This ‘industry’ is too much in its infancy to do these kind of comparison yet as folks have pointed out. There is promotional pricing, pricing for scale, etc. things need to mature some more before we can actually see what long term prices settle at and how companies compete.
Waymo is trying to manage demand. If they go too low they will need 10x the cars and won’t be able to scale to more cities.
Tesla is trying to create demand. Early on during testing, Waymo was free. Waymo also understands how much more backlash they’d get if overnight people stopped using Uber and Lyft.
Agreed, we also have zero visibility on numbers for both business units. Only once both Google and Tesla have scaled up and publish financial results do we know what pricing levels are sustainable. But lower than metered taxis & uber they'll be.
Which I think Waymo was specifically avoiding so they didn’t get bad press about out competing human drivers.
Tesla is opening the flood gates lol. I bet Waymo will drop their prices in Austin soon. Google has a LOT of money to play with. Competition is always a good thing for the consumer market.
You don’t enjoy the experience of watching a (typically) man juggling watching a show, holding a phone conversation or two, texting somebody, aaaaand driving you to your location, at the same damn time?
I either bike, take transit, or pay the Waymo. It's safer, more private, nicer cars on average, has my music and preferred temp when I get in; and it never talks to me about religion, politics, or sell me on their startup/product/crypto idea. It also never makes up a bullshit abuse report to the company because it didn't like that I'm wearing yoga leggings. It will also never pass me a joint but oh well.
No annoying drivers....no tips ...less weird smelling rides...pick the music....talk on your phone....it's your space ...not the car owners space and you just get transported.
It's like asking why would people pay for a hotel room when a hostel is half the cost.
"Opening the flood gates"?
It's barely a garden hose... Their entire Austin fleet is 50 vehicles lol. They can charge less because they're so much farther away from needing to turn a profit. Waymo is a real business that's actually ready to make money
Waymo is still extremely far from making a profit.
But… everyone knows, capturing market share early on is key. Even if it means taking a loss. If you can run your competitors out of town and get a better reputation early, it means big bucks years later
However far Waymo is, Tesla is multiple years behind. Tesla is more likely to run themselves out of town than any competitor. They aren't a serious operation
Lol okay. Unfortunately in the real world rich asshole billionaires get to be successful. Tesla is doing great and I'm pretty sure this cybercab business will succeed.
Tesla the memestock is doing great, but by no metric is Tesla the vehicle manufacturing company doing great, and Tesla the self-driving car company is doing even worse
Bro Tesla the company is doing very well, revenue and deliveries don't lie. Stock valuation yeah that's true crazy valuation. But the company itself is going very strong.
Tesla will have more robotaxis than Waymo this time next year. Waymo has been operating for 6-7 years still only 3000 vehicles. Why? They all lose money. Can’t scale until scaling doesn’t ruin your business. Tesla will manufacture 3000 cyber cabs per week. Hell, Waymo might just be out of business in two years.
Tesla will have more robotaxis than Waymo this time next year. Waymo has been operating for 6-7 years still only 3000 vehicles. Why? They all lose money. Can’t scale until scaling doesn’t ruin your business. Tesla will manufacture 3000 cyber cabs per week. Hell, Waymo might just be out of business in two years.
You’re one of those guys who actually believed Musk when he said you could buy a Model 3, let it drive itself around at night, and magically make you money, aren’t you? That level of gullibility is honestly impressive.
What makes you think Waymo is ready to turn a profit ? In Alphabets most recent quarterly report the “other Bets” category showed losses of 1.7 billion for the quarter with downside acceleration. Just yesterday, reports showed Waymo is seeking to raise 3 billion of debt. I’m wondering - what makes you say’s they are ready to turn a profit ?
Give us a break. Google is losing a fortune on Waymo. They can afford to subsidize it w cash from core business. Cost to manufacture Cybercab is about 30% of a Waymo. Cost of running it is less it's vastly more efficient.Cost of geofencing is less,no special maps needed. Waymo works but after all these years they barely got out of SFO?
