Waymo

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• federal_register 1 signal · latest 2024-12-27

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• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Google has famously spun out Waymo, a very famous Microsoft back in the day, this little site Expedia that was internal. Now that can be for economic reasons or the thing's getting so big and the existing management team is getting distracted by it. And Waymo needs to be out there on its own, raising capital to validate its, from what I understand, the back channel I got was, hey, we need to validate this valuation. And in order to get AI talent to work on a self-driving company, they, you know,

• bearish prediction Jason Calacanis

  they're going to ban Waymo's in New York, Boston, DC, and they're going to limit them with licenses.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  massive progress by Waymo. They're doubling the number of cars on the road, like every six months or so.

• neutral prediction Chamath Palihapitiya

  I could see robo taxis starting next year sometime with a safety driver and I could see them removing the safety driver and having remote interventions, which is how cruise did it. And I believe that's how Waymo is doing at a human intervention, maybe, you know, 2026, that would be the timeline I would be on humans in it 2025, no humans in it 2026.

• neutral assessment David Friedberg

  it's not uber lyft waymo tesla versus each other and they're all fighting it out it's that group every year taking 10 billion rides from people driving themselves

• neutral fact_claim David Friedberg

  waymo has decided they want to put their vehicles into the uber network

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  i want to see these kind of accidents these are the accidents we want to see now a little ticky tacky and then hopefully these systems become more reliable and to your point higher standard there's a much higher standard for robo taxis than a taxi driven by a human 30 40 50 000 people dying every year from drunk driving distracted driving and speeding uh and reckless driving you know we we know the short list here these things don't have that so it'll be a 10-year process i think for us to trust

• bullish assessment Anand Nandakumar

  I think this is where I would probably give credit to Waymo where they have done a very good job working with the regulators and being upfront and disclosing quite a bit.

• bearish prediction Anand Nandakumar

  That's how Waymo operates. That's how we built it at Uber. And there's a new wave, um, especially the, Tesla's 12.0 release, which is end-to-end deep learning, end-to-end machine learning models. That's where the future will have to go towards because in the first phase of version 1.0, anytime we see an edge case, you have to take over by human, collect all the data, and an army of people have to intervene and understand what really happened.

• neutral fact_claim Anand Nandakumar

  There's the first phase of autonomy, which is there are four modules to it, a perception, prediction, motion planning, and vehicle controls. That's a traditional model. That's how Waymo operates.

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  Sergey even more wealthy as Waymo, if it succeeds becomes a trillion dollar company, or AWS becomes a

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  But a more likely scenario is people opt in and say, you know what, Google spins out Waymo does a SPAC does a direct listing, YouTube goes out, and Google just becomes search and they take all the other bets, nest, and they just start spinning those things out.

• neutral fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  waymo already has to deal with uber

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  Now, back in May, Waymo said that they had 50,000 paid rides each week. Then June comes around, Waymo says, if you're in SF, it's now open, come on board, hop into your Waymo. Let's go. Then in August, they said they have now surpassed 100,000 paid trips per week. So a doubling from May to August with the addition of more space in San Francisco. But to me, that smells like product market fit, massive consumer demand. And, uh, I would say, given that there haven't been more headlines about Waymo'

• mixed prediction Jason Calacanis

  it's going to be hard for waymo to deploy this in you know a thousand cities around the globe

• bullish assessment Molly Wood

  this is big freaking news the exclusivity really hit my uh the hairs at the back of my neck because it feels very like a deep integration versus a lightweight partnership

• bearish assessment Jason Calacanis

  Then you have Waymo prices very high and somewhere in the middle is, I guess what the average will be.

• bearish assessment Alex Wilhelm

  we've estimated that Waymo cars on the low end would cost 5.5 trillion. That's 80,000 per car or 75,000 per car. Um, and then Waymo on the higher end, I think is 120,000 is what I was told.

• bullish assessment Ali Kashani

  uber obviously is really leading the charge they have eight av partners now way more obviously is on the right side doing a lot of um incredible work beyond the delivery side the largest uh on the platform

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  the cars by waymo are 150k 100k people are claiming that's the approximate cost range

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  they are the leader most number of rides but a high cost

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  there's a lot to respect for uh the experience that way most put together uh every time i ride in it it's it's it's you know it is a remarkable product experience to be able to go driverless

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  has waymo been really really aggressively barking up the wrong tree because i've been blown away with waymo's ability to expand paid rides across the us alex and but it sounds like you're going to surpass them so are they just making mistakes i mean i think

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  waymo said no we want as much sensor as possible we want as much maps as possible

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  waymo doing 150 000 rides in three or four cities

• neutral fact_claim David Friedberg

  the maps waymo tesla zoops ain't nobody gonna get that right in texas i can tell you that y'all

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I think it does show that they're confident enough to put Congress people in self-driving, which to me implies technology is advancing fast enough that we can go faster on the regulatory side

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  Waymo going to DC, I still think is clutch

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  Waymo did drop this week an announcement that they are now doing 250,000 paid rides per week up from 200.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  that's putting pressure obviously on Waymo to expand faster. Waymo is probably feeling like, oh my God, Uber and Volkswagen, they have a deal. Okay. Is Uber going to be the neutral platform?

