How about a Waymo competitor that uses nonporous, impervious materials for the interior, and automatically sanitizes itself in between passengers? You pay with Monero and logs are only kept long enough to solve any murders you might've committed, and for the next rider to report if you still managed to mess something up.
OK there might be some problems with this idea. But if I'm paying with credit card and it's attached to my name, they should be able to rely on the next passenger to report if I've damaged the car, right, and they could stop recording me?
Heck they could provide a camera with a physical cover that makes a 90 decibel sound when it opens, and it could check the car in between riders. "promise no peeping" definitely not good enough when minor physical hardware privacy measures are so inexpensive.
Stiff competition for humans, especially drivers outside the top quartile or so. Waymo appears to its passengers to drive much more competently than certainly any sub-average rideshare driver.
Although I like jobs for humans, I hope these aren’t all just set on fire because there is promise in reducing fatalities. Want to find a way for offline vehicles that can go 65MPH to remain legal though. Without Flock every block either unless we (in USA) forget what the whole USA thing’s about.
Edit: @Waymo would LOVE to see an industry-leading privacy pledge so good the EFF slaps their logo on it (even caveated), also your engineers are amazing
Waymo undoubtedly drives better than your average rideshare driver - I have taken dozens of Waymos in SF and the experience is unmatched. Also no chance of being harassed by the driver, which is a big plus.
Pick-up, drop off, and routing remain a challenge for Waymo. I hate having to walk a few minutes to get to the Waymo. Not that big a deal usually, but it became a problem when I was on crutches after spraining my ankle. Same for drop-offs, with the caveat that a human driver is going to see that I'm being dropped off in a bad neighborhood and not have me walk a couple blocks and is going to drop me off right outside my destination. Finally, routing. Waymo's take the weirdest routes sometimes. There was one trip I'd swear the Waymo Driver was the digital equivalent of drunk, the route it took was so convoluted. Which is kind of interesting. It means the system can reroute on the fly based on traffic conditions elsewhere and avoid getting jammed up. It's like when Google maps has you take a weird route to somewhere you're familiar, and then you look at traffic and there's an accident it's taking you around. Still a bad experience when a 10 minute ride turns into a 20 minute ride because the Waymo decides to go a weird way.
I report these issues in the app whenever I do take a Waymo, so hopefully they'll get better.
The one to ride is Zoox though. They have limited deployment but their vehicles have no steering wheel, it's like a gondola ride to your destination.
The one feature that Waymo has over other rideshare apps is that the cars presumably actually show up.
With all other apps, it feels like 50% of drivers just sit there waiting for you to cancel. I can't rule out that it's a bug with the app not showing updated locations in some cases (I've had an Uber show up even though the web app showed it three traffic lights away), but "actually gets me where I need to go in a timely manner" is a key feature and when "RIDE AVAILABLE, 3 MINUTES" turns into 7 minutes as soon as the app is done searching for a driver, and that turns into you having to cancel 5 minutes in and try again, the platform becomes useless.
Yes exactly. I loved that when i opened up the app to go some where the first thing I saw before I even put in where I'm going, was how long until ill be picked up. the cars don't care about the trips, not trying to tip/ride max.
> I hope these aren’t all just set on fire because there is promise in reducing fatalities.
Doesn't matter.
At this point, if the US doesn't lead, China will.
They have a massive population imbalance that they can only crawl out of with automation. Someone is going to have to drive around all those seniors. Once it's a proven model, it'll spread to the rest of the world.
Waymo inflates their prices to be above that of Uber/Lyft because they don't have enough vehicles to meet demand. But their operating costs / mile are lower than that of Uber/Lyft. I'd estimate their internal cost per mile is approx. half that of Uber/Lyft. They pocket the rest because they need to recoup decades of expensive R&D.
There is also no reason to compete with Uber/Lyft on price because they are just leaving money on the table. When Waymo first launched, we saw them try to undercut (Waymo was about 20% cheaper than Uber/Lyft) but now it's about 20% more expensive. People are willing to pay extra for Waymo, so why would they charge less?
