[xp84]

I’m not disagreeing with what you’re saying, but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone? Or would they be happy to sell all those super cool things to OEMs? In a world where “everyone” can make a car affordable that can run Waymo’s software, they may be happy to license all that to “everyone” and simply collect fat royalty checks, à la Microsoft in the 90s, allowing them to make a ton of incremental money without all the capex of making their own cars.

[elteto]

In a saner world Teslas would be running Waymo's self-driving stack instead of the half-baked "might kill you at any time" not quite-FSD.

[blonder]

They are not the same. I don't think Tesla or its consumers are interested in geofenced self driving, they want to be able to use it on road trips and driving around suburbs.

[Zigurd]

That is one plausible outcome. Waymo is experimenting with partnerships with ride hailing apps on the one hand, and building their software into Toyotas on the other hand. So far they have built a few thousand vehicles in a factory run by Magna, which specializes in low volume vehicles. Hyundai wants to sell Waymo tens of thousands of vehicles. That's going to look different in fundamental ways.

[scarmig]

It would be smarter to take that approach. Google's core competency is technology, technical infrastructure, and research. More mundane things like manufacturing and customer service are... shall we say, less of a core competency. Take the high value add, leave other things to automakers to duke it out. Also good for avoiding attracting even more regulatory attention.

[sroussey]

Why sell cars to everyone?

People on here used to buy servers themselves (very few of us still do), most now rent via cloud.

Why should transportation be different?

[toss1]

>>Why should transportation be different?

Good question, and for many it will not be, and rentals are acceptable.

But also for many, renting a car has a huge ICK factor. It is one thing while traveling to rent from an agency who has (purportedly) thoroughly cleaned and inspected the car before you get it. It would be quite another to rent cars like scooters, where the previous user likely smoked, left wrappers and food debris, and who knows what else, even damage. Plus, most people who own cars keep a fair amount of stuff in the car for their specific convenience, and have their own settings, etc.

The fact that the likes of Zipcar, Turo, and the lot have not entirely taken over urban transport but instead remain niche players shows the extent of this preference.

For suburban and rural markets, it just gets more extreme. How quickly could a rental service be able to deliver a car; could it reliably do it in less than 5-10 minutes for people to run an errand? If not, unless they are insanely cheap, ppl will likely want to own their own. Perhaps it'll be more of a hybrid, households owning one car and renting the spare for specific trips?

[lazide]

If you use them regularly, renting is both a pain in the ass and quite costly. If you have atypical security (or even normal, in many cases) or usage patterns, it’s even worse.

A lot of folks are relearning lessons on this front in Cloud right now.

[kjkjadksj]

Moores law applies to cpus not the car that has been functionally the same for decades.

[ThrowawayR2]

Not a good analogy: a server is not a personal space occupied by humans. It's for the same reason people don't want to hot-desk; they prefer a personal space with their own stuff in it.

[TulliusCicero]

They'll probably operate some services and also license their tech to carmakers to sell to consumers. I'm sure there'll be a subscription involved for that too.

[xbmcuser]

With the price declines in ev we are talking about 1 million ev even with all the waymo tech for $50 billion soon. approximate Annual Revenue of a private hire car is $50+k ie $50-60 billion a year for a million cars. But total taxi driver population is 350-400k in the US. I think people are underestimating the electric tech + ai/automation to hit soon.

[Tempest1981]

Do OEMs want to manage their own ride-share platforms? 10+ apps/providers?

[bigmadshoe]

I think they were referring to making personal vehicles self driving. Probably the rideshare market is just the start for Waymo.

[sideband]

Alphabet wants drivers on their devices looking at ads instead of driving.

[mschuster91]

> but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone?

Google doesn't do retail other than Chromecast and Pixel phones, and that is already annoying to them as it is because it involves something Google is notoriously bad at - actual customer support.

Starting up a car brand is orders of magnitude worse.

