Bringing fully autonomous rides to Nashville, in partnership with Lyft
102 comments
·September 17, 2025blinding-streak
jerlam
I wonder if Waymo is allowed to charge different prices, or advertise their own direct services, in these partnerships.
"Use the Waymo app instead, save 10%, and get a guaranteed Waymo!"
adrr
Curious what these ride sharing companies take for providing the platform. 30%? Having two play off each other they can probably push it down to 15% or lower.
Zigurd
I strongly suspect Waymo has hit break-even. If Google's published numbers on rides per week and fleet size are accurate, and the estimates of price per ride are close, expansion isn't going to be capital constrained.
ra7
In a recent interview, Waymo strongly hinted they now have positive unit economics in markets like SF.
From https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2025/09/03/waymo-co...:
> “Each car, the amount of revenue it's making would be shocking to most people,” Panigrahi said, without elaborating. “Because it just continuously keeps delivering ride after ride. On a per asset basis, it’s doing really well. That’s making progress in terms of unit economics very, very positive.”
So much so that in busy markets like San Francisco, Waymo could soon move into the black. “Not making specific statements about if we’re positive or not, but what I can tell you is that yes, key markets are showing us that we are,” Panigrahi said.
eatonphil
What is the reason or benefit of them being so secretive about this?
weatherlite
They don't gain much from disclosing anything imo , their competition reads every word they say. I'm not sure it matters that much but as a habit I don't see why they should disclose exact numbers.
boh
Because no highly indebted company is going to "strongly hint" that they aren't just hemorrhaging cash like everyone assumes--they will absolutely let you know. "Hints" are just best effort accounting aesthetics to seem like the dream is just around the corner.
leetharris
Even with expensive vehicles and hardware? Plus they are revenue sharing with the host Uber/Lyft platforms.
Feels very unlikely. I think they will need to bring car cost down to hit break even.
seanmcdirmid
LIDAR prices are falling fairly rapidly over time (although I’m not sure about the impact of tariffs). The car and computing resources are otherwise boring costs, maybe they are at around $200k/vehicle? That would be pretty easy to pay for a with a few months of rides. If most of the rides are going through the Waymo app, they aren’t paying a lot to uber and Lyft, and I doubt they are paying the full 30% to the ride sharing platforms anyways.
leoc
They're also spending an unclear amount of money on human driving-assistance workers https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zo... and the supporting infrastructure. Presumably it works out to a lot less per vehicle-hour than an in-vehicle, US-resident human driver, but a lot more than nothing.
I suppose another wrinkle is that driverlessness isn't only a cost saving (aspirational or real), it's also a positive attraction eg. for anyone who worries about their safety with a rando taxi driver or Uber guy. There are also cost savings achievable by timeshifting antisocial-hours work to elsewhere in the world, though presumably a significant part of the savings will be simply be the result of outsourcing to lower-wage countries.
Closi
> maybe they are at around $200k/vehicle? That would be pretty easy to pay for a with a few months of rides.
The 'few months' bit doesn't seem quite right - the cost to get a human to drive a car would maybe be $50k per year, so i'm not sure how a $200k vehicle can pay itself off in a few months vs a $50k car + $50k per year driver.
I'm aware that the cost / ride is higher for Waymo, but it doesn't sound like that would be enough to cover the extra $200k and not certain that scales to other geographies outside of SF.
I mean to pay off a $200k vehicle in a few months you would need each car to be clearing $3k a day in revenue or something like that.
It's probably a few years per car if they are at $200k. If they are 'in the black' or not will probably depend more about their accounting rules (i.e. depreciation) more than anything else.
Zigurd
Waymo can hit break even even with the relatively expensive Jaguar SUVs and Driver 6 hardware suite. As someone else pointed out, Google is making more money than most people realize on a per unit basis. My back of the envelope estimate is at least $2000 per vehicle per week. That easily covers financing the capex with thousands left over for opex and overhead.
Just switching to the Hyundai SUVs takes tens of thousands of dollars out of capex.
vineyardmike
Think about it in comparison to a real-life taxi or Uber and the math is surprisingly strong.
A real human driver needs to (vaguely) make a human salary, and cover things like gas, cleaning, car maintenance, car payments etc. That human salary is probably at least $50k if working full time in high end markets like SF. That “salary” also covers most OpEx costs for Uber like periodic cleaning and gas/charging of vehicles.
Lately, Uber has been $1.50-$3.00/mile in SF while Waymo has been $3.00+/m most times. Waymo also can drive 24/7/365 so should be able to command a higher per-car income.
I’ve heard rumors that a Waymo vehicle cost $200k to build with the sensors. Surely they’re aggressively lowering that cost now too. That’s 4-5 years of driving to pay off IF they’re making what Uber drivers make, but they’re almost certainly making much more.
