That would be much cheaper than a union bus driver who can clear 100k.
Safer too since bus drivers often go tons of overtime which isn't great for being alert.
Autonomous buses will come, but only after the approach has fully taken over the taxi market first.
No amount of self-driving busses fixes that.
>The only people who say that are people who are justifying their not riding the bus
Is this supposed to be a tautology? Obviously people who justify it are people justifying it. I would bet real money that the vast majority of women will choose a private vehicle over a bus if they were the same price.
people in NY and Chicago are fiercely defensive of their mass transit options. the bay area would be a terrible place without BART and Muni.
for all its problems, shared mass transit is a net good and there are millions of people in this country who prefer it.
Also, the 25 million figure is number of rides per month, not a measure of people who ride transit. Somebody might ride the bus to work 5 days a week, and that counts as 20 rides. The count of "people" that ride those transit methods drops to well below 1MM, factoring that in.
The Abundance movement has put a good moniker to this concept: Everything Bagel Liberalism.
[1]: https://sf.streetsblog.org/2017/03/06/lets-talk-seriously-ab...
If we take the same $ and get rid of the drivers we can run twice as many buses and that increased service will get a lot of riders who previously thought the service was too bad. Though you will need to run the additional service for a few years before people figure out service is no longer bad and start using it.
Now we do have to assume some intelligence in bus routing. There are a lot of bad bus routes in cities that will never get more riders because of how stupid they are.
Of course you are right that politics gets in the picture. Rail gets far too much attention for projects where the lowly bus is cheaper for otherwise identical service (and where rail is needed it is often done wrong). As already pointed out unions will hate this plan and they have power to screw the rest of the population (who because they don't ride now don't think they would if this plan happened) and the environment (they care about the environment only after their own self interests.
Still the numbers work on paper: self driving buses should get a lot more riders on yoru bus system because you can afford to run more service.
On rail I'm not as sure but on bus yes. Drivers are the largest cost associated with a bus line. There's also a whole set of downstream costs like bathroom breaks which requires that routes are aligned with bathroom stops and that bathrooms are kept in good working order. Breaks also decrease bus frequency (humans need breaks!) and running more buses is often limited by the number of drivers you can hire.
However bus drivers often play a dual role in US transit of discouraging anti-social behavior so it's unclear to me if you could even get rid of the bus driver and the associated inefficiencies or you'd just need to replace them with a police officer and deal with the exact same problems.
Many bus drivers are unhappy having to play this role, so that's also a factor.
In terms of bathroom breaks, I've seen the driver pull over to use the mcdonalds or grocery store bathrooms so that is probably "free." There are only a few places in LA metro system where there is a purpose built layover facility where one might imagine there being a metro maintained bathroom facility. Most layover facilities are just dedicated street parking for busses to queue, such as the one at the end of Western blvd and franklin where I've seen the drivers utilize the Lazy Acres grocery store facilities.
If buses ran more often, they hopefully would become attractive to a lot more people. Anecdotally, I think most issues happen later at night where there are a handful of people on the bus. Having more people all the time would hopefully discourage anti-social behavior even if it wouldn't prevent incidents.
It's usually that $transit_company needs $xxx,xxx,xxx to do a good job.
Politicians will only give it $yy,yyy,yyy to do the job.
That is why vertically integrated businesses can peel away business from existing non vertically integrated businesses with lower prices (legal liability notwithstanding). Sometimes it pays to have the business with more to lose insulated from liability by having a layer without much to lose.
It's a way for Waymo to prepare to turn on the spigot, too, if they dump a bunch more cars into the market.
It's important for Waymo to do all 3: show they can run the service themselves in a market, and work with both Uber and Lyft, to be able to get fair terms and the option to expand rapidly.
Ha! Lyft doesn't own much of its fleet! There's a small fraction of vehicles that lyft rents through Flexdrive.
Just like Tesla Self self-driving, Waymo can ask people, if they want to offset related capital costs, to buy cars and rent them to Waymo to be reconfigured and run as autonomous vehicles on profit profit-sharing basis.
