Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation
bloomberg.com207 points by JumpCrisscross 21 hours ago
207 points by JumpCrisscross 21 hours ago
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.
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 interactions, but I feel for the drivers, it’s a very tough job where most taxi drivers have to scramble to find places to urinate or do so in an empty bottle between their legs. There is not much dignity in the job. I feel a negligible segment enjoy it as a reliable career.
I wonder what will happen to the drivers if a large representation of the 1 million+ daily trips are displaced by automation?
I used to feel this way. In the early days of "ride sharing," I preferred Lyft and would sit up front so I could have a conversation with the driver, which they encouraged. It was really fun for a while, and I enjoyed meeting people from different walks of life. Over time, though, transportation became much more functional for me, and now when I take non-autonomous rides, it's more irksome than enjoyable when drivers strike up conversations.
Why the change? I think a big part of your experience is the fact that you "rarely take taxis." Once you're doing it daily or near-daily, the amount of smalltalk becomes more tiresome. Also, with kids and a busy life, I'm usually either looking to get things done or enjoy a rare moment to myself as I'm moving from place-to-place. I agree with OP that Waymo is a huge step up on those dimensions. There's no other human in the same space to feel awkward around.
The fact that they drive more safely and smoothly is a huge improvement, as well. Ironically, I thought this was going to be something I would hate about Waymo. "You mean it drives the speed limit and follows all the traffic laws? It will take forever to get anywhere." It took approximately one ride for my perspective to completely flip. It's so much nicer to not feel the stress of a driver who is driving aggressively or jerking to a stop/start at every intersection. It's not like you can tell them to just ease up a bit, either. When we ride with our kids, we feel massively safer in Waymos.
Yes, it will be disruptive, and I don't particularly love the dominance that big tech has in all of our lives, but I do think Waymo is a marvel, and I hugely appreciate it as an option. As soon as they can take kids alone to all their various activities, it will be yet another massive unlock for parents.
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 there was a bus that took a similar route, but it only ran every 20 minutes even during commute hours and wasn’t coordinated with the train, so if everything was running on time it would have been a 17 minute wait (plus an extra 5 minutes walking). I was busy and well paid enough that spending the extra $10 to save ~20 minutes of travel (and the uncertainty of when the bus would arrive, and how strongly it would smell like piss) was well worth it.
not everywhere in the US except NYC. People take trains in Chicago, for example.
They do, at a much higher rate than the US as a whole, but cars are still dominant. Transit mode share in the city of Chicago is around 21%, down from 28% pre-pandemic, while driving is at 44%. For Chicagoland as a whole, driving is 63%, transit only 9%. The usual source for this data is the American Community Survey; I pulled these numbers from https://api.census.gov, but the same source is also cited in e.g. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...) and Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-22/how-ameri...)
San Francisco's connection to Caltrain is deplorable, but as far as US cities go, the heart of it has pretty good public transportation.
> but as far as US cities go
That the load bearing part right there. SF's transportation is pretty piss poor
According to [1] the median Bay Area big tech worker earns $272k/year - or $130/hour.
According to [2] Uber drivers make $15 to $25 an hour, before expenses like fuel.
So while it's not normal it's certainly plausible that some people take taxis on a daily basis.
More broadly, as levels of wealth inequality rise in a given society, more people end up working in the personal service sector doing things like cleaning, food delivery, taxi driving etc.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra... [2] https://www.triplog.net/blog/how-much-do-uber-drivers-make
As a former Lyft driver in SF I felt kinda weird when saw the bit about urination. Like, that's just not a problem. As a driver you just plan ahead as in any other job out there where you're not allowed to disengage at a whim. Pilots and surgeons don't pee in bottles, why would drivers? It's kinda funny when people try to empathize but come up with these creative scenarios of what's challenging. The parts that are bad are same as any other thing done for a living: money and dealing with other people. The job was shit when people were shit and/or when the money was shit.
