I find Will Lockett on Medium a pretty level headed writer (250K followers). Here is his September take on hard it is going to be for Waymo to get to profitability. medium.com/predict/waym... - ThreadSky

rodneyabrooks.bsky.social • 47 days ago

I find Will Lockett on Medium a pretty level headed writer (250K followers). Here is his September take on hard it is going to be for Waymo to get to profitability. https://medium.com/predict/waymo-may-have-just-proven-the-robotaxi-industry-isnt-the-gold-mine-we-thought-it-was-7dee0985bbfe

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igilitschenski.bsky.social•46 days ago

Waymo is special because it suffers from a first-mover disadvantage like no other AV company. Because there was barely anyone to copy, they had to learn most lessons themselves. If Waymo can demonstrate profitability on the operational side alone, it will already be a huge achievement.

bernhard-jaeger.bsky.social•46 days ago

Well that is the same for all the major AD efforts.
Since most compaies don't publish their research all the companies have to pay the full price to rediscover the same ideas.
Agree that operational profitability would be a huge success. We don't know how much remote supervision the cars still need.

igilitschenski.bsky.social•45 days ago

I feel that in industry, everyone knows what everyone else is doing: companies hire from each other all the time. And even if employees follow NDAs, they still bring their experience with them when transferring. When Waymo started working on AV, there was barely anyone to hire from.

aniccia.bsky.social•45 days ago

When Waymo/Google started working on AV, Google was in an illegal conspiracy specifically to prevent the kind of hiring by competitors you are describing.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/silicon-valley-conspiracy-apple-google-224500394.html

bernhard-jaeger.bsky.social•45 days ago

Don't think it is that simple otherwise companies would publish as there is no downside if the others already know.
Maybe true for companies operating inside silicon valley?
I can see that they had to invest more upfront when they started 10 years ago with no experts in other companies to recruit.

aniccia.bsky.social•47 days ago

Robotaxi may be hard to be profitable, but that's more of a proof-of-concept/demo than a P&L business for Waymo.

Waymo plans to sell ADS tech to car mfg like Mobileye and have already begun edging away from being a vertically integrate passenger service in their partnerships w Uber and Moove.

esaund.bsky.social•47 days ago

An argument for AV taxis is that human drivers will be more expensive than operational overhead + amortized AI R&D. Cost of cars will apply to both, esp. as all cars acquire AI-enabled safety features. It's all in the biz model, which Lockett and we can only guess about in order to critique it.

shmmeee.bsky.social•47 days ago

I mean some of this is just outright inaccurate. He’s confusing LLMs with AI generally and thinking all the costs are car costs and car costs don’t come down. It’s some pretty poor thought from what I can see.

shmmeee.bsky.social•47 days ago

And I’m not sure the number of followers someone has is indicative of their level headedness. Often quite the opposite.

gnahraf.bsky.social•46 days ago

Levying tariffs on Chinese EVs is not helping the industry either. It shouldn't surprise if China also ends up leading the robotaxi space. Comparative advantage is not some pie-in-the-sky economic theory: it's consequences are real, its knock-on effects, immediate, far, and wide.

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