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  Waymo's already there at a very high price. So Waymo's in the game, Tesla's almost there, imminently there.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  waymo working to expand its fleet of 1500 jaguar ipaces or whatever they're called yeah we're seeing momentum right now to get from triple to you know four digits and then i think we'll be at five to display by the end of this year

• bullish prediction Chamath Palihapitiya

  these things are going to be everywhere and robo taxes will be everywhere waymos will be everywhere and waymo just did a deal with toyota to provide their self-driving cars

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  waymo is having a spectacular time in austin with uber the utilization of ubers in austin is 99 more utilization than human drivers in other words if a human driver like if if these waymos are doing probably 15 rides a day is my guess maybe they could hit 20

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  the only two people without human drivers currently are waymo and zooks i believe in the united states cruise was doing them without humans they're no longer doing it

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  i think it needs to be 5x at least three but that's just my personal belief i you know based on being a technologist for 30 years

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  this is showing twice as good i think for the mass population to want these to be deployed widely

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  here is information from waymo safety site as of this morning showing the difference in crash rates between waymos and human drivers in three markets across three different metrics... across those three metrics for example in phoenix in san francisco waymos have essentially 83 percent fewer airbag deployments with some air bar in there than human drivers so to me the data is pretty stark that even today these cars are doing better than the average joe

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  if you start thinking about who has the most robo taxis on the market by the end of 2026 or 2025 if you did that waymo is going to win

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  many parents are sending their kids to school in waymos now i think what we're going to see is autonomy takes over the city centers 50 60 70 percent of that in the next couple years moving the other drivers out

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  to waymo this is going to have zero impact on the drivers... you already have like a certain number of rides in san francisco are being done by waymo... we're going to see the same number or a growing driver base of humans for years while the autonomous ones get put into the market and we're going to see the humans do the routes that the autonomous ones can't

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  waymo says we don't do that we will when there's a problem tell the ai how to solve the problem so if the ai was stuck because it's behind an ambulance they say okay is there ability to make a u-turn here is the ability is there an extra lane to go around it

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  the real question is how different are these two technologies and how big of a part is lidar in waymo's success... waymo started with constrained areas and really trying to solve a constrained area problem where they were let's just say bespoke solutions right

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  waymo reaching 10 million paid rides... they did half of that in the last five months which implies about a million rides a month that are paid which to me is like real commercial viability because i have not heard a resurgence in waymo runs over your dog or whatever so it seems to me that as this ramps up the technology really must be maturing to the point which they can take on this much volume

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  i think in this case it will not be winner take all it will be three winners take most and those three winners will be waymo tesla and uber that's my belief

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  waymo the number one leader in this waymo providing to toyota

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  they said hey there's going to be 15 providers of autonomous to be a commoditized service it turns out it is going to be a commoditized service

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  so way most like we make this stuff we have an app but suddenly they were like well we have an app but uber's got you know 20 000 cities and 150 million or 250 million customers whatever it is and 30 million of them are uber one we we don't need to recreate the wheel here let's have them let's go into their distribution system their network

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  everybody's on the same team. Zoox, Uber, Lyft, Tesla, they're actually all on the same team. And right now that team has one point. The other team has 99 points.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  if you're Waymo versus Uber and Lyft or, you know, Waymo and Uber versus Tesla versus Zoox. What you're really in a race here in this infinite game is car ownership.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  where is, where isn't Waymo? A Waymo isn't in these Florida cities. Great. Florida is a freedom state. What are the freedom states, you know, perhaps right leaning and which ones have, um, you know, don't have Waymo yet. That might be the zig where they zag and be the first mover in those markets.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  Tesla has come here after Weibo already reached scale.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  Waymo must've had these when they had safety drivers. You just didn't hear about it.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  By the way, remote intervention, Waymo has it, Zoox has it, all the self-driving robots have it, everybody has it.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  This is kind of like halfway between, I guess, how Waymo launched or cruise or some of the other services.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  That's why Waymo had safety drivers, I think for five to 10 years, like, and they still do. Every time they go to a new place, they do safety.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  we're seeing i think pretty good cultural shift towards taking them uh waymo just announced it's going to roll out teen accounts in the phoenix metro area

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  some people don't want to be in a waymo some people only want to be in a waymo tipping is uh really nice to not have to tip not having to talk to somebody is really nice for some people other people really want to have somebody there they can talk to or who can help them with their bag

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  waymo just announced it's going to roll out teen accounts in the phoenix metro area so if you have a child between 14 and 17 underneath the 18 kind of theoretical threshold for for ridership now parents can have teen accounts and send their kids out and about which is incredible

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  So I think everyone in Waymo is for sure the same. The key players have their own data that they've invested a ton in. And so there are sources that wouldn't be available in an open source capacity.

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  I was thinking more like four of maybe you guys, Waymo, maybe Tesla. How many people do you think are going to get this right at scale maybe in the next five years?