Except we dont actually know how much it costs to run a cybercab because none are actually running. This is the classic Musk trap of not realizing the last 10% is not trivial but actually the hardest part
Waymo was free for a long time, though the optics there were different since the riders were effectively testers.
I do think the idea of deep pocketed robotaxi companies using artificially low prices to gain market share (and push human operators out of the market) is problematic.
Netflix, like any other company is charging the most people are willing to pay.
I cancelled mine! It wasn’t worth it to me. People keep swiping their card every month though and Netflix’s profits keep going up.
If you want prices to go down, get aggressive. Try a competitor, or cancel your subscription, and teach them what you’ll put up with. I started just buying blu rays again and ripping the data straight to my computer to make my own personal Netflix called “plex”. No subscription, no ads, just my movies and shows and fully mine. Plus gives more support to the movie studios and actors directly. No Netflix middleman!
Although with each Waymo costing $150k -$200k to purchase and equip with the huge array of lidar, radar, cameras etc compared to the Cybercab being around $20k - $30k to build with the cameras already installed and ready to go, Tesla has far less investment to recoup before each car generates a profit. The Cybercabs are also far more efficient in terms of electricity usage so lower operational costs from that perspective.
The main cost is not the vehicle but how many people are required per vehicle. This includes people maintaining the apps, people who clean and repair, support services like HR and accounting and it, and remote operators.
...and with servicing, maintenance and R&D being shared across Tesla's millions of consumer cars all of which helps to reduce the operating costs of the Cybercab.
You are correct. Google uses Terawatt Infrastructure as it's charging supplier. Waymo also doesn't own the land where their cars are serviced and cleaned, they are leased. This might be problem for Waymo in the future when it faces real competition
People per vehicle as a "main cost" is silly and not a differentiator between the Waymo and Tesla. HR and accounting are not going to vary much from one company to another and they don't scale with the number of vehicles (HR might if there were human drivers, LOL). People who clean isn't going to vary much between companies. Remote operators also shouldn't vary much unless one company's self-driving sucks. The main costs are:
People per vehicle -- Tesla and Waymo will beat Uber. This really only applies to Uber, who has to supply and pay a driver for every vehicle. HR, Accounting, Marketing, etc. are headcounts that don't scale much with number of vehicles or rides are are going to be similar for all companies. This changes if Uber eventually has self-driving vehicles via a partnership, etc. Cleaning scales with vehicles, but will be the same for all competitors. Remote operators don't exist for Uber (unless they go self-driving), but should be similar between Waymo, Tesla, and other self-driving competitors. If one company needs significantly more remote drivers, they have bigger problems.
Energy -- Tesla will win over ICE vehicles. Uber drivers can choose to use BEVs vs. ICE but Uber doesn't see the savings; the driver absorbs the vehicle cost. Waymo can choose to migrate to BEVs.
Maintenance -- Tesla will win over ICE vehicles. Waymo can deploy BEVs, but right now is ICE-based. BEVs have several thousand fewer parts, and many of the ICE parts are moving parts prone to failure. BEVs have no dissolving exhaust system. No oil changes. Basically no brake pad or rotor changes. Also, Waymo's top-mounted LiDAR unit has moving parts; moving parts are always more likely to fail. As a bonus for Tesla, Cybercab's exterior panels have the color infused in the material, so minor scratches will not be visible and won't need to be addressed. More serious panel damage will be addressed simply by replacing panels; no costly body-shop painting required.
Vehicle cost -- Amortized over the life / miles of the vehicle, Tesla will win. BEVs, especially Teslas, and especially Cybercabs, are designed to be low-cost to manufacture. And Tesla's vision-based system is less expensive than the multi-sensor systems used by Waymo and others.
BTW : All Waymo cars are electric. They transitioned to an all electric fleet in 2025, so your information is out of date. Waymo plans to replace their EV jaguars with Zeeker units.