For one, people actually need to trust your brand to survive for at least five to ten years - cars are an investment, and a car that I can't trust to get safety-relevant spare parts (brake rotors, brake pads, axle bearings) all of a sudden is essentially an oversized paperweight. For a company such as Google, this alone (remember Killed By Google) is a huge obstacle to overcome.

Then, you need production. Sure, you can go to Magna or other contract manufacturers, or have an established large brand build vehicles for you, or you say you have to go the Tesla route and build everything from scratch. Either way has associated pros and cons.

And then, you need a nationwide network of spare parts, dealerships, repair shops and technicians that can fix the issues that people will get alone because the wide masses abuse cars in ways you might not even dare think about while testing, or because other people run into your cars and so your cars need repairs.

Even being a derivative of an established car brand can be a royal PITA. Let's take Mercedes Benz as an example with the 2003-2009 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. On paper, it's a Mercedes vehicle, with a lot of the parts actually originating from stock Mercedes cars - but most dealerships will refuse to work on it. Either because they lack the support to even properly jack the car up, or because they lack the specialized tools for the AMG engine, or because they cannot even order the parts as Mercedes gates repairs for that thing to special shops. Or, again Mercedes, with Maybach luxury cars. The situation isn't as bad as with the McLaren, but their cars are challenging in another way - the S 650 Pullman weighs around 3 metric tons empty and is 6.50 meters long. Good luck finding a jack even capable of lifting that beast, most Mercedes sports-car shops don't carry jacks that are normally used to lift Mercedes Vito transporters!

Even Tesla, and they've been at it for the better part of two decades, still struggles with that. Their shitty spare parts logistics actually drive up not just insurance prices for their own customers, but for everyone - hit a Tesla with your Dodge and be at fault, and now your insurance has to pay out for months of a rental car because Tesla can't be arsed to provide the body shop the Tesla ends up at with spare parts in any reasonable time.

Established car brands however have all of that ironed out for many, many decades now. American, Asian, European, doesn't matter. And the spare parts don't even have to be made for cars: ask your local Volkswagen dealer to order a few pieces of "199 398 500 A" and one piece of "199 398 500 B" and you'll probably have a lead time of less than a day, at least in Germany - for the uninitiated: that part number belongs to the famous sausage, the second one to the accompanying curry ketchup, with more sausages being sold each year than actual cars.

And established car brands also bring something to the table: their own experiences with integrating smart technology. Yes, particularly German carmakers are notoriously bad in that regard, but for example Mercedes Benz was the first car brand in the world to get a certified Level 3 system on the road [1] and are now working on a Level 4 certification [2]. That kind of experience in navigating bureaucracy, integration and testing cannot be paid for in money.

tl;dr: I see no way in which Waymo goes to general availability regarding selling cars. They will run their own autonomous car fleets in select markets where they can fully control everything, but seeing Waymo tech generally available will be as part of established car brands.

[1] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren...

[2] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren...

[toast0]

> For one, people actually need to trust your brand to survive for at least five to ten years - cars are an investment, and a car that I can't trust to get safety-relevant spare parts (brake rotors, brake pads, axle bearings) all of a sudden is essentially an oversized paperweight.

Those bits should be easy, unless the OEM was tragically stupid. Where you'll get into trouble is when you need replacement computer bits; those are often tricky for mainstream brands, but if your niche brand ECUs all fail around the same time (wouldn't be the first time for a Google product), and the OEM isn't around to make new ones or make it right, off to the junkyard with all of them. If it's just normal failure rates, you can probably scavenge from totaled vehicles at junkyards even after new parts become unobtainium.

OEM style lighting will also probably get hard to find. Ideally a niche maker would lean towards standard parts there, but that's not the fashion of the times.

[robotresearcher]

> Starting up a car brand is orders of magnitude worse.

Tesla did it, and is more valuable than most other car brands added together. They had a novel product: a good EV that was fun to drive. Is that a unique situation? Could a truly autonomous car launch do it?

Your arguments make sense in themselves, but maybe underestimate the revolutionary value that a level 4 car would provide.