That's literally an edge case. For shorter trips, I've found it to be slightly cheaper (especially factoring in the lack of tips) with maybe a slightly longer wait.
Not all Waymo riders actually want the premium cars and we can’t assume that’s why they are choosing Waymo.
We have to assume that some and perhaps most riders would prefer to pay less to ride in a cheaper car but are mainly choosing Waymo because its autonomous (cool factor, the no-human factor).
Also, California mandates autonomous vehicles be fully electric by 2030. So Waymo literally has to be driving some kind of EV to comply very soon.
Jaguar’s I-pace was a poor-selling EV SUV from a struggling company with a lot of leftover inventory, so it’s almost a guarantee that Waymo got a great fleet deal on them.
(This is a city where buying a simple 40¢ metro ticket requires showing identification.)
My medium sized American city: “what train? What bus? What taxi?
I think the best evidence of that is how uber/lyft has to use grey-ish patterns to get you to choose upmarket options. They don’t list the fares sorted by price or even list the options in a consistent order, they will strongly suggest upsells like comfort or black or whatever tier they think gives the best chance of convincing you to pay more than the bare minimum.
They also upsell faster pickup which I have to think is a way better value proposition than sitting in a nicer car temporarily.
Currently, on Wednesday March 26th at 8:34 a ride from Bar Part Time in the Mission to Verjus in North Beach is $21.17 with a estimated 8 minute pickup time. The same ride on UberX has an estimated 2 minute pickup time at a cost of $15.34. I could see it being cheaper if you top 20% - but I don't tip nearly that high on Uber rides.
I will admit that I could possibly be self-selecting to peak times as I own a car in the city, so I only use ride share in the evenings; so it may very well be the case that the price/wait is more competitive at off-peak hours.
Furthermore, it's quite surprising to me that it seems that the human labor cost doesn't affect the price at all. The only price controls seems to be demand and the latent demand is enough to create a price floor where there is always a human that is willing to drive. It also seems like plain old logistics and traffic will prevent Waymo from providing enough supply to offer dirt cheap rides. The fact that a ride that would have cost me $5 in 2016 is almost 4x as much with "magic self driving technology" is not something I could have told my 2016 self.
The only time I take Uber in the bay area is to the airport (and when they approve Waymo for SFO I won't take Uber then either).
I’ve also seen that, although Uber and Lyft peak times seem correlated to each other, they seem uncorrelated to Waymo peak activity. But this might be stabilizing as Waymo ridership increases.
The real question is why tip on either of those? You pay through the app, the driver is compensated for their time, why tip extra? If you feel that Uber/Lyft are mistreating their drivers, stop using their service, not pay them on the side?
Highway is coming.
And scale will make it cheaper. It's only cheaper than Uber sometimes currently. That will change.
Uber drivers are already paid low wages and any price competition can lower their wages further.
Waymo has to pay for things that “come with” uber drivers: the cars, storage for the cars, employees to clean and maintain the cars, extra infrastructure to support the self driving cars like cellular data for each car, data centers, engineers, customer service to interact with police and resolve edge cases (will never go away). Waymo also has to pay all these people healthcare benefits and pay W2 payroll, not a thing for Uber.
Waymo is like a professional moving company competing on price with an army of lowest bidder independent contractors who already have a beat up graffiti van.
You have about 50% more KE at 80mph as you do at 65mph btw, if you find yourself needing to dissipate that energy rapidly.
The real risk is the opposite, cars bunched together at the same speed. This is where pileups occur, somebody at the front does something stupid and the people at the back end up colliding.
Unless you have a specific claim and source for your claim?
There's a good chance the driver will zoom past everything else, weaving between lanes accordingly, and you'll wish you were one of the slow vehicles. Although I'd be less concerned if the seatbelts worked.
So far, every time there's been self driving car progress, someone been like, "okay yeah, but can they do <the next thing they're working on> yet??" like some weird gotcha. Tech progress is incremental, shocking I know.
That's such a silly statement. One shouldn’t underestimate how UNeconomical real humans are.
In the past 12,000 years, human efficiency has improved, maybe, 10x. In the past 100 years, technological efficiency has improved, maybe, 1,000,000x.
Any tiny technological improvement can be instantly replicated and scaled. Meanwhile, every individual human needs to be re-trained and re-grown. They're extremely temperamental, with expensive upkeep, very short lifespans and even shorter productive lifespans.
In fact, humans have improved so little, that every time, they scoff at the new technology and say it will never take off, and they're still doing it 12,000 years later, right now, right above this post.
No, it’s created by and maintained by humans. You’re shifting the cost of a driver to software engineers, data analysis, people mapping out roads, etc.