The margin on each Waymo ride is currently very, very high. I don't expect Waymo to cut prices until real competition arrives.
It's not clear to me if their costs are lower yet. Waymo's vehicles are rather expensive (estimates for their newer Zeekrs are around $75k each), and they need to pay some number of remote monitors for exceptional situations (as noticed during the recent blackout in San Francisco). They also have to collect tons of data to build & maintain high resolution 3D maps of the areas they operate in. And they have to pay engineers to improve the self-driving software.
Waymo passed 200 million driverless miles in February. If we optimistically assume they're up to 300 million miles now, and every mile was paid for at $10 per mile, that's $3 billion in revenue since they launched. In that same time, Waymo has gotten $27 billion in funding. Of course they haven't spent anywhere close to that amount, and they are optimizing for faster rollout rather than profitability, but the finances aren't as gleaming as one might expect.
I'm sure Waymo will figure out ways to reduce their costs over time, but right now I think they're charging pretty close to what they need to break even.
We're looking at different metrics, you're analyzing the average total cost, while I'm analyzing the marginal cost. Waymo has enormous fixed costs like you mentioned, mapping cities and paying engineers are not cheap, which need to be amortized over a massive self-driving fleet. But those are fixed costs which don't increase with fleet size. Waymo currently operates only ~3000 vehicles, which is not enough to amortize those fixed costs into overall profitability.
What matters most are marginal costs (i.e. how much does it cost for Waymo to add 1 more ride). Looking at marginal costs, Waymo takes in more money than it spends on each ride, so projecting outwards when Waymo operates a large enough fleet, Waymo will be profitable.
Uber/Lyft run enormous fleets of ~2 million vehicles in the US, and that's how they are able to maintain profitability. They can spread their engineering and management expenses over millions of rides.
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Doing my own math, the marginal costs for Waymo are:
Revenue: Each Waymo vehicle brings in ~$50/hour
Expenses: Waymo must pay for
* Assume the cost of a vehicle is $100k
* Amortized depreciation of the car (assume vehicles need to be fully replaced after ~25,000 miles, vehicles average 25 miles / hour, vehicles need to be fully replaced after 10,000 hours, cost is $10/hour)
* Maintenance (Assume the total cost of maintenance is an additional 25% of the vehicle price, vehicle price is $100k and vehicle lasts 10,000 hours, cost is $2.5/hour). This is likely an underestimate, I didn't model the cost of a mechanic, so this could be as high as $5-7/hour.
* Support (assume 1 support agent can support 10 vehicles, Philippine support agent costs $10/hour, so amortized $1/hour per vehicle)
* Cleaning (needed daily, costs $1/hour per vehicle)
* Datacenter compute for vehicle coordination ($0.50/hour per vehicle)
* Electricity (Assume $2/hour)
10 + 2.5 + 1 + 1 + 0.5 + 2 = $17/hour to operate a Waymo.
In conclusion, the marginal costs for Waymo is very profitable.
Even when just looking at marginal costs, I doubt Waymo is half that of a human driven vehicle. If we assume a robotaxi lasts 200k miles before being retired, then the cost of the vehicle alone ($75k) is 37.5 cents per mile. If a vehicle drives 200 miles a day, that's $5 of electricity (250Wh/mile x 10 cents/kWh), maybe $15 of labor to clean, and the space to park it near downtown ($3/day). That's another 12 cents per mile for a running total of 50 cents per mile. Then factor in maintenance (tires, brakes, suspension, etc) and you're probably close to $1/mile. Then you also need support staff, remote operators (approximately 1 per 50 vehicles, but paid significantly more than Uber drivers), and plenty of compute and storage for the high resolution maps (which must be constantly updated as the environment changes). And none of that includes the R&D costs to improve the vehicles or the self-driving software. Yes many of these costs decrease as fleet size increases, but it'll be a while before it gets below $1/mile. (Nationwide, Uber's rates are $1-2/mile depending on the area.)
