301–310 of 399 posts
Why is autonomous driving being pursued but not remote driving? Why can I have a seat at my house with controls and drive my Uber/18 wheeler from my house?
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This is an R&D cost thing and the right analogy is to the telephone operator. It obviously cost a lot more to build even the first electromechanical last mile exchanges (with Strowager / SXS switches) than to hire some young women to work as operators, let alone to design something like System X (a computerised telephone exchange used in most of the UK from the 1980s) but you don't have to keep paying for the R&D on…
No, I think the BOM cost of Waymo is higher.
$3.28 variable cost per ride is less than what Uber is paying its drivers (median pay is ~$10.88 per ride). I imagine it nets out significantly in SDC's favor after adding back in cost of gas, insurance, and maintenance. And, the $300k should decrease over time.
Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving customers already in Phoenix, AZ.
Imo, the fact that Uber knows this, and is still partnering with Waymo is a sign of weakness bc Waymo's intention is very clearly to own the customer eventually.
This is fascinating, obviously it makes a tonne of sense for uber as a platform to offer waymo's autonomous vehicles. The first question I had though was "who extracts value here". Does Waymo get to demand human-driver level prices and therefore capture loads of value or does Uber actually capture the value because they're where the customers are. But then I realised... it doesn't matter. Waymo is part of Alphabet, a…
I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber obviously cannot spin up an org to replicate self driving vehicles in a few months. By that logic I would say Waymo has all of the power since they could develop their own app and undercut uber on pricing. The customers would instantly leave as it is a race to the bottom with ride share.
Google has already done this. Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving customers already in Phoenix, AZ. Completely driverless - nobody but the passenger in the car.
If you are a designer with a taste for spilling soup, cold pasta, and involuntarily calzone pizza, I recommend you start looking at options there, because:
- Restaurants operators do not want to leave their kitchen; if there’s a terrasse, waiters already go near the street, but it’s not true for everyone: drive through probably aren’t close enough without the car having an articulated arm.
- Food is messy at any conceivable temperature, and anything that looks even slightly gross is a huge No-No: human drivers have to deal with so many ways to preserve the food not to get yelled at, and all that knowledge is going out of the window without them.
- Customers do not want to leave their sofa. Period. Sometimes, they can’t. Always, they don’t want to — “playing video games” is the traditional excuse for “I can’t right now!” but bowel movements, or other reasons for priority hip movements, or just plain not paying attention. Your car will wait while the food gets cold. And losing money because hangry people inexplicably can’t pay attention to their notifications is not the worst part: their expectations will always be worse. The worst Karens are not the ones at Starbucks, upset that their name is spelled wrong: it’s those you haven’t seen yet because they can’t go to Starbucks because their lack of emotional balance keeps them at home most of the time.
Anyway: exciting concentration event (Alphabet is buying what’s left of Uber for pennies in a year), but there are still miracles to pull off. I, for one, will bow in silence when I finally get to see how one of the few geniuses we have left will fix this.
I've only seen 2 comments about Tesla on this thread. But, it seems people underestimate Tesla on here (I'm not the biggest fan). Though they are having great progress in their FSD beta- one way to mark this is by the number of users with access to it, which has increased significantly. This allows them to collect a lot more real world data then their competitors. Once this gets better and is able to prove better dri…
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I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber obviously cannot spin up an org to replicate self driving vehicles in a few months. By that logic I would say Waymo has all of the power since they could develop their own app and undercut uber on pricing. The customers would instantly leave as it is a race to the bottom with ride share.
Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing…
But this will be different for robots though. This is not a moat for Uber.
People here arguing about whether "Google could / could not bang out an Uber app in a weekend" are apparently completely unaware that Google has already done this. Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving customers already in Phoenix, AZ. Imo, the fact that Uber knows this, and is still partnering with Waymo is a sign of weakness bc Waymo's intention is very clearly to own the customer eventua…
I still don’t understand the strategy for Waymo. After running that taxi service in phoenix for this long they resorted to partnering with Uber, it’s a huge failure. What does Uber bring to the table at all? An app that is easily replicable and with google’s reputation they can easily get customers off of Uber to their own platform. It’s a colossal failure. I was really hoping they would use Waze for this purpose. In…
I think they’re accepting the fact that it’s crazy tough to gain market share and requires MILLIONS in ad spending. Sometimes it’s better to have a small piece of a large pie, especially when trying to bootstrap its brand, instead of taking a much bigger slice of a minuscule pie
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Google's missing piece isn't the app. And it isn't the lawyers. It's the network of riders. Waymo promised to 10x their scale this year. Waymo could saturate the territory with empty vehicles waiting for riders on the Waymo app, or it can tap into a fraction of Uber's volume.
As others have pointed out, Google could scoop up tons of riders in a heartbeat, by announcing a ride share platform publicly (which would get tons of news coverage) and by advertising the feature within Google Maps, Waze, etc. Google only needs to put together a one-sided marketplace, where Uber/Lyft had to build a two-sided marketplace. And Google already has a connection to billions (at least hundreds of millions)…