-driving cars is pretty much solved by trains. They’re fast, generate no traffic, are very safe, and reduce pollution in urban areas. Even electric cars produce noxious break dust.
Addendum
The “America is too big” argument drives me nuts. (1) Again, look at China. (2) The EU is decently large and connected very well by rail. (3) We’re America. We went to the frickin moon. Defeated the Nazis. Etc. We can build trains. Not to mention what a boost it would be to the economy with all the jobs a project like that would create. Sure, we wouldn’t have an Elon but that’s fine by me.
While I also love trains and public transit, China is about the same physical size of the US, but has about four times the population, so it's four times denser. Definitely makes trains more appealing for them.
> We’re America. We went to the frickin moon. Defeated the Nazis. Etc. We can build trains.
Absolutely we can build trains. It's not that we're incapable. It's that it's not financially viable based on the usage it'll get.
Again, I'd love better trains in the US, but it doesn't make sense in a lot of cases in the US still due to density and current value props for individuals. If it was valuable, someone would do it.
Now, for intra-city transit, the lack of trains also drives me insane.
Maybe that setup works in China where everyone lives on top of each other in shoeboxes and you can just route a monorail through an apartment building, but I like both having my space and living adjacent to a large city. You could put a teleporter to the train station on my boulevard and I'd stand next to it while I wait for an Uber. You could build a train station a block from my house and I'd move somewhere else. I would pay multiples of any train ticket price to get into an autonomous sleeper Waymo and wake up in a city hours away in front of my hotel. You literally could not pay me to take more public transit if I have any other option, and I don't think I'm alone in that, and building more of it doesn't solve that.
America's strength here is that it's full of great places where you can live like that, take public transit everywhere, walk everywhere else, if that's what you want, with the compromises it comes with. But instead of moving to those places people say "build more public transit", which then just sounds like "I wish public transit was more accessible to me specifically" and then we're just back at taxis, or building rail to connect the front doors of everyone on earth.
It doesn't, really. China sells absolutely fucktons of cars domestically. There are also dozens of brands that most people have never even heard of and don't even get exported because domestic demand for a functional 10-15,000 electric car is so high. Every residential complex is absolutely rammed with cars, ranging from tiny runabouts to Tank 700 plus-sized SUVs.
That demand doesn't exist because everyone lives 5 minutes walk from work and loves the subway. Though millions upon millions of people do both, and subways have expanded probably 1000% or more in the last 15 years, million upon millions also want a car. In many cases they may not represent all the miles a person travels (eg subway to work but car for other trips).
High speed rail also is a replacement for many car miles driven because while a cross-country ticket is expensive, driving is still expensive in fuel and wear and takes days to boot.
Though it's not quite like a cosy European station near the old town: some some stations are the better part of half a mile across (not along the platforms, across), and aren't right in the city centre so there can still be some walking involved!
On the other hand, you can have takeaway food delivered to the station ahead and receive it at your seat. And it's far more comfortable even in economy.
The diversity of the world truly never ceases to amaze me. Thats a wild take. Driving is an awful experience - its expensive, its stressful, cars are uncomfortable, and the whole thing is extremely dangerous.
More over, I would argue that America is very much not a place where you can live car-free. There are very few places in the country where you can live without a car, certainly if you have a family.
That being said, building more public transit everywhere would allow more people to get out of the way of people like you who will drive no matter what.
Cars are clean and if they aren't, there's a rating system for that. Bus is dirty? The city will surely see to your ticket eventually.
Cars are uncomfortable? Pay another couple dollars and Uber will send you an SUV just for you if you want. Try offering a couple dollars to the people sandwiching you on either side on the subway and see if it makes you more comfortable.
I've never had a license beyond a temp, my family doesn't own a car. I agree driving is stressful, which is why I prefer to pay people who drive for a living to do it for me, so it's not about driving for driving's sake, it's about what's comfortable to use and convenient. Most public transit is neither.
Even without competition it will be a long time before Waymo is operating in most American cities.
