That's why passive index funds and a hands off approach are so often recommended. You cannot really mess up much by buying the whole market and then sitting on it long enough.

Wait until you read about options!

No, they were just scared of missing out.

All of those spaces are actively being explored by various companies.

How does self-driving package delivery work? Who delivers the package?

The long history of "First mover advantage" being a myth implies they are more likely Nokia or Blackberry than Android

What about all the expensive hardware, gpus, lidars? That’s like having iOS on your phone and if you want android you need to buy extra things that are worth same price as your phone.

A lot of times the Waymo is only a few bucks more, so if you were going to tip the uber driver it balances out anyway.

Driving in a car that doesn’t smell like driver just farted right before picking you up is worth the premium.

I’ve seen people claim, I need to say Waymo working In NYC, Chicago and other places but never Southeast Michigan. What’s so unique about that area?

Waymo works in SF Chinatown btw, which is probably the most complicated locality in its driving zone.

Why is southeast Michigan difficult to drive in? I don't know anything about the area but I would guess if GPS navigation works and it's less dense than SF/LA, most of the major issues are solved?

Anyone who's taken enough Ubers and/or has had bad enough luck to have gotten a terrible Uber driver. Pretty much everyone I know, along with myself have had multiple awful Uber driver experiences.

Did uber/lyft get radically better in the last 12 months?

I had one rapidly cycle their prius between 50 and 70 on the freeway because regenerative brakes save gas (I felt carsick for hours after arriving at my destination), and another actually get an angry mob to tap on the windows and berate their driving. (The mob was justified.)

Since then, I’ve given up on using them whenever possible.

Checkout this thread for who those people are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44258139

I think waymo actually has a better km/accident ratio than the average driver. Plus if you haven't done it before, it'll be a cool experience to ride in a car with no driver!

But in the long term I think the point of waymo is that it'll be cheaper: no need to pay the driver if there isn't one!

Women. Turns out, Uber/Lyft can't really do anything about drivers assaulting passengers.

All that may be true. Human drivers are not the point of comparison. The search business is. Waymo will still always be a lower margin business than search for the reasons I enumerated.

Waymo may end up being great business. But it is unlikely to exceed what search is/was. For that reason, press X to doubt GP's claim that Alphabet is undervalued. "IT'S PRICED IN" [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/eberem/ever...

>Autonomous cars won't sue you

but the companies that own them will or their insurance carriers.

As big as search!? Doubtful. The entire globe is unlikely to be the addressable market. China will never let Waymo in. India will undoubtedly field multiple worthy competitors. Europe is hostile to technological progress and even more-so to American tech cos. In most parts of the world, Waymo is unlikely to be able to deliver a positive gross margin business given the per-capita-income of most places.

It could be a big business. In fact, I hope it is. Lives will be saved. But there is still a lot to be worked out, and the margins will never be as sweet as those of search.

One of the main reasons to vertically integrate is to expand margins by squeezing cost out of the value chain. My point still stands: Waymo will never have margins as good as search.

How much money they've spent in the past is irrelevant. That money all came from investors, in exchange for a stake in the company. It never needs to be "paid back". Besides which, those investors have earned all those funds back already, and then some (on paper).

All that matters at this point is how much money they'll lose/earn in the future. There are no shortage of investors willing to put money into this effort, and they're growing exponentially, so there won't be any pressure for them to turn overall profitable for several more years.

Uber took 14 years to make it to profitability. Money's frequently characterized as impatient, unable to look past the next quarter, but when it wants to be, it can wait.

Waymo's older than Uber, but they hold many key patents by this point. Now that they've started running a taxi service, it seems straightforwards to scale up, assuming that is the business they want to be in. Then it's just a matter of charging more than it costs to run the service, and wait.

How much money do they make off the average person in the value of ads shown per year?

Now compare to how much money the average person spends on driving per year.

If Waymo winds up running half the market in autonomous transportation over the next several decades, it'll make search look like peanuts in comparison.

Imagine if you could buy your own "Waymo-equipped car". No need for driving lessons. No aggravation. No road rage.

How many people would pay for such a luxury car? With the US population aging and public transit non-existent in most places, Waymo probably has a market for cars.

Tesla’s robots during that investor event were shown to be controlled by humans wearing mimicking hardware

They've been partnering with Uber to maintain the fleet in some cities haven't they since they already have regional infrastructure? I don't think they want to be in the fleet management business.

Yes. Because we should all be judged by our failures.

[flagged]

He was ousted from Paypal before anything major happened, he was basically just a shareholder.

The Boring Company is an obvious bust. So is the Hyperloop. Neuralink is another likely bust. Tesla solar is going nowhere. The Cybertruck is a millstone around Tesla's neck. Etc, etc.

I don't deny his accomplishments. On the contrary, I think he is a genius. It's just that he is an extremely, damagingly biased genius.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960

You’re arguing over semantics. Was SpaceX the most successful space company before Elon took over? Did they have reusable rockets?

If the answer is no, then clearly the catalyst was Elon taking over

Either go ague with Wikipedia, or put some argument in the comment when making claims you expect people to verify themselves. People are just going to look it up on Wiki.

> SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk in 2002 with a vision of decreasing the costs of space launches, paving the way to a self-sustaining colony on Mars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX 2nd paragraph

We are humans.

Google was late to search, late to smartphones, late to internet email. I'm having a hard time thinking of any of their large markets where they were a first mover, maybe YouTube-ish, widespread user uploaded internet video wasn't meaningfully available before the rise of YouTube.

On topic, Waymo is clearly a first mover in self-driving, having the first legal commercial services.

But, being the first mover is usually more of a disadvantage than an advantage, IMHO.

https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-m...

The day this news was released, Elon released the video of him talking to the Optimus bot to overshadow the news. Showman gonna showman.

Alphabet has $95B of cash and short-term investments on hand. I don't think lack of capital is the obstacle to scaling here.

https://abc.xyz/investor/sec-filings/quarterly-filings/2025/

Tesla still has no autonomous vehicle that customers can actually buy, let alone rent back for taxi service. So any "strategy" remains entirely hypothetical.

I so wish Tesla had gone Waymo’s route and focused on delivering really safe LIDAR-based level 4 with cheaper hardware. I think they’d be well-positioned to take the market by storm.

But instead they made an ideological stand on cameras only, and they’re helmed by an unhinged drug addict who lies constantly, to the point many who once would have loved to buy an actual self-driving Tesla now won’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, even if they do someday deliver an L4 experience.

I really, really hope Waymo licenses their tech. I think that would stomp Tesla into the ground once and for all.

Not a problem. The costs for sensors always falls rapidly as production volumes scale up. The first GPS receivers were large dedicated devices that cost thousands of dollars. Now they're just a chunk of IP in the SOC for every little consumer device and cost pennies.

Teslas have a ~about 500 miles between interventions (they don't release actual data, no surprise), whereas Waymo is at around 17,000 miles.

That's a 34x divide. At full scale that's something like 30% of Teslas having an intervention every day.

You are supposed to supervise Tesla FSD. Waymo doesn't require someone in the driver's seat at all. They aren't the same thing.

We’ve also not seen how capable Tesla is at evasive maneuvers. We have plenty of videos (hundreds now) of Waymo making instant swerves to avoid children running onto the road, cars running red lights, a person falling from a Scooty etc. These are not maneuvers you would expect from a human, which shows how Waymo has pretty successfully crossed the human bar in safety. If Tesla does not demonstrate this, on top of driving normally, I don’t think they have a product. The barrier to give control to a computer is super human not human like driving.

Also philosophically I don’t see how a big neural network will create such evasive maneuvers, unless you try to create such scenarios in a simulator and collect evasive data. Seems prohibitively expensive to do so in the real world.

It's a "joke" (I wouldn't call it that, but it's a vastly different product) because you have to pay attention to the road at all times.

You don't live in a Waymo city, so I understand. A lot of people who don't live in a Waymo city don't really get it.

Waymo is a completely different product than FSD. It's a robot that comes and drives you from point A to point B. You can do whatever you want while it's driving, such as take a nap or work on your laptop.

Tesla was SAE level 2 in 2013, and they are still SAE level 2. Waymo's Robotaxis are SAE level 4, and they can drive on public roads empty with no human supervision, both technically and legally.

> I have 2 AI4 Teslas with FSD

That is false. No Tesla is capable of full self-driving.

Mandatory supervision by a human on the driver’s seat is not full self-driving, no matter how much Elon insists on calling it that.

Tesla FSD has been autonomous by the end of the year for 8+ years now. Don't believe people desperate to make Elon's lies seem plausible.

It would be great if Tesla figured out how to do safe autonomous driving with their very limited sensor suite, but there's a lot of reason to be skeptical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

I wouldn't not be surprised if they figure out some very narrow way to have no safety driver in the car (1:1 remote ops?) by the end of the year.

FSD is widely considered to be off its originally-stated goal by at least 5 to 6 years.

> Their goal is by end of year.

It's like what 6-7 years since the goal was "end of the year".

Can we expect you to come back on Jan 1, 2026 and provide an update?

You're not "posting your opinions on Tesla", you're literally shoveling them into everybody's throats. You'd be "posting your opinions" when it was one, two comments, and not plenty, like under this news. You're a Tesla freak or fanboy, not an objective commenter.

Yeah, I also heard Sky Ferreira’s album is coming out this year.

I think the downvotes might be due to one or more of the following:

- You're uncritically parroting the notoriously untrustworthy talking points of a notoriously untrustworthy company, and HN posters expect more critical thought in comments.

- You're redirecting to some rumored "goal" rather than a realistic prediction, which was the topic, and HN posters liked the topic.

- HN posters may think that your vested interest in tesla behooves you to think more critically than the average person on matters involving tesla, rather than less, to overcome any implicit bias you might have.

- I have a goal of end-of-month, so that means I'll have it even sooner than tesla, right? This is how many view the claim by tesla, except I, a random person, literally have less of a reputation for dissembling and failure to deliver than tesla does.

> Their goal is by end of year.

Ummm.