• neutral assessment Dave Ferguson

  I don't think that on the technical side, if you spent time within Waymo, within Neuro, within Tesla, I don't think you're going to see a huge amount of daylight in terms of the machine learning techniques and tools that are being used.

• neutral fact_claim Alex

  one thing we're seeing Waymo just do now is go to D.C., go to Denver, go to places like Seattle where it rains and where it snows.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  they keep saying a Waymo cost $175,000. Waymo cost $250,000. And now I know those numbers were from like 10 years ago because I remember reporting on them.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  in the way that waymo does with a deterministic model

• neutral prediction Jason Calacanis

  i don't think waymo is going to be able to like snap their fingers and turn on new york either maybe it takes waymo 12 months in new york maybe it takes some six months whatever

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  it took five or six years for waymo to get approved in each city and to figure out all the edge cases

• bearish prediction Jason Calacanis

  this is going to become an issue folks because as these things become more prevalent people are going to f with these things in new york i guarantee it

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  waymo just got their permit for new york

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  These are much more affordable. The only difference is some of the trim and some of the components. If you look at the trim, the light on my new Juniper Model Y, which I think I'm leasing, but it's like $55K, maybe $60K all in. So, this is $40K, and it would be $48K with self-driving, so I think it's $12K less than mine. You have the light goes across, and you have a glass roof, not a steel roof like this one has, doesn't have the glass roof, which some people might prefer actually, because some

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  you can get a Model 3 standard for now just under $40K, and you can get the Model Y standard for just under $40K, and the Model 3 standard for $37K, Jason, which seems, even without discounts, pretty damn affordable.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  there's major pressure right now on the EV category in terms of affordability from two fronts. One is the tax credit going away. You just get 7,500 or something. And then internationally, BYD, Xiaomi, we talked about a bunch of these car companies.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  shout out to Tesla for having a great hype video, but what they announced were more affordable EVs, Jason.

• neutral fact_claim Zach

  The average single-family home in Texas with one battery is going to get about 24 hours of backup with kind of moderate usage, and then, of course, 24 hours, sorry, 48 hours of backup with two batteries.

• bullish prediction Zach

  We're looking to expand in early 2026. So we haven't yet announced what our next market will be, but we hope to bring base to every household in America and beyond. And we want to be a global energy technology market leader.

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  But boy, what a great insight they had that, hey, we don't need another source of energy. We need to store energy when it's at the lowest possible rate.

• bullish endorsement Alex

  And what a great real estate play. If you wanted to build a bunch of batteries and put them somewhere, you've got to buy some land here. You just, you know, get a little 10 by 10 spot on people's existing properties and you get to distribute all this power. It's just super brilliant.

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  I love about your business, Zach, is that it hits on those notes. People here would like to be resilient. They would like to be independent of the grid or at least semi-independent of the grid.

• neutral fact_claim Zach

  It could be hundreds of thousands of single-family homes.

• neutral fact_claim Zach

  there's usually some kind of catchment area is a term I would use around the data center in which you can install the batteries such that they are electrically equivalent to having the battery behind the meter at the data center.

• bullish prediction Zach

  I think it could be the opposite actually where these hyperscalers are actually subsidizing the power costs for the consumer in this kind of mechanism that I've described. So, you know, we hope to flip that script.

• bullish assessment Zach

  we want to win the AI race. We want to help these data center loads get grid connected faster.

• bullish fact_claim Zach

  So we are working on a product that we call Speed to Power, which is a solution for data center developers to get grid connected faster.

• bullish fact_claim Zach

  With our next generation product is a 40-kilowatt-hour battery and 20-kilowatt inverter.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  It does seem the way you're constructing these to go on the outside of suburban homes and not rely on solar, just to put them on the outside seems incredibly quick.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  Our installs happen in a number of hours, so on the order of four to six hours with our current generation of hardware.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  Yeah, the way I think about this is I think that product is, you know, you can think about it as the Ferrari of batteries, right? And ours is really the, you know, the Camry, Corolla, you know, workhorse product, right? It's not an iPhone, right? It's not a premium, shiny product that, you know, should be $20,000, right? Our product is an infrastructure asset. It's an efficiency box. It's a savings machine, right? And we sell it as such. We position it as such. So, you know, I think if you look

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  Our next generation hardware that is, might I remind you, fully custom-designed and manufactured by BASE, is much faster to install. And this is a really important piece. When you have a vertically integrated business and the time and the cost of the installation hits your bottom line, you care a lot about the mechanism by which that battery is installed. And so we've designed our battery to be installed in a very different way than home batteries have really ever been installed. And I'll just l

• bullish assessment Zach

  So LFP really do have safety, right? So when you see, you know, safety risk with batteries, most of that is oriented around NMC batteries because you have higher C rates and higher risk of thermal runaway. And effectively what that means is you can charge and discharge the battery much faster, which really matters in a car, right? Because you got to get, you know, zero to 60 in three seconds. Doesn't matter so much in a home battery. And so the LFP chemistry is a better solution for stationary s

