Waymo for Business

I suspect Waymo has purchased all available Jaguar i-Paces (~= every Jaguar i-Pace?), which are no longer in production, and was planning on rolling out their purpose-built Zeekr vehicles to scale further. The 100% tariff on Chinese EVs introduced in 2024 probably made this plan financially questionable, leaving them without a supply of new vehicles. Late last year Waymo announced a partnership with Hyundai to buy a version of the Ioniq 5 assembled in the US which might've been motivated by this problem.

The Zeekr vehicle was announced in 2021: https://waymo.com/blog/2021/12/expanding-our-waymo-one-fleet...

100% tariff in 2024: https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/14/joe... ; https://www.reuters.com/business/us-locks-steep-china-tariff...

Hyundai partnership announced a few months later: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/waymo-and-hyundai-enter-partn...

Plus what others have said about sheer number of vehicles not being the only obstacle to scaling.

From someone that worked in the industry ~6 years ago, it's clearly going well for them - frankly, they're expanding and scaling way faster than I would have thought possible in 2019. They've got something like 6 cities running right now and what, 3-4 more announced?

Another thing to keep in mind is that rideshare revenue in the US is extremely geographically concentrated in urban cores. This is why every AV company was targeting SF as their first city (excepting Waymo, which did some stuff in PHX). 'Hyperfocused expansion' probably looks a lot closer to tackling new, novel areas in different metro areas rather than, say, expanding down in to San Jose and the central valley.

These things, they take time.

They've clearly hit (or projections confidently show they'll hit) a point where each car is profitable. I worked in the space for a while - platform upgrades (new cars, sensors, etc) are planned out years in advance and are pretty complex processes. But generally, each upgrade was a massive decrease in cost per car. (usually 50% cheaper or more). So also possible they want to wait for the next platform transition.

> Why are they not hyper-focused on scaling the number of vehicles on the road

I am no expert here, but my assumption scaling is not yet dependent on just having more cars, that they have to do extra work, that is not yet automatable, in each area they service plus some extra maintenance cost for every area they service.

maybe some car pool services for the most frequent routes could run at regular intervals. there could even be some predefined stops to efficiently batch many people getting on and off the car pool at once

The next generation vehicle is much bigger https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-waymo...

Especially when I'm guessing a lot of these "urban tech worker" commutes are mostly on surface streets or congested highways barely moving any faster. In my experience cycling to work I am actually faster on the bike than when I take the car. This is mostly due to filtering to the front of the intersection effectively eliminating any and all effects of rush hour traffic. Another huge factor is I can also park the bike directly in front of the door to the building, no having to walk from a designated parking or drop off zone.

That doesn't seem right. Taking your own car, which you park at both ends of the trip, is clearly worse from a vehicle utilization and land use standpoint. A Waymo that takes a dozen trips a day and never park on the street seems obviously superior.

Driving your own petrol car is surely worse? What are you talking about...

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It's common for events / conferences / businesses to provide Lyft and Uber codes for some percentage off a ride or even a free ride to or from the location. This is effectively that but for Waymo.

You can bulk purchase daily transportation for your employees, so they can work on their commute too. How exciting.

From the link in the announcement: https://waymo.com/business

Provide safe and sustainable autonomous rides for your team with Waymo for Business. Easily set up commuter programs, events transportation, and corporate travel for a variety of industries and use cases.

With Waymo for Business, you’ll get access to our business portal to set program parameters, manage members, generate codes for events, and keep track of everything, from budget to program engagement.

They’re announcing that they’re building an offering that suits business needs (provide vouchers to employees, track spending, etc.) and giving businesses the opportunity to sign up to be notified when it’s available. Pretty straightforward stuff.

Trucking is probably going to be one of the things that's harder to automate, and given the way things are going we best hope they don't given the absolute bloodbath it would create for labor (trucking is one of the most common professions in the US). I would wager that would lead to unrest in a way we've not seen in a long time.

> I mean how many people drive for 30 to 60 minutes just to get to work in or already a bit stressed out because of the drive.

Will this still make sense if Weymo has to spend 30-60 minutes getting to wherever the worker needs to be picked up, presumably the suburbs?

Plenty of workplaces reimburse for ubers right now

> the real challenge is just getting local communities to allow Waymo

This isn’t a real challenge. There are more cities that want to be early adopters (for the investment and jobs) than have a politically-active Luddite streak.

At the end of the day, we’ll do the labour-intensive work of development in the former and deploy to the latter once it’s efficiently scalable, probably with limited local labor (and thus consent) requirements.

Filling the roads with single person occupancy vehicles is not a replacement for "legacy public transportation".

I guess by "legacy public transportation systems" you're thinking buses?

GoA 4 trains exist today. GoA 3 is usually more practical and is widely used today. So Waymo would be very late to that and have all the wrong technology stack. But sure, there could be room for the Waymo Driver driving a bus, that may not make as much sense as you imagine but anything is possible.