clydeiii
Member
“Reckless driving” could have applied to the turning vehicle but you lead the witness with your follow up messages.
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Waymo
- Thread starter Daniel in SD
- Start date
stopcrazypp
Well-Known Member
Reading the full conversation, he let the person say reckless first, then clarified which car he was referring to because otherwise it would have been ambiguous.
diplomat33
Average guy who loves autonomous vehicles
Doggydogworld
Active Member
Not sure what economics you are siting but scaling up is the key to profitability.
diplomat33
Average guy who loves autonomous vehicles
Always the pessimist, I see.
Not sure why more people riding would be bad for Waymo's business. Generally, businesses want more customers because it means more revenue. That's kind of how a business works.
Doggydogworld
Active Member
Only generating enough demand to keep ~300 cars busy in one of the world's best ride-hail markets is really bad news for scaling.
diplomat33
Average guy who loves autonomous vehicles
I think you are not looking at it right. Waymo is not going to stay at 300 cars. Now that the waitlist is over, demand will exceed what 300 cars can handle. So Waymo will add more cars. So I see it as very good for scaling because it means Waymo will grow their fleet to meet the new demand.
willow_hiller
Well-Known Member
Demand will also very much depend on the pricing. If scale allows Waymo to lower prices, then people will naturally choose it over alternatives like Uber and Lyft.
But from what I can find right now, Waymo can be more expensive than the alternatives. Here's some discussion about the pricing from 5 months ago:
Doggydogworld
Active Member
This makes no sense. A waitlist exists when demand exceeds supply. The waitlist is gone because supply is now sufficient.
I'm not saying the fleet will stay at 300 cars forever. But it will until they figure out how to grow demand. Until today each time they wanted to grow the fleet and increase revenue they just needed to pull customers off the wait list. Now they have to go out and attract new customers. That's hard to do. Just ask anyone in business.
According to some reports from customers, the waitlist was over 100K people about a month or so ago. So with the waitlist over and rides available for all, that's quite a few customers read to start using.
What is the wealth demographics of the Waymo riders? Will Waymo offer discounts to lower income people?
stopcrazypp
Well-Known Member
Actually I think Waymo claimed that in August last year:
Wasn't able to find user statistics for Uber/Lyft, but was able to find trip statistics that says 38.5M trips were made in San Francisco in 2020, so more than 1M trips per day (note this included Covid with the report pointing out ridership dropped significantly post-Covid vs pre-Covid):
General Characteristics
The previous section evaluated the completeness and integrity of the 2020 public TNC Annual Reports, revealing extensive data quality issues. This section explores the reports, in order to identify general characteristics of TNC activity, where possible, and acknowledge limitations and...
tncs2020.sfcta.org
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My comment was based on Waymo sub-reddit discussions from current Waymo customers, and the comments about recent waitlists were about 1-2 months ago or so. Here are a few comments from about 2 months ago:
stopcrazypp
Well-Known Member
So they had around 100k waiting for months and then cleared them out quickly in the recent month or two?
No, I think they had about 100k a month or so ago and then decided to terminate the wait list and go fully public.
jabloomf1230
Minister of Silly Walks
Waymo's wait list size was calculated by the same people who estimated the number of Cybertruck reservations.
It appears that there are over 6,000 Rideshare Drivers in San Fransisco.
The most surprising numbers from SFCTA’s report are the sheer volume of rides being given by Uber and Lyft: more than 150,000 intra-San Francisco trips per day, which is roughly 15 percent of all vehicle trips taken within the city and more than ten times the number of taxi trips. How long will it take Waymo to reach even half of these trips a Day?
The most surprising numbers from SFCTA’s report are the sheer volume of rides being given by Uber and Lyft: more than 150,000 intra-San Francisco trips per day, which is roughly 15 percent of all vehicle trips taken within the city and more than ten times the number of taxi trips. How long will it take Waymo to reach even half of these trips a Day?
Doggydogworld
Active Member
Don't be ridiculous, almost all businesses get along just fine without rapid growth. Waymo is not most businesses, they need huge scale to survive. I'm a fan of their technology (though less so after PoleGate). It's their business metrics that worry me.
They already invited those 100k over the last month. The wait list is over because there's nobody left on it to invite. The blog post says almost 300k SF riders downloaded the app. That's 1 in 4 SF residents, very impressive. But they're only doing ~3k rides a day in SF. So their average customer takes one ride every 100 days??? Holy crap.
Imagine Tesla today announced the Cybertruck wait list was over after <15k deliveries. No reservation needed, order today and take delivery next week. Would that be a sign of strong demand?
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