• neutral fact_claim Zach

  So we do everything above the cell. So we take the cells and we design modules and the modules are part of a pack. And then we build the power electronics that basically make up the inverter that allow us to move power in and out of the battery. And so we design all of those components that are above the cell. What I'll say is today we don't make cells. I think, you know, over the long arc of time, we may go into the cell business as we further vertically integrate. And if we do that, the reason

• neutral fact_claim Zach

  A lot of the capital will go into battery CapEx. So, you know, the things that go through the factory, some amount of it will go into the machines. The building is already standing. A new building from scratch. We'll soon be able to talk more about Base Factory 2, which will be a bit more CapEx. But the majority of the capital is going to be going into these assets. And then growing our team, right? We've got 250 people, some of the best engineers, operators, and creatives from all across the co

• bullish assessment Zach

  So by vertically integrating our manufacturing here in Austin, we'll be able to take a ton of costs out of the system and drive our landed costs down, tighten those paybacks as we discussed, increase our returns, and drive costs down for consumers. And really, this is what it's all about, right? It's like, why are we building a factory? Like, yes, it's cool to have a factory and it's fun to walk around and, you know, touch the machines. But the reality is, like, we're doing this because we want

• bullish assessment Zach

  Yeah, the idea is that as we develop new generations of the technology, our cost to deploy the marginal asset goes down, the paybacks shorten, and our returns go up, and then we pass those returns on to the customer in the form of lower prices. So our view is that electricity is a commodity. The best electron is the cheapest electron. So our vision as a business is to develop a compounding cost advantage through vertical integration, drive cost down for the consumer, and sell the lowest cost ele

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  you'll recoup the entire value of the battery and be into the profit on each one of those installs.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  It's roughly a 10-year useful life asset, and the payback is well inside of that.

• bullish fact_claim Zach Dell

  Yeah, so $6.95 upfront and $19 a month for one of our systems. And the paybacks are fast. It's a number of years, handful of years.

• bullish fact_claim Zach Dell

  No, I mean, it can be, it can be $0 to, you know, power can be $0 in the middle of the day when there's tons of solar. The sun is high in the sky. There's tons of solar in Texas. About 20% of our fuel mix in Texas is solar. And so you really low-cost power in the middle of the day. And then in the middle of the night when the wind is blowing and not a lot of people are using electricity, you have very low-cost power. In the evenings, in the summer, you have what's kind of known in the industry a

• bullish fact_claim Zach Dell

  Yeah, so I'll take a step back first and say that what we believe is that people want their power to be affordable and reliable, and that's really it, right? So when you think about your electricity, you want your bill to go down and your lights to stay on. And the way that we do that is by installing batteries that we own and operate on the homes of our members. When the grid is up and running, to your point, Jason, we use the battery to support the grid in times of high demand, and when the gr

• bullish assessment Zach Dell

  So we've been executing to the best of our ability over the course of the last two years, two and a half years since we started the company, and our product has really resonated with customers. So we've been growing really fast. We've got more demand than we can handle, and so we're trying to uncontrain the business by growing our supply, building a factory, starting to manufacture these batteries here in Austin, and now this new round of capital really uncontrains us from a capital perspective

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  So, you can look at those two, and you can see that they have discipline. I don't think they want to chase the average return. No.

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  In the Series A, they do join the board. And that gives them two swings at bat. The seed fund can just make these 500K to $3 million checks. They can put 40 of those investments maybe into the $200 million fund for about $5 million on average.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Nobody talked about it. I think we were the only show to ever talk about it. Why? The Waymo was stationary and it got hit.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  Tesla's rightfully being very cautious as they should be. And they have permits to run ride sharing in 10 cities.

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  They're going to get there. They're going to get there. It's obvious. They are going to build something that hopefully this is the dream. This is the objective. We'll be able to navigate things it hasn't seen before better than the people who are building perfect models like Waymo.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  So for everybody like, oh, my God, Tesla's never going to get there. Oh, they're, you know, they missed all these different benchmarks over 10 years.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  I think there's three or four players who are going to get there all around the same period of time.

• bearish prediction David Friedberg

  This could make you build a more even playing field.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  Actually, you know, you talk a lot about, you know, Tesla having cars on the road. So many of them, giving them a data advantage. Yeah. Uber has a lot of cars on the road, too.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  But I think this is this is freaking awesome. And just to be clear, to double click it in case you're watching the video version, none of that Tesla video was real. It was all synthetic or as Tesla put it, video below is fully generated and not a real video. But I love this idea, Jason. We talk a lot about how, you know, once we get self-driving, it's going to save lives. Here's a way to accelerate our timeline to that point. Fantastic.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  You know, frequently late, never wrong is, I think, the track record so far.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  So he's often late, but never wrong is what I always say when people ask me for a quote always.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  They said they believe FSD has been solved. Of course, there's the natural criticism that Elon's been saying, hey, we're very close for a long time. But, you know, he was very close at landing rockets, you know, and then they did and had reusable rockets.

