When Uber and Tesla were acting like cowboys and creating plenty of drama for the media Waymo (under the sensible and boring leadership of non-techy car industry vet John Krafcik) was quietly structuring itself to be in the game for the long haul, following the whole "Fuck You Money" episode that saw most of the Google Self Driving Car Project's original talent leave for easy Venture Capital elsewhere.
Waymo is very tight lipped about their operational costs, I would really love to know how close they are to being revenue positive. Recent moves by Waymo suggest they believe they are getting close.
Waymo has started onto a very good trendline now, for sure, and a path to revenue-positive is becoming clearer. But they have a loooooooong way to go before they are offsetting even their operating costs, let alone beginning to pay down their (absolutely massive) fixed costs.
I think the bear case is actually pretty tough for Waymo. Their scaling is not cheap.
- The cars are, by all account, expensive as hell; I've seen $200k+
- The cars require ongoing cleaning, maintenance, mechanical work
- There's a massive customer support operation; not just people to call for support when your car gets stuck, but people who can step in and remote-instruct the vehicle.
- Expanding to a new city requires a massive data-gathering operation before any paid trips can begin.
None of this is taking into account the massive fixed costs that come with being a tech company - hundreds of $400k+TC employees, server bills in the tens of millions, thousands of top-of-the-line GPUs for training clusters.
Given how fast Waymo is scaling, we should look at forward revenue projections, if available. Also, when it comes to TAM, Uber is a good standard to compare against. In Q2 2024[1], Uber had
- 10.7B revenue (42.8B ARR), out of which 6.134B (24.5B ARR) was from "mobility" and others from delivery/freight.
- Real fun part: Gross booking revenue for mobility was 20.554B, but revenue for Uber itself was 6.134B, or 30% of gross revenue. If 70% is going to drivers, that is Waymo's opportunity. It can price at 40% discount to Uber's prices while still reaping twice the revenue per ride. Start with the most lucrative markets where Uber is already profitable and expand from there.
[1] https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_earnings/2024/q2/e...
https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...
E.g. If you needed to clean the carpet in a vehicle, make the carpet easily removable and washable in an industrial washing machine.
What on earth are you talking about? A Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla will easily last 200k miles. In places with salt and rust, the body will probably fall apart before the engine and transmission give out.
Honestly, I'd not use the word many, perhaps a significant number....
Does everything you buy keel over and die the minute its warranty is over? Do you throw away your car the first time it needs a repair?
Yes, I assume they're asking about the operating margin. That's the number everybody cares about. If it's positive, then Waymo can theoretically become revenue positive by adding more cars and regions to their fleet.
It is risky to ignore total profit and loss of the entire company
I think their (apparent) success probably does have a lot to do with some combination of having the deepest pockets and (I think?) being a few years earlier to get started than everyone else, but still, it also looks like they had a better strategy, and I'm pretty curious how that worked.
What specific "moves" by them indicate they are close to being profitable? All the industry research I get indicates they are still negative to the tune of $1B+ a year.
He studied mechanical engineering and worked in that field for a while. Do we agree that there is other technology than software?
Tesla has focused on attempting to solve all cases using vision and generalize it as much as possible. The pro is you would be able to drop FSD capabilities anywhere in the US and it will work. The con is the tail of edge cases take significantly more effort then the first 80%.
Waymo instead of being generalized, works off of a detailed map for each region they drive in. They have a complete expectation of every detail on those roads and so then only need to account for the dynamic unknowns on the road. The pro is that they are getting to hands off driving sooner. The con is that anywhere its deployed needs detailed mapping and for that mapping to be kept up to date.
Time will tell which strategy pays off.
This isn't entirely true. Everything at Waymo is built to be generalizable. Engineers and execs at Waymo have said to multiple times, as recently as yesterday [1].
They are able to drive just fine without up-to-date maps as well. It's an assumption built in to the system. The cars are also self-mapping. Ultimately, maps are just another input to the general driving software. The same driving software is deployed across all their cities.
And therein lies the fundamental flaw with Waymo's approach...
1. https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Miles-Of-Streets/...
With modern drones and UAV, getting millimeter level details on infrastructure should be easy and cheap.
I would expect such maps for every corner of the world in next 5 to 10 years.
If you want a grounded explanation of how Tesla’s stack works, follow @greentheonly on twitter. He’s a Tesla reverse engineer who regularly posts about the software that’s actually running on the car.
