Also, they seem to have the lead over most and the market opportunity is huge.
They are not even close to being able to do what Waymo does.
The question is not, who has the first taxi on any public road anywhere, but who first can launch 10000 of autonomous taxis and make money.
Waymo so far is just a gigantic money fire, and even if you assume their autonomy works, many people have made arguments that the businesses case is really not very solid at all. Waymo has incredibly few ours driven on public roads outside of a limited area.
Self driving is mostly a software problem, and to solve general driving, a gigantic learning problem. How is gone solve that first and scale it, is open.
I would put my money on Tesla, and I wouldn't invest in Waymo if I could.
Disclosure: I work at a self driving company that is neither Tesla nor Waymo.
Think about how much capital will be required to put a million Waymo vehicles on the road. How many zeros are there on that number? Who is going to be paying that bill?
Given this, even if Waymo are first to driving 100% perfectly, I expect that Tesla will eventually leapfrog them.
I'm also wary because ride sharing is a customer service intensive industry, an area Alphabet isn't exactly strong at.
These were never my problems with taxi service.
Tracking is the thing that makes the rideshare services better--and taxis could apply that, if they wanted to.
Tracking solves most bad things about taxis. "Is it actually coming? How long until it gets here? Did they hit something unexpected? etc."
The whole Prop22 thing in California is another facet to the equation: ride sharing companies argue that freelance status means they have a far bigger, broader and elastic fleet, whereas a model with fixed costs would make availability look more like taxis before rideshare came along.
Don’t forget: upfront pricing. Most taxis won’t tell you the price until you get to your destination. And how do you know they took the quickest route?