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  It's a, I guess this is all the cameras on the car. Yeah. The new Tesla hardware stack is eight cars. And this looks incredibly real. If you showed this to a hundred people, a hundred people would say that's real. So they now have the ability to build situations for the car to navigate. And then test it over and over and over again, which is extraordinary because what are the chances that like, you know, a deer comes running out into the street in this or a dog, you know, it's like to capture th

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  It's counterintuitive. It's Jevon's paradox, as you guys have heard many times in the last two years, or me say, induced traffic.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  And then you have Alphabet, also known as Google. And Google is really, I think, the most interesting one. They're up 40% this year of their stock because people were like, they're going to get killed. So last year, search was going to get killed. As I said on this program and the other program, my thesis is people are going to be doing more searches and that the pie is going to continue to get bigger. Why? The answers are better. And if the answers are better and you solve problems quicker, you

• bearish criticism Jackie Fielder

  For any Waymo, other TNC lobbyists in the crowd, we are absolutely coming for your bottom dollar.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Well, it says here that Waymo said it rear-ended the Waymo. So they do have, they didn't take the time to get that quote. So I think they could have been more, I'm not saying they're completely inaccurate here. It's not like they said the Waymo killed. But I feel they could have been a little more accurate here.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  The Waymo did not hit the motorcycle. A Waymo was involved in a car accident resulting in a death near Lemon Street, according to police. 1.30 a.m., Waymo spokesman told AZ family that a motorcycle rear-ended the Waymo before a second car struck the motorcyclist and continued to drive. This had nothing to do with the Waymo, obviously.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  And based on all the coverage that I can read, the reaction is kind of like, well, that's not gonna change much. So I think this is actually very positive for the progress of self-driving cars, because as we know, human drivers are much more dangerous and they kill a lot more animals.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  I think BlackRock and some other folks had bought positions in it so they could just get their return or they could be converted into Google SOC at some point if they really felt it was core to the Google mission going forward.

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  But there's nothing that says they can't change their mind. And then they could go to the existing shareholders and buy them out if they've already bought 10 or 20% of the company.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  Now that it's a real business, there is an argument of, well, why would you get outside capital? I think it's because they want to spin it out, eventually make it its own company, and force it to stand on its own.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  The CFO of Google felt like the market thought that other projects like Loom, Google Glass, etc., they were perceiving that that was a money pit and they were like college projects that would never stand on their own. Therefore, they said, if you want to keep spending money on these, you've got to go get outside funding to put a valuation on it and prove that it's going to be commercialized. Because Waymo, it was like, when is this thing going to get commercialized? You know, we're in year 7, 8,

• mixed prediction Chamath Palihapitiya

  I do think with Waymo being worth or going out raising money at 100 billion and Google is looking at that saying, hey, we've got to compete with Elon. That's a big task. He's going to have all this manufacturing. If we have Waymo plus Uber, you know, we don't have to change any behavior. We, you know, we have Google Maps. We have Waymo. We have all these other partnerships. I think the only way for Waymo to compete with Tesla right now is to partner with Uber.

• neutral prediction Chamath Palihapitiya

  Well, I don't think they've run away with the whole thing. So I think if they wind up being, let's just say they wind up being 10 points, they'll be 10 times bigger. So let's say Tesla wins and is 50% of the market and Waymo and Uber and Noro, they all get 10, 20%, 5%, who knows what percent of the market, Zooks, et cetera.

• neutral assessment Alex Wilhelm

  The reason why the connectivity argument struck me so, so like a good possibility is because if they didn't have that issue, then they could have just popped in remote drivers and solve the problem.

• bearish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  Uber drivers were not pleased, uh, with this situation, uh, they were like, see, uh, we told you keep the humans in the loop.

• bullish prediction Jason Calacanis

  The next time this happens, these Waymos will be instructed to on their own without internet connections, just safely find a parking spot on the right side of the road... they'll just program this into the stack. And this will be the first and last time you get to laugh at them doing this. They'll be like ballet dancers in Swan Lake making their way off the road.

• bearish criticism Alex Wilhelm

  This is, I don't think exactly what Waymo was promising the world, but if you watch this little clip, you'll see here in San Francisco, a catastrophe. We have Waymos literally just stopped in intersections. They are blocking traffic

• bearish prediction Ben

  if Tesla were to have any significant issue when it comes to autonomy in particular Waymo, except for Nathan, wouldn't Nathan then get like 10 times as much business? No, the industry, the industry would be paused for a very significant time and it would be a winter for this industry.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  DoorDash and Waymo worked together in Phoenix on some things.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  And then we look at the one where the child got hit in Santa Monica. Waymo did the right thing. Waymo slowed down. It was, I believe, the child's fault. The child darted into the street is every parent's nightmare. You have to teach this.

• bearish prediction Jason Calacanis

  internationally, it's going to be Uber number one and then distant second and third would be, you know, um, uh, robo taxi and Waymo.