"Use the Waymo app instead, save 10%, and get a guaranteed Waymo!"
From https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2025/09/03/waymo-co...:
> “Each car, the amount of revenue it's making would be shocking to most people,” Panigrahi said, without elaborating. “Because it just continuously keeps delivering ride after ride. On a per asset basis, it’s doing really well. That’s making progress in terms of unit economics very, very positive.”
So much so that in busy markets like San Francisco, Waymo could soon move into the black. “Not making specific statements about if we’re positive or not, but what I can tell you is that yes, key markets are showing us that we are,” Panigrahi said.
Notice the weird language:
> That’s making progress in terms of unit economics very, very positive.
He says the "progress" is "very, very positive," but if you're not paying close enough attention you might come away thinking that the unit economics are what's very very positive.
All that said, what he's saying makes sense. They're able to charge more for their rides since they offer the convenience of not having to deal with a driver, and they're not paying the driver, who is the most expensive part, so yea, I'm bullish on them.
Feels very unlikely. I think they will need to bring car cost down to hit break even.
I suppose another wrinkle is that driverlessness isn't only a cost saving (aspirational or real), it's also a positive attraction eg. for anyone who worries about their safety with a rando taxi driver or Uber guy. There are also cost savings achievable by timeshifting antisocial-hours work to elsewhere in the world, though presumably a significant part of the savings will be simply be the result of outsourcing to lower-wage countries.
The 'few months' bit doesn't seem quite right - the cost to get a human to drive a car would maybe be $50k per year, so i'm not sure how a $200k vehicle can pay itself off in a few months vs a $50k car + $50k per year driver.
I'm aware that the cost / ride is higher for Waymo, but it doesn't sound like that would be enough to cover the extra $200k and not certain that scales to other geographies outside of SF.
I mean to pay off a $200k vehicle in a few months you would need each car to be clearing $3k a day in revenue or something like that.
It's probably a few years per car if they are at $200k. If they are 'in the black' or not will probably depend more about their accounting rules (i.e. depreciation) more than anything else.
Just switching to the Hyundai SUVs takes tens of thousands of dollars out of capex.
A real human driver needs to (vaguely) make a human salary, and cover things like gas, cleaning, car maintenance, car payments etc. That human salary is probably at least $50k if working full time in high end markets like SF. That “salary” also covers most OpEx costs for Uber like periodic cleaning and gas/charging of vehicles.
Lately, Uber has been $1.50-$3.00/mile in SF while Waymo has been $3.00+/m most times. Waymo also can drive 24/7/365 so should be able to command a higher per-car income.
I’ve heard rumors that a Waymo vehicle cost $200k to build with the sensors. Surely they’re aggressively lowering that cost now too. That’s 4-5 years of driving to pay off IF they’re making what Uber drivers make, but they’re almost certainly making much more.
Like Uber and Lyft before them, their biggest barrier to profitability is likely their HQ costs full of expensive engineering jobs - and they also have the R&D costs of training the car.
- Waymo has the advantage of launching sooner but has much more expensive vehicles which will eat into margins.
- Tesla has the advantage of full vertical integration owns their hardware and cheaper cars but also trying to do this with vision only.
- Zoox has the advantage of building purpose-built autonomous vehicles from the ground up with Amazon's deep pockets behind them, but faces the challenge of manufacturing at scale for a novel vehicle.
Tesla also seems to have the 'advantage' of ruthlessly exploiting labour; I very much hope they do not succeed.
Zoox being owned by Amazon also makes me deeply suspicious of their business practices.
This is assuming you mean just the economic definition of value. If you mean value more broadly, then your statement is even less true; in that case hedge funds would be worth nothing.
Not to say this isn’t a worthy problem to solve or that cars have no use. They’re great for rural life. But maybe 80% of the use-case for self-driving cars is pretty much solved by trains. They’re fast, generate no traffic, are very safe, and reduce pollution in urban areas. Even electric cars produce noxious break dust.
