Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by belter » Tue, Feb 03, 2026, 1:28 AM UTC

tokioyoyo wrote: post #227

belter wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They’re currently testing them in weird ass tiny streets here in Tokyo. I have a feeling you haven’t been in a Waymo?

>> They’re currently testing them in weird ass tiny streets here in Tokyo.

With real drivers mapping the roads. [1]

If you rent a car in Madrid or Paris, do you spend years "mapping" the towns before you are able to drive safely from A to B?

Waymo is nothing more than a geofenced Disney ride.

[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2024/12/partnering-with-nihon-kotsu-a...

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

#292

Post by dyauspitr » Tue, Feb 03, 2026, 1:33 AM UTC

6keZbCECT2uB wrote: post #213

dyauspitr wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m aware of those but those only go 2-3 miles so they don’t work for the majority of suburban and rural Americans. Also they don’t have the convenience of delivery to your door unless they can start using elevators.

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

#293

Post by dyauspitr » Tue, Feb 03, 2026, 1:34 AM UTC

anonymars wrote: post #256

dyauspitr wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artificially protecting jobs by holding back technology is terrible form. At best it’s short term before the economics become an order of magnitude cheap and at worst it’s hamstringing your economy so you’re left behind.

Be that as it may, I would argue there's a straight line from "it's okay to destroy this fairly-low-skill-career for the good of the economy" to the overall situation the US finds itself in today

I figure that’s the way of the world. We’ve gone from a majority low skill economy to a much more complex one over the decades. It will probably continue.

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

#294

Post by nradov » Tue, Feb 03, 2026, 1:40 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #282

nradov wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. The local car dealerships and Tesla service centers seem to be pretty busy doing heavy maintenance on electric vehicles. The drive train might be marginally simpler but there are still a lot of moving parts that break or corrode just like any other vehicle.

Body work, misaligned panels, I mean surely there is a lot of work to do on Teslas. But you don't need to build out for that, you could just get repair shops to do it under contract.

No, you're missing the point. Collision damage repair is farmed out to separate body shops. But Teslas are mechanically very unreliable and break down a lot even without collisions. Ironically, more mechanically complex vehicles like the Toyota Prius hybrid are more durable and reliable.

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

#295

Post by nradov » Tue, Feb 03, 2026, 1:43 AM UTC

belter wrote: post #288

nradov wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you put human lives on the line, both on the shared public road and inside the Waymo then how the sausage is made totally matters, as directly applies to what the failures modes are. Safe from A to B only holds in ideal conditions and limited zones. The hard problems like rare edge cases, weather, unpredictable humans, are precisely why it cant scale easily. If the tech was truly solved, Waymo would not be geo fen…

It may not scale easily but it is scaling. Waymo (Alphabet) has access to essentially infinite capital to make that happen. I predict that within 10 years the majority of the US population will have access to their rides.

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

#296

Post by seanmcdirmid » Tue, Feb 03, 2026, 1:45 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #294

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Body work, misaligned panels, I mean surely there is a lot of work to do on Teslas. But you don't need to build out for that, you could just get repair shops to do it under contract.

No, you're missing the point. Collision damage repair is farmed out to separate body shops. But Teslas are mechanically very unreliable and break down a lot even without collisions. Ironically, more mechanically complex vehicles like the Toyota Prius hybrid are more durable and reliable.

That has more to do with Tesla being incompetent than with EVs being intrinsically more complex vehicles that cannot be durable and reliable.

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

#297

Post by seanmcdirmid » Tue, Feb 03, 2026, 1:49 AM UTC

dmix wrote: post #259

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really maintain electronics, you swap them out when they are detected to be bad. Electric vehicles don't need tune ups or overhauls, it is light maintenance and full on component swaps. Send the defective components back to the factory for refurbishment and/or recycling.

I don't think $50k LIDAR sensor suites are disposable like that and the computer integrations is pretty sophisticated I'd imagine. These cars will take a beating.

> In China, the cost of automotive LiDAR has plummeted due to aggressive manufacturing scale and the shift toward solid-state designs, with mass-market ADAS units now priced as low as $150 to $200. Leading Chinese suppliers like Hesai and RoboSense have reduced the average selling price of LiDAR in China to between $450 and $500, significantly lower than the $700 to $1,000 global average. While high-performance, robotaxi-grade sensors—similar to those used by Waymo—still command higher prices of approximately $500 to $1,000 per unit, the total cost of a comprehensive autonomous sensor suite in China has fallen to roughly $2,100, compared to the tens of thousands required just a few years ago. This rapid price erosion has enabled LiDAR to become a standard feature in Chinese electric vehicles priced as low as $25,000, far outpacing adoption rates in Western markets.

I'm not sure how much google is spending today ATM, but it is probably nowhere near $50k even with 100% tariffs.

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

#298

Post by 0x457 » Tue, Feb 03, 2026, 1:58 AM UTC

LargeWu wrote: post #163

biztos wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m surprised they don’t have opt-in LLM-based “chatty mode” where you can talk to the AI personality of your choice while riding. Obviously shouldn’t be the same AI that’s deciding whether to run over the child or crash into the oncoming train. [edit: riding not driving]

> LLM-based “chatty mode” where you can talk to the AI personality of your choice I'm genuinely baffled that people would want to do this.

Some people, not me, just can't go a second without conversation.

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

#299

Post by 0x457 » Tue, Feb 03, 2026, 2:04 AM UTC

guiomie wrote: post #224

belter wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Well, not all of LA is Waymo accessible. Suburbs of LA IIRC in-fact are no accessible. Only dense LA areas are covered and no freeways.

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

#300

Post by tbossanova » Tue, Feb 03, 2026, 2:04 AM UTC

josu wrote: post #88

lazarus01 wrote: post #60

Earlier 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 wonder what will happen to the drivers if a large representation of the 1 million+ daily trips are displaced by automation? If it happens gradually enough, they will just find other jobs. After the transition, society will be producing more with the same labor force, and thus the aggregate utility will increase.

In the past when automation displaced many jobs, we did things like raise the age kids could stay in school. There used to be huge numbers of e.g. 14 year olds who previously would be expected to go to work that would now have the opportunity to stay in school. Kind of like a mini UBI as in the transition period they would usually get given food, healthcare etc at least minimally. What’s the equivalent now?