• mixed prediction Jason Calacanis

  in the U S it's going to be if robo taxi gets up and running in the next year or two, it's probably going to be robo taxi. Number one, Waymo number two, Uber number three

• bearish assessment Jason Calacanis

  Waymo is not going to take that business from Uber, but the rollout is going to be slow and steady.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  Waymo doesn't want to force people to go through the Uber app, which is what they're doing in the other two markets that are in business. I think it's Atlanta and Austin.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  So they had a small test in Arizona for like 10 cars and that came to an end. That was my understanding, an exclusive deal.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  so yeah because Waymo has it without the safety driver so he believes or he said that a couple of

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  for example if it's a construction that the vehicle was not able to recognize it then the one behind the desk can give it an instruction to to bypass it

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  it's at least it's it's a perfect safety track record nobody's been killed

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  and they're using minivans

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Waymo has a small scale testing without a safety driver in Arizona in Arizona

• neutral fact_claim James Peng

  SPEAKER_05: when the first Waymo cars came out the cost of that sensor array I think it was almost 10 years ago now that they started 10 years ago yeah my understanding is it was over a hundred thousand dollars for all the lidar and sensors is that ballpark correct SPEAKER_115: used to be more than that

• neutral fact_claim James Peng

  Actually, same as Waymo. We are not making the vehicles yet. We are retrofitting an existing vehicle by putting the sensors and also developing advanced AI algorithms so that to make the vehicles fully, be able to handle all the traffic scenarios by itself.

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  I know that was like a big controversy for them when I had mentioned it previously, they seem a little bit upset about like people even discussing that there could be interventions or crews. And then what are the interventions that are occurring? I think some transparency there would be good.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  And I think the cars themselves cost about half that. So I think the entire upgrade must be on the order of $50,000. I think.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Last I heard they're paying $120,000 for their cars.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  Tesla has the most miles collected on any kind of autonomous system. We have the second, and then Waymo actually has quite a bit less than, than any, than any of us.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  Um, so I, I think it's a detour. I think, I think they'll regret that.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  Waymo has really seemed to have pigeonholed themselves in this LIDAR sensor strategy. Um, you know, they don't seem to have any interest in moving away from LIDAR, which I think is a mistake.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Waymo seems to, uh, be the one player that has full autonomous vehicles on the road at scale. Um, their approach is the old school approach.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  I mean, from my understanding, they've got over a billion dollars in burn rate and less than a thousand cars. So that's over a million dollars per car per year. Now revenue probably looks on the order of a hundred to $150,000 a year. So it's very far off from something that makes sense. Um, and I think some, you know, obviously they can get that down pretty quickly, but I think some of those things will be hard to remove, especially the remote operators, the costs in developing new mapping for a

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I think their strategy doesn't really make sense from business perspective. I think, you know, that they don't have unit economics at all. And a part of that is because of this strategy that they're using, which requires, you know, mapping all the areas that they drive in. It requires a lot of remote supervision. Not sure how many remote supervisors they have now, but I'm guessing it's on the order of a half to one per car. You know, I, I just don't think this scales, uh, nearly as well as a str

• neutral criticism David Friedberg

  It seems to me that open source has won so much of the problem space in computing that it's odd to me that all of the self-driving companies and projects are closed. Whether it's Tesla, cruise, Waymo, um, or, or any number of them.

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  self-driving is really really hard and we know that tesla has been spending years getting to this point and then google as well so i'm not sure why there'd be more than two or three companies that can do self-driving

• bullish endorsement David Friedberg

  The world's most trusted driver.

• neutral fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  That's one of the things. And the other one I would say is what you just said, which is, you know, it's a brilliant team. And the team works really hard, but like bad things are going to happen in the real world with human drivers around our cars. And the team takes that so seriously. And so that's, it's, it's like, it's like having worked at, I mean, I worked at Airwell and I knew we were there too, but like other kinds of tech companies. I know every kind of company is stressful. It's a differ

• neutral fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  I think one of the hardest challenges was making, we made such a big decision in going fully autonomous, which is sort of the reason we're here during COVID. You mean getting that person out? The person from behind the wheel, scaling this. And so then bringing the culture back together to now scale. So we just needed like, we needed a minute to lock back in.

• neutral fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  So, on the question of open sourcing, that isn't something that we're spending a lot of time talking about right now. Okay.

• mixed assessment Tekedra Mawakana

  So we really think about it as this sort of learning journey, but it's also just where we started, right? I mean, part, part of the conversation we get to have now is what would, if the driver was at this level of maturity, where would we have started? Um, that said, we have global aspirations. We're always thinking about them. ... There's a lot of confusion about full autonomy versus partial autonomy. Um, there's not a lot of legislative activity that's informed by experts. Right. So I don't kn

• bullish fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  Yeah, we've said sort of publicly and we've had partnerships where we've made the technology available. Um, it's a question of when, you know, when will a level four sort of product be available and interesting to consumers at scale? You know, that's part of the question, but absolutely. This is part of our strategy.

• bullish assessment Tekedra Mawakana

  Um, yeah, not, not going to get into that other than to say to you, I, this is the thing I spend all of my time focused on and we are on, but there's a path there. There's completely a path there.