It would be crazy if a self driving car company would undertake projects that undermine public transport, for example. Proposing mad things like vacuum pod trains to head off conventional HSR for example. Imagine!
This is assuming you mean just the economic definition of value. If you mean value more broadly, then your statement is even less true; in that case hedge funds would be worth nothing.
People who want to maintain their wealth find value in hedge funds. Being able to insulate your wealth from whateveris happening in the world, without you having to think about it is valuable.
Lyft is a good distribution channel for their self driving car initiatives with good coverage, Uber is too expensive at this moment.
Also, pleasing the customer, imagine opening Waymo app and not being able to order a taxi 40% of the time. With Lyft/Uber you can easily switch the ride mode and get a car with driver if all self driving cars are busy
They both can build themselves, but if you provide solely self-driving ride hailing, a lot of times customers might not be able to find cars in upcoming 6-7 years until they ramp up full production to meet demand.
Sure - that seems like "tech" - I was asking about "customer base"
It's also made me think that Waymo's a) don't need lidar, and b) don't actually need the extensive mapping that the public has been lead to believe they need. They're being overly cautious, because they know people's lives are on the line here.
(a) you can amortize the large up-front cost of the hardware over many more trips per day.
(b) you can geographically restrict where the vehicle operates to areas you've mapped in detail and know to be relatively safe
(c) you can collect lots of raw data for training and allow remote operators to assist if the vehicle gets stuck (many people would have privacy concerns if their personal car was doing this).
Over time, the hardware cost will come down, geographic availability will increase, and the need for remote assistance will decrease. Then you might start to see ones you can fully own.
At that point, though, the question becomes would you want to own one? Particularly if ride-share vehicles are ubiquitous and you can nearly instantly summon one that's exactly the type you need no matter where you are.
EVs also have the potential to act as large backup batteries for your home.
You can also choose how to amortize your costs. My mom's been driving the same car for 22 years now.
Innovative. That must have felt nice to claim
In San Francisco, Waymo has already passed Lyft in number of rides, and is projected to pass Uber by the end of the year.
> Riders will hail via the Waymo app, and as our service grows, riders will also be able to use the Lyft app to match with a Waymo vehicle.
(Disclosure: I work at Waymo, but not in partnerships)
Maybe they get something out of it in the short term. Longer term, they are janitorial and service staff that are interchangeable with any number of companies.
The two completely replaceable components of this project are 'sitting pretty'? They should be scared to death because this is in fact the death knell for both companies. If the market decides that they are going to be nothing more than 'fleet management' companies for waymo then their share price will crater.
What we need is trains. Trains everywhere. We had this once in fact; we had passenger rail to every corner of europe and north america. Turning that back on would massively improve traffic.
Also, I think your assertion that autonomous cars don't solve traffic is partially wrong. If entire fleets of cars can "think" as a whole, you can avoid some traffic problems, such as traffic waves, that occur due to individual decision-makers.
we could solve this by importing entire crews from Europe or Asia, but knuckledraggers insist on cREaTinG lOCal UNioN jOBs
Walking 30 mins from the station is no issue. Try walking through a far flung terminal at DEN or ATL or the new TBIT at LAX, you will walk 30+ mins from the gate before you hit your rideshare point I expect. Also, rail stations do not exist in a vacuum. They often interface with bus lines that go parallel or perpendicular to the rail routing, so that 30 min walk could just be a 2 min ride.
We also do have railbuilding experience in this country. LA metro has built out their entire network of over 100 rail stations within the last 35 years. This is the fastest rate of railbuilding on the entire continent, not just in the U.S., in a high land value land labor cost area to boot. As we speak multiple concurrent rail projects are being planned or actively built. Much of the build out is paid by a 1 cent sales tax measure that local voters approved with 71% in favor.
I don't think that walking for 30 minutes is "no issue". Of course at airports you have to walk 30 minutes because those are a special case, and you have no other option. Also, trips to/from the airport do not make up a large portion of the average person's trips.
