Just read the blog post but I’m not clear on what's actually being launched here. As an org, why would I 'subscribe' today, what do I concretely get (coverage, pricing, SLAs, etc.) vs. just signing up for a future interest list?
It's common for events / conferences / businesses to provide Lyft and Uber codes for some percentage off a ride or even a free ride to or from the location. This is effectively that but for Waymo.
I never heard of companies doing this. The most I've heard of is some sort of shuttle bus service, and even then there's no real expectation that you'll work on the ride there. Taxi-style transport is only for exceptional circumstances (eg. you worked late), or you're on some sort of business trip.
It's a reasonably common perk for tech companies in my experience. Often with limitations on the allowed endpoints and maximum daily cost, but routine use is still expected.
Provide safe and sustainable autonomous rides for your team with Waymo for Business. Easily set up commuter programs, events transportation, and corporate travel for a variety of industries and use cases.
With Waymo for Business, you’ll get access to our business portal to set program parameters, manage members, generate codes for events, and keep track of everything, from budget to program engagement.
They’re announcing that they’re building an offering that suits business needs (provide vouchers to employees, track spending, etc.) and giving businesses the opportunity to sign up to be notified when it’s available. Pretty straightforward stuff.
maybe some car pool services for the most frequent routes could run at regular intervals. there could even be some predefined stops to efficiently batch many people getting on and off the car pool at once
Hope it's better than Uber for Business. I signed up my company for Uber for Business and everything about their pipeline was broken for corporate accounts. They still send me regular reports for an account that I can't use because I can't log into it.
Worthless and a waste of my time. Total joke. For everything I hear about Uber's supposed good engineering, I couldn't see a lick of it.
Trucking is probably going to be one of the things that's harder to automate, and given the way things are going we best hope they don't given the absolute bloodbath it would create for labor (trucking is one of the most common professions in the US). I would wager that would lead to unrest in a way we've not seen in a long time.
Why are they not hyper-focused on scaling the number of vehicles on the road now that they have a working system? Is Waymo afraid of flooding the supply and crashing prices? Are they too expensive to build/maintain to justify a lower price point?
What is going on, if you have PMF the logical next step is scale.
I suspect Waymo has purchased all available Jaguar i-Paces (~= every Jaguar i-Pace?), which are no longer in production, and was planning on rolling out their purpose-built Zeekr vehicles to scale further. The 100% tariff on Chinese EVs introduced in 2024 probably made this plan financially questionable, leaving them without a supply of new vehicles. Late last year Waymo announced a partnership with Hyundai to buy a version of the Ioniq 5 assembled in the US which might've been motivated by this problem.
There are months long lead times to arrange to rent space for depots, install charging points, and to staff up the depots, which need to operate 24/7. The more visible part of the leadtime to open a new city is in testing the service areas. But I doubt that the critical path.
> Why are they not hyper-focused on scaling the number of vehicles on the road
I am no expert here, but my assumption scaling is not yet dependent on just having more cars, that they have to do extra work, that is not yet automatable, in each area they service plus some extra maintenance cost for every area they service.
I think maybe unclear in my comment, I’m referring to scaling within the cities they’re in. e.g. in SF it still takes 15m for a Waymo to arrive as opposed to Uber’s 3m and it costs more. I would’ve expected Uber drivers to be out of a job, which is not the case (I also drive occasionally)
From someone that worked in the industry ~6 years ago, it's clearly going well for them - frankly, they're expanding and scaling way faster than I would have thought possible in 2019. They've got something like 6 cities running right now and what, 3-4 more announced?
Another thing to keep in mind is that rideshare revenue in the US is extremely geographically concentrated in urban cores. This is why every AV company was targeting SF as their first city (excepting Waymo, which did some stuff in PHX). 'Hyperfocused expansion' probably looks a lot closer to tackling new, novel areas in different metro areas rather than, say, expanding down in to San Jose and the central valley.
These things, they take time.
They've clearly hit (or projections confidently show they'll hit) a point where each car is profitable. I worked in the space for a while - platform upgrades (new cars, sensors, etc) are planned out years in advance and are pretty complex processes. But generally, each upgrade was a massive decrease in cost per car. (usually 50% cheaper or more). So also possible they want to wait for the next platform transition.
This is really exciting news! I think many tech companies would be interested in this service as it's a huge perk if you make your people commute into work.
I mean how many people drive for 30 to 60 minutes just to get to work in or already a bit stressed out because of the drive.
But second, wouldn't it be cool if places that serve alcohol could have a whole bunch of these codes to hand out! If somebody looks a bit too buzzed, just give them a code for a ride and send them on home. Heck even give him another code to come back in the morning and get their car!
Presumably that part of the drive would happen before rush hour, so it would be faster.
And yes, for certain cases it will be - employees who start their day less stressed produce more value. For people with paid mid-six-figures, this potentially lets the company wring more cognitive labor out of their them instead of them wasting it on driving (and maybe they'll even work from the car).
> the real challenge is just getting local communities to allow Waymo
This isn’t a real challenge. There are more cities that want to be early adopters (for the investment and jobs) than have a politically-active Luddite streak.