• bullish fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  And we just did a UX study. And we found that a third of people use the service in San Francisco to go to their doctor appointments. We're like, that feels like real life. And 36% were using the vehicles to go to local businesses, which is also real life. And so these are the kinds of signals that we're trying to get. As far as like personally owned cars, we've always had as part of our strategy from the beginning that we would start with ride hailing and local delivery, and that eventually we w

• neutral fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  I think what you just described is exactly the AV ecosystem that I'm talking about. And yes, out of necessity. ... let everyone do what they're good at. Like we're good at building this driver.

• neutral fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  it definitely led to more scrutiny in San Francisco because there was already an active and continues to be a fairly active voice against technology in San Francisco. And so we needed to continue to engage, which we were already doing, provide more data, which we're of course willing to do. And I think over time, what we'll see is, you know, we have to get to a place where the amount of data that we're providing actually advances the safety concerns.

• bullish fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  we drive in a week more than a human drives in a lifetime. ... we're the only company where it's one driver. ... This is one driver learning all the time in unison.

• bullish fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  one of the largest, uh, reinsurers in the world, Swiss Re, has actually been doing our safety. ... I think they're very eager to get the data sets that we're releasing. Like we really set 20, uh, safety papers last year. They're all wanting to understand what the actual impact of this technology can be.

• neutral fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  We have the partnership with Uber because we think it's important for us to create an AV ecosystem around this technology. Like, this isn't going to be, we've created technology and we're going to figure out everything ourselves. Like, that would be foolish and very expensive and we'd never find ourselves profitable. But having companies that are experts in integration, having automotive partner, you know, we're not building the car, having network partners, having fleet operating partners, publ

• bullish prediction David Sacks

  once this product scales, there's not really giving me a need for Uber anymore, right? Why would you need Uber if you can just summon the robot car directly or the robot driver, whatever you want to call it, right? Driver, car, whatever. I mean, doesn't this logically disrupt Uber once it's at scale?

• bullish fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  And so over time, you're certainly going to see us announce new places, but you're also going to see, like in San Francisco, we launched a 24-hour service in a limited territory. And over time, we've expanded that territory.

• bullish prediction Tekedra Mawakana

  And because we're building a driver and not a car, you'll see us scaling in a number of ways. So we have partnerships right now. We have a partnership with Uber in Phoenix. Why are we doing that? People are like, oh my gosh, I got my Uber Eats in a Waymo. Like, why are you all doing that? It's because we're building a driver. And so we're trying to figure out all of the ways in which this driver could be applied to future use cases.

• mixed assessment Tekedra Mawakana

  And so the challenge that we have to tackle with a lot of humility is how prepared is the public? You know, humans can kill other people. How prepared is the public to accept that this isn't going to be a panacea and it's not going to be perfect?

• neutral fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  So we are pushing to make sure people who put autonomous vehicles on the road have to demonstrate their safety case. We think the worst thing that could happen is introducing a new technology that doesn't actually improve this problem. Because it'll kill the whole industry.

• bullish endorsement Tekedra Mawakana

  For us as a company, we are obsessed. Our culture is about safety. This mission is about safety. And we want to expand the number of people who have access to mobility options. If you need a driver's license, then it's just like every other mobility platform. You have to be behind the wheel.

• bullish assessment Tekedra Mawakana

  We learned that ourselves back in 2015 and 16 and 17. We had an autopilot highway product. We allowed employees at the time, Google employees, to ride in that product. We told them to pay attention. We told them, you have to be alert and be prepared to take over. What did they do? They were human. We want to do other stuff when we're in the car. On the phone. Like, I want to be on the phone. I want to get to that meeting. I need to send that last email. I need to check whether or not my son's do

• bullish fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  It's given us the opportunity to scale at this point. We're the only company that's doing level four driving on public roads 24 hours a day.

• bullish endorsement Tekedra Mawakana

  So obviously, we have conviction that we need LiDAR, radar, and cameras. We have all three.

• bullish assessment Tekedra Mawakana

  Level four and above means you do not need a driver's license, nor do you need to sit behind the wheel. So when you're focused on tackling the hardest challenge first, it's really important for the driver, the Waymo driver, to ingest dense urban environments. Because that is where the driver is going to learn the most. Sitting on freeways, seeing the same thing every day can be predictable. It's not entirely predictable, but it's not additive to what the machine learns.

• neutral fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  So I think, just for everyone to orient, when you think about the levels of autonomy, we are only focused on level four and above.

• neutral fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  we're testing on highways in Phoenix and San Francisco. With safety drivers. With employees. Yes. And a human behind the wheel.

• neutral fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  What we've been able to determine as of June of this year with over 22 million, what we refer to as RO miles, those are miles that are fully autonomous. We've been able to have 83% fewer airbag deployments, which, of course, is important because those are high impact, and 73% fewer injury-causing crashes.

• neutral fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  You've done, it seems like, millions of rides now. No fatalities, correct? That's right.

