I'm pretty sure this is the first big post about Waymo on HN, the comments are fun to read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13168888 :)
Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation
211–220 of 348 posts
Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation
#212No 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, police manually directing traffic, chaotic mixed behavior.
A cop overriding a light is not an “edge case”, it is a semantic and social reasoning problem that current perception stacks still do not robustly solve. It works because the world is pre modeled, not because the car understands driving.
Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem. Dont get fooled by Wall Street stock pumping.
Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Im fortunate to live in an area dense with traditional taxis and Ubers, no Waymo yet. I rarely take taxis, the exception is when I have to haul my gear to the studio for a jam session. I always take a taxi, because it’s cheaper and faster than using an app to call an uber. On 80% of the trips, I end up having a nice chat with the driver and learn something new about humanity or myself. I really enjoy these interactio…
I think there will still be delivery services where you need someone to go into the restaurant and then up to the customers door. That’s going to stick around unless we get to a point where the restaurant is responsible to load up the Waymo and the customer is responsible for getting it out which probably won’t happen anytime soon. The whole delivery market was also mostly created overnight from something that didn’t…
In Miami, there are several competing companies like Coco Robotics which employ human "pilots" to monitor a small fleet of robot delivery boxes where the restaurant deposits the food in the box and the box unlocks with integration into the app.
Just figured you'd want to know anytime soon was at least a year ago.
Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation
#214Earlier 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.
The average monthly payment for a used car in the US in 2025 was $532, according to https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/average-car-paym.... This does not count insurance, taxes, parking, or gas.
A status symbol will easily run you $1000/mo. I currently pay $350/mo (including cost of capital), and I don't know how I would pay less for a car that's not actively falling apart. Chevy Spark, manual transmission, $7k KBB value, averaging 500 miles per month.
Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They probably see the electronics and software as their product, hopefully they will license it to someone so my next car will have it :). Lidar prices are cheap enough these days (but coming out of China, so who knows with Trump if that will apply to us).
Another approach is Waymo acquires Tesla's auto technology. Tesla sloughs off its dinosaur car business to focus on its new robot mission, and Waymo detoxifies the Tesla auto brand.
Aside from destroying about $1.25 trillion of market cap, this would leave everyone better off.
Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the better option is to not be so anti immigration
So let's poach these people from the third world and...what about the third world? People can't just be made in factories like robots and self driving cars can. It seems inevitable that either we will have really sucky retirements (please die early grandpa, we can't take care of you!) OR (hopefully) automation will come to the rescue despite luddite protests.
Plenty of people from the third world are interested in moving, trying something new. We should all be free to try new things, but of course you he world isn't set up that way. Seems like we could match up dual needs. The western developed world is in the midst of a racist and fascist period, so not the best time to try this. We have competing changes, shortage of workers in many job areas in the West like the trades in the US, also shortage of jobs for young people in the west.
Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation
#217Why 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.
Rich people and big companies buy insurance too.
Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
No they won't. The product is so outrageously superior on every dimension to the status quo that municipalities will figure out whatever they need to in order to accommodate them. You think the folks on City Council enjoy chauffeuring their own children around and will block a solution to it?
Wait till you see the showdown that's building up in NYC. Mamdani, the new nyc mayor, has been a long time friend and advocate for NYC taxi workers alliance. He even participated in a hunger strike with them in 2021. Waymo is right now starting the wheels turning on getting NYC permits, but taxi workers have already made their (obvious) stance clear: No Waymos.
The NY Governor's office has always been pro-SDC's, the Mayor's office has always been against them.
Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you have to pay him back with interest or equity That's the price for infinite scaling. If a business can't make more than that it should be shut down. i.e. do you want to make 25% of 1 billion or 5% of 1000 billion?
The point the great-grandparent is making is that Google could comfortably finance the project itself and make 100% of the upside, not 25% or 5%.
And the point here is borrowing more money increases available funds for bigger rewards. Google can fund 1 Waymo but not an infinite amount of them.
Re: Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation
#220Earlier 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.
I disagree with their reasoning and would say it's more for strategic benefits.
Giving firms that they get along well with (like Sequoia) allocation feels like a mix between a favor and possibly a way to signal that the valuation has some external buy-in too.