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Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation

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

#241

Post by vel0city »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #144
kccqzy wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. This can vary a lot. 6 years ago, I was driving a Subaru BRZ which averaged 32 mpg. My commute was ~30 miles each way, add in a couple miles for weekly errands, and let's just say I was using 10 gallons/week. If gas was $3, that's $30/week, $120/month. Plus $150/month for insurance, it's $270/month. Still way under your 350-500/month figure, but that's also assuming the…

You're not including an amortized cost of maintenance, registration fees, etc. Adding in tires alone ($720 for a set, 50k/1200 ~=41 months, ~$17.50/mo) brings it to almost $290/mo. Oil change every 6 months or so, add another $10/mo or so. Now we're at $300/mo and hoping nothing in the car breaks and needs repairs on a car that's already paid off, and we still haven't paid our taxes and registration fees.

Now figure in the fact you've got several thousand dollars in a car instead of even something like a high-yield savings account. At even 4% APY, if you had just $8k tied up in that car that's another ~$27/mo of income you're missing out on.

I'm not making the argument riding a taxi for every trip is cheaper than this. Just pointing out there's a lot of things people don't think about when they think of the cost of car ownership.

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

#242

Post by pixelready »

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.

Yeah, this is one of my guilty automation pleasures alongside self-checkout. I hate that I am displacing a human, and I mourn for the handful of really pleasant taxi / Uber experiences I’ve had over the years, but damn is Waymo such a better default experience right now.

I really hope there’s enough viable competition over time to keep costs down or I worry this will evolve into robo-limos rather than a nice cheap default option for areas without good public transit infrastructure. The DUI prevention alone is such a huge win.

There is the matter of surveillance though. I don’t love that I have to take their word on not abusing the cabin recordings, but I guess that’s pretty much all modern vehicles (via onStar and the like) not just robo-taxis. Pretty much every Sci-fi dystopian with urban infrastructure has that scene where the corrupt authorities have someone’s self-driving car pulled over remotely, that seems important as well given the state of things lately.

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

#243

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

yfdrea wrote: post #131
bandofthehawk wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the situations you've described and the fact that our answer as a society is seemingly to throw up our hands at our inability to solve these situations other than by increasing the number of cars on the road in a way that funnels even more wealth to a tiny group of unfathomably wealthy sociopaths who also use ourour personal information to impact our spending habits... very depressing. i really hate it here.

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

#244

Post by UebVar »

alooPotato wrote: post #189
dotBen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very capital intensive operation given the amount of vehicles that need to be carried on the balance sheet. There are many reasons why a conglomerate like Alphabet doesn't want to hold all of that directly on the balance sheet, which is why Waymo is run as a subsidiary with its own sources of capital. When I was at Uber 10 plus years ago and we were ideating autonomous vehicles. The general consensus was that…

> There are many reasons why a conglomerate like Alphabet doesn't want to hold all of that directly on the balance sheet Can you tell us those reasons? I think this is basically _the_ question.

"Tech" was incredible light on CapExp compared with everything else (until AI hit, that is). That is what allowed its explosive growth. On the one hand alphabet is not used to that. On the other hand it is turning into a more normal business with more CapExp, and like other more "normal" business it uses more external investment. As a general rule of thumb: The more capex, the more leverage; for example commodity extraction, infrastructure or power generation are very capex heavy, and heavily leveraged.

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

#245

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

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.

huh? i bought a used, very low-end/utilitarian 10 year old car and paid more than half upfront and my monthly payment was like $300. factor in insurance and gas and i was easily close to 400-450. the days of $1000 beaters that actually run well are gone :(

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

#246

Post by kentm »

belter wrote: post #212
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.

Waymo is not solving driving , it is closer to a sophisticated Disney Parkland ride. It is running inside a tightly constrained Operational Design Domain: - Geofenced areas - HD pre-mapped roads - Curated infrastructure - Remote ops fallback This is not general autonomy, it is highend automation inside a controlled distribution. The system degrades exactly where humans do not: construction, unmapped lane shifts, poli…

I’m pretty sure people vastly overstate how important “HD pre-mapped roads” are to Waymo.

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

#247

Post by fragmede »

tfehring wrote: post #203
direwolf20 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxis daily! In a country without trains, is that normal?

Driving to work is the most common way of commuting everywhere in the US except NYC. So in that sense, no, taking a taxi to work daily is not normal, just as walking, biking, and taking public transit aren’t normal. When I worked in San Francisco I took Caltrain to the city, but I took Waymo from the train station to the office. San Francisco, like almost all US cities, has poor local transit coverage. In my case the…

San Francisco's connection to Caltrain is deplorable, but as far as US cities go, the heart of it has pretty good public transportation.

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

#248

Post by nradov »

belter wrote: post #226
guiomie wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I in the Tesla stock subreddit? "Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem." If you consider SF and LA suburbs, than Europe is a suburb.

Would you address my other technical comments on what Waymo really is?

From a consumer perspective, no one cares what Waymo really is. If customers can pay and get from point A to point B reliably and safely then it doesn't matter how the sausage is made. Regardless of technical challenges and limitations they're obviously going to expand coverage to more areas.

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

#249

Post by UebVar »

floxy wrote: post #184
everforward wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t even think that’s rational, but it may be what’s propping them up. Last earnings call Musk said Optimus wasn’t doing “meaningful work” at Tesla and as far as I’m aware they haven’t done meaningful work anywhere. I think they’re behind the curve there. Figure AI recently finished an apparently successful feasibility trial of their humanoid robots with BMW and Boston Dynamics has a deal with Hyundai for their A…

>I’m not even convinced humanoid robots are going to pan out in general. I want one personally, so it can rake the leaves, mow the lawn, tend the garden, do the laundry and dishes, replace the roof, etc., when I'm old. But they should also be used to pick up litter along the highway, paint over graffiti, etc..

I feel like the humanoid form is getting in the way for that, and that a "Spot" like design with a hand on top is better suited for that. Also i think laundry and dishes are already 95% automated since about 50 years.

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

#250

Post by echelon »

josefx wrote: post #143
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.

Money from Google internally might be subject to internal power dynamics and come with strings attached. Having reliable outside funding from people who don't get a say in things might be a better alternative for a project that doesn't want to end up as Stadia 2.0 .

Google Genie would have disrupted Stadia anyway, fwiw.
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