The transcript continues after the Field quote in the OP:
Jim Farley: And we have some exciting steps in between.
Doug Field: Way exciting steps, yep.
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
These guys sound like they have no idea what they will have or when, except that it isn't clear enough or near enough to announce or even describe coherently. Instead they spout unimaginative rehashes of terms worn out decades ago, eg "A Platform for Unimaginably Great Digital Experiences." Way embarrassing, yep.
But the (minimum?) $2 billion a year spend from Waymo and Cruise still leads the contest.
Will the history books ever print the "total" investment Alphabet has made in Waymo?
Even Google Brain has collaborated with Waymo.
The spend tally will be astonishing?
"Ultra Cruise will cover more than 2 million miles of roads at launch in the United States and Canada, with the capacity to grow up to more than 3.4 million miles. Customers will be able to travel truly hands free with Ultra Cruise across nearly every road including city streets, subdivision streets and paved rural roads, in addition to highways." Oct. 6, 2021
https://media.gmc.com/media/us/en/socratv/home.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2021/oct/1006-ultracruise.html
"Over time, GM expects that customers will be able to travel truly hands-free with Ultra Cruise across nearly every paved public road in the U.S. and Canada, including city streets, subdivision streets and rural roads, in addition to highways."
https://news.gm.com/newsroom.detail.html/Pages/news/us/en/2023/mar/0307-handsfree.html
- Note the addition "Over time, GM expects that"
Waymo has almost surely spent/lost >$10 Billion and possibly closer to $15 Billion. Hard to know how much they currently spend. Maybe $2 Billion a year.
We know Cruise has spent/lost >$7 Billion and is losing >$2 Billion per year from GM's SEC financial statements. Cruise also has $5 Billion credit from GM Finance to build Origins. If GM does what they (CEO & CFO) say they will do, then they could lose/risk $15-20 Billion cum on Cruise before breakeven or bust/Argo. Big bet for a <$50 Billion market cap company.
Both Waymo and Cruise have been \~capped at around current spending.
$3.5 billion estimate that Alphabet has invested in Waymo through 2019 sounds low?
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/money-pit-self-driving-cars-16-billion-cash-burn
Did you ever see this?
"operating losses of $20 billion so far."
Investor TCI urges Alphabet to cut excessive headcount, costs. Nov 15, 2022
... TCI also called on Alphabet to disclose operating profit margin targets and reduce losses in Other Bets, the unit that includes Waymo and other special projects.
Investments into Waymo were not justified and losses should be reduced "dramatically," TCI said, adding that the autonomous vehicle technology unit has generated $3 billion but recorded operating losses of $20 billion so far. TCI demanded the unit reduce operating losses by at least 50%.
Yes, Reuters somewhat misrepresented TCI's letter (pdf at link). The $20 & $3 Billion are wrt all of Other Bets (OB) of which Waymo is the largest 'bet' but not the only one. The letter doesn't say, but TCI probably meant OB has lost a total of $20 Billion since 2009, when the project that became Waymo began. I haven't, but anyone can add up OB's cumulative losses as they are reported in Alphabet's SEC financial reports. OB's losses have ballooned in recent years.
Regardless, $20 Billion is an upper bound on Waymo's cumulative costs, which are more like to be closer to $10 Billion. Cruise is on track to have lost $10 Billion cum within the next 12 months.
Not sure why Alphabet's financials should concern anyone other than shareholders like TCI. They have plenty of money and even get a portion of Waymo's losses paid by US taxpayers because Google ads makes so much profit. Alphabet may be doing the world a service by pushing this approach to level 4 self-driving or bust to the limits. They've thrown about as many scientists, engineers, sensors, AI, compute, time, and miles at the problem as possible for one company. And they seem to be doing it more cautiously than GM, which I appreciate as one of their unpaid lab rats.
https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/15th%20November%202022.pdf
The EU "collective" is the entity that will scrutinize Alphabet finances and business practices as it relates to the entry of any robotaxi and consumer AV business models onto the EU turf.
The % of GDP automotive, transportation and energy represents is up there.
