Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

blog.waymo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 520 posts

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#21

Post by austinkhale »

kccqzy wrote: post #10
austinkhale wrote: post #5

I live inside the original area in Phoenix where they did their training. I have to give kudos where it's due. I originally _hated_ their cars constantly driving around our neighborhood, but I was persuaded to try one a few weeks back. It completely changed my mind. They are now my favorite way to get around. I am a very happy, frequent customer and hope they keep adding coverage and more cars. This is absolutely the…

For those of us not located in areas where Waymo is available, do you mind elaborating on why this is your favorite way to get around? As compared to Uber, Lyft, etc.

- The cars are very safe, very conservative drivers

- The interiors are nice, well air conditioned and don't smell

- You don't have to talk to a person, which I don't always hate but have had some bad experiences. This just removes the roll of the dice from the equation entirely.

- They are currently at par or cheaper with Uber/Lyft prices and typically it's faster for the car to arrive

- You get to play your own music

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#22

Post by ijustlovemath »

bushbaba wrote: post #16
sgarrity wrote: post #7

10,000 trips / week is impressive. How many vehicles is this?

It’s not really when you consider their burn rate. Say each of those trips gross 10$. That’s just 100k/week or $5.2 million/year. They’d need to likely 10,000x the ride volume to even be close to profitability. Uber does 7.64 billion rides per year. And they are not profitable. The waymo cars sure ain’t cheap, and scale of operations will take a ton of cash. I wonder if waymo would ever be profitable.

The difference is that the variable costs are much lower - just recharging the EV + any other incidentals, as opposed to having to pay a driver for every ride. That's why Uber never became profitable, because they had to share the fare. Waymo has higher up front costs, but if the cars are there, they have much more profitable fares.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#24

Post by boulos »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #17

I can't for the life of me figure out how to sign up for the waitlist in SF. The app just says "you'll receive updates about San Francisco." Anyone been successful with this?

Sorry if that's unclear, if you set up the app, logged in, and are located in San Francisco when doing so, I think that's equivalent.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#25

Post by majormajor »

jccooper wrote: post #20
majormajor wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably more of a mixed bag. Self-driving car fleets probably increase suburbization in the same way that trains created suburbs long ago. Depending on how it breaks out, "more space per person at similar total environmental impact" is a quality of life win but not a climate-change-fighting one. Pedestrian safety and other externalities are probably a big win, still.

I feel like the increase in suburbanization due to self-driving cars is probably pretty small over person-driven cars. Given the low building density that human-driven cars create (read: parking lots) there's some hope that a large change in car parking behavior would lead to lots of infill development.

If your commute is "sitting in an office doing email or taking calls" instead of "having to babysit your car through traffic" you're gonna see some significant behavioral changes.

The parking lot point is interesting, I hadn't thought about that.

But it's not obviously better to me: commuting behavior is very time-of-day determined, and the cars are gonna have to be somewhere in between rush hours. You don't want them on the road, and you can probably shift around to catch other sorts of predictable demand, but environmentally you're gonna want to minimize the total nubmer of miles driven without passengers.

EDIT: so in areas with less development and commmuters are parking their cars in surface lots all day, yeah, you don't need those surface lots for commuters + all the other lots at retail, residential, etc all at once if the cars are moving around to other uses during the day. But in denser recent-development areas where office parks predominantly have underground or garage parking it may be harder to realize infill there.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#26

Post by xnx »

melling wrote: post #3
alphabetting wrote: post #2

> "we are now serving over 10 thousand trips per week to public riders, not including employees. With this latest expansion, we intend for those numbers to accelerate rapidly to 10 times that scale by next summer" they've been pretty cautious on predictions after the AV hype boom and bust a couple years ago. 10x in a year is an ambitious goal.

10,000 trips in electric vehicles. Self-driving EV’s in all major cities would be a big win for the climate and the air quality.

And noise! I will rejoice when idiots are no longer allowed to speed and operate clearly illegal (in terms of emissions and noise) vehicles on public roads.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#27

Post by mertd »

tommoor wrote: post #4
melling wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10,000 trips in electric vehicles. Self-driving EV’s in all major cities would be a big win for the climate and the air quality.

And pedestrian/cyclist safety

To be fair, human drivers don't do terribly well on that front.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#28

Post by pizzalife »

bushbaba wrote: post #16
sgarrity wrote: post #7

10,000 trips / week is impressive. How many vehicles is this?

It’s not really when you consider their burn rate. Say each of those trips gross 10$. That’s just 100k/week or $5.2 million/year. They’d need to likely 10,000x the ride volume to even be close to profitability. Uber does 7.64 billion rides per year. And they are not profitable. The waymo cars sure ain’t cheap, and scale of operations will take a ton of cash. I wonder if waymo would ever be profitable.

1. It's impossible!

2. It's possible but it's going to take forever

3. It's real and happening now but it's dangerous

4. It's not dangerous but it's annoying and blocking an intersection sometimes

5. It's not annoying but maybe they won't make money

we are here.

6. It makes money but what about drivers

7. It works in cities but what about suburbs

8. It works in suburbs but what about rural areas

9. This city in Turkmenistan is the last place on earth without any autonomous vehicles and visiting is like getting into a time machine

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#29

Post by ketzo »

bushbaba wrote: post #16
sgarrity wrote: post #7

10,000 trips / week is impressive. How many vehicles is this?

It’s not really when you consider their burn rate. Say each of those trips gross 10$. That’s just 100k/week or $5.2 million/year. They’d need to likely 10,000x the ride volume to even be close to profitability. Uber does 7.64 billion rides per year. And they are not profitable. The waymo cars sure ain’t cheap, and scale of operations will take a ton of cash. I wonder if waymo would ever be profitable.

Are we really evaluating a fleet of self-driving taxis on profitability today, though?

If they're reliably doing 10,000 trips a week, I promise you they don't need to worry about finding additional investors.

"It's not really impressive to be doing 10,000 self-driving taxi trips every week, because it's currently costing them money" is a really, really wild take.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#30

Post by mechagodzilla »

ijustlovemath wrote: post #22
bushbaba wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not really when you consider their burn rate. Say each of those trips gross 10$. That’s just 100k/week or $5.2 million/year. They’d need to likely 10,000x the ride volume to even be close to profitability. Uber does 7.64 billion rides per year. And they are not profitable. The waymo cars sure ain’t cheap, and scale of operations will take a ton of cash. I wonder if waymo would ever be profitable.

The difference is that the variable costs are much lower - just recharging the EV + any other incidentals, as opposed to having to pay a driver for every ride. That's why Uber never became profitable, because they had to share the fare. Waymo has higher up front costs, but if the cars are there, they have much more profitable fares.

Maybe - Waymo has to recharge, clean and maintain a fleet of cars that they own (and which are depreciating and likely have no resale value, at least at the moment) - Uber's drivers effectively use their wages to cover all of those costs. I'm curious how Waymo is handling all of the fleet maintenance, recharging, cleaning, etc, and how they plan to scale that infrastructure.

I also wonder how Waymo plans to handle 'surges' - they either have enough cars to handle peak demand, in which case many are idle much of the time (and thus not making money), or they build a fleet for the minimum/average, and let more elastic competitors cover surges (or it's just impossible to get one at rush hour anywhere). It really seems like Uber/Lyft/etc ought to have a better business model than this very centralized, capital-intensive approach, and they're seemingly incapable of earning a profit.

Post reply on HN