Addendum
The “America is too big” argument drives me nuts. (1) Again, look at China. (2) The EU is decently large and connected very well by rail. (3) We’re America. We went to the frickin moon. Defeated the Nazis. Etc. We can build trains. Not to mention what a boost it would be to the economy with all the jobs a project like that would create. Sure, we wouldn’t have an Elon but that’s fine by me.
IMO: - Tesla is pushing Waymo on pricing and service areas - Tesla will drop the safety monitor in the next 6 months**
**I say this as a FSD subscriber on my own car and seeing the arch of progress, albeit with a software branch that’s supposedly 3-6 months behind Robotaxi’s
Speaking of which, if SpaceX announced today that they are going to put people on Mars in 5 years, I still would find that more believable than Tesla getting anywhere close to Waymo, in the same time frame.
Tesla is probably a year behind on their software, but they can scale out infinitely faster than Waymo on the hardware.
Either way, we win.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/nhtsa-...
We're now at San Francisco, SFO airport, Austin, Nashville, and NYC, is that right?
List of cities here: https://waymo.com/rides/
I will say as someone who is suspicious of self driving cars...they are not really worse than Atlanta drivers as a typical pedestrian. They are dangerous in different ways...but not necessarily more or less.
What we need is trains. Trains everywhere. We had this once in fact; we had passenger rail to every corner of europe and north america. Turning that back on would massively improve traffic.
Also, I think your assertion that autonomous cars don't solve traffic is partially wrong. If entire fleets of cars can "think" as a whole, you can avoid some traffic problems, such as traffic waves, that occur due to individual decision-makers.
Lyft is a good distribution channel for their self driving car initiatives with good coverage, Uber is too expensive at this moment.
Also, pleasing the customer, imagine opening Waymo app and not being able to order a taxi 40% of the time. With Lyft/Uber you can easily switch the ride mode and get a car with driver if all self driving cars are busy
They both can build themselves, but if you provide solely self-driving ride hailing, a lot of times customers might not be able to find cars in upcoming 6-7 years until they ramp up full production to meet demand.
Sure - that seems like "tech" - I was asking about "customer base"
(a) you can amortize the large up-front cost of the hardware over many more trips per day.
(b) you can geographically restrict where the vehicle operates to areas you've mapped in detail and know to be relatively safe
(c) you can collect lots of raw data for training and allow remote operators to assist if the vehicle gets stuck (many people would have privacy concerns if their personal car was doing this).
Over time, the hardware cost will come down, geographic availability will increase, and the need for remote assistance will decrease. Then you might start to see ones you can fully own.
At that point, though, the question becomes would you want to own one? Particularly if ride-share vehicles are ubiquitous and you can nearly instantly summon one that's exactly the type you need no matter where you are.
EVs also have the potential to act as large backup batteries for your home.
You can also choose how to amortize your costs. My mom's been driving the same car for 22 years now.
It's also made me think that Waymo's a) don't need lidar, and b) don't actually need the extensive mapping that the public has been lead to believe they need. They're being overly cautious, because they know people's lives are on the line here.
This is incentivized as private enterprise developing autonomous warfare tech.
It doesn't help traffic, and it only will if self driving cars are already the majority, which is a convenient perspective for developers of this tech, but is not viable and not a true statement.
I don't want to be that guy, but we all know trains and trams are the better tech. Luxury trains/trams would be a banger. Private rooms with better amenities than a car, why not?
The autonomous car industry is a few things: car protectionism, oil protectionism, autonomous warfare development and gimmicks.
The two completely replaceable components of this project are 'sitting pretty'? They should be scared to death because this is in fact the death knell for both companies. If the market decides that they are going to be nothing more than 'fleet management' companies for waymo then their share price will crater.
Maybe they get something out of it in the short term. Longer term, they are janitorial and service staff that are interchangeable with any number of companies.
I mean, they do today, but maybe they don't want to be in that business.
In San Francisco, Waymo has already passed Lyft in number of rides, and is projected to pass Uber by the end of the year.
> Riders will hail via the Waymo app, and as our service grows, riders will also be able to use the Lyft app to match with a Waymo vehicle.
(Disclosure: I work at Waymo, but not in partnerships)
Innovative. That must have felt nice to claim