If you want an explanation about how real AV companies stacks work, I’d read Sebastian Thrun’s robotics textbook - then imagine what’s outlined in that book but with ML plugged in to a ton of spaces throughout the stack. This is also similar to how Tesla’s stack works, btw - greens just good to follow because a lot of people refuse to believe Tesla isn’t running some kind of “LLM but for driving” fully end to end black box model.
Tesla won’t launch a robotaxi anytime soon because they can’t use remote support or HD maps - although I think they’ve been stepping up their mapping efforts. Even the demo at Universal studios a few weeks ago was HD mapped - per @greentheonlys twitter.
I worked in the space for years and have seen the internal of both a traditional robotaxi company’s stack and Tesla’s.
For perception Waymo uses more sensors than Tesla. It uses lidar to construct a 3D scene of what the car is seeing, while Tesla uses SLAM-like techniques with their cameras. What people are missing is that these are only a small part of the perception problem - lidar returns a monochromatic 3D scene so it cannot see labels, markings, read signs, lights etc. LIDAR simply doesn't carry the necessary information needed to navigate the world, thus it is a secondary source of info. Cameras in motion do carry all the information needed, so the big difference between them is only one part of the overall perception stack.
Once you have constructed a labeled, accurate 3D scene (whether by lidar or SLAM), "action" is the same and there is no difference between Tesla and Waymo here. They both have to learn how to drive safely using the same information, so it's going to be a lot like LLMs where there's difference between LLAMA/Claude/GPT, but they're also all kinda the same thing.
Going through this thread, it is mind blowing how people let their fanboyism for others talk nonsense. So many Elon lovers here. Can all those Elon lovers just jump in the backseat of a Tesla and turn on FSD (which is an oxymoron) and jump on a high way or something? The world would be a better place. I can’t wait to see their faces and a the drivel they will come up with next year when Elon announces delays and other bull**t fit why he can’t launch what he promised. It’s going to be hilarious.
This is the thing that drives me nuts: wantonly ignoring regulations designed to protect consumers, and claiming that it was going to save more people than it hurt, in the long run. Tesla's participation in the market has not and will not make self driving arrive earlier than if they had refrained from participating. All it has done is given them an opportunity to compete for market share, and engage in pump and dump scams by misrepresenting their progress to naive investors.
The biggest small detail is that Waymo's expansion is gated on achieving performance goals like very little need for remote supervision because Google won't hire a building full of remote monitors. Tesla claims this will be possible "by next year."
edit : also, are there differences in the core algorithms ? Tesla seems to be full AI / ML. Is waymo the same ? ( as the company is older i wonder if they haven't built more things manually)
Contrary to what other people in this thread are saying, the remote support isn’t remote direct driving of the car - essentially what will happen is that if the car finds itself in a situation where it’s unsure of how to proceed and it’s safe to stop, it will pause for a few seconds and wait for a remote operator to clarify a situation for it.
A good example might be road construction - if the car detects new road construction work that doesn’t match its map of the area, and its onboard systems determine that it’s not sure how to proceed through the construction with confidence, it will send what it thinks the top five likeliest ways to proceed to a remote operator. The operator then selects the proper path (or says that none of them are proper). The car will then follow the path presented by the operator, but actual driving behavior /collision detection / pathfinding is still determined locally. Think of it like ordering a unit around in StarCraft.
I also made the mistake of assuming the remote operator drives the car but if you watch Waymo's technical videos, it's clear that the AI is in control of the car all all times and the remote operator is just doing near real time labelling of what the car is seeing.
How are they doing this on the software stack? Any references?
In one case, greentheonly realized some fraction of Tesla’s cars are shipped out of the factory still in dev mode, with debug mode enabled and increased privileges. He found someone with a car like this who was down to helped and swapped part of his cars hardware with their car, and from then on was able to get a much better view of what was running on his car.
Unfortunately twitter is awful to search and a lot of his info is buried deep in old threads, but a few (old) examples to illustrate that he regularly does this.
Visualizing the outputs of the models running in the car: https://x.com/greentheonly/status/1404164587927314435
Tesla’s dev debug menus circa 2020: https://x.com/greentheonly/status/1336467014727110656
It’s been a while since I’ve worked in the space so I haven’t followed green as closely.