• neutral fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  we've had a 24-7 ride hailing service around the clock. It was in 2020 during COVID, though, that we removed the driver from behind the wheel.

• neutral fact_claim Tekedra Mawakana

  It's completely true. It's a true thing. And it's over 100,000. Over 100,000. Week per week. Yeah.

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  I think this is the year that self-driving finally broke through. Obviously, Tesla's got full self-driving, but also this Waymo One app, people are going wild over it. So I think this is the year that self-driving broke through. And I think next year is going to get bigger and bigger.

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  Also, Waymo, also delightful. And, you know, they had a rough year with some of that woke imagery in Gemini, but I think they had a great rebound. Waymo's a really good story. Yeah, I think Waymo...

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  i think the age of autonomy is here and i think there is going to be some partnerships that will happen between amazon doordash uber tesla waymo and that cohort and i would not be surprised to see tesla could buy uber right now for but 10 of its market cap and waymo could spin out and partner with uber amazon

• bullish fact_claim Sundar Pichai

  We had the same scenario in self-driving maybe three years ago. There were so many people doing self-driving. It looked like everyone was roughly the same, but they weren't. I could internally tell the difference that how far ahead Waymo was.

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  And suddenly it looks like Waymo is on track to be a $100 billion business. And this is actually going to work.

• neutral fact_claim Sundar Pichai

  You can think of Waymo as a big robot. We are driving around everywhere. So we're making with our partners cars that way.

• bearish criticism Chamath Palihapitiya

  if you look back, he made this bet once before, which was Tesla FSD versus Waymo. And Tesla FSD only had cameras, it didn't have LiDAR. But the bet was, I'll just collect billions and billions of driving miles before anybody else does, and apply general compute, and it'll get to autonomy faster than the other more laborious and very expensive approach.

• neutral fact_claim Travis Kalanick

  So, so in the U S we have Waymo, we see the Waymo's in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, coming soon to Miami, coming soon to Atlanta, coming soon to DC. They're even talking about New York.

• bullish prediction Chamath Palihapitiya

  but it's that it's something else there's no way somebody as smart as Silver Lake comes in if they think there's not a path to liquidity so the other thing they have to promise is they're like listen we will take this company public and in return you will help us build a better company than everybody that committed capital into that company

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  point they made that evolution particularly in a company like Waymo where they said we can't be the sole funder they brought in Silverlake they brought in all these other investors they did this actually with Verily they did this with a bunch of what they call other bets is they made the conscious decision because Chamath on the flip side by bringing in outside capital and having an independent board for these subsidiaries they were actually able to drive better outcomes because now there was go

• bearish criticism Travis Kalanick

  The Waymo machine takes a hundred times more energy to drive a Waymo than a human does to drive a Waymo.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  Look, I think Waymo obviously is ahead. The existence proof is there. Their issue is manufacturing and scale and urgency and fierceness. Like, yes, come on. Let's go.

1. 2028-02-23 they're going to ban Waymo's in New York, Boston, DC, and they're going to limit them with licenses. · Prediction · pending
2. 2028-02-17 That's how Waymo operates. That's how we built it at Uber. And there's a new wave, um, especially the, Tesla's 12.0 release, which is end-to-end deep learning, end-to-end machine learning models. That's where the future will have to go towards because in the first phase of version 1.0, anytime we see an edge case, you have to take over by human, collect all the data, and an army of people have to intervene and understand what really happened. · Prediction · pending
3. 2028-02-15 this is going to become an issue folks because as these things become more prevalent people are going to f with these things in new york i guarantee it · Prediction · pending
4. 2028-02-15 these things are going to be everywhere and robo taxes will be everywhere waymos will be everywhere and waymo just did a deal with toyota to provide their self-driving cars · Prediction · pending
5. 2028-02-05 internationally, it's going to be Uber number one and then distant second and third would be, you know, um, uh, robo taxi and Waymo. · Prediction · pending
6. 2028-02-05 if Tesla were to have any significant issue when it comes to autonomy in particular Waymo, except for Nathan, wouldn't Nathan then get like 10 times as much business? No, the industry, the industry would be paused for a very significant time and it would be a winter for this industry. · Prediction · pending
7. 2028-02-05 The next time this happens, these Waymos will be instructed to on their own without internet connections, just safely find a parking spot on the right side of the road... they'll just program this into the stack. And this will be the first and last time you get to laugh at them doing this. They'll be like ballet dancers in Swan Lake making their way off the road. · Prediction · pending
8. 2028-02-05 This could make you build a more even playing field. · Prediction · pending
9. 2028-02-05 I think it could be the opposite actually where these hyperscalers are actually subsidizing the power costs for the consumer in this kind of mechanism that I've described. So, you know, we hope to flip that script. · Prediction · pending
10. 2028-02-05 We're looking to expand in early 2026. So we haven't yet announced what our next market will be, but we hope to bring base to every household in America and beyond. And we want to be a global energy technology market leader. · Prediction · pending

VentureSignalScore 79/100 for waymo, composed from 1 of 4 components (index v0 cross-signal), discounted ×0.79 for 30% signal coverage