Definitely. Their custom vehicle had optimizations for cost, but seems to be on hold due to tariffs.
Waymo also has the option to drop prices lower than Uber/Lyft when vehicles are unutilized, though they still need to stay above their per-mile depreciation and operating costs.
I think that’s an unproven assumption.
There’s certainly reason to believe it to be true of course, but uber and Lyft are already capturing upwards of 50% of the fares for each ride, and that’s without the capital costs on their books. Removing the driver from the equation can’t lead to much more than that 50% (realistically much less) margin.
Going from charging $10 to $5 isn’t going to make rides suddenly materialize. Especially in rural areas there are just times that people aren’t going to be looking to go anywhere, and wait time becomes far more of a factor that raw costs.
That's not true. If you check Uber's Q3 financials, gross bookings for "Mobility" were $21B while revenue was $6.5B. That's way lower than 50%.
I'm not sure if that's an accurate number, but I have seen a lot of complaints from drivers that they're getting a far lower share of the trip revenue than they used to. It's pretty remarkable that in a competitive market where Uber and Lyft are almost perfect substitutes for each other and charge almost exactly the same prices, that they're able to maintain these gross margins.
How much this matters depends on the price of the car. We don’t know how much a Waymo costs, but they’re probably not cheap.
To be profitable with lower utilization, they’ll need to work on reducing how much each car costs somehow.