The economic side of Waymo still makes absolutely no sense to me. Uber, with no heavy capital investment, has been pretty much unprofitable for over a decade. The car companies are low margin. The taxi companies are low margin. Alphabet has like 30% profit margins. Waymo's business proposition is 1) to own a very capital-intensive fleet of bespoke cars with no resale value, 2) employ an extremely expensive team of engineers to develop autonomous driving for them, 3) use this incredible capital investment to try to undercut an industry that is already barely or not at all profitable and earn back their 10s of billions of dollars in investment (and 10s of billions more of costs in the future), one taxi ride at a time.
And that's completely ignoring their issue with surges, as their robot car supply is inherently fixed - they either don't intend to handle surges, or intend to have low utilization of their fleet.
And that's completely ignoring their issue with surges, as their robot car supply is inherently fixed - they either don't intend to handle surges, or intend to have low utilization of their fleet.
None of it makes sense to me.