There are other considerations as well. For example, available ride shares can scale up/down with demand, while Waymo & competitors will need lots of spare vehicles to satisfy peak demand.
I'm certain autonomous vehicles will eat up the market currently held by Uber/Lyft/Taxis. It's just going to take longer than a lot of people expect.
In San Francisco, it has to be. Because of prop 22, Uber/Lyft must compensate drivers a minimum of $22.40/hr, plus $0.36/mile for vehicle expenses. Waymo doesn't have this cost, so it's effectively ~$25/hr cheaper to operate than Uber/Lyft.
I looked up the numbers - the estimated Uber/Lyft cost per mile in SF is ~$4.50/mi, and Waymo is trending around $1.40/mi (estimated 2025 number).
Where is this estimate? I found a wide range of estimates in my web search, from a per-mile cost of revenue of $2 (meaning a loss of $2 per mile excluding capex), to up to $50/mile.
The Gemini results when I searched for this cited this Reddit post [1] which cites this Reddit post [2], which conveniently gives your $2/mile answer.
Anyway, digging into the Reddit posts which gave your lower-bound number, the reasoning seems very suspect. In particular, the biggest methodological problem is that they use retail price numbers when Waymo is almost certainly getting wholesale prices. So it assumes $110K ($70K for a Jaguar iPace + $40K for sensors and other AV equipment) for the car depreciated over 5 years, but $70K is the retail price for a Jaguar, including dealer markup, distribution, marketing, etc, and when you are buying thousands of them you are almost certainly not paying retail. Likewise, it figured 25c/kwh for electricity, which is retail off-peak PG&E rates, but Google just buys their own solar panels and pays pennies for electricity. The AV equipment figure of $40K was I recall what it cost back in ~2014; the cost of LIDAR has come down dramatically since then and now runs $500-1000/vehicle, so that number should also be suspect. And if vehicle cost is more like $50-60K/year than $110K/year, $7K/year in insurance is way too high. Hell, Google could just self-insure with their $250B in cash, they've got a stronger financial position than every insurer other than Berkshire Hathaway.
Engineering costs are capital/fixed costs, they're paid once to develop the technology and don't scale with the number of trips. Operating costs (which is what I'm discussing here) are what it actually costs to run each ride. Waymo's marginal cost per trip doesn't include a chunk of some engineer's salary.
Once there are enough trips, the fixed engineering costs are spread across more and more trips, exponentially trending towards zero, driving the cost per trip even lower.
IIRC, in SF they're slightly more expensive before tip, but having ridden in them in SF, LA, and AZ I've always felt they were cheaper. Over the long run, they will probably end up being cheaper from the wholesale perspective since eventually the parts and technology cost will come down with time and scale while human wages will continue to rise.
That said, it doesn't really matter if they're cheaper as long as they're comparable.
The cars are newer and nicer (for now), they're almost always cleaner since they can rotating one car out for cleaning doesn't mean the driver is losing earnings, they're better drivers than the average ride-share driver, you don't feel the need to tip, and I've multiple of my friends who are women call out that they feel safer in them because there's no risk of the driver being creepy (or worse).
I don't think Waymo is trying to win on price right now. I think as long as they just stay somewhat competitive on that front the other benefits will continue to draw in customers.
Alphabet/Google/Waymo is a technology business, with emphasis on business. They're not running a charity. They're in it to make money. If it's a $20 Uber ride to somewhere, they're not going to leave money on the table and charge $10 because they don't have a driver to pay. They're going to charge $22 for the premium experience because they know people will pay that.
That sounds right. Passenger pays for lower risk, etc. The market sees the company making $2 extra and a competitor will see if they can do it for just $1 extra.
If a waymo costs $200k (car+sensors+install labor) and drives 200k miles, then amortizing up-front costs alone are about $1/mile. We don't really know what the TCO of a waymo is, and it's possible it could go down with economies of scale. Rideshare drivers can get paid $1-2/mile although it varies a lot.