Like Uber and Lyft before them, their biggest barrier to profitability is likely their HQ costs full of expensive engineering jobs - and they also have the R&D costs of training the car.
xnx
The Zeekr vehicle would've brought costs down, but it is now subject to a huge tariff. No telling how much that has set them back.
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dkobia
What a time to be alive. 3 companies competing for what might be the next trillion dollar business.
- Waymo has the advantage of launching sooner but has much more expensive vehicles which will eat into margins.
- Tesla has the advantage of full vertical integration owns their hardware and cheaper cars but also trying to do this with vision only.
- Zoox has the advantage of building purpose-built autonomous vehicles from the ground up with Amazon's deep pockets behind them, but faces the challenge of manufacturing at scale for a novel vehicle.
oldjim798
Why do we want a trillion dollar business? Why is that good for society/the world?
Tesla also seems to have the 'advantage' of ruthlessly exploiting labour; I very much hope they do not succeed.
Zoox being owned by Amazon also makes me deeply suspicious of their business practices.
charcircuit
The value of a business is based off how much value they will provide to others. In order to be a trillion dollar business you have to be providing a lot of value to others in the current or people are speculating you will provide value in the future.
oldjim798
The value of a business is entirely the part the second of the line - its entirely people speculating on the future value. Thats why Telsa is worth so much compared to other auto makers - its a small, niche player who makes poor quality cars - but investors believe it will take over the world hence its 'valuation'.
This is assuming you mean just the economic definition of value. If you mean value more broadly, then your statement is even less true; in that case hedge funds would be worth nothing.
bpodgursky
Because Americans spend 93 billion hours driving each year and tens of thousands of people literally die each year in car crashes. Unlocking that time and those lives is an unimaginably large quality of life improvement.
grues-dinner
Probably not ideal if one company controls the whole shebang though.
McAlpine5892
We already have solutions for this called trains, buses, subways, etc. Public transportation. Yes, America is huge but look at China building out high-speed rail at an incredible pace. The amount of money dumped into self-driving could have built out an impressive amount of infrastructure for public transportation.
Not to say this isn’t a worthy problem to solve or that cars have no use. They’re great for rural life. But maybe 80% of the use-case for self-driving cars is pretty much solved by trains. They’re fast, generate no traffic, are very safe, and reduce pollution in urban areas. Even electric cars produce noxious break dust.
Addendum
The “America is too big” argument drives me nuts. (1) Again, look at China. (2) The EU is decently large and connected very well by rail. (3) We’re America. We went to the frickin moon. Defeated the Nazis. Etc. We can build trains. Not to mention what a boost it would be to the economy with all the jobs a project like that would create. Sure, we wouldn’t have an Elon but that’s fine by me.
oldjim798
Autonomous cars would be safer, I completely agree. They won't fix traffic though.
hibikir
If there's a trillion dollar business there, it's on transporting goods, not people. Ultimately a self driving car is a cheaper chauffeur or a cheaper taxi. The addressable market doesn't change that much because of price, and the more it changes it, the worse it is for infrastructure. Deadhead miles traveled are not better for traffic because there is no human driving them. All we get is more miles traveled over the same limited infra.
jedilord
[dead]
losvedir
This feels like an inflection point.
We're now at San Francisco, SFO airport, Austin, Nashville, and NYC, is that right?
baseballdork
They're in the Phoenix area as well.
List of cities here: https://waymo.com/rides/
panarky
And Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Tokyo
jayd16
Los Angeles
gol706
They have hired staff in San Antonio but not officially announced a launch yet.
Fricken
They achieved a critical milestone, which is achieving profitability with their mature operations in Phoenix and SF, so yep, they now have the all clear to roll out broadly.
mcoliver
And Los Angeles
yiweig
And Atlanta via Uber
avs733
and RAPIDLY growing in Atlanta from what I see as I wander the city. I just saw one of their new Geely based vehicles today for the first time.
I will say as someone who is suspicious of self driving cars...they are not really worse than Atlanta drivers as a typical pedestrian. They are dangerous in different ways...but not necessarily more or less.
willahmad
From market standpoint I am curious if Google or Amazon is willing to acquire Lyft for the tech and customer base.
Lyft is a good distribution channel for their self driving car initiatives with good coverage, Uber is too expensive at this moment.
AnishLaddha
what moat does lyft have? i know san francisco is a special case but waymo is already beating out lyft, with its own app: https://www.fastcompany.com/91347503/waymo-is-winning-in-san...
willahmad
moat is in institutional knowledge of operations in ride hailing industry.
Also, pleasing the customer, imagine opening Waymo app and not being able to order a taxi 40% of the time. With Lyft/Uber you can easily switch the ride mode and get a car with driver if all self driving cars are busy
sib
What customer base (at least in the US) does Lyft have that Google or Amazon don't? Estimates for Amazon are ~250M and Google ~275M users in the US.
willahmad
it's not only about number of users. You also have regulations in different cities and states, existing models trained based on past supply demand behavior, somewhat optimized workflows for the ride hailing industry, payments, risks.