Drastic Cost Reductions: The total cost of the Zeekr-based Ojai is estimated to be less than half the cost of the Jaguar I-PACE it replaces, even when accounting for steep U.S. import tariffs.
Purpose-Built Integration: Because Zeekr’s SEA-M architecture was designed from the ground up for autonomous ride-hailing, it eliminates the labor-intensive retrofitting process. The vehicles are shipped "stripped" of Chinese sensors to clear regulatory hurdles, allowing Waymo to seamlessly install its custom technology during final assembly in Mesa, Arizona.
Next-Gen Hardware Efficiency: The platform debuts Waymo's 6th-Generation Driver. By leveraging ultra-high-resolution 17-megapixel cameras, Waymo cut the overall sensor count by 42% (dropping from 29 cameras to 13, and 5 lidars to 4). This brings the sensor hardware stack down to under $20,000 per vehicle.
Mass Production Capability: Unlike limited consumer vehicle production, Zeekr’s platform allows manufacturing partners to scale output to tens of thousands of units per year to support rapid city expansions.
But even with this fixes , vehicle cost is not the main issue, it's operational cost. New York City taxicab medallions, before Uber, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that was acceptable to the cab businesses.
Uber replaced the taxicab back office, and dispatch (per cab cost, an app with a large base has a good car to operator ratio, even including customer support and IT), and off shored maintenance and cleaning and fueling to the driver, so it was very effective at replacing taxis by lowering operational cost.... and since everything was tracked electronically, it is safer than cabs whose safety was enforced in a 19th century way of licensing and inspections.
The robotaxis need to reboard maintenance and cleaning and fueling back to themselves, so in that way the Uber model still might have an advantage, but the cost of the driver, being removed completely, will make up for it.
Nobody actually knows how much cybercab costs to build.
Add to it that the production volume will never be huge you need to add cost for building out entire factory for them with huge capacity that will mostly sit idle.
The Cybercab’s new “Unboxed” construction method is recognised as just a further step of cost reductions begun by their gigacasting process, a process that is now being copied by many other auto manufacturers including Toyota.
No sensible commentator disagrees that the Cybercab is a very cheap vehicle to build.
Tesla, anyone wanting to make money from owning and operating their own robotaxi(s) (optionally in the Tesla Robotaxi fleet), and companies/institutions with large campuses wanting onsite transit.
Really think so? And when one of the cars gets into an accident, Tesla will take full responsibility? It will pay for the damages and fix or replace the car?
There are multiple estimates on the cost of Ojai. The sensor stack is down to $20K. I have seen estimates for the total vehicle cost between $80K and $115K. When the Ioniq 5s start rolling out the vehicle cost will drive down to close to $60K.
Surely a Cybercab is less expensive to build than a Model 3. Model 3 sells for less than $40K, and its manufacturing cost is less than the selling price. That’s a lot less than $60K. Also, Cybercab has been intended to be a taxi from day one and is engineered to minimize operating costs.
Way to route for a company that buys cars from foreign companies instead of building their own like Tesla and Zoox. Or at least buying American cars for their robotaxi fleet like Uber’s Lucid vehicles.
I hope Waymo fails. They’re the least American robotaxi companies which is probably why reddit sucks them off so hard
My neighbor kid’s toy car is way more efficient than the cybercab and it only costs $300. It does not matter how cheap it is if it is not working. Tesla’s bottleneck to not scale is never how expensive the car is. Model Y is not expensive either.
Multiple Teslas have now been documented driving 3,000 miles coast to coast across both the USA and Canada fully autonomously under FSD with zero human interventions through rain, snow storms, cities and highways.
And of course, there are now 209 Tesla Robotaxis driving autonomously without safety drivers across 7 cities with zero at-fault incidents over the last few months.
