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Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

blog.waymo.com

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Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#2
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, and Uber is sitting at around a $70Bn market cap, surely if this is starting to show signs of success Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber, vertically integrates, gets a great platform, great customer base, has all the customer service infra that google sucks at and they just slowly phase out the human drivers by rolling out autonomous vehicles as they're legalized in each jurisdiction.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#6

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…

[deleted]

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#7

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…

Alphabet has a large stake in Uber. They don’t need to own it outright to realize huge returns.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#10

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…

Alphabet has a large stake in Uber. They don’t need to own it outright to realize huge returns.

Sure, but there's massive advantages to bringing it in house. The only reason I could see for them not doing it is that as autonomous vehicles are deployed widely there's going to be a massive backlash from current uber drivers and strategically it might be good for Alphabet to be able to use Uber as a heat shield.
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