This is why Uber doesn’t make any money, despite being more expensive for the customer as compared to traditional taxi services. Coordinating Ubers across the country costs a lot of servers and a lot of engineers. Sure, the system is automatic - maintaining it isn’t.
So you end up with a lose-lose-lose scenario. The ride is more expensive for the customer. The driver makes less money. And Uber bleeds hundreds of millions a year.
Technology is neat, yes, but often we don’t stop and think “wait… does this make sense?”
We don’t know if autonomous cars make any economic sense. They could end up not. It doesn’t help that 99% of tech companies in the transportation space are just making trains with extra steps. Like, guys - have we even done feasibility analysis?
> it cost twice as much as an Uber
Surely incidental since the typical price per ride is about the same. Generally though, the relationship between the cost to operate a service profitably and the price presented to the user is very complex, so just because the price happens to be x right now doesn't tell you much. For example, something like 30% of the price of an iPhone is markup.
> while having a longer wait time for a car
Obviously incidental?
> It also couldn’t operate on the highway so the transit time was nearly double.
Obviously easily fixable?
> One shouldn’t underestimate how economical real human operators are.
There's nothing to underestimate, human drivers don't scale the way software drivers do. It doesn't matter how little humans cost, they are competing with software that can be copied for free.
> Waymo can’t share the business expense of their vehicles with their employees
They can share parking space, cleaning services, maintenance, parts for repair, etc.
> I’m sure it’ll improve but this tells me that Waymo’s price per vehicle including all the R&D expenses must be astronomical.
Obviously, they're in the development phase. None of this matters long term.
> They are burning $2 billion a year at the current rate even though they have revenue service.
"The stock market went up 2% yesterday so it will go up 2% today too and every day after that."
> Plus, they actually have a lot of human operators to correct issues and talk to police and things like that.
Said operators are shared between all vehicles and their number will go down over time as the driving software improves.
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To sum up, every single part of what Waymo is trying to do scales. Every problem you've mentioned is either incidental or a one-off cost long term.
> There's nothing to underestimate, human drivers don't scale the way software drivers do.
Barf. How tech bro can you get? Did you say this unironically?
The number one tech bro or MBA blind spot is the assumption that everything in the physical world scales with software and that every business and type of cost benefits greatly from economies of scale.
There are a great number of examples where that’s not true. Cookies store chains like Crumbl are a really good example. All the economies of scale stuff with them backfires. The product is too low price and too simple to make in batches, so the businesses with the best margins are ones that avoid traditional brick and mortar rent and don’t hire employees.
In the same way, a taxi’s labor cost seems like it’s a huge scaling problem that needs to be resolved but really think about the costs involved with creating that scale to replace them.
The median uber driver’s lifetime earnings might not even equal the amount of money the Waymo self driving sensor array costs to install. A lot of people do the job temporarily, not even long enough to significantly depreciate any equipment or incur maintenance costs.
A typical uber driver doesn’t pay to store their car at home. Waymo needs to rent/buy space to store cars during off-peak hours.
A part time uber driver shares the car repair cost with their personal driving. That driver gets paid $0 to handle all the things on the side you have to do to repair a car like calling the shop or scheduling an appointment. They also get paid nothing to do basic self-service maintenance like gas/charging, replacing windshield wipers, car washes, cleaning the car, etc. every single one of those things is something Waymo has to pay a human to do.
A part time driver can buy a car after it has depreciated, and that cost savings may be worth a year’s earnings or more. Waymo essentially has to buy brand new cars and outfit them with expensive tech.
A part time uber driver can talk to the police themselves. Waymo needs a call center employee to handle that.
A part time uber driver can escape an edge case driving situation. The Waymo needs the call center employee for that.
Any time the rider wants to talk to someone during the ride, Waymo pays someone to answer.
The self-driving software infrastructure including all the R&D and operations staff all represent employees that companies like uber don’t have to hire.
It also couldn’t operate on the highway so the transit time was nearly double.
One shouldn’t underestimate how economical real human operators are. It’s not like Uber drivers make a ton of money. Uber drivers often have zero capital expense since they are driving vehicles they already own. Waymo can’t share the business expense of their vehicles with their employees and have them drive them home and to the grocery store.
I’m sure it’ll improve but this tells me that Waymo’s price per vehicle including all the R&D expenses must be astronomical. They are burning $2 billion a year at the current rate even though they have revenue service.
Plus, they actually have a lot of human operators to correct issues and talk to police and things like that. Last number I found on that was over one person per vehicle but I’m not sure if anyone knows for sure.