In addition, when Tesla first started allowing the public to assist in testing FSD they had 200K testers. As of the last quarterly report the number of users had grown to 1.4M. Those testers/users have not been restricted to geofenced urban areas and limited times of day. They’ve been using FSD on all types roads across the US, Canada, and Mexico, and recently also China and five European countries. Tesla’s been collecting driving data the entire time. FSD’s been exposed to a much larger number of miles and situations than has Waymo’s driving software. When automated taxi service testing starts expanding into more and larger geofences I think that difference will show.
You’re confusing CapEx with OpEx (which is much more important). An additional one-time $100k per car is $0.10/mi when amortized over a million miles. So I think the cost of the car is basically irrelevant, especially considering that those costs go down over time.
These vehicles won't come closes to a million miles. Let's generously assume 250k. That makes $0.25/mi which is a substantial cost factor if long term prices trend towards 1.00/mi.
And CapEx will determine how fast a network can grow. OpEx how fast it'll break even.
Except that Tesla’s existing fleet of hundreds of Robotaxis driving around 5 different cities have had zero at-fault incidents over the last few months of operation according to the latest NHTSA data.
And then there are the multiple Teslas that have driven 3,000 miles coast to coast across the USA and Canada completely without human intervention thru snow storms, rain and urban and highway driving.
I remember like 5 years ago when a guy from Ubers SDV division built a car that went coast to coast without him touching the wheel. 5 years ago cruise (from general motors) test cars were going 20,000 miles between interventions as reported to California dmv. They also drove 5 million unsupervised miles safely before the crazy incident that set them back.
The litmus test is proving that your ‘black box’ is safe over many 10s of millions of miles. Any serious accident can set you back 5 years. Humans go 100 million miles before causing a death so until you reach that number I doubt regulators will let you scale.
Waymo has proven safety over 2-300 million miles unsupervised. Tesla still has a very long way to go - especially at the snails pace they are moving.
The cybercabs are using the same scaled out tech that your average Tesla uses. There is economies of scale as well as a lot more data they are able to work with. While I'd love for waymo to win, they will get beat on pricing. Their zeekr series might help them bring costs down some. Let's wait and watch.
Except that the R&D cost for FSD is shared across its millions of existing cars with FSD
And the costs of setting up a new production line are amortised over the hundreds of thousands and potentially millions of CyberCabs that Tesla plans to build.
In contrast, that $100k + cost is a direct hit to the budget for each and every Waymo built and that cost will always be far higher than each CyberCab because Waymo are buying vehicles from a third party (Jaguar and now the 107% tariff-heavy Zeeker) rather than keeping it in-house like Tesla.
Then there is that enormous, expensive sensor array which will always be an added expense on top of the base vehicle.
I'm not really following what you're trying to say here. Tesla spent about $2BB to build its production line for the Model 3. Even if Waymo's spending $20 for every unit vs. $1 for the CyberCab, its going to take a huge number of units to make up that $2BB difference. Care to share the math you're imagining?
Since you asked about Austin specifically, most people here are missing the point that Waymo operates on Uber in Austin. Waymo doesn’t have its own ride sharing app in Austin.
Per Uber’s current pricing approach, AVs and human taxis have the same price. So Waymos cost whatever a human would cost.
I’m sure Tesla factored that in when setting their early phase pricing, but it’s not really an apples to apples comparison because there’s an intermediary (Uber) setting the prices
Because they are subsidizing it more I imagine. Uber actually has to make a profit. Waymo doesn’t need a profit considering they have Alphabet behind them, but I guess they want to set expectations for later on. Tesla doesn’t care I imagine.
You can't build a business model on not caring... Tesla made the Cybercab with one goal in mind: cheapest price/mile(km). That is why it is always going to be cheaper then Waymo, while being more profitable.
They haven’t even built 1% of the required infrastructure for these things.
Where are the charging hubs? The cleaning facilities? What new service centers have they opened to not bottleneck their current ones which are horrendous?