That's just the current cost. The long term cost structure should be based on cars that come out of the factory with all the right stuff pre-installed. There's a BOM for some extra components; many of which you might already find in some cars. Otherwise it's just another EV. So, long term the extra cost per mile relative to a driver driving the same car should be cents rather than dollars per mile. And of course if there is no driver, some components like manual controls, dashboards, mirrors, etc. actually become redundant as well. So the total BOM might actually be lower long term.
The driver cost is of course the big saving. And they need breaks as well and don't drive 24x7. A robo taxi only has down time when there are no rides, or for charging and maintenance/cleaning.
Mostly what Waymo is doing currently with customized vehicles is not actually super scalable. But it helps at their relatively small current scale. You wouldn't design a custom vehicle + factory for their current growth rate. That becomes more interesting when they start scaling beyond tens of thousands of new vehicles per year. They are probably in the lower thousands currently.
I think they raised close to 20-30B so far. They say they are doing 500K rides per week. At 15$ per ride that adds up to ~390M/year. That's revenue, not profit. But if they could 100x that by rolling out to more and more cities and larger and larger areas, it's going to add up to annual revenues that add up to more than what they raised. That's not going to happen overnight, obviously. But they seem on a path where they are scaling, optimizing, reducing their cost, and growing.
The risks here are mainly that they won't have the market to themselves. Others are doing robo taxi's too and if any of them starts scaling faster and cheaper, Waymo could hit some growth issues. Also, with multiple companies competing, prices per ride would eventually go down. The next five years are going to be interesting.
> A robo taxi only has down time when there are no rides, or for charging and maintenance/cleaning.
It's wierd to see this fantasy of machines on HN, of all places - that they have no downtime, no additional costs - it's only a savings from employing people), and (not said here) they don't make mistakes.
Lots of machines have far more downtime and cost than people. Many have more maintenance hours than operating hours.
During peak hours Waymo is more expensive than standard uber/lyft - I don't pay attention to black/premium pricing. Off-peak the price can be comparable. I mainly check because my wife prefers it.
Depends on the region, I think. Lyft and Uber partner with them in certain cities, so you transparently are charged the same as a similar ride with a human driver. It's only a better experience than a human driver, though, in my view. No chance of yapping, more privacy, no chance of your driver being a psycho, cars are better maintained.
It's hard to measure "cheaper" as an end user consumer, the price you pay for the service, because it's very likely they're operating at a loss to gain market share and growth.
Exact same reason why Uber and Lyft were considerably cheaper than taxis in many big cities when they first launched (eg: Lyft in Seattle in 2013/2014), running at a loss, and the pricing has now incrementally grown to become the same as, or even more expensive than traditional meter taxis in some places.
Engineers design a road for 55. Police say make it 40 for $$ and pretext. Public says make it 60. Karen says make it 30. Politician says they don't care as long as Karen stops screeching, the public doesn't hate them and the police doesn't hate them. End result ->45
Refactoring the humans out would only change a couple of the less influential inputs to that equation. It might actually make it way worse if the public loses interest.
I think a lot of time, speed limits are set based on the expected amount of traffic, not the curvature or the road. For example, I-5 in the Portland area south of the OR-217 interchange has extremely gentle curves. You could take them at 100 mph and not risk losing grip.
Yet the limit is 55 mph anyways because that area is expected to have considerable traffic, with traffic merging on and off. The limit is kept low to keep collision speeds low.
But if every car was autonomous, that wouldn't be necessary. Autonomous cars can be far more cooperative than human drivers, even without inter-car communication. It's 4 lanes wide. We could let that left lane go 90 mph for the cars that don't need to be exiting any time soon, while the right lane travels slower because cars are either merging on or off. Human drivers suck at this kind of arrangement because we have slow-pokes that think "The limit is just a limit, I don't have to go that fast" and go 5 under the limit in whatever lane they feel like, combined with others that think being overtaken is a personal insult, people that think their lane is a birthright and don't let people merge ("I have to tailgate or else people get in front of me!"), and other toxic human behaviors.
Take the human out of the equation, and we can easily go faster than 55.