I enjoyed it as a job, not a career. But that was in 2015.
Pilots and surgeons surely have easily accessible bathrooms as a part of their workplace, no? They’re also compensated significantly more and (IMHO) given a lot more dignity
In my city public bathrooms are extremely rare and it’s not trivial to find one. I’m sure taxi drivers are a bit more in tune with where they are out of necessity but even then it’s no guarantee they can find convenient parking/be in the right place/etc.
No. Not for some surgeons at least. Once you start cutting you may have to stay until the job is done so get good at holding it. In the The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe podcast episode Dr. Rahul Seth talks about doing 12 hour surgeries. No breaks, no bathroom, constantly on his feet working.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-the-way-i-heard-it-with-m...
Commercial pilots flying airliners generally have it a bit easier. As for military pilots flying tactical aircraft, well this song might give you an idea of what they face.
Yep. This is a really weird thread. The no bathroom piss in bottle thing is not a thing I encountered in my IRL XP. Never felt this imaginary problem, never affected my dignity.
Funny enough, I did later work on surgical training tech and went into O.R.'s. And yeah, everyone in the room stays until the work is done, no easy pee pee breaks. Back to back procedures. But then also nobody ever complained about that there either. It's a fun job.
Idk. I'd reiterate a point I was getting at: what makes any job less dignified is dealing with shit people and/or shit pay. Fwiw Bathrooms you can plan for same as you plan for getting hungry by packing a lunch.
It sounds that I'm joking, but I'm not -- would it be so weird if those surgeons wore diapers?
>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?
And homo economist lived happy ever after with his field of spherical cows.
And the median wage will continue to decline, as the productivity gains are scooped up by fewer and fewer.
US median household income is at an all time high.[1] The pandemic caused a decline for a few years but it's recovered now.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-...
> I always take a taxi, because it’s cheaper and faster than using an app to call an uber.
I'm really surprised to hear that. Are you in a large city where taxies are common? Or do you have a local taxi service and app that is very good?
> I really enjoy these interactions, but I feel for the drivers, it’s a very tough job where most taxi drivers have to scramble to find places to urinate or do so in an empty bottle between their legs.
Public toilets, their condition and their non-existence are an often-overlooked issue! It's not just highly problematic for taxi drivers, but also for parcel and postal delivery people... and it's not just relevant for workers either, it's also (IMHO) a violation of anti-discrimination laws.
Imagine you're old and don't have much bladder control or volume, or you're a woman who recently has given birth, or you got one of the variety of bowel related diseases, or you've got a child who is still dependent on diapers. Your range of free unimpeded movement is basically limited to where you have easy and fast access to a toilet or at the very least a place to take care of yourself/a child.
try talking to young attractive women on their experiences and you'll maybe appreciate this somewhat forced interaction less. my partner has been literally kidnapped multiple times (refused to take her to her destination and refused to let her out for over an hour), had drivers refuse to unlock doors until she gave them her number at least once every two months, and constantly has drivers take detours and longer routes to force conversation for longer.
the sooner we can stop subjecting people to having to interact with strangers in a semi-private setting just for basic needs like getting around, the better off vulnerable people will be
God, yes, and someone think of the gong farmers and pole men.
That's a pretty dismissive attitude for ~100 million professional drivers worldwide, making a living doing actual useful work on a forum where the vast majority of users do not do any useful work.
There is also a demographic cliff most of the world is currently going off, declining birth rates and labor shortages. Would you rather have a human nurse in your very old age retirement, or a human driver. Because we don’t have enough young people now for both.
There are not labor shortages. Instead we see massive youth unemployment.
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.
I'm all for immigration, but the world isn't producing enough people to make that a very viable long term solution. Eventually we have to reduce our demand for labor, especially when our civilization is lopsided for awhile with older people and not enough young people (a problem that will fix itself eventually as the old people die off, I guess).