A better and more common example would be going to a friend's house or grocery store. Compare:
Home>self driving car>destination
Home>bus>train>bus>destination (with likely higher amounts of walking between each)
Admittedly the car performs much worse our traffic score, but cars are essentially point-to-point which I think is a huge advantage. Additional advantages include privacy and cargo space.
Like it or not, our built environment has been made for cars. Metros still offer value for high density areas, but for the huge number of Americans that live in suburbs/exurbs, self-driving cars are the answer.
I mean, they do today, but maybe they don't want to be in that business.
This is incentivized as private enterprise developing autonomous warfare tech.
It doesn't help traffic, and it only will if self driving cars are already the majority, which is a convenient perspective for developers of this tech, but is not viable and not a true statement.
I don't want to be that guy, but we all know trains and trams are the better tech. Luxury trains/trams would be a banger. Private rooms with better amenities than a car, why not?
The autonomous car industry is a few things: car protectionism, oil protectionism, autonomous warfare development and gimmicks.
It does, I'm certainly more comfortable in an i-Pace than most of the economy hoopties I've ubered in. The time penalty is minimal (except for that time I had to chase a waymo around the block), and worth it for the comfort and safety.
> It doesn't help traffic, and it only will if self driving cars are already the majority, which is a convenient perspective for developers of this tech, but is not viable and not a true statement.
It certainly helps me arrive to my destination quicker than muni metro which I can often run faster than. Throwing individual benefit under the bus for collective benefit is rightfully a non-starter in the US.
> I don't want to be that guy, but we all know trains and trams are the better tech. Luxury trains/trams would be a banger. Private rooms with better amenities than a car, why not?
How much would a private room cost, even if we had ubiquitous Japan-tier rail?
> The autonomous car industry is a few things: car protectionism, oil protectionism, autonomous warfare development and gimmicks.
And fulfillment of individual desires
> It does, I'm certainly more comfortable in an i-Pace than most of the economy hoopties I've ubered in.
The lack of choices due to monopoly capitalism is a self fulfilling prophecy. (regular capitalism after some time is monopoly capitalism)
> Throwing individual benefit under the bus for collective benefit is rightfully a non-starter in the US.
This is a false dichotomy brought about by living in an economy controlled by finance capital. Individual benefit does not have to look like this and can be more internally and externally consistent.
Especially since this industry contains the seeds of its own destruction IN its own logic. Like I said, its more expensive than rail and to have any speed benefits it requires the majority of cars to be autonomous, which most likely will never happen. Not to mention physical safety and cyber security/privacy.
> How much would a private room cost, even if we had ubiquitous Japan-tier rail?
A private room would cost less because there are less costs involved overall. Rail/tram is cheaper and better.
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I am, generally, arguing for medium and long distance travel tho. But in regards to short-distance specifically I think my argument still stands. I dont think it presents any greater benefit than the alternatives, of which some are definitely better. You'll see how mass use, if it even gets there, will make it just "another one". It doesn't scale.
Plus autonomous warfare dev right under our noses.
Great, but I'm actually in Nashville and I know there's about zero chance we get a (real) train, and that the train stops would definitely be no closer than the bus stop that's already inconvenient enough to not be worth it. The bus system used to (I think they still have it in one area) have a program where you could get free Uber/Lyft rides to/from bus stops, and cheaper autonomous rides could definitely make that more feasible to continue offering.
> oil protectionism
The Waymo vehicles I've been in were electric. If electric cars are "oil protectionism", then you can probably warp trains into it too (the bus certainly would be).
IMO: - Tesla is pushing Waymo on pricing and service areas - Tesla will drop the safety monitor in the next 6 months**
**I say this as a FSD subscriber on my own car and seeing the arch of progress, albeit with a software branch that’s supposedly 3-6 months behind Robotaxi’s
Tesla is probably a year behind on their software, but they can scale out infinitely faster than Waymo on the hardware.
Either way, we win.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/nhtsa-...
Speaking of which, if SpaceX announced today that they are going to put people on Mars in 5 years, I still would find that more believable than Tesla getting anywhere close to Waymo, in the same time frame.