I strongly suspect Waymo has hit break-even. If Google's published numbers on rides per week and fleet size are accurate, and the estimates of price per ride are close, expansion isn't going to be capital constrained.
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.
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.