> As of April 11, there were 65 Mercedes autonomous vehicles available for sale in California ... One of those has since been sold, which marks the first sale of an autonomous Mercedes in California ...
Those are pretty small numbers and strike me more as them testing the waters. It's neat to see some potential in the space after what felt like a total collapse with Waymo and Tesla especially not living up to expectations. It's not clear how good the tech is here, but it's a political victory for the space if nothing else.
Waymo is amazing and has fully replaced Uber for me in SF. They're also expanding to the entire peninsula from SF down to Cupertino - you're out of date on this.
Waymo driving in SF is way better than human. It's not timid either.
This Mercedes post is marketing - it's not really what people consider autonomous given the constraints.
> "Drivers can activate Mercedes's technology, called Drive Pilot, when certain conditions are met, including in heavy traffic jams, during the daytime, on specific California and Nevada freeways, and when the car is traveling less than 40 mph. Drivers can focus on other activities until the vehicle alerts them to resume control. The technology does not work on roads that haven't been pre-approved by Mercedes, including on freeways in other states."
The above makes it nearly useless and far less useful than what Tesla has been shipping for years imo.
How is Waymo pricing compared to Uber or other ride share?
I originally thought autonomous cars would greatly reduce costs but considering the tens of billions dumped into these companies, they can't charge lower prices as they have to recoup investments.
It's a dollar or two more expensive than the corresponding Uber (non-shared) fare in my experience, so a bit less after tips. Keep in mind that the "true" price of these services probably isn't the biggest pricing factor right now. The cost is a way to manage demand, get some additional income, and investigate what the market will bear.
> As of the latest available information, Waymo is not yet profitable. Alphabet’s Q2 2023 earnings report indicated that its “Other Bets” category, which includes Waymo, had revenues of $285 million and an operating loss of $813 million. This was a decrease in operating loss from $1.34 billion in the second quarter of 2022, but still significant. Over the last five years, “Other Bets” has generated $3 billion in cumulative revenue but incurred $20 billion in operating losses, with Waymo constituting the bulk of these losses.
I just don't see the end game. Are marginal rides not profitable even at Uber fates? Uber for instance was losing money because they were taking rev from profitable cities to give incentives and build up drivers in the new markets. But Waymo doesn't have that problem. Is it just GPU spend that they can eventually stop?
Nothing about that quote indicates that waymo loses money on marginal rides, rather that it loses money in aggregate which is not particularly surprising considering low overall volume , r&d overhead of both head count and things like cars and facilities to store said cars
I suspect it's vaguely near gross profit, that is excluding almost all the expensive engineers, marketing, R&D costs, new silicon development costs, etc. It's not remotely operationally profitable though, you're right.
The business model is pretty simple. Robotaxis can operate much cheaper than humans and simultaneously provide a better service. Competing at the same cost as existing services makes them massively profitable. You can unlock additional efficiencies through things like fleet management, not supporting unprofitable cities the way Uber has to, vehicles designed for longer service lives and so on. Most companies plan to use that market (and closely associated ones like food delivery) as a profitable beachhead to scale down the technology to the point where it can be applied more ubiquitously in things like consumer vehicles. Some are more vocal about this than others.
I wonder if anyone has done an analysis looking at a set of tasks and ordering them according to the ease of automating them compared to the cost of labor.
Self-driving cars seem like a poor choice of market, since the task is very complex and there are also many people worldwide who are willing to work as drivers.
The sweet spot would be a task that is easy to automate and also doesn't have much human competition. Obviously the OG automation case of assembly lines fits this. LLMs can occupy this space since there are probably more people who can drive a car than can write grammatically correct natural language. I would put self-driving trains in this category as well but that's an outsider's perspective.
> originally thought autonomous cars would greatly reduce costs
In general, it's a mistake to think that selling price has anything to do with the costs. The price is simply what the market will bear. If people are paying Uber $x for a service, waymo would be stupid to price the same service much lower than that. If their costs are much lower, they would rather make that much more profit. If the rider wants a small piece of that pie they can invest in the business (via stocks in the case of Google).
I think more realistically google right now does not want to undercut uber and by extension real drivers who're doing it for a living.
They don't need that kind of bad publicity when potentially the licenses they operate under could be pulled given enough political pressure.
I wouldn't consider current pricing indicative of what it might ultimately be, consider that if aggressive enough google could divert a big portion of the countries car spend to themselves.
In addition to what others have said about pricing, you need to compare Waymo with Uber Black, not UberX or shared rides. Waymo says they are aiming to be a premium service because the cars (Jaguar I-pace) are much nicer and, of course, there’s the novelty of not having a driver.
At least in my city (state, really) the police have vacated their duties to enforce roadworthiness because hand-wringing quasiliberals said that enforcing the laws against bald tires and missing headlights was hurting the poor. Also my state does not have and never had annual safety inspections.
It's not a novelty that the driver in the driverless car won't hit on, or harrass a woman taking a trip late a night in an altered state. Uber and Lyft have paid out to settle thousands of lawsuits brought by women who get assaulted by drivers.