This is a good read: https://www.understandingai.org/p/elon-musk-wants-to-dominat...
This talk by Waymo co-CEO is even better (especially from 33:50): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_wGhKBjH_U
Driverless miles: Waymo 20M, Tesla 0
Self-driving miles: Waymo 20M, Tesla 2000M
I don't think Tesla will ever operate a self-driving car with no driver where they are legally liable for crashes.
Only metric that counts is driverless miles. That's the true test of autonomy.
If you want to play the "ultimate goal" game, the ultimate goal is to do it all profitably at scale -- and Tesla is way ahead on that front, which is why their fleet self-drives almost as much per day as Waymo's fleet has ever driven.
Time will tell, but anyone who can't make a case for both "Tesla wins" and "Waymo wins" scenarios is a fanboy with deeply compromised thought processes.
Tesla may be profitable, but nowhere close to a working solution. So how far ahead are they really?
tesla uses cameras + local support (safety driver)
I imagine they'll try to switch to remote support at some point.
Google maps is famous for their human driven cars that drive around with sensors. Is there overlap here?
The software that actually does the driving, ie turns the wheel and works the pedals, is very similar between the two companies. Tesla took a big step in Waymo’s direction earlier this year when they replaced their optimization based path planner with a neural network.
1. Since that video, FSD 12.5.6.1 has been released, and v13 (which is what is rumored to have been used on Cybercab) is just around the corner. It is completely disingenuius to point to a video 7 months old (on FSD 12.3!) and insinuate that it is representative of the current experience.
2. In FSD, interventions are in your hands. With Waymo in the same situation, your fate lies solely in the remote operator watching your vehicle and how quickly they are able to react. FSD is obviously not perfect but the rate of interventions plummets with every new major release.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XagBTmpgw
Your understanding of remote support is entirely wrong. At no point can a remote operator "drive" a Waymo. They confirm or change plans when the car gets stuck -- that's it.
No one knows when that happens. But it feels pretty certain it’s happening.
I’ve been using FSD for 5 years now. It’s gone from glorified cruise control to something I generally don’t need to intervene with on city streets in that time. Will it improve that fast over the next five years? I doubt it. But it doesn’t have to because the residual problems are much fewer if harder. At this point, especially given the rate of AI improvement overall, I am confident in that five years those problems will largely if not entirely disappear.
Do I take a nap in the back seat? Of course not. Should it be marketed in its condition? I don’t know. But I do know the joint probability of me making a mistake as the attentive operator and it making a mistake while in control is significantly lower than either alone. The fact it makes mistakes at times is obviously concerning to me as a driver, and the fact I also make mistakes actually doesn’t concern me nearly as much as it should. However - I catch its mistakes, and it doesn’t make mine. Why is it rational to be more upset about the machine making a mistake than a human? It’s not - but humans are taught logic and are never rational.
But it's not a robotaxi. Even its level of sensor and compute redundancy is not ready to be a robotaxi. Nothing shown at the Cybercab event changed that. They go for form over reliability every time.
With HW3, they ate their redundant compute node because they underestimated the compute required for the task.
Now even with the redundant node utilized for non-redundant purposes, that doesn't seem to be enough as they are finally admitting HW3 will never not be "supervised".
And then the many years of lying about its upcoming readiness. There are websites out there where you can find all of Musk's quotes about it being just around the corner, or their current generation of vehicles all becoming money-making robotaxis with a little software update worldwide.
There's no indication at all they'll break out of the 100-120 miles per safety disengagement they currently sit at (community tracker, Tesla themselves doesn't publish reviewable safety data).
You being happy that your car can finally make zero intervention trips is NOT the standard necessary for taking the driver out of the seat.
> This is FUD. Who or what speeds up to 55 mph to enter a rotary? How is it that the posted limit and presumably map data indicates 55mp seconds before the rotary? What do you expect FSD which is training on humans using vision and the maps to do? I saw a dinky little rotary sign AT the rotary. I'd slam on the brakes or have an accident too.
> Why would the car come to a stop? I don't see a stop sign, and most roundabouts are yield and I don't see another car blocking your way. Why enter a roundabout at 55? You are wrong, not the car or FSD. You don't know the correct way to drive a roundabout.
FSD mimics human behavior. If you are speeding into a roundabout at 55 mph, you are the one in the wrong, not FSD. It's honestly kind of incredible the ridiculous lengths people go to try to discredit FSD.
