| ▲ | jillesvangurp 4 days ago |
| Waymo needs $16B to build what Tesla already has: manufacturing capacity. Without that, there are only so many cars they can put on the road. They've proven they can do the rides. But they haven't proven they can do it cost effectively. To scale up and start making a profit, they'll need to start building/buying lots of Waymo cars. That's not going to be cheap or fast. That's going to involve a lot of capital expenses. Tesla is the other way around. They can definitely make lots of cars and make a profit. But they haven't quite gotten FSD to the stage where it can do rides properly. Supposing they at some point figure that one out, they are very well positioned to start producing vehicles by the hundreds of thousands pretty soon after. That's indeed the premise for their valuation. It's risky but not completely without merit. Another point to make is that Waymo and Tesla are not going to have this market to themselves for very long. There are quite a few autonomous ride hailing companies serving rides at this point. And while the attention is often on the US, China is moving pretty quickly as well. Several companies competing there in several huge Chinese cities, for example. On the US side, I think there are a few players that might become competitive soon. Zoox is looking pretty solid. And Rivian is rumored to be pushing autonomy as well. There are a few more players in various stages of technical readiness. The real battle will be in a few years when we are past the basic "does it work", "is it safe" questions and legal approvals all over the world become more routine. Then it will be all about volume and scaling. That's going to take probably at least until 2030. |
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| ▲ | seanmcdirmid 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Based on the news, I think Waymo will import base vehicle builds from China and then adding the control systems and software to those. So it’s not like they will start making cars. |
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| ▲ | sowbug 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That sounds right. Unless Waymo considers car manufacturers to be its competition and therefore something to commoditize, it wouldn't make sense for them to get involved in ground-up manufacturing. And by this point, it seems like an electric-car platform already is close to a commodity, which is another reason for Waymo not to waste capital building another. | | |
| ▲ | seanmcdirmid 4 days ago | parent [-] | | They probably see the electronics and software as their product, hopefully they will license it to someone so my next car will have it :). Lidar prices are cheap enough these days (but coming out of China, so who knows with Trump if that will apply to us). | | |
| ▲ | sowbug 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Another approach is Waymo acquires Tesla's auto technology. Tesla sloughs off its dinosaur car business to focus on its new robot mission, and Waymo detoxifies the Tesla auto brand. Aside from destroying about $1.25 trillion of market cap, this would leave everyone better off. |
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| ▲ | dmix 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Who will repair them and maintain all of the electronics? Even if you buy cars that's a giant operation. | | |
| ▲ | seanmcdirmid 4 days ago | parent [-] | | You don't really maintain electronics, you swap them out when they are detected to be bad. Electric vehicles don't need tune ups or overhauls, it is light maintenance and full on component swaps. Send the defective components back to the factory for refurbishment and/or recycling. | | |
| ▲ | nradov 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Nah. The local car dealerships and Tesla service centers seem to be pretty busy doing heavy maintenance on electric vehicles. The drive train might be marginally simpler but there are still a lot of moving parts that break or corrode just like any other vehicle. | | |
| ▲ | seanmcdirmid 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Body work, misaligned panels, I mean surely there is a lot of work to do on Teslas. But you don't need to build out for that, you could just get repair shops to do it under contract. | | |
| ▲ | nradov 3 days ago | parent [-] | | No, you're missing the point. Collision damage repair is farmed out to separate body shops. But Teslas are mechanically very unreliable and break down a lot even without collisions. Ironically, more mechanically complex vehicles like the Toyota Prius hybrid are more durable and reliable. | | |
| ▲ | seanmcdirmid 3 days ago | parent [-] | | That has more to do with Tesla being incompetent than with EVs being intrinsically more complex vehicles that cannot be durable and reliable. |
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| ▲ | dmix 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't think $50k LIDAR sensor suites are disposable like that and the computer integrations is pretty sophisticated I'd imagine. These cars will take a beating. | | |
| ▲ | seanmcdirmid 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > In China, the cost of automotive LiDAR has plummeted due to aggressive manufacturing scale and the shift toward solid-state designs, with mass-market ADAS units now priced as low as $150 to $200. Leading Chinese suppliers like Hesai and RoboSense have reduced the average selling price of LiDAR in China to between $450 and $500, significantly lower than the $700 to $1,000 global average. While high-performance, robotaxi-grade sensors—similar to those used by Waymo—still command higher prices of approximately $500 to $1,000 per unit, the total cost of a comprehensive autonomous sensor suite in China has fallen to roughly $2,100, compared to the tens of thousands required just a few years ago. This rapid price erosion has enabled LiDAR to become a standard feature in Chinese electric vehicles priced as low as $25,000, far outpacing adoption rates in Western markets. I'm not sure how much google is spending today ATM, but it is probably nowhere near $50k even with 100% tariffs. | | |
| ▲ | dmix 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Just look at prices for the new Audi SUV with LIDAR. It's $30k more than the prior model without it and it's far simpler than Waymos setup, with a single front sensor. Waymo's have multiple and a much more sophisticated computer set up. |
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| ▲ | bryanlarsen 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Waymo has 0 need for manufacturing capacity. There are dozens of companies that do that really well at a low margin already that'll be happy for the business. They made a timing mistake by choosing Zeekr for it, which is limiting their expansion at the moment. That's a lot easier/cheaper/quicker to fix by choosing a different partner than by building their own. |
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| ▲ | IshKebab 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Making a driverless car "driver" is clearly much harder than manufacturing cars though. Many companies manufacture cars and have done for decades. On the other hand Waymo is the only company that has actual driverless cars on the road. It took them a very long time. Tesla have been trying for a very long time too and still have a long way to go. So IMO Waymo has something far more valuable than Tesla.
(Obviously the market isn't rational though so I wouldn't necessarily invest based on that.) |
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| ▲ | x187463 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Tesla has geofenced self-driving taxis operating in Austin as of Jan 2026. I wouldn't say they have a long way to go to achieve functional parity with Waymo. They do, however, need to prove reliability and safety, which comes with time and rides. | | |
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