> "Drivers can activate Mercedes's technology. called Drive Pilot, when certain conditions are met, including in heavy traffic jams, during the daytime, on specific California and Nevada freeways, and when the car is traveling less than 40 mph. Drivers can focus on other activities until the vehicle alerts them to resume control. The technology does not work on roads that haven't been pre-approved by Mercedes, including on freeways in other states."
It's remarkable how often these significant limitations are ignored.
The difference between SAE Level 3 versus Level 2 is liability, not functionality. Conceptually, it would be relatively simple to create a Level 3 system that only worked in parking lots and never drove over 5 MPH. And yes, such a system would be "Level 3," which naively sounds better than "Level 2" because the number is higher.
But you could compare such a system that works only in parking lots against Tesla's Supervised FSD Level 2 system which controls the vehicle at prevailing speeds on all city streets and highways, executes left and right turns, stops at traffic controls, executes U-turns, parks, and everything else. Tesla doesn't want to assume liability yet because they are still iterating fast. The last few builds have been released about two weeks apart.
The functional domain of a Level 2 system can be significantly greater than a Level 3 system. And that is the case when comparing Tesla Supervised FSD versus Mercedes Drivepilot. It remains commendable for Mercedes to take on liability, but we should not kid ourselves. Doing so is a play for cheap media wins and punchy-sounding milestones like what we see in this article. It's not actually moving autonomy forward in any meaningful way when compared alongside Waymo and Tesla FSD. The scope of the Mercedes system is simply too narrow.
> The difference between SAE Level 3 versus Level 2 is liability, not functionality. Conceptually, it would be relatively simple to create a Level 3 system that only worked in parking lots and never drove over 5 MPH. And yes, such a system would be "Level 3," which naively sounds better than "Level 2" because the number is higher.
No one’s going to take liability if their technology is not ready for the conditions they want to work in. And no one’s creating systems that only work in 5 mph parking lots just to claim the L3 title. So comparison to hypothetical systems aren’t useful.
The limitations of the Mercedes system are only a little higher than the hypothetical parking lot Level 3 system. The point is to emphasize that a narrow Level 3 system is not very interesting compared to a broad Level 2 system. Technical capability > appeasing lawyers.
Uhh but a narrow Level 3 system will also in general do broad Level 2. You think these Mercedes can't do adaptive cruise control at 60mph wherever you want to activate it?
I would take a car with reliable, narrow L3 and reliable broad L2 (especially when the L3 is reliable in the most frustrating driving conditions to encounter) over broad pseudo-L3 any day.
Waymos are incredible, but Teslas are a much worse tradeoff than what MB is proposing here in my opinion.
> Uhh but a narrow Level 3 system will also in general do broad Level 2. You think these Mercedes can't do adaptive cruise control at 60mph wherever you want to activate it?
The Mercedes system will absolutely not follow navigation routes, change lanes, execute right and left turns, execute U-turns, stop at traffic controls, and so on. All of which FSD will do.
A broadly capable Level 2 system that is suitable for 99% of driving scenarios (with supervision) is way more interesting than a tightly constrained Level 3 system that is only suitable for <1% of driving scenarios.
> The difference between SAE Level 3 versus Level 2 is liability, not functionality.
No it's not. The difference is functionality, proof that the vendor believes they've achieved that difference is most clearly communicated via liability.
> The scope of the Mercedes system is simply too narrow
Producing systems that perform reliably under the prescribed conditions is called "good engineering."
> Tesla doesn't want to assume liability yet because they are still iterating fast.
I would guess the reason for not wanting to assume liability is not their update cadence, but the same reason that made Mobileye fire them as a customer.
Level 3 actually lets you take a break while driving. L2 systems don’t and therefore IMO don't provide significant benefits.
More range and more driving conditions just don’t matter here if I can’t read a book on the way to work then it’s not self driving just advanced cruse control.
You can read a book on the way to work. Before going fully remote, I did it every weekday, using a magnificent piece of technology called public transit.
And level 5 beats level 3, however I don’t have any public transport options on the way to work and nobody is selling level 5 self driving cars. Mercedes hasn’t mapped my roads either, but that’s a lower barrier than getting nationwide public transportation setup.
And this is the why I think pouring money on autonomous driving is a net negative for most but a small group of shareholders: a public transit infrastructure is expensive, but the net benefits are immense, and can be had today.
Every dollar spent on private cars reduces that infrastructure, and that's not just my own thinking, but also that of car manufacturers, as evident by their lobbying to derail public transit projects.
Further I don’t live in a city so my local government has zero interest in public transportation beyond school buses. We just don’t have the density where it makes any sense. When I did live in a city the issue wasn’t drivers it was the inability to scale roads for local demand. Self driving cars don’t change anything about that equation.
...those same Mercedes cars that have Level 3 also have a much more "powerful" and flexible Level 2 system built in, but this requires to keep a hand on the wheel and pay attention to the road (mentioned towards the end of this video, at around 6:15: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLz95Gw7g8c)
What are you referring to with Waymo? They were still operating in LA and SF as of this week. Do you mean Cruise (owned by GM)?
