It's both.

Moving people and things (Waymo Via[1] is their autonomous trucking and delivery subdivision) via roadways is worth (in revenue) hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone. Even capturing a fraction of that market, and carving out profit (by displacing expensive, accident-prone and sleep-needing humans), is a money hose on its own.

[1] https://waymo.com/waymo-via/

I disagree. There’s a ton of profit margin on the table selling driverless rideshares and licensing the tech to other automakers. While Google will be able to serve a few ads during the ride, that will amount to a few cents of ad revenue vs. several dollars of transportation services. Tesla is already setting a price for full self driving that does not even work or exist at 15k, so the actual retail price could easily be tens of thousands, absolutely dwarfing the 5 year ad revenue per user, let alone the incremental increase from a few extra hours of screen time a week.

I'm not an expert but I doubt there's really a ton of profit in rides. Uber, Lyft, even taxi companies are barely profitable after many years. With the amount of money and time spent on making self driving work I'm not sure they'll ever make their money back.

You realize like 60% of the Uber / lyft fee goes to the driver? Now imagine there is no driver… the math sure changes

I'm begging you to read up on the actual experiences of drivers for Lyft & Uber - there are dedicated subreddits.

Lyft and Uber are not leaving 60% of the money on the table to the drivers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/lyftdrivers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uberdrivers/

Are you including tips and recruitment fee and driver bonuses?

Absolutely. No competent accounting would exclude those.

Nobody is saying it’s a livable wage for a human. In many competitive markets drivers spend more time driving around looking for a ride than making money. But it’s still a huge cost to Uber/Lyft to pay people even if they’re paying a pittance.

Neither me nor the person I was responding to mentioned the words "liveable wage".

Want to respond to the 60% figure?

Yes, 60% of the money including tip (which is a cost that gets passed onto the consumer and therefore reduces ridership) seems more or less correct to me. A forum where people to go to complain about Uber/Lyft doesn’t seem like a representative enough sample to refute that.