How do you know it isn't already at that price?

Uber estimated that it costs Waymo $2/mile to operate.

Google says they charge $1.60 to $2.60 a mile, depending on location and demand, so Waymo is already almost certainly at the price you claim you'd be taking it.

I think you dramatically underestimate how much it actually costs to operate a car. Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business. Likewise, very few people depreciate their car over just 5 years. Or clean it inside and out every single day.

Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car. Also notice the comments talking about how the per vehicle price is high, how that flows into higher insurance, and all kinds of other things.

https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1il5d5i/unit_costs_p...

Maybe someday there will be a discount AV taxi company using 10 year old beat up Honda Civics that only get cleaned once a month and provide extremely barebones support to pull the costs down to $1/mile. That's a 50% drop in costs from today, so hard to see it coming very quickly. But that's still pretty expensive to be using as a daily commuter!

And note that the IRS per mile rate is $0.70/mile. It's not perfect but it is a decent third party estimate of the true cost of operating a car. Hard to see any taxi company charging anything less than that. So a 10 mile commute every day is still going to cost you $280/month in an AV taxi for the foreseeable future.

> Google says they charge $1.60 to $2.60 a mile

That’s surprising. I’ve been trying to find data on rates and crowd-sourced data and anecdotes seem closer to $6/mile

> Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business.

And on the other hand, each Waymo parking spot is probably a lot cheaper per unit time than 250 square feet inside a house in a residential area. And presumably they need a lot less than 1 parking spot per car.

> Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car.

Doesn't that sound cheap? If a car can average 10 rides per day, that's $16 per ride.

Is it clear that they are decommissioning them when they are done depreciating them?

> Uber estimated that it costs Waymo $2/mile to operate.

Waymo costs are immaterial right now. Their cars are not production cars, and they have spent billions on R&D that they can't even hope to recoup with the current fleet.

That being said, $2 is super-low. The IRS rate for car depreciation write-off is 71 cents per mile.

> But that's still pretty expensive to be using as a daily commuter!

The true cost of a transit ride in NYC or Seattle is around $20-$30 per ride. People don't actually pay that much because it's heavily subsidized.

Once self-driving matures, it'll also be subsidized and it will completely kill off transit. Maaaaaybe excluding subways in some areas.

I’ve never seen a Waymo ride be even close to $2/mile