I don't think the price they charge for Waymo is related almost at all to their operating cost. Operating cost is undoubtedly much higher. I suspect Waymo has set fleet size based on how many cars they want operating for gathering the best amount of data and testing improvements, and then prices are set by demand (i.e., price that keeps the cars busy while minimizing wait time).
There you go - I would have said their operating cost is much lower. Paying the wages of the drivers for a year costs more than the car - even a car plus all those fancy LIDAR's.
Their development costs are a different story. I suspect only a company like Google could sustain it. But presumably it's one off, and if they spread it over 1 million taxi's in the USA it would only be a fraction of the revenue.
Those development costs have an upside too. It's a moat. If they pull if off they will have a monopoly. The will get away with being able to change just under the cost of a real driver for years. We may well be bitching here in a decades time at the obscene profits alphabet is making off us, and yet we have no obvious way out.
> I would have said their operating cost is much lower. Paying the wages of the drivers for a year costs more than the car - even a car plus all those fancy LIDAR's.
No, Cruise shared a few months ago that operating costs per mile is still higher than a car with a paid driver.
If operating costs were below a human driver, they would be scaling as fast as possible to recoup the developmnent costs for the current level of tech, which have already been expended.
> No, Cruise shared a few months ago that operating costs per mile is still higher than a car with a paid driver.
The page you link to says a) it (the entire operation?) is bleeding money, and b) it's operating costs are reducing, and c) quote efficiency improvements helping reduce the costs of simulation and machine learning used to test and improve AV performance.
I can't see where it explicitly says it's operating costs alone that exceed they call the magic threshold of $1/mile (which is presume is what a car + driver costs). And given they mention (c) above it seems unlikely they meant it was just operating costs.
That aside, they go onto say quote Operating costs per mile for Cruise autonomous vehicles or AVs has fallen by an average 15 percent monthly over the first half of 2023. That's an extraordinary rate for costs to fall. If indeed operating costs exceed that of a human driver it wouldn't have remained that way for long, had they continued.