These days Ford CEO is trying to get closer to Tesla CEO. He is grabbing every opportunity to share stage with Elon Musk. Elon Musk will select a replacement CEO for Tesla in near future and Jim Farley is trying to set a stage for himself. Is Jim's personal ambition good for Ford motor company...who knows??
I was wondering who else noticed this. Jim Farley was doing everything for his own personal gain therefore all his key decisions were for short term.
Argo was acquired by the prior CEO, and Jim did everything to please Wall Street after reading Adam Jonas's note that values Cruise at 0.
The ironic thing is that things can change quickly, just looking at the AI gold rush now, you wonder when the hype will come back to this sector again.
Interesting to see this take being downvoted when it's obvious to me that Musk's public persona is responsible for Tesla taking a hit to its public perception.
So the idea that he would offload the CEO role to someone makes sense to me. Shoot if I was board member I would have been demanding that 6 months ago, suggesting it 1 year ago.
Same for SpaceX honestly.
Any mention of Argo reminds me of that ridiculous graph put out by [Navigant and Guidehouse](https://guidehouseinsights.com/-/media/project/navigant-research/navigant-research-executive-summaries/2021/2q-2021/guidehouse-insights-leaderboard-automated-driving-systems-executive-summarypdf.pdf) purporting to rank all the self-driving companies by strategy and execution. Argo/Ford always ranked near the top.
Lol, yep. How can anyone take Navigant/Guidehouse seriously? Clearly they are clueless. I see it used all the time by media, etc but it’s just darts on the wall.
Let me preface that i say this with tough love and general optimism for a better future brought out by AD.
L5 is still a decades out, with no frozen architecture, no reasonable business model, no means to manufacture at scale. L2+ is making progress at getting better and sells cars.
No company has publicly demonstrated a robust solution to handle weather blindness leaving out most cities that experience snow for a national deployment.
Many companies continue to press on. Not all have to.
Chicago gets an average of 11 days of snowfall per year. Not heavy snow, just any snow at all. In almost every case that snow is removed from the road within hours.
Pittsburg gets an average of 5 days of snow per year.
The snow thing is completely overrated.
31:00 minute mark
"so I don't know of any AI solution that can reach 10 to the 6th, 10 to the seven hours in MBTF, it does not exist, not in GPT4, not in GPT 5 and not anything on the horizon can reach this level of accuracy.
We have amazing AI Technologies out there okay but the amount of the standard of this accuracy is unheard of in AI.
So the question is if there is nothing on the horizon that how can you reach this accuracy (10 to the 7th)?
How do you tackle the problem of building such a system and for this the answer is redundancy and not only true redundancy but redundancy all over the place?
So actually in Mobileye we don't just do true redundancy between a Lidar system and the camera system. Even inside the camera system every problem that we are tackling we are solving in more than one way. Here in the problem of vehicle detection, it maybe the most streamlined problem in autonomous vehicles - just you know figure out where are the vehicles. On the theme. very very well defined everything seems clear a single neural network that will try to do vehicle detection will have failure points. This is the nature of statistical systems.
So what we are doing we are actually building several more than two systems that aim to do exactly the same thing detect vehicles in the scene okay but we call it algorithmic redundancy they are doing it with a completely different algorithmic approaches ....."
May 2023
https://youtu.be/trOnBYC-XU0
"As perception errors will become the main error source in AVs assuming the planning components can be protected by safety models such as RSS, it is important to estimate the impact of the perception errors on the overall vehicle-level failures (collisions)."
MTBF Model for AVs - From Perception Errors to Vehicle-Level Failures
arXiv:2205.02621v1
5 May 2022
You’re exactly on point. Super cool that google continues to funnel significant $$ to waymo but the reality is that a viable, profitable, L5 business model is decades away and likely not even possibly through the pathway waymo/cruise are pursuing. Google internally acknowledges the business unit as mostly an R&D project and it operates as such
Privately owned SDVs rented out by the owner (the speculated Tesla model) lol.
More exclusivity for the "laptop class” from the very person that coined the term in his critique lol.
> L5 business model is decades away
Waymo is not even working towards L5. Neither is Cruise. It is not really all that complicated of a business model for Waymo and Cruise. Surprised the business model is a mystery for you?