I'm OK with robots driving cars like I'm ok with not needing an elevator operator anymore to use an elevator.
Well, the point is that if we reach a point in which a robot can do it better and cheaper, it's no longer useful work.
I personally find that fighting dismissive attitudes is better done by not being dismissive towards other things (or people in this case)
It’s healthier for the discussion culture here as well.
I've taken taxis in the US, and i can understand why people wouldn't want to. Taxis in other countries are a different experience.
Huh? how can one possibly generalize whatever experience they have not only to one country but to “other countries”, i.e. to the world. I’ve taken taxi in many countries, in all continents, and my experience have been that the drivers are generally helpful. There are scams and bad experience, but that’s minority. That applies to any country, the US included
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.
I think the word "professional" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment.
My experience with taxis has been almost universally negative.
Honestly same thing, taxis seem to be polite and up to have a chat about anything here. So, not that hyped about these things really.
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 exist before.
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.
these things are all over the city i live in, too. absolute menace and an abuse of the commons. i've had them literally run into me more than once and i've started physically moving them out of my way when they stop in the middle of the sidewalk.
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.
I've been mercilessly downvoted for the suggestion, so at least on HN we can assume it's not what people want. :-)
why would anyone need this when then can pull out their phone and use their LLM of choice, if they wanted. I expect some large percentage of social users will just facetime chat with their friends during the ride
For me, this is the major selling point to own a car. I may drive a few times a week, and taxis might be much cheaper, but no way I'm going to deal with human taxi drivers if I have a choice.
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.
Same. Ever been a vulnerable woman stuck in a car with a man who starts ranting that "nobody wants to date men who aren't rich anymore" and it turns out the driver is angry because the women that are trapped as riders won't go out with him?
Or how about, "Nice place...you live alone here?"
Absolutely would choose the robot.
Yea, I can't imagine being a woman and having to deal with some of these drivers.
This doesn't compare, but as a man I get really put off by the amount of invasive questions (where I work, where my family is from, etc) when I'm just trying to get from point A to point B.
I'm a mid-millenial FWIW, so I very much remember a world of only having old school taxis.
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.
Erm, what would you propose as an alternative answer?
Presumably women are giving those creepy drivers bad ratings, and yet they are still on the road. So, that's clearly not working.
Sure, the US should fix their transit system, but that doesn't help women now.
So, the default answer becomes, "Get your own car, plebe." And that's super expensive and requires you to drive.
Or, a woman can take a Waymo.
I'm right there with you about hating the megajillionaires, but I'm open to hearing your alternative suggestions.
> Is it really that bad to share a car with someone?
Sometimes it is, and you never really know when.
Some of my most unpleasant experiences involved a couple of reckless drivers, even more nutters who insisted on talking about their politics or pet peeves, I fear one of them may have gone beyond mere eccentricity and probably required some medical intervention, but couldn't figure out how to report that without possibly resulting in the driver being punished by the app.
Hah, I had a 2am conversation with a woman from Argentina about Javier Milei which is one of my Uber riding highlights.
But then another time a guy warned me not to open his glove box because his Glock was in there and he sounded deranged and it’s the one time I’ve literally gotten out of the car and cancelled my Uber.
One female Uber driver told me about how she had to go to court because a drunk man threatened to stab her with a knife (that he was brandishing), then he passed out and the police had to haul him out of her car. The .1% ruin it for everyone else.
Personally, I find it odd to have interactions with anyone just based of transactionality. I want to interact with people because I have relationships with them. I've always found it hard to figure out exactly how nice to be with someone you don't know. I don't think this is a maladjustment on my part, I think you probably shouldn't be overly nice to people before you establish trust with them... and that takes time.
The human driver could be nodding off because they didn’t bother sleeping last night, or maybe they just had some food with lots of garlic, or…ya, this has all happened to me before. I’ll take the Waymo over uber.
