Waymo is patronized by Alphabet for as long as it needs to be. This has been good, as it takes off a lot of pressure to virtue signal fake progress to impatient investors; a fate many of Waymo's potential competitors haven fallen victim to.<p>When Uber and Tesla were acting like cowboys and creating plenty of drama for the media Waymo (under the sensible and boring leadership of non-techy car industry vet John Krafcik) was quietly structuring itself to be in the game for the long haul, following the whole "Fuck You Money" episode that saw most of the Google Self Driving Car Project's original talent leave for easy Venture Capital elsewhere.<p>Waymo is very tight lipped about their operational costs, I would really love to know how close they are to being revenue positive. Recent moves by Waymo suggest they believe they are getting close.
Anyone knows whether there are fundamental differences in the approach waymo took vs tesla, or are they following the same algorithms and techniques, with more polishing or experience in the "small details that makes all the difference" ?
Big Tech is largely set of interlocking duopolies.<p>* Ads: Google/Meta<p>* Cloud: Amazon/MS<p>* Mobile: Google/Apple<p>* Desktop: Apple/MSFT<p>* VR: Apple/Meta<p>There's also smaller players and sometimes strong third players (eg GCP), but by and large there are no single winners. Waymo and Tesla are looking like a good bet on the self-driving duopoly. I think a lot of people are skeptical on Tesla because "LIDAR", but lidar is largely irrelevant. It is only used in 3D scene reconstruction, it has nothing to do with actual driving which is the hard part.
What a terrible business, past, present, future, any way you want to stack it. Once whatever executive sponsors of this science experiment age out, you can expect this company to no longer exist. At this point, it's basically a redirection of wealth from Google shareholders to small group of people who are running a very expensive, medium size taxi cab company that needs a constant stream of outside capital to keep running.<p>The fact that they decided to use expensive Jaguars for their fleet just shows they are openly laughing in the faces of Google shareholders. They know how preposterous the entire venture is. At least they have had the foresight not to kill anyone (yet).
This will cover another 4 years of R&D. They have a very long way to go before the economics of their business make sense. They are pretty far from making money on a per ride basis. They'll have to show significant per ride profitability before they can scale.
I wonder what Waymo sees as the limiting factor to expanding to the top 24 US metropolitan areas in the next 12 months: affordable vehicle availability (e.g. tariffs on Zeekr), all-weather performance in northern climates, regulatory limitations?
What's the exit here? They've raised over $10 billion at VC multiples, valuation around $50 billion. Do they expect this to be a $1 trillion company, even then the return would be a modest 20x.<p>I feel when that much money is at stake and such a high exit is expected, this could distort incentives. I feel like investors would prefer to set their money on fire for some tiny probability of that 20x+ return rather than look to actually make a modest profitable business
Google controls/dominates search, much of the mobile phone market, OS on many devices, some of our programming languages, build tools, infrastructure, maps, ads, video, email, and now transportation? Anything I’m missing?