> FSD mimics human behavior. If you are speeding into a roundabout at 55 mph, you are the one in the wrong, not FSD. It's honestly kind of incredible the ridiculous lengths people go to try to discredit FSD.
That's just rephrasing the YouTube comment. Try watching the video yourself. Particularly watch test #7.
Here's a summary:
• The car is on a highway, traveling at normal highway speed of 55 mph. There is no visual indication that there is a roundabout somewhere up ahead.
• After traveling ~3800 feet there is a sign that indicates a roundabout and says the roundabout speed is 15 mph. The roundabout is not yet visible.
• The car continues at highway speed past another sign ~600 feet past the first that also shows that there will be an upcoming roundabout. The road starts curving after that sign, and the roundabout starts coming into view ~600 feet further down the road.
• The car continues approaching the roundabout at highway speed until the human intervenes. He tried to give the car as much time as possible for FSD to decide to slow down. In some of the tests he waited long enough that when he did hit the brakes he had to brake very very aggressively to slow down to 15 mph before entering the roundabout.
Even if it does not have that roundabout in its map and did not read the signs so it is not expecting a roundabout there shouldn't is see it as a sharp bend in the road that should not be taken at highway speed and slow down?
This is a laughable hot take. "seconds before".
Watching the video, it starts with him at 43mph, and he drives at 55mph for FORTY SECONDS before encountering the roundabout.
All these clowns saying "Oh, in the real world he'd have slowed down for that roundabout".
No. He wouldn't have started slowing down two-thirds of a mile away (40 seconds at 55mph). This is a garbage argument.
One is doing it completely driverless and has to get it right every single time. The other has a driver ready to intervene and just needs a single intervention-free drive.
Also, Waymo works.
The disadvantage of using the LIDAR and full sensor stack is largely price.
It's the fundamental difference between partial autonomy and full autonomy.
Don’t get me wrong waymo is impressive, I use it as much as possible. The future looks amazing. Do you also agree Tesla’s self driving is impressive?
Tesla FSD is impressive for a driver assist system. But that's all it is — a driver assist. They need orders of magnitude improvement to match Waymo's performance and go driverless.
My work is about 10 miles way in the Seattle area. I can go to and from with zero interventions until I get to my works parking garage
The data is the most important part, to solve real world driving everywhere, you need huge amounts of data for all the edge cases. Tesla has millions of cars on the road gathering this data, vs a couple of thousand for Waymo
Except that Alphabet has been mapping and scanning for years, since before Waymo. And, Waymo vehicles are on the road while waiting for a fare, so they can use that time for mapping, while Teslas are reliant on where their owners go.
I find it fascinating the crew of Tesla fanboys on this site that run around downvoting anyone who isn’t drinking the koolade, but never have anything factual or constructive to add to the conversation.
There is literally no indication at all that Tesla is right and every other expert in the industry is wrong about vision only never working. We’re a decade in and they still can’t prevent phantom braking that a 2010 ford Taurus didn’t suffer from.
No. A Tesla with a driver and a Waymo have a lot in common: "When self driving cars don't actually drive themselves"
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/insider/when-self-driving...
There isn't a big story to this. Does Waymo share details about how and when its vehicles are driven remotely? Since the answer is no, you can only assume that it is pretty often.
Really kudos to Zoox for turning a profile about them into this unveiling of Waymo. I fell for Waymo's sleight of hand. Aspirationally, we really do want self driving cars.
Occasionally there are problems of being stuck (at 0 mph) due to a lack of aggressiveness or the refusal to violate a rule, or being in a loop the car can't figure a way out of. Often times this is just a safety precaution, at this early stage, of wanting a human in the loop to confirm a plan, but sometimes it's because the system isn't robust enough to properly make the plan and I'm sure that's where a lot of the development effort is currently pointed -- reducing these events to as close to zero as possible. That's the long tail. It never really quite goes away.
They aren't. The car asks the remote operator about its options, the operator suggests an option, the car proceeds. Nobody is driving in realtime over LTE, that would be insane.
To be pedantic that's not really a good argument against the possibility of remote driving. All of Waymo's service areas are inside the coverage areas of AT&T's 5G+, Verizon's 5G Ultra Wide, and T-Mobile's 5G Ultra Capacity networks.