I've had one driving while reading their phone and checking stocks and looking up for about 1/2 a second of every 4 seconds.
I’m fine to share a car. I’m less keen on dying in one.
Riding in a car is easily the most dangerous thing I do in my daily life and my subjective impression of how well uber/lyft/taxi drivers drive is not great.
The Uber Driver who told me all about his Glock in the glove box was pretty off putting.
Also the Jeep that picked me up in August with broken air conditioning, although that was an annoyance vs “what is happening right now am I going to die”.
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, and I don't really like driving, but since a car is easily 30 minutes faster than public transport to drive in to work, sadly 30 minutes of traffic in the morning is still faster than public transport, no matter how annoying it is. Oh and no waiting in the rain/cold is a nice bonus.
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.
That's not outrageous as a car price once you add insurance, maintenance, taxes, parking, license fee, cleaning, etc
Along with any interest on the purchase or foregone investment gains. You can use a true cost of ownership calculator here.
https://www.edmunds.com/honda/accord/2022/cost-to-own/?style...
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.
There's no shot that number isn't being driven up by people purchasing more car than they need. You can get a used car for $10,000 or less, there's no reason one needs to pay $500/mo.
You sure about that? A $7k car expensed over 18 months plus insurance and road tax is ballpark $450 /mo. That omits maintenance and fuel but conversely also underestimates how long the vehicle will be kept on average. Depending on where you live parking will range from free to potentially more than $100 /mo.
If you manage to stretch $10k cars out to 5 years on average with zero maintenance it's less than $200 /mo but ... no maintenance in 5 years?
I think $300 /mo plus fuel and parking is probably a reasonable estimate for frugal behavior.
> 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 car is paid off.
> 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.
$350-500/month is cheaper than taxi rides. Even with a more reasonable 5-10 mile commute, I'd be spending probably $50/DAY if I took taxis.
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.
The standard tax deduction for car travel is $0.70 / mile in the US, which accounts for things like insurance, gas, maintenance, and depreciation. So $500 / month is around 700 miles, which probably around 90% of US drivers surpass.
There is no tax deduction (in the US) for vehicle use that is non-business related.
Correct, the person you are responding to is using it as a benchmark for the all-in cost of driving a vehicle on a per-mile basis.
You are ridiculous. The all in cost is easily that. Cars don't run on air. Insurance costs money.
And you don't use "ingenious" there.
> A car does not cost $350 and $500 per month.
Insurance alone can be 100€ a month (and more so for younger drivers). At a very modest 5 liters / 100km and a one way route of 20 km you're at 800km a month / 40 liters of gas => 1.80€ a liter => 72€ in fuel. Your average car then has 20 ct/km for maintenance costs (inspections, spare parts, oil changes, tires, workshop time), so another 160€ a month - and more if it is a run-down junker car.
That are just the fixed running costs you have with pretty much every car, around 330€ a month. We haven't talked about depreciation yet at all. Even if you say you buy a barely road worthy wreck for 3000 € and run it until it's only ripe for the junkyard to fetch maybe 500 € every two years, that's still about 100€ a month you're paying.
And what we also haven't had a single talk about is operating and purchase taxes, highway tolls, city-core tolls, rental spots for parking (including the price you have paid for the garage in your house, it's a lot of real estate), that also can easily add to many hundreds of euros each year.
Cars are expensive once you actually include replacement/depreciation and maintenance costs.
> Cars are expensive once you actually include replacement/depreciation and maintenance costs.
Yep, that describes cars. High up front cost that barely goes up when you need more done (meaning: family of 5? Car beats even the bus fare for a 3km ride to school). In trade for independence, cheap groceries, cheaper travel (at least in opportunity cost), cheap days out with the family, bigger house is realistic, ability to go work in not so well connected places (I'm a consultant), capacity to actually get heavy things, collect people, not waiting/dragging things around in cold/rain/...
