Human labour is by far the most expensive aspect of taxis. If a tax driver earns 35,000 USD/yr, a self-driving car only needs to cost < 35,000/yr to turn a profit at scale.
IIUC, FSD costs are mostly captured by the running service, and the lidar equipment. The lidar equpiment is < 20,000/car for sure, and I can't imagine it costing 15,000/car to service it using waymo's ride hailing platform at scale.
And then on top of 24/7 operation if the lidar equipment can last at least a 5 year life time, it'd be about <$4000/yr/car since its amortized over the life of the lidar equipment.
There's a market for taxis. And there's almost certainly a market for taxis with good ride-hailing apps (as well as private cars). But they're mostly a product for business travelers and well-paid professionals in urban areas. But I fully expect the VC-funded 50% or so subsidies to go away.
Profitability doesn't matter, revenue does in there being a market for ride hailing. You have to assume that Waymo doesn't have the cost of paying drivers income.
Presumably because the cars would be substantially more expensive than an ordinary car due to all the high tech packed into them. Assuming that the components of the car have a finite lifetime, it might be possible that the overall cost is so much significantly more than a normal car that they won't be able to compete with a human driven solution like Uber.
Does anyone have any actual statistics/calculations on this sort of thing?
They built the most expensive solution (significant dependence on LIDAR) that scales the poorest (requires centimeter-precision 3D mapping of every street it drives on). Google Maps cars would need to do significantly more than they already do today on an even wider scale, and to be profitable it'd likely have to inundate you with ads on top of being the most expensive service.
...Meanwhile, the ADAS in many new consumer cars can pretty much drive itself already.
Waymo has to convince you their way is the "only" way to do self-driving cars, because nobody in their right mind would chose their solution otherwise.
> ...Meanwhile, the ADAS in many new consumer cars can pretty much drive itself already.
Yeah, not really. "Pretty much" drives itself isn't a thing. It either drives itself or it doesn't. Which ADAS system allows me to sit in the back seat while it drives itself fully?
> Waymo has to convince you their way is the "only" way to do self-driving cars, because nobody in their right mind would chose their solution otherwise.
Considering every self driving car company except Tesla (maybe MobileEye but even they have backup LIDAR systems) uses the exact same approach as Waymo, this is way off the mark.
