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Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

bloomberg.com

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

#131

Post by yfdrea »

bandofthehawk wrote: post #80
nvch wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, this is the major selling point to own a car. I may drive a few times a week, and taxis might be much cheaper, but no way I'm going to deal with human taxi drivers if I have a choice.

This seems weird to me, maybe it's a generational thing. Is it really that bad to share a car with someone? You don't have to talk to them the whole time.

As a woman, while 95% of the ridesharing trips I take are perfectly pleasant and sometimes great with conversation the 5% of rides where you are trapped in a car with a creep asking you extremely off putting questions sours the entire concept of ride sharing for me.

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

#132

Post by tialaramex »

askl wrote: post #86
jFriedensreich wrote: post #35

No product had such a fast transition from novelty to "omg i never want to interact with a human again". I feel about 100% less stressed and happier using a waymo or riding motorbike or bicycle next to a waymo than with human drivers. I hope this next phase will bring availability and prices down. We need this in europe.

> 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.

Taxis are also public transport and so their provision in cities is in fact part of the transport fabric. Since there must be taxis, why not improve them?

This isn't about poor people, at least for me, I'd much rather be alone than with Elon fucking Musk. If I want to hang out with people I will choose when and who. The least good bit of being in a taxi is small talk with the driver.

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

#133

Post by infecto »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #116
infecto wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they truly wanted the capex, this would not be a mixed round A fully internal recap would have been simpler. The presence of outside capital, even minority, is consistent with a gradual transition toward shared ownership, asset light structures, or operator partners.

They have made many comments over the years about this too.

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

#134

Post by Analemma_ »

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.

Car insurance has essentially doubled in price over the past few years, from a combination of

- cars becoming more complicated to repair. Marco Arment of Overcast related an incident where his Rivian had a simple fender bender, and his insurance was billed $15,000 in labor and parts to fix it because of the monobody construction where you have to tear apart half the car to fix anything

- inflation in both goods and services means car repair costs are going up

- more reckless and uninsured drivers thanks to general post-covid norm breakdowns

Insurance alone can now be $150-200/month even if you don't have a particularly nice car. Combine that with gas, maintenance, and registration taxes, and I think most people in the US are paying at least $350/month for their car even if amortized costs mean they don't realize it.

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

#135

Post by guywithahat »

simianwords wrote: post #24

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

Probably because Tesla sells about a million cars a year, including the worlds best selling car (Model Y) since 2023. The stock consistently performs well as well, I know they outperformed estimates for last quarter. Being positioned well for autonomous driving presumably helps hold the stock up, but I don't think that's the core of the valuation, and Waymo does a fraction of what Tesla does. Waymo is impressive, but their 2025 revenue was ~350 million.

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

#136

Post by greyw »

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 wont really miss taxi drivers. I guess that says a lot about them.

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

#137

Post by tialaramex »

askl wrote: post #126
jFriedensreich wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> have you ever taken public transport in less mainstream lines? Yes, I have. I never drove a car myself and maybe used a taxi 10 times in the last 30 years. Will waymo even be available in less mainstream areas? It seems more reasonable for them to go for dense places instead and leave the unprofitable regions for someone else.

> Will waymo even be available in less mainstream areas?

Ever is a long time. It's not reasonable to predict beyond a decade or so. It's easily possible that this becomes huge and in the 2040s people are astonished that "driving yourself" was a thing, the same way it's hard to comprehend now that most people weren't literate. Not "Couldn't write an essay / read a newspaper" but "Couldn't sign their name / read a postal address"

But it's also possible that this goes nowhere, and outside of a few large cities there is never a robot taxi market, it just doesn't exist. Waymo is, among other things, a bet that there is a large market.

Dense places are where it starts, but that was also true for the telephone. Bell didn't provide service to tiny rural settlements, they wired places like Boston and New York, AIUI the general service provision was a government initiative even in the US, it was never strictly profitable enough for huge corporations to spend their own money making it universal.

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

#138

Post by jFriedensreich »

dmoy wrote: post #119
jFriedensreich wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

its mostly pee and vomit, poo is indeed rare.

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

#139

Post by sowbug »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #111
jillesvangurp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds right. Unless Waymo considers car manufacturers to be its competition and therefore something to commoditize, it wouldn't make sense for them to get involved in ground-up manufacturing.

And by this point, it seems like an electric-car platform already is close to a commodity, which is another reason for Waymo not to waste capital building another.

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

#140

Post by smugma »

spwa4 wrote: post #81
nvch wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, this is the major selling point to own a car. I may drive a few times a week, and taxis might be much cheaper, but no way I'm going to deal with human taxi drivers if I have a choice.

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,…

Yes, all those things. Except on cost, at least in SF, MUNI is free for children.

We mostly drive wherever we need to go, especially when it's all of us. But if we're going to a Warriors game, we always take Muni, at it's more convenient (and free for adults too if you show your ticket).

Also, it's generally faster and more convenient (and fun) to get to Chase Center via Muni than driving. Getting back is tough both because this is peak Lyft/Waymo demand as well as peak Muni demand.

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