Of course one can't, you just completely ignore what they care about. They don't care in the slightest about minor EBITA from a test deployment of ~120 cars as a $1T company. This serves two purposes. Clearly proving the idea of FSD being safe-enough for public deployment, but much more relevantly the ability to sell the idea of deploying owned vehicles as work-free side hustles.
Tesla has a P/E of well over 300. The next closest in the S&P 500 is...oh, right, around an eighth of that. Their entire business model is predicated on this going perfectly, then getting royalties like crazy from providing taxi service to every city in America from peoples' parked Tesla vehicles.
You can dither all day about what I think (that this is all a both meanings of "gross" grift) or that it's a magic look to the future. But they couldn't give a shit about income or profit right now, whether or not it's a scam.
All EVs depreciate faster than ICE vehicles. As a percent, this isn't going to cause an appreciable difference between Tesla and Waymo because both are using EV platforms. Depreciation cost as an absolute value is going to be less for Tesla because the cost of their vehicles is significantly less.
Starting at 45k and depreciating 50% is a 22.5k cost. Starting at 200k and depreciating 25% is a 50k cost. Tesla would clearly have the advantage in the depreciation department
Interesting take. It’s like when I call my credit card company and they make me hold for 45 minutes on the phone. It’s not bad service because they’re very nice when I talk to them. Right? Like that?
Eight years ago when I bought my first Tesla there was only one service center in Atlanta. That was an availability issue. Today there are five within about a twenty mile radius, but few in the rest of the state. On the other hand I’ve not often needed to take either of my Teslas in for service, not nearly as often as the gas cars I’ve owned in the past.
Amazon, Google and Nvidia care because it’s a strategic imperative for all kinds of reasons. Imagine Amazon without AVs. They will all have great AV tech. Think of the ancillary benefits, how it helps with data collection, AI models, etc.
1) enter a market well below profitability.
2) attempt to drive out competition while increasing base.
3) slowly increase revenue as to not allow competitors to gain back market share.
4) profit
To capture market share, and then it will naturally raise up higher after it is captured. It’s marketing share captivating the user to stay in it no matter what it charges.
Pricing today has no relation to actual costs. Tesla, with a full time supervisor, has higher costs than those who don't. The prices are set to "see what happens when we set the price at $x" and to control demand. With too low a price, demand gets too high and wait times become long, and you don't learn about how riders respond to a real world service.
Actually, the price of base car hardware will vary, but not like electronics. Yes, a BYD Seagull may cost a lot less than a Hyundai Ioniq, , but it's not less than transistors, which cost one billionth of what they used to cost.
Waymo’s current vehicle costs mean nothing. The Jaguars were hand-assembled proof-of-concept vehicles. After Zeekr comes U.S.-built Hyundais. Each generation will get cheaper. Ultimately all AV taxis will have similar enough hardware cost (excepting luxury vehicles) that it won’t be a factor in the competition.
A Waymo car cost about 5-6x more than a cybercab. Tesla also owns the charging network, isn’t sharing profits with service like Uber, need way less energy, and their whole car fleet software & hardware is the same for customer cars.
I’m pretty sure Robotaxi will always be way cheaper than Waymo. They had a 15 year concept building an all-in-one solution and now it pays off
Robotaxi, like any other rideshare, will be as expensive as the market allows it to be. Long-term, it’s silly to think that Tesla’s accountants would say “we own supercharging and the car has half the BoM of a Waymo, so our price must be half”
Getting a Lyft across LA was like $15 when they were starting. This will be the same story.
True for most markets, but perhaps not for robotaxis. The market is not limited to the current taxi customers, it's private mobility. TAM massively increases with lower prices, hence they won't go the Netflix route with pricing is my best guess.
Price of the car is not important . Its the salaries of the support crew. The reason robo taxis can compete at all is not having a driver. If one compsny requires 1 support staff per 3 cars and thevother is 1 per 30 cars thats the cheaper one.
