All that matters at this point is how much money they'll lose/earn in the future. There are no shortage of investors willing to put money into this effort, and they're growing exponentially, so there won't be any pressure for them to turn overall profitable for several more years.

Waymo's older than Uber, but they hold many key patents by this point. Now that they've started running a taxi service, it seems straightforwards to scale up, assuming that is the business they want to be in. Then it's just a matter of charging more than it costs to run the service, and wait.

Now compare to how much money the average person spends on driving per year.

If Waymo winds up running half the market in autonomous transportation over the next several decades, it'll make search look like peanuts in comparison.

How many people would pay for such a luxury car? With the US population aging and public transit non-existent in most places, Waymo probably has a market for cars.

but the companies that own them will or their insurance carriers.

On topic, Waymo is clearly a first mover in self-driving, having the first legal commercial services.

But, being the first mover is usually more of a disadvantage than an advantage, IMHO.

Tesla robotaxi already serves more than Waymo, and it’s only been 1 conservative month.

> SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk in 2002 with a vision of decreasing the costs of space launches, paving the way to a self-sustaining colony on Mars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX 2nd paragraph

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960

The Boring Company is an obvious bust. So is the Hyperloop. Neuralink is another likely bust. Tesla solar is going nowhere. The Cybertruck is a millstone around Tesla's neck. Etc, etc.

The day this news was released, Elon released the video of him talking to the Optimus bot to overshadow the news. Showman gonna showman.

That's a 34x divide. At full scale that's something like 30% of Teslas having an intervention every day.

You don't live in a Waymo city, so I understand. A lot of people who don't live in a Waymo city don't really get it.

Waymo is a completely different product than FSD. It's a robot that comes and drives you from point A to point B. You can do whatever you want while it's driving, such as take a nap or work on your laptop.

I wouldn't not be surprised if they figure out some very narrow way to have no safety driver in the car (1:1 remote ops?) by the end of the year.

It's like what 6-7 years since the goal was "end of the year".

Ummm.

ILS being under maintenance and unavailable for certain runways is also far from unusual.

Automatic landings started in 1964. I think that it seems hard mostly because of how tightly regulated aviation is - modern technology could probably make things a lot better if people were more receptive to the idea of heavy automated aircraft over populated areas.

Look up the Airbus ATTOL project's first automated takeoff a few years ago.

Also, there's virtually no automation when it comes to interacting with ATC.

The less you can change about the product and environment, then automation run slower and less effectively.

Air liner operations could be automated, but the minimum equipment list would be more stringent, the destination airport would not be able to take any equipment out of service for maintenance, visibility minimums would increase, takeoff and landing operations would require more slack time.

Besides all of that, the owner of the airplane would still want to have some crew on board.

In short, it's not worth it yet.

===

There is also the paradox of automation: Automation generally makes the hard parts harder and the easy parts easier.

In fact, it's pretty routine. Don't have the source at hand, but somewhere around 1% of all landings (at airports with ILS) are autolands.

I think it was Boeing that even requires at least 1 autoland per plane every 30 days or so.

You can find videos of this on YouTube. Completely hands-off.

Neither roads or train tracks solve the traffic problem.

For another example, can you imagine trains replacing school buses in a large, rural school district? Sometimes (not always), buses are better than trains.

See also: LA

(Zermatt pics https://www.traveladventuregurus.com/zermatt)

Would a Waymo that you don't have to store, park, fuel, or maintain have been restrictive?

When you live and work in a city, they're much less practical.

You see a robot driving around in a pile of trash.

I see a robot with nobody micromanaging him telling him how to live his life, etc, etc.

<we are not the same meme dot jpeg>

I'm not saying self driving cars are the solution, but they are a piece of the solution.

  Here, robust transit has solved the last mile problem for most people.

In terms of having the industry? Absolutely. How many other areas of "tech" has Europe basically punted on and ceded to Americans? Currently there's some gnashing of teeth across the pond for how there's no real European equivalent to the big US cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP).

This is demonstrating my point about population density and transit.

In many regions of the U.S. people live too far apart, shops and businesses are zoned apart into wide spread business areas. Public transport won't provide a good experience.

In a notable part of European cities people live in denser quarters, where a "third place" is reachable in walking distance, some degree of shipping, doctor visits, work are close by. There public transport can fill the gaps for the remaining trips in an (space) efficient way. Self driving cars however would clog the area.

Adapting US settlement structure to allow public transport won't happen. However a self-driving car can turn the dial for individuals to move out of the urban European area into more rural areas. Question is how big that group is.

A superior user experience is going exactly from where I am to where I want to be safely, quickly, and affordably. Self-driving cars are looking really good for those criteria.

Americans have this idea that transit is for poor people, which translates to "it's not important for transit to make money", which translates to "we need to make it illegal for transit to possibly try to make money", so there aren't even vending machines at the platforms. Whereas in Asia they do profitable land development at the transit stations.

I suppose regulations don't care if you can see no one is behind you.

I have a limited version of SuperCruise which means it operates hands-free on freeways but nowhere else. My wife's Equinox EV has the regular version, which operates on a lot of arterials near us and has more capabilities. The first time that the Equinox signaled, changed lanes to pass, signaled, then changed lanes back was shocking.

We moved to a small town and drive a lot more than we used to and I find that having those capabilities really helps relieve the stress.

I will say that I move to the center lane when going through a notorious set of curves on I-5 in Portland because my Bolt doesn't steer as smoothly as I'd like near the concrete barricades. I wanted SuperCruise because it has a fantastic safety record. There are lots of times it's not available but when it is, I have near-total confidence in it.

On the flip side, there are airports like Cleveland where people just park their car at arrivals and disappear for 20 minutes.

I didn't go to Logan a ton though.

https://www.tesla.com/robotaxi

Tax-free tips paid to robots go to the hardworking AI engineers -> AI engineers voluntarily donate part of their tips to a 501(c)(3) that helps support struggling venture capitalists.

Something like that. We'll work it out the details once the right PAC donations are in place.