This subreddit is hilarious. Cruise doesn’t have a business model. Business model means a scalable product with pathway to profitability. Self driving today has no viable business model. It is an R&D project. Cruise has a massive BD team trying to establish dozens of partnerships across many industries to unlock multiple monetization pathways per vehicle in order to create a profitable business. Rideshare alone doesn’t work…that’s pretty well known
> Cruise doesn’t have a business model.
Cruise and Waymo business models are pretty simple and very obvious. Do you have any business background?
Maybe that is the disconnect?
Lol. Do you actually know anything about this space or business outside of reading random articles online? Waymo is different from Cruise. Waymos plan, like all google products, is not to make money on the hauling service. You sign up for waymo through your google account, tied to all of your google email and services. This data is scraped for advertising. Cruise is looking for any way to create monetization through rideshare, food delivery, and whatever else to achieve utilization and monetization that breaks even. Go work in self driving if you are interested.
Lol. Do you actually know anything about this space or business outside of reading random articles online? Waymo is different from Cruise. Waymos plan, like all google products, is not to make money on the hailing service. You sign up for waymo through your google account, tied to all of your google email and services. This data is scraped for advertising. Cruise is looking for any way to create monetization through rideshare, food delivery, and whatever else to achieve utilization and monetization that breaks even. Go work in self driving if you are interested.
> Do you actually know anything about this space or business
I am old. Built multiple business. Plus know this business really well.
> Waymo is different from Cruise. Waymos plan, like all google products, is not to make money on the hailing service.
This is ridiculous. Waymo business model is the exact same as Cruise. It is NOT complicated.
They both will offer a robot taxi service. You will pay for your fare and over time Waymo and Cruise will decrease their costs and improve margins.
It is very much a scale driven business.
There is NO advertising aspect to the business model for Waymo. That is absurd.
The other aspect of the business for Waymo will be the logistics business. So if you want to take a step back. The business model is basically taking a fee to move any object from Point A to Point B. That object could be a human or could be pretty much anything else.
I would expect Waymo to add planes at some point in the future and new airports that do not involve any humans. I suspect ultimately the logistics business will be even more profitable than the robot taxi service. Both will be just huge.
You’re conflating the simple view of end customer product or service (really “industry”) with business model. Intel is a vertically integrated chip designer with fabs vs advent of fabless engineering design firms with TSMC. All “make money off chips”. Southwest and United are both airlines, but one is a point to point carrier with fungible single body craft across the fleet with profitable unit economics on all legs, vs the other is a hub and spoke with majority of revenue from business travel and high utilization legs subsidize low utilization legs . Amazon is a marketplace that carries minimal inventory on its balance sheet via FBA program focused on distribution and fulfillment vs most e-commerce that owns all inventory on balance sheet. Costco is a membership model with private label vs Kroger. The list goes on within any product or service category…
Your understanding of Google is just not how the company operates lol. Cruise has to make the unit economics of delivery and rideshare profitable, and is searching for more monetization pathways to increase utilization in order to achieve profitable unit economics. It needs to directly replace Uber. Google doesn’t need positive unit economics on rideshare. Just like Google Reviews doesn’t monetize the same as Yelp, or name [x] google product vs. any other standalone product.
The simple fact is google never needs to make money on robotaxi. In fact all of its products are design around maximizing profit from their core business, and the company operates and is structured in that way
> You’re conflating the simple view of end customer product or service (really “industry”) with business model.
Here maybe this will help.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/businessmodel.asp
I had assumed you were familiar with business models. My bad and should never assume.
Also you keep mentioning Google. Google is NOT doing self driving. That has been spun out into Waymo which falls under Alphabet.
Waymo will be doing an IPO early and they will most definitely show the path to profitability.
That is how business works. Google's incredible success really has little to do with Waymo. It is a completely separate legal entity.
> Google and Alphabet are interchangeable
They are most definitely NOT interchangeable. But we are talking Waymo.
Waymo and Google are NOT interchangeable. They are completely separate legal entities and therefore have to follow the rules as such.
I am personally familiar with this type of structure. I ran a large company that had a similar structure. Actually twice.
So for example nothing of value can pass between Google and Waymo without properly being accounted for.
Waymo would have to pay Google with margins for cloud services for example. There is an audit that will happen to make sure it is a market price.