I am confused last I heard Tesla required one backup driver per car ?
The CyberCab will be a true competitor when Tesla gets approval in California. Until then they are operating in low regulatory environments that allow them to offer a substandard product.
You are comparing the cost of a Waymo now at low scale with the expected cost of a Cybercab and massive scale. I can guarantee that those Cybercabs on the road currently cost much more than a Waymo.
At scale Waymo would be able to get an OEMs to build a custom model for them with the sensors built in. Then the only cost difference would be the sensor suite at scale and the profit that the OEMs makes. Which would be likely under $10k, which over a 200k useful life is all of 5c per mile which no consumer would notice if Waymo charged that much more. I don't have a clue what any taxi I take costs per mile.
When your tech does not work at scale, you need pull something else out. You don’t need a specifically built car to scale. You cannot scale model Y and there is no way you scale on another car. It is never the cost that Tesla cannot scale.
Because the cybercab costs $30k to build and a waymo costs $120k. Also tesla has vertically integrated insurance and repair/service centers whereas waymo does not. Its not promotional, this is the most expensive the tesla robotaxi network will ever be
Here's a breakdown on where it's projected. A few points...
that thing being a 2 seater and a lot of other wild design decisions (no brake fluid, which some china EVs do also) mean the cost per mile is low even by EV standards.
A driver alone costs .60 to $1.20 a mile. The drive ALONE costs 2x the cost of a CyberTaxi.
Self driving cars that the mfg owns and knows how to cheaply repair AND owns the insurance company are weirdly cheaper to insure.
Waymo's existing fleet was based on Janguars that cost 120K+. They have newer cheaper ones and that SHOULD bring down their cost, but they are bigger and no where near as energy efficient per mile (But will be a better call for picking up more than 2 people).
Driver labor is the passenger-mile wage after Uber’s cut, before the driver’s own car costs. It is the main reason Uber stays near $2/mile while a ramped Cybercab can target $0.30–0.40.
Big tech strategy: subsidize free or cheap product until customers are addicted and legacy solutions have eroded, then enshittify revealing actual costs to both customers and advertisers.
The funnest part of this whole debate is CURRENTLY cybercabs cost substantially more than waymos.
Waymo current cost about 100k
Cybercab cost = cost of running a car factory for a year (wild guess 200 million, actual could be 1/2 or triple this) + raw materials for a each car( aluminum, plastic, computers ) + the 10 years R&D cost amortized + city set up costs + day to day operation expenses
Divide this number by maybe a 100 -300 cars launched in 2026 and you end up with a price over a 1 million dollars a car 2026
The question for Tesla is just because they can make batches of cars cheaper, can they sell them? Tesla has not even announced a business model. Will they run them or let others, prices, launch dates, rates, fees, etc
This is a money loser for all for at least 5 more years
The cost to put a Waymo car on the road is prohibitive. And Lidar on it's own has limitations. Cybercabs are inexpensive to scale and the human-like AI is very advanced and overcomes the limitations of Lidar.
Tesla is just making up pricing so that cybercabs looks attractive. In reality Tesla has spent billions to tens of billions trying to make robotaxis over the last decade plus. They may never recoup the investment.
It cost them hundreds of millions to billions. Setting up a production line for a product they can't sell
It's an interesting decision, you lose operational flexibility by having a mixed capability fleet which will lead to increased wait times for a ride when the larger capacity is requested (there would be no impact on ride times themselves, but overall time would increase). Simply because the nearest vehicles are statistically more likely to be the 80% or whatever of the fleet is dedicated to 2 passenger use. Additionally a smaller portion of the fleet being larger capacity vehicles means it's poorly suited to absorb surges in larger vehicle requirements like might show up on weekends and holidays, resulting in even more wait time because all 5 passenger vehicles are currently giving rides. Up to 2 rider combos can choose to get larger vehicles rather than wait but not the other way around.