In any case, the Mercedes system is what's known as a conditionally autonomous system. It can drive itself under specific conditions, but a human is still involved in operating the vehicle as soon as it exits that design domain. Waymo (and Cruise) are fully autonomous systems. Humans are not involved in the control loop and the vehicles will stop if they leave their operational domain. Tesla FSD is not an autonomous system at all and requires a human to always be in control.
Waymo and Cruise have failed to scale and it doesn't look like they ever will. It's difficult to find a single article with the full context, but around 2017 as Waymo started giving limited rides to the public, everyone though the problem had been solved. There was a flood of startups hoping to be a strong second mover in the space, and then basically nothing. Expectations have shifted over time, but 7 years later and there's been only small incremental progress.
> In any case, the Mercedes system is what's known as a conditionally autonomous system.
Yes, but it's significant progress if it reaches consumer hands. This sounds like the typical Waymo marketing of "you can't get to Level 4 through Level 3". I bought into this at one point, but Waymo and Cruise have demonstrated that going straight to Level 4 with $100k+ (probably much more than that) of sensors and corresponding maintenance doesn't scale.
Waymo is the only one actually scaling driverless taxis. They’ve gone from providing public rides in 1 city (Phoenix) to 3 cities (+SF, LA) with a 4th one (+Austin) coming soon. They’ve given more than a million rides, with the majority of them coming in the last year. No one else is doing this.
If other companies thought they’d hitch on to Waymo after they started giving rides in 2017, then that’s on them. Because Waymo has been pretty clear that their scaling is going to be methodical and not instantaneous.
"Taxi service in a congested urban area" is probably the market where it makes the most sense. Trips are pretty short, cars stay in the a local area where they have hyper-accurate mapping data, and are likely to quickly find another passenger or can return to a nearby parking/waiting area.
Waymo won't keep a monopoly on this forever. There are still high barriers to entry, but they will fall sooner or later. If there is money to be made, competition will come.
Indeed congested urban areas are their market. That's exactly why they are in two of the largest taxi markets (SF and LA) where it doesn't snow.
I'm not sure about barriers to entry lowering soon. First off, this is an incredibly hard problem no one else seems to have cracked (and even Waymo has a long way to go). Second, they could help influence regulation that requires extremely high safety records, mandatory sensors, etc. which could make it harder for others to compete. It's all very early though.
i also find it difficult to find data on how much they're scaling but anecdotally, i've been seeing a steady increase in waymo vehicles all year, here in tempe i encounter at least 3-4 every day it seems, driving in some pretty impressively heavy pedestrian traffic and on freeways too
I'm curious why Waymo is considered to be not living up to expectations? They operate in limited number of places, but seem to be just fine driving there (of course some people will not like them regardless). Tesla - yes, not comparable..
"Even if Waymo's schedule slips a few months and it introduces a self-driving car service in the middle of 2018 instead of late 2017, that will still give the company a multiple-year head start over most of its rivals. And it would confound skeptics who insist that full self-driving technology is still years away."
Ok, maybe the as-of-2024 product is living up to the 2018-horizon expectations from 2017 (as long as your expectations were not at the high end of the range at the time).
The people who didn't get a driving license in 2017 because what was the point if cars would drive themselves in a couple of years may care. Even more so if they finally have to wait to 2050.
Anyway, the question was about expectations - and those came with a timeline.
> Anyway, the question was about expectations - and those came with a timeline.
The mention was of a "collapse" in the space, too-- which can't be true if we're still getting there.
I expect the timeframe of 2030 is when we get most of the way there. Even exponential growth takes time to reach a big world. Most of what Waymo has left to do is rollout.
Waymo does not sell cars. They are in a different business.
I don’t really know the numbers but Waymo adds something like 50k worth of hardware into the cars. That is not a viable approach for consumer cars (Mercedes, Tesla, etc).
Maybe. Not everything ever manages to make it to low cost, high volume- either because there is no reasonable path to making it that cheap, or because there are not sufficiently large markets in the in-between prices.
Given that Mercedes is taking responsibility for accidents caused by the system I can see why they would launch cautiously. Less of an issue if it goes wrong.
Are there human “watchers” in your waymos? Or are they completely autonomous?
They just started testing in my city and have humans sitting there not doing anything. So it makes for kind of an uncomfortable ride. Chitchatting with the Uber driver is the worst part of my ride, so I’m looking forward to just robots.
In SF, all the Waymo rides I've taken are completely autonomous... no watchers in the car. This has been the regular mode of operation here for quite awhile.
This isn't to say you won't see Waymo cars with drivers/watchers, but most of those seem to be transiting areas were they don't operate.
Of course there are no people in the car. I can’t take a walk anywhere without seeing at least one Waymo drive by without anyone in the front seat. This is old news. It’s really really funny reading these takes. We’re living in the future and there are still people making predictions about it.
Those are pretty small numbers and strike me more as them testing the waters. It's neat to see some potential in the space after what felt like a total collapse with Waymo and Tesla especially not living up to expectations. It's not clear how good the tech is here, but it's a political victory for the space if nothing else.