I don't see why you should prefer jobs for humans. If a robot can do a job as well better and more cheapy than a human, it should, and that goes trebly for any sort of safety-focused job. The right fix is eliminating the need for make-work and not creating more unnecessary jobs.
That is, of course, tremendously challenging. It's impractical to look at a job performed by millions and just saying "well fix capitalism" when eliminating the jobs. But it's still the right solution. There shouldn't be gas station attendants, there shouldn't be redundant bureaucratic figuers and managers, and, when possible, there shouldn't be millions of paid car drivers.
Ironically, Uber used the same tactics to replace taxis with rideshare:
(Taxis/rideshares) are dangerous, drivers harass you, etc. Ours are so amazing, people love them.
The reality is that I have zero problems with rideshares (or taxis, when I'm someplace that still has them). Being a social animal like other Homo sapiens, interacting is a positive but drivers have no problem giving me peace. I'd much rather have the intelligence and flexibility of a human who can communicate, adapt, and solve problems.
When explanations get posted directly in HN comments, I imagine someone somewhere in the world is able to learn in spite of their Internet restrictions/firewalls
People will also post their own interpretations in response to comments, and quickly find out they missed something.
… But if you try to automate it, like include a summary under every HN post, you encourage laziness too much and are pre-chewing too heavily. Some balance here.
[on topic]
(OK I’m done making excuses, time to read the article… thanks for the encouragement!)
I thought this was not explained in the readme directly but in fact I missed it. I wasn’t going to read Microsoft entire changelog! But it was substantive, thanks to sibling commenter:
“2025-09-05: VibeVoice is an open-source research framework intended to advance collaboration in the speech synthesis community. After release, we discovered instances where the tool was used in ways inconsistent with the stated intent. Since responsible use of AI is one of Microsoft’s guiding principles, we have removed the VibeVoice-TTS code from this repository.”
Yeah, I'm sure there could be a better metric, if the metric's purpose was to check on the progress until the AGI target rather than doing business based on it (and so, hammering the metric to fit the shape of "realistic goal")
Wow, the phone tap requirement, love it! And your ethics, the best part.
Constructively, of course (if you care for feedback devolving ramble-y):
Could almost see myself using a web app version of this for kicks. But can’t sign up for another network (though would be happy to link a self hosted project, if I could stumble through setup). Apps don’t feel private (Apple neglects to offer basic firewall/other features), and not sure how someone would look at me trying to get them to register somewhere… maybe the phone tap pitch is enough? (Especially if it’d allow one-tap registration for friends inviting new friends, because the phone bump allowed for some data transfer.)
Anyway, understand self hosting is ostensibly permanently destined to be unpopular but somehow feel if the pitch were “be your own network, tap the phone, use this Friendster infrastructure/instruction set to link your networks”, I’d be more tempted.
It’s almost unfair for me to say this, still registered on Meta properties… even need them for work… uhg!!! Zuck pls retire to do philanthropy & hire OP
if op is really serious about fixing social networking he needs to figure out a way to operate it that wont enshittify.
ie, public good, not for profit, something like that.
as is hes already signaled he intends to enshittify it eventually ("premium features"..?) which to me is a non-starter.
the problem is that a successful network beyond a certain size like this needs funding. its unfortunate but this needs legal /compliance, moderation, even marketing...
those things aren't free, but you could imagine ways to pay for them. Id totally accept a small subscription fee for a network like this if paying that fee could guarantee privacy, and that the person hosting all my data would not be looking to squeeze every dime of value out of me as a user.
anything less than solving the funding problem and you are just saying you will become facebook (or get bought by them). no thanks.
OK there might be some problems with this idea. But if I'm paying with credit card and it's attached to my name, they should be able to rely on the next passenger to report if I've damaged the car, right, and they could stop recording me?
Heck they could provide a camera with a physical cover that makes a 90 decibel sound when it opens, and it could check the car in between riders. "promise no peeping" definitely not good enough when minor physical hardware privacy measures are so inexpensive.
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