Oh and these DON'T add up. Bring the kids to school AND drive to work AND get groceries by car? You don't pay 3 times like you do with any other means of transport, you pay 1.2 times what you pay when doing only one.
With 2 people in the car it easily matches public transport costs if you use it enough. Oh and even by yourself it's like half taxi/uber fares, a third or less of waymo fares (though at least those don't charge per person).
Car insurance has essentially doubled in price over the past few years, from a combination of
- cars becoming more complicated to repair. Marco Arment of Overcast related an incident where his Rivian had a simple fender bender, and his insurance was billed $15,000 in labor and parts to fix it because of the monobody construction where you have to tear apart half the car to fix anything
- inflation in both goods and services means car repair costs are going up
- more reckless and uninsured drivers thanks to general post-covid norm breakdowns
Insurance alone can now be $150-200/month even if you don't have a particularly nice car. Combine that with gas, maintenance, and registration taxes, and I think most people in the US are paying at least $350/month for their car even if amortized costs mean they don't realize it.
Marco Arment of Overcast related an incident where his Rivian had a simple fender bender, and his insurance was billed $15,000 in labor and parts to fix it because of the monobody construction where you have to tear apart half the car to fix anything
Hyundai Ioniq 5, backing into the garage next to the RV, and at "backing into the garage" speed ran into the RV. The fiberglass body of the RV suffered a 3 inch diameter break in the fiberglass that I could have fixed myself. The Hyundai? 17,000 American dollars. The rear quarter panel took a dent, and (IIRC) the bumper might have had some damage. Part of the problem was that there really isn't a "rear quarter panel" anymore. No, as I looked at it, that piece of sheet metal goes all the way from the rear bumper to the front of the passenger compartment. The shop didn't replace that piece, but rather cut the dented piece out and welded in new sheet metal.
Between that, and all the sensors, etc., $17K for backing into a piece of fiberglass at not even a walking pace. Now that the car has some years on it, if I do that again they'll probably total it.
> I think most people in the US are paying at least $350/month
What an absurd statement. Mine has gone down in the past several years, and I pay around that per 6 months.
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 :(
The cost is a factor -- and something that I think policy makers should very much push to change.
For our family of four, two of us pay for public transport as of now. That adds up to $12 round trip; which is often more expensive than parking in the even in a high density area. Once we have to start paying for the kids too, that would add up to $24 for a round trip, which ends up being more expensive than driving. I get that public transportation is expensive to operate; maybe that alone is the root of the problem here.
Yes, all those things. Except on cost, at least in SF, MUNI is free for children.
We mostly drive wherever we need to go, especially when it's all of us. But if we're going to a Warriors game, we always take Muni, at it's more convenient (and free for adults too if you show your ticket).
Also, it's generally faster and more convenient (and fun) to get to Chase Center via Muni than driving. Getting back is tough both because this is peak Lyft/Waymo demand as well as peak Muni demand.
I’m guessing you live in America where car ownership is heavily subsidized? Many places you would spend $500/month just to park your car, maybe more.
In most of America there is abundant free parking on private property including homes, stores, and workplaces. That is hardly a subsidy. I understand the argument that dense cities shouldn't have so much free public street parking but there are only a handful of neighborhoods where that even matters.
The "free parking" isn't really free, you just have land that is really cheap devoted to it. And where it isn't...well, American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them. Street parking matters in almost every neighborhood in Seattle now...since parking on its own is expensive, and you will also have to pay for a few busted windows on your car for the pleasure of free street parking.
The highways are heavily subsidized by general funds these days since raising the gas tax outside of a few states isn't very popular.
I'm American but in the other countries I lived in (Switzerland and China) and the many countries I've visited, private car ownership is always a luxury, not a cheap necessety attainable by everyone.
> The "free parking" isn't really free, you just have land that is really cheap devoted to it.
When I can park my car in my driveway at no marginal cost to myself, most people (including me) would call that free.