At the end of the day, we’ll do the labour-intensive work of development in the former and deploy to the latter once it’s efficiently scalable, probably with limited local labor (and thus consent) requirements.
“Meet Sustainability Goals: Waymo’s fully electric fleet helps organizations advance their sustainability targets”
Taking a private taxi to commute to work or school is easily the worst thing you can do environmentally in a city. Doesn’t really matter that you’re not burning dinosaur juice.
Especially when I'm guessing a lot of these "urban tech worker" commutes are mostly on surface streets or congested highways barely moving any faster. In my experience cycling to work I am actually faster on the bike than when I take the car. This is mostly due to filtering to the front of the intersection effectively eliminating any and all effects of rush hour traffic. Another huge factor is I can also park the bike directly in front of the door to the building, no having to walk from a designated parking or drop off zone.
While I agree that it’s kinda unpleasant to get all sweaty before work, many larger corporations have offices (usually with gyms) have locker rooms and showers to support bikers. While I’m able to take transit, many of my coworkers do bike+shower at the office for commuting.
The bike is in fact the more appropriate transport for moving a 200lb person than a 5000lb vehicle. Literally 95% of the energy being consumed is just to move the damned vehicle around, not to do anything productive with it.
Showering uses hot water and you also must change clothes, which also require cleaning. If you are doing this twice per day in addition to someone using some other means of transportation there is a non trivial energy cost involved.
If the car propulsion is non fossil fuel based then the car wins because you are using much less water.
I shower once a day regardless. I combine my bike commute on the way in with train or bus depending on the route I feel like. No sweat that way. The ride back I will do on a bike and take a shower after. Gets the cardio requirement done at the same time as the commute so it's a two birds one stone thing.
Showering does use hot water, but, it's maybe 20-30 litres, and you're heating up by what 25-30 K ? That's just not very much energy, and since we want heat we can go via a heat pump to do less work, whereas that's not an option for the car.
I did some envelope guesses and I can't see how this can come out for the car.
What I do is bike to and from the train station on the way in, saves me a 15 min walk on either end and no sweat at all biking at easy pace for a few mins especially when its so cool in the morning. On the way back I will bike the whole way for the fitness benefit and shower when I get home as usual after work. Once you are in shape though, which happens surprisingly quickly with regular riding, you won't really sweat from ~30 mins easy pace rides.
If you don't have a train or bus along the way, ebikes can also save you sweat. You don't even need to pedal at all.
That doesn't seem right. Taking your own car, which you park at both ends of the trip, is clearly worse from a vehicle utilization and land use standpoint. A Waymo that takes a dozen trips a day and never parks on the street seems obviously superior.
I think the point is it's green washing. True sustainability is public transit, or biking or walking. This is just a line item got a company to blast as sustainability in marketing. This will let Waymo absorb some money from green washing slush funds.
The waymo carries no passengers when it's driving to pick up its next customer. So, its average occupancy (<1) is somehow even worse than that of a car used exclusively by one person.
This is incorrect, because you have used the wrong denominator. The average occupancy of a private car is approximately zero. Most of the time, it just sits there empty.
Again, this is not correct. Parked cars absolutely "participate in traffic" by making the other things in the city further apart and less convenient to reach without cars, and cars parked on the curb are taking up an entire lane of the street, which is half the street in many cases, or in some places like Manhattan the parking lanes are 2/3rds of the street.
the more people use it, the more likely there will be someone nearby to pick up next. and this issue is not exclusive to waymos, it applies to taxis in general.
Cool and natural expansion of their ride services to match Uber for Business.
Not mentioned that I could find in the materials, but ride-sharing/shuttle service would be a natural option to first pilot with Waymo for Business. That would put Waymo one step closer to upgrading legacy public transportation systems.
GP said upgrading, not replacement. Bus or train currently can’t do last mile. Without a viable option people may opt for cars instead of bus or train. This will help, not replace, public transportation. It may make bus/train more popular.
A 5000lb car to move a <200lb person is a terrible last mile option. There has never been a better time for last mile options than today. On the train I see all sorts of bikes, ebikes, escooters, and skateboards being used.
Electric microtransit is awesome in the right situation: able bodied, acceptable weather, minimal cargo, traveling solo, secure vehicle storage at destination. Waymo vehicles will be an excellent tool in the toolkit for moving people safely, efficiently, and affordably.
That right situation describes the vast majority of peoples trips. Not many disabled people hauling a cord of wood through a blizzard very often. Most peoples trips by far are their single occupant commute to and from work.
That's very fortunate or very strategic of you to choose your home and workplace to work so well with the bus routes. Most people in the US do not have a bus stop within 50 meters of their home and workplace (and certainly not a single bus line that operates frequently at all times needed).
I guess by "legacy public transportation systems" you're thinking buses?
GoA 4 trains exist today. GoA 3 is usually more practical and is widely used today. So Waymo would be very late to that and have all the wrong technology stack. But sure, there could be room for the Waymo Driver driving a bus, that may not make as much sense as you imagine but anything is possible.
That depends a lot on where you are. Even with BART running beneath, the 125 capacity articulated buses running every 2 minutes along Mission St in San Francisco are pretty packed at rush hour.
For shorter journeys not having to walk as far to, go down into and up from rail stations can make up for the slower speeds.