This might mean the rider experience is poor for larger groups which probably means they would just choose to avoid using Tesla rather than the alternatives creating a bit of a self reinforcing phenomenon.
It's a risk of any segmented fleet, for example, if you need an "XL" or "XXL" or pet accessible Lyft vehicle then you will need to wait longer, there are simpler fewer of them out of the overall set of vehicles available so they are statistically speaking further apart. You might get lucky of course but on average it's going to be a longer wait time.
This might mean the rider experience is poor for larger groups which probably means they would just choose to avoid using Tesla rather than the alternatives creating a bit of a self reinforcing phenomenon.
You assume Tesla doesn't know how many larger cars are needed... That is nonsense.
Outliers are a real bitch. It doesn’t take waiting longer than service B or C after getting out of a concert with friends for you to completely disregard option A even when you’re riding solo.
Outliers affect all ride-hailing services. I know from personal experience that many cabs hailed in places like concerts and such leave with 1-2 passengers, so they are actually worse than having more 2 person cabs available.
I drove Uber & Lyft in Vegas for 2 years and I’d say many (half or more) of rides to and from concert and sporting venues as well as convention venues had 3+ passengers. EDC, Raiders, PBR Rodeo, etc.
Even if the exact right number of larger cars is on the road at any given point in time the wait time will be longer because they will be more spread out. This is a simple mathematical outcome of there being a lower percentage of cars suitable for the minority of rides that have more passengers.
This is what makes no sense. If they are going to truly continue to run Model Ys along with Cybercab, then why bother with Cybercab at all. Model Y development costs have been long written off and they have something like 400k of excess production capacity for Model Y. I can't see how Cybercab will be cheaper to produce. And running cost difference will be marginal maybe 1c per mile.
And that is before the obvious unattractive things about Cybercab - that it is very low and difficult to get in and out esp in a dress, anything you carry has to go on the floor between your legs if there are two of you, you can't slump sideways in the seat and stretch your legs out like you can on your own in a taxi. It just seems like a stupid design esp when the whole idea behind robotaxis is to expand the market past what Uber serves currently to target people want to replace the car they use to take kids to school or to target groups of teens going to the mall.
I think Tesla's goal is to phase out Model Ys as robotaxis eventually. Having an autonomous car with pjysical controls is a liability and just doesn't seem right, because either you let people sit in the driver's seat (no way), or you always keep it empty and permanently have a 5-seater car with one less seat.
Keep the model Y's but remove the steering wheel and pedals, giving it one extra available seat. This is supposedly what the Waymo Ojai plans to do eventually.
This is called dumping, selling a product or service below cost in an attempt to drive competitors out of business and thus gain a monopoly and then set prices as high as you like.
Neither company is actually trying to make money right now. What the two of them are trying to do is to test things, and one of those things is their business model.
And this reflects the role that the two companies expects self driving cars to play. For Tesla, Tesla expects self driving cars will soon extremely cheap. Google and Waymo does not.
Tesla and Waymo both expect hardware costs to be low. Next Waymo vehicle is a Hyundai. Sensor costs fall over time. All AVs will cost about the same to produce, 5-10 years from now, adjusting for size and any luxury aspects. The hardware cost difference will be small enough to be a very minor factor in the competition.
It’s a combination of
1. They can (because of lower costs)
2. They want (they want to expand their business fast)
They have a plan to rapidly grow(10%/week) their miles per week for the rest of the year and expect to still make a large profit once they have saturated the entire market.
Tesla has 9 million vehicles training their AI, all over the world. Their tech is a a lot more basic, but IF they make it work, Waymo is dead in the water. That is bad for Waymo as they have been loosing money with a promise ... if their promise becomes shakey ... the money pool will vanish.
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u/HighHokie 4d ago
This ‘industry’ is too much in its infancy to do these kind of comparison yet as folks have pointed out. There is promotional pricing, pricing for scale, etc. things need to mature some more before we can actually see what long term prices settle at and how companies compete.