If you have a driveway. I had to look around hard for a house with a car port that wasn't just a slot in a crowded alley, heck, I saw some beautiful houses that had no effective parking at all (maybe they had sunk garages built in 1920 that were not usable by modern cars).
> And where it isn't...well, American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them.
The driver of housing cost in US cities is lack of supply. Parking spaces are a drop in the bucket versus what is missing. The root cause is zoning laws; particularly the height restrictions as they currently stand.
> Parking spaces are a drop in the bucket versus what is missing.
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/seattle-parking-spot-sells-...
That was 2022, $56k is probably about 10% of a one or two bedroom condo price.
> The root cause is zoning laws; particularly the height restrictions as they currently stand.
Tokyo is, as I understand it, the libertarian ideal for a city that doesn't let zoning get in the way of a good time, and parking space prices are still expensive there:
> Monthly rental rates for spots in the 23 Wards range from ¥30,000 to over ¥80,000, which reflects high underlying property value.
That's $200 to $500 a month.
I think there's a misunderstanding. I'm not claiming that parking space if charged at the market rate for an unimproved cement room in a high rise is particularly cheap. You can only fit so many cars within the footprint of a typical condo after all.
I'm claiming that removing parking (ie converting the raw sq footage over to living space) would not meaningfully impact housing prices. The existence of parking, free or otherwise, is not a significant contributor to the housing shortage. The issue is one of scale. That's what my "drop in the bucket" comment is referring to.
You specifically said "American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them". That is technically correct but in context it is blatantly wrong. The price increase as it stands is approximately zero.
The error is failing to differentiate between cost due to construction and maintenance versus cost due to land value. The latter is linked to total supply and thus height restrictions. The former is not the primary component in HCoL cities. You can easily verify this by checking the cost to purchase an apartment building in say San Francisco versus a small town in the midwest. (I refer to the cost to purchase the entire building there, not the cost to rent a single unit.)
> American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them.
Which means people were willing to pay to have a place to park. WAI
Taxis are not a replacement for having a car for commuting for like 99% of people
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.
>We need this in europe.
I'm not against automated driving at all, but in my experience we actually don't have that much use for stuff like this in most (big) European cities, since almost all of them have good public transport options already. I think trams especially fill the hole of "low-friction transport in a city" perfectly. I think having less vehicles on the road is a benefit to us all, but I understand some cities are not as tightly packed for public transport to work that well.
Either way, less human drivers is better.
My anecdote: My wife had to literally have two drinks before here first Waymo ride. Now she doesn't want to use anything else other that Waymo when we can't drive ourselves, and totally agree with her
Having said that, Uber was amazing experience when it started too, now it's on par with cabs.
> No product had such a fast transition from novelty to "omg i never want to interact with a human again".
I still recall when taxi services were the only offering, and Uber et al were marketed as ride sharing services instead of ride hailing services. It's hard to put into words the transformative effect that ride hailing services had throughout the world. Overall rides are now far safer and more reliable, to the point where the old days feel like the dark ages.
> We need this in europe.
No we don't. Your github says you're from Berlin, why the hell would you ever need a taxi in your life?
Someone should just find a cure for for the fear techbros have of being near poor people.
I don't live in Berlin, but even if: have you ever taken public transport in less mainstream lines? Apart from nothing working and connections taking forever and operations stopping at night, horrible signage that lets you stress even more, you sit next to human excrements, hooligans coming from football games, nazis wanting to beat you up, stink, rude music and beggers. I sometimes miss it for sentimental value, but compared to a world of robots driving us with relaxing music in a clean and safe space i know what future I want.
Is there really that much poop on Berlin public transit?
Seattle has some of the highest per capital homeless in the US, and a dearth of public toilets, and yet there's not that much poop on our public transit.
I am also skeptical that y'all's violent crime rate is higher than ours.
Granted I haven't taken Berlin public transit in 20 yrs, so I don't know.