I also wouldn't trust NYT reporting on anything related to Big Tech: they have a well-documented pattern of anti-big-tech biased reporting.
Listen to yourself.
In this comment, you are saying the verbatim words "where to drive" to mean the navigation that Google Maps does, but then you used the verbatim words "where to drive" to mean resolving questions about obstacles. So I guess, yes, resolving questions about obstacles is indeed remote driving, and navigation questions from Google Maps is not remote driving. But everyone already knows that.
The sort of obvious definition of self driving means no human intervention whatsoever, which Waymos also fail. So I don't know. Why doesn't Waymo use Google Maps instead of people to tell the car, "where to drive"?
This has happened multiple times in San Francisco. You can find videos of driverless Waymo cars getting stuck. You can also find a hilarious instance where a stuck Waymo was driven by the emergency personnel after it became stuck.
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There's also smaller players and sometimes strong third players (eg GCP), but by and large there are no single winners. Waymo and Tesla are looking like a good bet on the self-driving duopoly. I think a lot of people are skeptical on Tesla because "LIDAR", but lidar is largely irrelevant. It is only used in 3D scene reconstruction, it has nothing to do with actual driving which is the hard part.
Source? AIUI lidar is actively used as a sensor/input to detect absolute distance between things, which seems like 80% of what you need to drive safely.
Once you've accurately perceived the world, the hard part is the action, and the judgement needed to drive safely. It doesn't matter how you got your labeled 3D scene (LIDAR or SLAM), you have to figure out how to navigate it safely and this is more like 90% of the self-driving challenge. If you look at videos of the latest FSD in action (12.5) perception is not an issue. Teslas see everything just fine, they don't disengage because they didn't see a car, but because their judgement is not human level yet.
I’ve watched countless hours of FSD footage and have FSD on my Model 3, and I’ve never seen it incorrectly map the position of a vehicle. Both Tesla and Waymo seem to have reliable perception stacks, the actual decision-making is the hard part, like you said.
I've been to two in the Phoenix area (Lost & Found FTW).
They are secure facilities near freight train tracks, and their neighbors are logistics companies. I saw Waymo vehicles coming and going, but I did not spot their point of entry into the building. There was no "big parking lot" full of Waymos or chargers visible from the outside.
The visitor/guest entrance is just a security desk and a waiting room with about 3 chairs. Even during business hours, the front door may be locked. You announce your purpose and the security guard admits you. I was once told that I'd need to wait outside, no problem: the weather was fine, and picnic tables were nearby. Once an employee retrieved my Lost & Found items, I was sent on my way.
I feel when that much money is at stake and such a high exit is expected, this could distort incentives. I feel like investors would prefer to set their money on fire for some tiny probability of that 20x+ return rather than look to actually make a modest profitable business
The ideal end game for self-driving taxis is replacing personally-owned cars. Instead of anyone having a car of their own they'd just order one for any journey they make. If ordering a taxi is easier and cheaper than owning a car, and potentially faster and safer because it's self-driving, it's a no brainer for anyone who sees a car as a cost rather than a recreational vehicle.
If they manage to do that then Waymo will be significantly more valuable than a trillion dollars.
Baidu Apollo now has a $28K self driving vehicle [0], I doubt Waymo is ever getting close to those numbers. They might replace some US personal cars, but they won't be able to compete globally.
edit: Waymo wanted to use Zeekr vehicles before, I guess that ship has sailed now - they will have to get by with their new Hyundai contract [1]
[0] https://cnevpost.com/2024/05/15/baidu-apollo-launches-6th-ge...
[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/waymo-and-hyundai-enter-partn...
Why? In theory, Waymo should be able to copy everything Baidu is doing, e.g. manufacture in a low-labor-cost country like India.
This is mainly about the technology, that's the hard problem. Optimizing the costs is something that has been done many times before and we know how to do it.
Baidu can have their test car kill a pedestrian every day for the next 10 years if necessary, that's not exactly an even playing field.
They will start using highways with regular passangers probably by the end of this year. Maybe Baidu can launch on highways with a 10x higher accident rate, but I don't think it's a significant advantage to the business.
Uber knows this. They just did not have the money or tech Alphabet could bring to bear.
Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean due to wear?
I need a ride a 9am and 5pm just like half the city. People keep talking about fleets being in demand and your Tesla becoming a taxi while you sit on your office but wouldn’t everyone else’s also?