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

Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 348 posts

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#111

Post by seanmcdirmid »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #96
simianwords wrote: post #24

why is Tesla much higher? I thought Tesla's market cap was because of the self driving feature.

Waymo needs $16B to build what Tesla already has: manufacturing capacity. Without that, there are only so many cars they can put on the road. They've proven they can do the rides. But they haven't proven they can do it cost effectively. To scale up and start making a profit, they'll need to start building/buying lots of Waymo cars. That's not going to be cheap or fast. That's going to involve a lot of capital expense…

Based on the news, I think Waymo will import base vehicle builds from China and then adding the control systems and software to those. So it’s not like they will start making cars.

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#112

Post by malfist »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #102
nananana9 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty dismissive attitude for ~100 million professional drivers worldwide, making a living doing actual useful work on a forum where the vast majority of users do not do any useful work.

There is also a demographic cliff most of the world is currently going off, declining birth rates and labor shortages. Would you rather have a human nurse in your very old age retirement, or a human driver. Because we don’t have enough young people now for both.

Maybe the better option is to not be so anti immigration

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#113

Post by stackghost »

nananana9 wrote: post #84
dmd wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God, yes, and someone think of the gong farmers and pole men.

That's a pretty dismissive attitude for ~100 million professional drivers worldwide, making a living doing actual useful work on a forum where the vast majority of users do not do any useful work.

I think the word "professional" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment.

My experience with taxis has been almost universally negative.

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#114

Post by mschuster91 »

kccqzy wrote: post #90
spwa4 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always (as soon as I could) owned a car, first on independence, but soon that became on price. A car costs between $350 and $500 per month, plus about 2 gas tanks, let's say $600. That's only 10-15 short taxi rides and two long taxi rides at best. And now I have a family, there's 5 of us. A car is easily less than half the price of public transport for what I need to do (because you pay per person). I hate traffic,…

A car does not cost $350 and $500 per month. If it does, it’s a status symbol, not merely a tool to get from A to B, and therefore it is unfair to compare it against taxi rides. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a nicer more luxurious car for yourself. But it’s just ingenious to compare that against taxis with beaten-up and spartan but reliable cars.

> A car does not cost $350 and $500 per month.

Insurance alone can be 100€ a month (and more so for younger drivers). At a very modest 5 liters / 100km and a one way route of 20 km you're at 800km a month / 40 liters of gas => 1.80€ a liter => 72€ in fuel. Your average car then has 20 ct/km for maintenance costs (inspections, spare parts, oil changes, tires, workshop time), so another 160€ a month - and more if it is a run-down junker car.

That are just the fixed running costs you have with pretty much every car, around 330€ a month. We haven't talked about depreciation yet at all. Even if you say you buy a barely road worthy wreck for 3000 € and run it until it's only ripe for the junkyard to fetch maybe 500 € every two years, that's still about 100€ a month you're paying.

And what we also haven't had a single talk about is operating and purchase taxes, highway tolls, city-core tolls, rental spots for parking (including the price you have paid for the garage in your house, it's a lot of real estate), that also can easily add to many hundreds of euros each year.

Cars are expensive once you actually include replacement/depreciation and maintenance costs.

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#115

Post by pu_pe »

paxys wrote: post #82
pu_pe wrote: post #52

It seems like a fair valuation to me. I can see a path for them to approach or surpass Uber's revenue (~$50B) in the future, and I think their technology and brand are actual moats in comparison to all other driverless systems out there.

I'm in the opposite camp. Waymo has neat tech, yes, but already valuing it on par with Uber is absurd considering the sheer scale at which Uber operates. 70 countries, 15K cities, 36 million daily trips. And this isn't counting Uber Eats and other side businesses. Waymo will have to accelerate its operations to the max for the next decade just to catch up. And that's assuming operating at such a scale is even possibl…

There is no doubt they have a lot of catching up to do, but you have to consider their advantages.

If Uber goes away, Lyft or others can take over the entire market overnight, precisely because they don't have their own fleet or unique technology. Waymo is placing itself as first mover into a completely new category of transportation which will require capital investment and new tech, so it will be much harder to displace once it gets going. It could target automated cargo transport in the future too.

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#116

Post by bryanlarsen »

infecto wrote: post #64
kolbe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alphabet is providing $13bn of the $16bn raise. What are you talking about? Do you really think that $3bn matters in the slightest?

Yes and what matters the most is what Waymo has been signaling for years. They don’t want the capex (owning and running the physical cars). I don’t know the intent of this raise but you have to realize companies may have a good asset but they don’t want to own it 100% for a multitude of reasons. Some of them could be as simple as wanting to get other investors involved and comfortable with the asset to maybe take on…

By investing $13B of the $16B they're signalling they do want the capex, at least for now.

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#117

Post by stackghost »

pm90 wrote: post #7

Why does Google need outside investors? Is it a play to get a “serious” valuation since it would be vetted by outside parties? I guess Im questioning why Waymo doesn’t just IPO, or raise 100% private raise by Google.

>I guess Im questioning why Waymo doesn’t just IPO, or raise 100% private raise by Google.

Why not 100% internal funding, not sure, but the reason why companies don't always IPO is because taking on debt is more efficient (i.e. it's cheaper in terms of cost of capital) than equity, because of the "tax shield" effect, debt can be raised in a non dilutive manner, and a few other (less important) game-theoretic reasons.

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#118

Post by xnx »

malfist wrote: post #112
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also a demographic cliff most of the world is currently going off, declining birth rates and labor shortages. Would you rather have a human nurse in your very old age retirement, or a human driver. Because we don’t have enough young people now for both.

Maybe the better option is to not be so anti immigration

Birth rate is declining almost everywhere

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#119

Post by dmoy »

jFriedensreich wrote: post #110
askl wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need this in europe. No we don't. Your github says you're from Berlin, why the hell would you ever need a taxi in your life? Someone should just find a cure for for the fear techbros have of being near poor people.

I don't live in Berlin, but even if: have you ever taken public transport in less mainstream lines? Apart from nothing working and connections taking forever and operations stopping at night, horrible signage that lets you stress even more, you sit next to human excrements, hooligans coming from football games, nazis wanting to beat you up, stink, rude music and beggers. I sometimes miss it for sentimental value, but…

Is there really that much poop on Berlin public transit?

Seattle has some of the highest per capital homeless in the US, and a dearth of public toilets, and yet there's not that much poop on our public transit.

I am also skeptical that y'all's violent crime rate is higher than ours.

Granted I haven't taken Berlin public transit in 20 yrs, so I don't know.

Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

#120

Post by nayuki »

ronnier wrote: post #19
thundergolfer wrote: post #4

I presume if you invest in Google you are indirectly (but significantly) invested in Waymo, like it is with Anthropic? Waymo is the best service I've used in many, many years. The jump from Uber->Waymo is similar to the quality jump from Taxi->Uber 12 years ago, but I don't see an obvious way for Waymo to get enshittified.

> but I don't see an obvious way for Waymo to get enshittified My guess is that once Waymo starts to extremely take off, law makers in various cities will start to pass laws to ban them or the number of regulations will make it impossible to run at a profit. This will almost certainly happen. It will disproportionately impact an entire segment of the population and will put them out of work.

This video is very apt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tjZchYXMmA Australian Taxpayers' Alliance - "ALL Obsolete Industries Deserve The Taxi Bailout!" (1m38s) [2015-12-13]
Post reply on HN