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Comment by jimbo808 | Hacker News Reader

The huge disadvantage they have over people is that their cars cost $250k, require a workforce of people to retrieve and repair them, maintain them, clean them, monitor them, etc. They are more expensive to operate than a normal car with a human driver, so far. The break-even point requires a lot of problems to be solved, and even then, the upside is not looking to be astronomical in the best case.

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I'm glad a very wealthy company is investing in hard tech R&D. Irrespective of the projected financial outcome.

I think Google can handle paying for any number of $250k cars to get a good share of the future of transportation.

I expect that in 10-20 years, all cars will be self driving.

I’ve heard that 10-20 years self driving spiel since Uber launched

I was also promised that I’d be 3d printing my shoes and living in the metaverse and AI will make me magical new products

All I really got was an endless social media feed

This argument proves too much. That some technical progress arrives slower than predicted does not mean no progress ever occurs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_too_much

This was thought decades ago too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project Compared to 1994 we have now endless computing power and yet no reliable self driving car is available on the market.

My Tesla is quite reliable when self driving!

Not at all — they're working on cheaper cars that they're testing in SF, and they will probably only roll out Waymo to the wealthiest markets in the US. Think airport rides to JFK instead of a taxi that works anywhere in the country. They will be very profitable.

The cost of Waymo cars is immaterial right now. They are not production models, they are test mules. So you might as well make them nice-looking.

Real mass-production cars will be comparable with regular cars in price. The sensor suite is not _that_ expensive.

Waymo is talking about scaling up operations globally and the market is competitive, the cost 100% does matter.

They need large Chinese production lines for lidar, integration kits for cars plus the in car computing, repair pipelines for both sensors and cars, real estate to park cars, the infrastructure/processes to clean and charge them quickly, teams of remote drivers, insurance policies, etc. Then they need to compete with mature decentralized Uber and taxi fleets who push their car/maintenance costs onto drivers, while Waymo grows adoption of their mobile app where prices will matter if they aren't as perfectly reliable and low risk as hiring a human. The self driving novelty effect won't last forever

All of that requires large capital expenditure and careful business models

Google is capable of burning truly huge amounts of money on projects that look exciting and have long term prospects (e.g Youtube). They could lose $10-20 billion a year on Waymo for a decade if needed.

You can't just cancel Sergey's favourite pet project, regardless of economics.

That's easier to stay that when it's an R&D project doing pilot runs in a small set of cities. When you need tell shareholders you want to run a fleet of 100k cars then those numbers start becoming very serious.

Waymo also took $11B from outside investors, so it's just not Alphabet taking the risk

They don't actually _need_ to do any of that. They can just license the technology to automakers and local operators.

All cars require a workforce to maintain though.

Hard disk drives were the size of washing machines. I don't see how they will ever be practical!

Not comparable at all. Autonomous driving isn't obviously a viable business. It's not because computer programs can't drive well, it's because the and workforce infrastructure required to maintain and operate the expensive fleet may be less efficient than a human maintaining their own vehicle.

Isn’t the implication there that Uber works because the drivers shoulder more costs and make less money, but Waymo won’t work because they have to shoulder all the costs?

I'm implying that drivers are more efficient at cleaning and maintaining, refueling, storing, repairing, and replacing their cars they own than the complex systems of personnel maintaining a much more expensive fleet of cars they don't own or give a shit about.

Are you also implying that people who maintain vehicles for a living do a worse job at it than the owners doing it themselves? I would say the opposite is true.

Plenty of companies around the world have well-maintained fleets of vehicles. Trucking businesses, bus companies, train companies, even some taxi companies with salaried drivers, ...

No, I'm implying that people who maintain their own cars do it more efficiently. The simple stuff like cleaning has to be done by someone. It's not about doing a "worse job," it's about doing a more expensive job.

Waymo is replacing human drivers with a capital-intensive fleet business, a substantially more expensive vehicle, and still a large number of remote assistance staff, fleet operators, safety engineers, incident response, operations staff, etc.

But I'm not saying they can't beat a human driver, I'm just saying it hasn't been proven that they will. It may only be that the highest demand markets will provide a sufficient enough utilization to make it economically viable.

You also have to be some completely isolated sociopath to not see the very obvious political and economic risks if this does indeed become successful

No amount of lobbying will help you win against a million drivers suddenly out of work

Some technologies scale, some don't, at all. Your point is moot.

Well, washing machines were once the size of washing machines; and they still are.

They will lose to Tesla cabs, due to price and not having full control of their supply chain.

Tesla has a grand total of 39 unsupervised cabs operating. Waymo has literally 100x more with 3800 and growing.

https://robotaxitracker.com/?provider=tesla

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