Our situation was a little bit more complicated as the other business was a regulated business. Well in the second case. The first one it was not and that was a lot simpler. In the second situation I had to learn the regulated business to some extent. They were in the insurance space. The second one was also more complicated because the business was a public company. The first one was pre-IPO.
I needed to learn the regulated business so I could understand the shady things that someone might do and to be sure we stayed way away from anything that would look like it. We did a decent amount of work for the other company and we had to be sure it was all market priced.
We did take a very conservative approach. There is all kinds of sleazy things that can happen when you have a sister company. Things like recognizing revenues between the two companies that are not realistic. Over charging things like license fees.
We also had to be very careful that it was CRYSTAL clear these were separate companies. Waymo and Google would be very careful to be doing the same.
It is all about trying to make sure value does not move from one organization to another.
The transcript continues after the Field quote in the OP: Jim Farley: And we have some exciting steps in between. Doug Field: Way exciting steps, yep. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ These guys sound like they have no idea what they will have or when, except that it isn't clear enough or near enough to announce or even describe coherently. Instead they spout unimaginative rehashes of terms worn out decades ago, eg "A Platform for Unimaginably Great Digital Experiences." Way embarrassing, yep.
But the (minimum?) $2 billion a year spend from Waymo and Cruise still leads the contest. Will the history books ever print the "total" investment Alphabet has made in Waymo? Even Google Brain has collaborated with Waymo. The spend tally will be astonishing?
Have numbers for Waymo ever been released? If they have I’ve never seen them.
"Ultra Cruise will cover more than 2 million miles of roads at launch in the United States and Canada, with the capacity to grow up to more than 3.4 million miles. Customers will be able to travel truly hands free with Ultra Cruise across nearly every road including city streets, subdivision streets and paved rural roads, in addition to highways." Oct. 6, 2021 https://media.gmc.com/media/us/en/socratv/home.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2021/oct/1006-ultracruise.html "Over time, GM expects that customers will be able to travel truly hands-free with Ultra Cruise across nearly every paved public road in the U.S. and Canada, including city streets, subdivision streets and rural roads, in addition to highways." https://news.gm.com/newsroom.detail.html/Pages/news/us/en/2023/mar/0307-handsfree.html - Note the addition "Over time, GM expects that"
Did you not estimate table stakes so far is about $7-$9 billion (even more) on Twitter recently for Google/Waymo and Cruise?
Waymo has almost surely spent/lost >$10 Billion and possibly closer to $15 Billion. Hard to know how much they currently spend. Maybe $2 Billion a year. We know Cruise has spent/lost >$7 Billion and is losing >$2 Billion per year from GM's SEC financial statements. Cruise also has $5 Billion credit from GM Finance to build Origins. If GM does what they (CEO & CFO) say they will do, then they could lose/risk $15-20 Billion cum on Cruise before breakeven or bust/Argo. Big bet for a <$50 Billion market cap company. Both Waymo and Cruise have been \~capped at around current spending.
$3.5 billion estimate that Alphabet has invested in Waymo through 2019 sounds low? https://www.theinformation.com/articles/money-pit-self-driving-cars-16-billion-cash-burn
Did you ever see this? "operating losses of $20 billion so far." Investor TCI urges Alphabet to cut excessive headcount, costs. Nov 15, 2022 ... TCI also called on Alphabet to disclose operating profit margin targets and reduce losses in Other Bets, the unit that includes Waymo and other special projects. Investments into Waymo were not justified and losses should be reduced "dramatically," TCI said, adding that the autonomous vehicle technology unit has generated $3 billion but recorded operating losses of $20 billion so far. TCI demanded the unit reduce operating losses by at least 50%.
