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Comment by mmoustafa | Hacker News Reader

Why are they not hyper-focused on scaling the number of vehicles on the road now that they have a working system? Is Waymo afraid of flooding the supply and crashing prices? Are they too expensive to build/maintain to justify a lower price point?

What is going on, if you have PMF the logical next step is scale.

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I suspect Waymo has purchased all available Jaguar i-Paces (~= every Jaguar i-Pace?), which are no longer in production, and was planning on rolling out their purpose-built Zeekr vehicles to scale further. The 100% tariff on Chinese EVs introduced in 2024 probably made this plan financially questionable, leaving them without a supply of new vehicles. Late last year Waymo announced a partnership with Hyundai to buy a version of the Ioniq 5 assembled in the US which might've been motivated by this problem.

The Zeekr vehicle was announced in 2021: https://waymo.com/blog/2021/12/expanding-our-waymo-one-fleet...

100% tariff in 2024: https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/14/joe... ; https://www.reuters.com/business/us-locks-steep-china-tariff...

Hyundai partnership announced a few months later: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/waymo-and-hyundai-enter-partn...

Plus what others have said about sheer number of vehicles not being the only obstacle to scaling.

There are months long lead times to arrange to rent space for depots, install charging points, and to staff up the depots, which need to operate 24/7. The more visible part of the leadtime to open a new city is in testing the service areas. But I doubt that the critical path.

Scaling is going well. Latest data available is from April: https://www.thedriverlessdigest.com/i/163651491/weekly-trips...

I think I remember them targeting 1M rides/week in 2026.

> Why are they not hyper-focused on scaling the number of vehicles on the road

I am no expert here, but my assumption scaling is not yet dependent on just having more cars, that they have to do extra work, that is not yet automatable, in each area they service plus some extra maintenance cost for every area they service.

Currently operating in: * Phoenix * SF * LA * Austin * Atlanta

Announced: * Dallas * Denver * Miami * Seattle * Washington, DC * New York City * San Diego * Las Vegas * Philadelphia * London * Tokyo

Seems like they are definitely scaling up...

I think maybe unclear in my comment, I’m referring to scaling within the cities they’re in. e.g. in SF it still takes 15m for a Waymo to arrive as opposed to Uber’s 3m and it costs more. I would’ve expected Uber drivers to be out of a job, which is not the case (I also drive occasionally)

From someone that worked in the industry ~6 years ago, it's clearly going well for them - frankly, they're expanding and scaling way faster than I would have thought possible in 2019. They've got something like 6 cities running right now and what, 3-4 more announced?

Another thing to keep in mind is that rideshare revenue in the US is extremely geographically concentrated in urban cores. This is why every AV company was targeting SF as their first city (excepting Waymo, which did some stuff in PHX). 'Hyperfocused expansion' probably looks a lot closer to tackling new, novel areas in different metro areas rather than, say, expanding down in to San Jose and the central valley.

These things, they take time.

They've clearly hit (or projections confidently show they'll hit) a point where each car is profitable. I worked in the space for a while - platform upgrades (new cars, sensors, etc) are planned out years in advance and are pretty complex processes. But generally, each upgrade was a massive decrease in cost per car. (usually 50% cheaper or more). So also possible they want to wait for the next platform transition.

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