> I am also skeptical that y'all's violent crime rate is higher than ours.
Ok well I am wrong. Berlin's violent crime rate is 2-4x higher than Seattle? Huh. The homicide rate is within touching distance.
That was not what I expected, ok.
It wouldn't take much to have more violent crime in Seattle, according to my gut (yeah, I know, "show me the numbers"). Granted, it's probably gotten worse since we moved here 25 some years ago, but coming from places like my old hometown of Indianapolis, Seattle didn't have any place I wouldn't feel comfortable walking at night. Again, it's changed a lot since (there are some areas I would avoid at 2 a. m. now), but I still feel much safer in Seattle than other large cities.
Yea I agree it's not like Seattle is St Louis or anything.
Still, I just naively assumed that major German cities would be even better. Guess not though.
I’d put Berlin ubahn halfway between nyc and japan in terms of cleanliness and orderly behavior, the bigger problem is that there’s no ac in the summer
Didn't see any poop in berlin, but did see it in Shibuya station, spread out by hundreds of people.
> have you ever taken public transport in less mainstream lines?
Yes, I have. I never drove a car myself and maybe used a taxi 10 times in the last 30 years.
Will waymo even be available in less mainstream areas? It seems more reasonable for them to go for dense places instead and leave the unprofitable regions for someone else.
> Will waymo even be available in less mainstream areas?
Ever is a long time. It's not reasonable to predict beyond a decade or so. It's easily possible that this becomes huge and in the 2040s people are astonished that "driving yourself" was a thing, the same way it's hard to comprehend now that most people weren't literate. Not "Couldn't write an essay / read a newspaper" but "Couldn't sign their name / read a postal address"
But it's also possible that this goes nowhere, and outside of a few large cities there is never a robot taxi market, it just doesn't exist. Waymo is, among other things, a bet that there is a large market.
Dense places are where it starts, but that was also true for the telephone. Bell didn't provide service to tiny rural settlements, they wired places like Boston and New York, AIUI the general service provision was a government initiative even in the US, it was never strictly profitable enough for huge corporations to spend their own money making it universal.
I mean, I can understand wanting to start in dense places. But those are also the places where public transit is a viable existing solution.
Personal transit just looks incredible inefficient and unscalable if everyone would use it. I could totally see it as a last resort solution for situations where nothing else is available, but that's an unattractive market that isn't going to make anyone rich.
In an urban area the "last resort" cases add up. The last time I was in a taxi it was the middle of the night, and I'd just smashed my head open, so I had concluded that I must not trust my own judgement and should seek immediate medical attention, buses don't run in the middle of the night (on that route)
I think ambulances were invented for this use case.
Ambulances are for emergencies. An ambulance could be dispatched depending on availability, but the dispatch team has more experience with this than I do and so they - like the hospital's initial triage team - would put me in the "injured but not dying" category and maybe I get an ambulance in an hour or two depending on other priorities.
They don't want me to go home and fall asleep, because it is possible that I have a brain injury and will never wake up, but their advice is going to be "Can you get somebody else to drive, or maybe call a taxi?" not "We will Blue Light an ambulance to you ASAP".
Everyone has the "fear" of being near other people, regardless of their affluence. That's why apartments are not built for 20 but got 2-5 people and doors exist. I don't see why it must be a rich people thing when it comes to self driving cars. Could also become super interesting by making remoter areas more serviceable.
I literally got a taxi today in Berlin because the trains were on strike, and the other day because the trains and trams were broken due to ice. You really can’t think of valid uses for a taxi?
Taxis are also public transport and so their provision in cities is in fact part of the transport fabric. Since there must be taxis, why not improve them?
This isn't about poor people, at least for me, I'd much rather be alone than with Elon fucking Musk. If I want to hang out with people I will choose when and who. The least good bit of being in a taxi is small talk with the driver.
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War crimes are extremely violent crimes, and it's not "poor people" giving the orders.