They both can build themselves, but if you provide solely self-driving ride hailing, a lot of times customers might not be able to find cars in upcoming 6-7 years until they ramp up full production to meet demand.
sib
>> willing to acquire Lyft for the tech and customer base
Sure - that seems like "tech" - I was asking about "customer base"
telotortium
Is this the first time Waymo has partnered with Lyft? I’ve only heard of Uber partnerships before? From what I can find, previous Lyft collaborations were only pilot testing, not commercial rollouts.
daemonologist
Also interesting that it's not exclusive - they're saying you'll be able to use either the Waymo app or the Lyft app (and get a Waymo at random, presumably). I believe the previous deals with Uber have all been exclusive - no Waymo app in that market.
testfrequency
“As families and businesses move to Tennessee in record numbers, our state continues to lead the nation in finding innovative solutions to transportation challenges," said Governor Bill Lee.
Innovative. That must have felt nice to claim
yalogin
Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment. They don’t own any cars anyway, now they don’t even have to deal with drivers. Also I am glad google finally found a GTM strategy for their tech. They are building these machines themselves though. These are expensive and cost a lot in maintenance, wonder how the numbers look for them
evgen
> Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment.
The two completely replaceable components of this project are 'sitting pretty'? They should be scared to death because this is in fact the death knell for both companies. If the market decides that they are going to be nothing more than 'fleet management' companies for waymo then their share price will crater.
xnx
> Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment
Maybe they get something out of it in the short term. Longer term, they are janitorial and service staff that are interchangeable with any number of companies.
garrtt
Is there any hope of actually being able to fully own a self driving vehicle as a consumer? Seems that a concerning majority of the autonomous driving conversation is framed in the context of ride-sharing.
jonas21
As the technology is developed, it makes sense to start with ridesharing because:
(a) you can amortize the up-front cost of the hardware over many more trips per day.
(b) you can geographically restrict where the vehicle operates to areas you've mapped in detail and know to be relatively safe
(c) you can collect lots of raw data for training and also allow remote operators to assist if the vehicle gets stuck (many people would have privacy concerns if their personal car was doing this).
Over time, the hardware cost will come down, geographic availability will increase, and the need for remote data collection will decrease as the tech matures. Then you might start to see ones you can fully own.
At that point, though, the question becomes would you want to own one? Particularly if ride-share vehicles are ubiquitous and you can nearly instantly summon one of exactly the type that you need for your trip.
brian_spiering
Yes, there is hope to fully own a self driving vehicle as a consumer. One example is comma.ai, inc.
boh
I have a feeling Nashville normies are going to be super psyched having to drive behind these things.
deathanatos
Nashville's airport suffered gridlock yesterday: https://fox17.com/news/local/what-caused-the-over-14000-vehi...
oldjim798
Autonomous cars are not the solution to traffic issues. At best, the may make some driving situations slightly safer because humans are terrible drivers.
What we need is trains. Trains everywhere. We had this once in fact; we had passenger rail to every corner of europe and north america. Turning that back on would massively improve traffic.
gs17
Unfortunately, our airport traffic is getting a Tesla Tunnel instead of a real train.
cman1444
I disagree. Building trains in America is next to impossible in the modern day. Obtaining the property for the railways would be extraordinarily difficult, because America has such strong property rights and is such a legalistic society. It's a recipe for way over-budget and behind schedule projects. Just look at the California project. There's also very little expertise in the rail industry in America due to underinvestment in recent decades. Furthermore, the built environment is so spread out because it was built for cars, so you don't get the clustering effects of density around train stations. Rail isn't that helpful if you have to walk another 30 minutes from the station to actually get to your destination.
Also, I think your assertion that autonomous cars don't solve traffic is partially wrong. If entire fleets of cars can "think" as a whole, you can avoid some traffic problems, such as traffic waves, that occur due to individual decision-makers.
rangestransform
> There's also very little expertise in the rail industry in America due to underinvestment in recent decades.
we could solve this by importing entire crews from Europe or Asia, but knuckledraggers insist on cREaTinG lOCal UNioN jOBs
choilive
The USA has proven to be... incapable of completing any public transport infrastructure anywhere near on budget or on time. This is a deeply rooted problem. Until this gets solved autonomous electric vehicles could theoretically just leapfrog the problem altogether. Point to point transportation also mostly solves the last mile problem.
jonas21
Let's say you have autonomous cars that can caravan together with zero or near-zero separation between them. At that point, is it a train?
triceratops
We also need buses and mini-buses and taxis to get people to and from train stations. Autonomous driving makes this cheap and feasible.
devinprater
Oh yes please, just a little closer! Come on bring it to Talladega AL where tons of blind people live!
Interesting that Waymo has relationships with both Uber and Lyft now. They can play them off each other for future expansion opportunities, while continuing to learn the nuances of the high-scale rideshare biz from them.