Doggydogworld
Active Member
They apparently had 70-100 contractors, down from 200+ a year ago.Although ostensibly only ten employees will be affected -- and they will be offered relocation to Detroit or Phoenix -- the reality is that businesses like Waymo rely on contractors exactly for situations like this: they can cut them loose without the repercussions of employees and don't even have to disclose how many are getting axed.
They only need a certain number of remote support staff, and their delayed rollout means they need fewer than planned.I find it interesting that the Waymo spokesperson tried to spin it as "we're not downsizing, we're consolidating" but the writer wasn't having any of it. Waymo's "expansion" in Detroit and Phoenix wouldn't require closing Austin and relocating employees if they had money. The budget belt is clearly tightening.
Austin is good area for engineering - lots of local grads with lower costs and more employee loyalty than the Bay Area. It's too costly for a call center, though. Waymo stopped R&D testing in Austin some time ago, leaving only a high cost remote ops center.
You're reading too much into this. Austin is the 30th largest metro area in the US and only #4 in Texas. It's not one of Waymo's top 10 rollout targets and probably not in their top 20.If Waymo was actually close to offering a true robotaxi they would not be shuttering operations in a major urban center.
Tesla has a vastly superior business model. Getting 100k people to donate half a billion and provide free alpha testing while accepting full liability is an amazing accomplishment. But we'll see if regulators accept Tesla's ... umm, informal approach to safety.Compare this to Tesla's approach where FSD is beta-tested as driver assistance.
What will a random city prefer - a few million accident-free miles without drivers in Phoenix or billions of self-audited miles with untrained drivers and accident rates higher than other late-model luxury cars?So while Waymo may be able to convince regulators in Phoenix, or some place in California, or Florida (which is trying to attract robotaxis) I think they will have to sweat for it, and will lack data to support moving into additional markets.
Yes, remote monitors are a big hit with nervous regulators. I expect most jurisdictions will require them for robotaxis.As an aside, I also noticed Waymo's recent insistence that they were going to remove the safety driver. What they didn't make clear is that they employ remote monitoring for remote driving.
Here's the thing - Waymo needs the robotaxi model to work and they need to beat others to market. Tesla doesn't really care - selling 100% margin FSD to a few hundred thousand car buyers per year is better than slugging it out in the robotaxi market, which may not even develop as predicted. Even without going driverless, Tesla will add features like crazy the next 12 months. If that motivates 125k extra people to spend 8k extra on average that's a billion of incremental cash flow to Tesla and ~1.5b of incremental GAAP net income.