Interesting that Waymo has relationships with both Uber and Lyft now. They can play them off each other for future expansion opportunities, while continuing to learn the nuances of the high-scale rideshare biz from them.
xnx · 47m ago
They've also partnered with Moove in Miami and with Avis.
What a time to be alive. 3 companies competing for what might be the next trillion dollar business.
- 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.
oldjim798 · 18m ago
Why do we want a trillion dollar business? Why is that good for society/the world?
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.
bpodgursky · 15m ago
Because Americans spend 93 billion hours driving each year and tens of thousands of people literally die each year in car crashes. Unlocking that time and those lives is an unimaginably large quality of life improvement.
McAlpine5892 · 8m ago
We already have solutions for this called trains, buses, subways, etc. Public transportation. Yes, America is huge but look at China building out high-speed rail at an incredible pace. The amount of money dumped into self-driving could have built out an impressive amount of infrastructure for public transportation.
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.
oldjim798 · 13m ago
Autonomous cars would be safer, I completely agree. They won't fix traffic though.
hibikir · 2m ago
They will make it worse, as it makes it easier to move a vehicle around. When the price goes down, the usage goes up. And it's traffic whether the vehicle has a human being transported, it's circling waiting for a fare, or it's on the way back, empty, from taking a child to school
robertlagrant · 2m ago
They might fix it a bit. Cars might be able to travel at more consistent speeds, not speeding up and slowing down, that causes traffic, and fewer accidents would also reduce traffic.
Maybe in the future they could also travel closer together!
willahmad · 9m ago
you are right, it probably won't fix the traffic, but it doesn't matter because if you are not steering the wheel then you can work or study while in the traffic.
there is a huge economic impact
hibikir · 5m ago
If there's a trillion dollar business there, it's on transporting goods, not people. Ultimately a self driving car is a cheaper chauffeur or a cheaper taxi. The addressable market doesn't change that much because of price, and the more it changes it, the worse it is for infrastructure. Deadhead miles traveled are not better for traffic because there is no human driving them. All we get is more miles traveled over the same limited infra.
Zigurd · 1h ago
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.
ra7 · 36m ago
In a recent interview, Waymo strongly hinted they now have positive unit economics in markets like SF.
> “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.
leetharris · 49m ago
Even with expensive vehicles and hardware? Plus they are revenue sharing with the host Uber/Lyft platforms.
Feels very unlikely. I think they will need to bring car cost down to hit break even.
seanmcdirmid · 42m ago
LIDAR prices are falling fairly rapidly over time (although I’m not sure about the impact of tariffs). The car and computing resources are otherwise boring costs, maybe they are at around $200k/vehicle? That would be pretty easy to pay for a with a few months of rides. If most of the rides are going through the Waymo app, they aren’t paying a lot to uber and Lyft, and I doubt they are paying the full 30% to the ride sharing platforms anyways.
leoc · 35m ago
They're also spending an unclear amount of money on human driving-assistance workers https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zo... and the supporting infrastructure. Presumably it works out to a lot less per vehicle-hour than an in-vehicle, US-resident human driver, but a lot more than nothing.
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.
Closi · 26m ago
> maybe they are at around $200k/vehicle? That would be pretty easy to pay for a with a few months of rides.
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.
No comments yet
Zigurd · 25m ago
Waymo can hit break even even with the relatively expensive Jaguar SUVs and Driver 6 hardware suite. As someone else pointed out, Google is making more money than most people realize on a per unit basis. My back of the envelope estimate is at least $2000 per vehicle per week. That easily covers financing the capex with thousands left over for opex and overhead.
Just switching to the Hyundai SUVs takes tens of thousands of dollars out of capex.
xnx · 46m ago
The Zeekr vehicle would've brought costs down, but it is now subject to a huge tariff. No telling how much that has set them back.
losvedir · 58m ago
This feels like an inflection point.
We're now at San Francisco, SFO airport, Austin, Nashville, and NYC, is that right?
And "Silicon Valley" (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Los Altos). Quotes because that excludes San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and Milpitas.
zbrozek · 10m ago
There are a ton of them in Sunnyvale, so I expect that area to flip to public availability soon.
willahmad · 52m ago
From market standpoint I am curious if Google or Amazon is willing to acquire Lyft for the tech and customer base.
Lyft is a good distribution channel for their self driving car initiatives with good coverage, Uber is too expensive at this moment.
moat is in institutional knowledge of operations in ride hailing industry.
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
sib · 37m ago
What customer base (at least in the US) does Lyft have that Google or Amazon don't? Estimates for Amazon are ~250M and Google ~275M users in the US.
willahmad · 29m ago
it's not only about number of users. You also have regulations in different cities and states, existing models trained based on past supply demand behavior, somewhat optimized workflows for the ride hailing industry, payments, risks.