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.
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.
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.
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 fenced or expanding so slowly.
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.
Im not because the statement you wrote is too generic, « not solving driving » … solving driving could mean many different things. It’s the classic rage bait one liners you see on Reddit from Tesla bag holders. It’s funny because everything you’ve described IS solving « driving » from my perspective. I sit in the back and go read hacker news without having to drive.
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...
Roads are not solving transportation, they are closer to a sophisticated trace track. Roads are a constrained Operational Design Domain:
- Geofenced areas
- pre-build structures
- Curated infrastructure
- fallback to gravel in times of the inevitable event of maintenance.
This is not general transportation, it is a highend infrastructure inside a controlled environment. The system degrades exactly where humans/horses do not: River crossings, Creeks, steep hillsides, marshes, beaches.
A river flooding a road is not and "edge case", it a usual occurrence, and a problem that roads do robustly solve. It works due to extensive maintenance, not because the asphalt can actually deal with water.
Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem. Dont get fooled by Wall Street stock pumping.
Asphalt is not marketed as Level 5 intelligence. You can make analogies but that is very different from a rebuttal...that you did not do. The hard part is still unstructured human chaos. Time will prove which one of us is right.
See you at the next construction zone...
I’m pretty sure people vastly overstate how important “HD pre-mapped roads” are to Waymo.
Most of this comment was written by an LLM. There are certain tells, such as the tone, as well as usage of “ for quotations instead of the much more common ". I think you added the last couple of sentences.
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.
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 we would run the technology platform and private equity would own fleets of cars built and operated to our specification.
Waymo has concluded either we are too early in the journey to decouple the tight vertical integration or they want to go very big and own all of the capital expenditure for what will presumably be a global rollout ultimately.
For anyone like me with a finance and technology crossover interest I actually think this is as interesting, maybe more interesting, than the private equity play around data centers at the moment because all of that is constrained against chip delivery and power constraints.
> 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.
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.
> The general consensus was that we would run the technology platform and private equity would own fleets of cars built and operated to our specification.
Private equity, or private capital (debt investors)? Although I guess PC was less of a thing 10 years ago.
Alphabet is providing $13bn of the $16bn raise. What are you talking about? Do you really think that $3bn matters in the slightest?
What I'm talking about is that is still considered an external capital raise for the purpose of the markets and where those assets sit on the balance sheet.
Also, keep in mind the Alphabet doesn't fully own Waymo. I don't know the percentage ownership of hand, but that also feels like it's probably a prorated investment based on ownership so Alphabet doesn't reduce its voting control.
That's what I'm talking about.
Yes and what matters the most is what Waymo has been signaling for years. They don’t want the capex (owning and running the physical cars). I don’t know the intent of this raise but you have to realize companies may have a good asset but they don’t want to own it 100% for a multitude of reasons. Some of them could be as simple as wanting to get other investors involved and comfortable with the asset to maybe take on larger roles in future rounds. Or in this case potentially running the car part of the business.
By investing $13B of the $16B they're signalling they do want the capex, at least for now.
If they truly wanted the capex, this would not be a mixed round A fully internal recap would have been simpler. The presence of outside capital, even minority, is consistent with a gradual transition toward shared ownership, asset light structures, or operator partners.
They have made many comments over the years about this too.
What gradual transition? Alphabet's ownership percentage is unchanged.
Notice I left a list of potential reasons. Not that ownership has changed. Just pointing out for folks like yourself that Google has made commentary about this exploring the idea of partnering with companies that operate the physical fleet. $3bn even if chump change for you is still a larger placement and has some level of signaling indicating the want to get other folks involved at some level.
I didn't ask for potential reasons. You're talking about the "reasons" for a "gradual transition," and I am telling you that this investment isn't transitioning anything. Everyone is keeping their equal share of the company. So, I don't understand why you are giving reasons for something that isn't currently happening.