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.
telotortium · 1h ago
Is this the first time Waymo has partnered with Lyft? I’ve only heard of Uber partnerships before? From what I can find, previous Lyft collaborations were only pilot testing, not commercial rollouts.
daemonologist · 1h ago
Also interesting that it's not exclusive - they're saying you'll be able to use either the Waymo app or the Lyft app (and get a Waymo at random, presumably). I believe the previous deals with Uber have all been exclusive - no Waymo app in that market.
testfrequency · 1h ago
“As families and businesses move to Tennessee in record numbers, our state continues to lead the nation in finding innovative solutions to transportation challenges," said Governor Bill Lee.
Innovative. That must have felt nice to claim
yalogin · 31m ago
Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment. They don’t own any cars anyway, now they don’t even have to deal with drivers. Also I am glad google finally found a GTM strategy for their tech. They are building these machines themselves though. These are expensive and cost a lot in maintenance, wonder how the numbers look for them
evgen · 23m ago
> Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment.
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.
xnx · 25m ago
> Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment
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.
Autonomous cars are not the solution to traffic issues. At best, the may make some driving situations slightly safer because humans are terrible drivers.
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.
triceratops · 11m ago
We also need buses and mini-buses and taxis to get people to and from train stations. Autonomous driving makes this cheap and feasible.
devinprater · 19m ago
Oh yes please, just a little closer! Come on bring it to Talladega AL where tons of blind people live!
garrtt · 19m ago
Is there any hope of actually being able to fully own a self driving vehicle as a consumer? Seems that a concerning majority of the autonomous driving conversation is framed in the context of ride-sharing.
brian_spiering · 14m ago
Yes, there is hope to fully own a self driving vehicle as a consumer. One example is comma.ai, inc.
trevor-e · 27m ago
Why would a company like Lyft/Uber partner with Waymo at this point? That sounds like doing a deal with the competitor who _will_ completely kill them off in the future.
zhengyi13 · 24m ago
Not necessarily. Does Waymo really want to run all the additional infra and services and people ops required to be a full soup-to-nuts ride hailing service?
I mean, they do today, but maybe they don't want to be in that business.
bigyikes · 10m ago
Owning the user base seems like a huge strategic advantage.
Atlas667 · 46m ago
Nobody needs this.
This is incentivized as private enterprise developing autonomous warfare tech.
barbazoo · 31m ago
People do “need” it but for the wrong reasons such as failures around zoning urban planning, public transportation, etc.
komali2 · 23m ago
Privatization of many things is turning out to be a failure. Sewage, water - see the UK, failure. Healthcare: USA, failure. Utilities: UK, USA, failure. Mail: Denmark, failure. Transportation: UK, USA, utter failure. Further privatization will deepen this failure.
rangestransform · 25m ago
any technology is dual use if you squint hard enough
noahmbarr · 37m ago
Don’t rule out Tesla’s Robotaxi. I’m 10 rides in (Bay Area— around SF proper), and it’s clean, cheap, and efficient. As good or better than Waymo.
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
kamranjon · 33m ago
Is Tesla robotaxi actually even close to Waymo? I thought they still needed someone in the car with the robotaxi and Waymo had been operating fully autonomous for quite a while already. My understanding is that this is one of the reasons people really like Waymo, it’s like a private ride.
dawnerd · 29m ago
Tesla lost the race and won’t even be in the space in any meaningful way in a few years. They’re only limping along because they have some guy pumping the stock.
lokar · 33m ago
6 normal months, or 6 Elon months?
YeCKqkhM · 19m ago
I'm always flabbergasted by Tesla fans' commitment to vastly inferior product and their insistence that the big breakthrough is "just around the corner bro, believe me". I'm pretty sure you all just have Stockholm Syndrome after paying for FSD in like 2019 and ingesting copium for over 5 years. most gullible fanbase alive
cbdumas · 31m ago
As I commute on a motorcycle (often in the rain, causing lower visibility) this is terrifying to me and I hope regulators in my state don't let it happen here until Tesla can prove their "camera only" approach is safe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(Japan)
- 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.
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.
Maybe in the future they could also travel closer together!
there is a huge economic impact
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.
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.
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.
No comments yet
Just switching to the Hyundai SUVs takes tens of thousands of dollars out of capex.
We're now at San Francisco, SFO airport, Austin, Nashville, and NYC, is that right?
List of cities here: https://waymo.com/rides/
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.
Innovative. That must have felt nice to claim
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/nhtsa-...
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.