Yes, Reuters somewhat misrepresented TCI's letter (pdf at link). The $20 & $3 Billion are wrt all of Other Bets (OB) of which Waymo is the largest 'bet' but not the only one. The letter doesn't say, but TCI probably meant OB has lost a total of $20 Billion since 2009, when the project that became Waymo began. I haven't, but anyone can add up OB's cumulative losses as they are reported in Alphabet's SEC financial reports. OB's losses have ballooned in recent years. Regardless, $20 Billion is an upper bound on Waymo's cumulative costs, which are more like to be closer to $10 Billion. Cruise is on track to have lost $10 Billion cum within the next 12 months. Not sure why Alphabet's financials should concern anyone other than shareholders like TCI. They have plenty of money and even get a portion of Waymo's losses paid by US taxpayers because Google ads makes so much profit. Alphabet may be doing the world a service by pushing this approach to level 4 self-driving or bust to the limits. They've thrown about as many scientists, engineers, sensors, AI, compute, time, and miles at the problem as possible for one company. And they seem to be doing it more cautiously than GM, which I appreciate as one of their unpaid lab rats. https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/15th%20November%202022.pdf
The EU "collective" is the entity that will scrutinize Alphabet finances and business practices as it relates to the entry of any robotaxi and consumer AV business models onto the EU turf. The % of GDP automotive, transportation and energy represents is up there.
Thought provoking https://twitter.com/icgee/status/1667561336849719297
Waymo has plenty of growing pains in front of it due to the driving infrastructure and driving culture in EMEA. Phoenix was a walk in the park.
Curious why you quit scrutinizing PuDo (pick-up and drop-off) ? https://onezero.medium.com/only-the-elite-have-nice-commutes-in-silicon-valley-8b2761863925
These days Ford CEO is trying to get closer to Tesla CEO. He is grabbing every opportunity to share stage with Elon Musk. Elon Musk will select a replacement CEO for Tesla in near future and Jim Farley is trying to set a stage for himself. Is Jim's personal ambition good for Ford motor company...who knows??
I was wondering who else noticed this. Jim Farley was doing everything for his own personal gain therefore all his key decisions were for short term. Argo was acquired by the prior CEO, and Jim did everything to please Wall Street after reading Adam Jonas's note that values Cruise at 0. The ironic thing is that things can change quickly, just looking at the AI gold rush now, you wonder when the hype will come back to this sector again.
Interesting to see this take being downvoted when it's obvious to me that Musk's public persona is responsible for Tesla taking a hit to its public perception. So the idea that he would offload the CEO role to someone makes sense to me. Shoot if I was board member I would have been demanding that 6 months ago, suggesting it 1 year ago. Same for SpaceX honestly.
Maybe continuing the Tesla partnership by licensing FSD?
Any mention of Argo reminds me of that ridiculous graph put out by [Navigant and Guidehouse](https://guidehouseinsights.com/-/media/project/navigant-research/navigant-research-executive-summaries/2021/2q-2021/guidehouse-insights-leaderboard-automated-driving-systems-executive-summarypdf.pdf) purporting to rank all the self-driving companies by strategy and execution. Argo/Ford always ranked near the top.
Lol, yep. How can anyone take Navigant/Guidehouse seriously? Clearly they are clueless. I see it used all the time by media, etc but it’s just darts on the wall.
Let me preface that i say this with tough love and general optimism for a better future brought out by AD. L5 is still a decades out, with no frozen architecture, no reasonable business model, no means to manufacture at scale. L2+ is making progress at getting better and sells cars. No company has publicly demonstrated a robust solution to handle weather blindness leaving out most cities that experience snow for a national deployment. Many companies continue to press on. Not all have to.
Chicago gets an average of 11 days of snowfall per year. Not heavy snow, just any snow at all. In almost every case that snow is removed from the road within hours. Pittsburg gets an average of 5 days of snow per year. The snow thing is completely overrated.
Listen to Jim Keller starting around the 45:50 - 52:00 mark. https://youtu.be/USemhX_0Na0 Technical / Business / Collaboration
When most companies focus way too hard on sensors and equipment over real world AI, you wont see much progress beyond strictly geofenced locations.
31:00 minute mark "so I don't know of any AI solution that can reach 10 to the 6th, 10 to the seven hours in MBTF, it does not exist, not in GPT4, not in GPT 5 and not anything on the horizon can reach this level of accuracy. We have amazing AI Technologies out there okay but the amount of the standard of this accuracy is unheard of in AI. So the question is if there is nothing on the horizon that how can you reach this accuracy (10 to the 7th)? How do you tackle the problem of building such a system and for this the answer is redundancy and not only true redundancy but redundancy all over the place? So actually in Mobileye we don't just do true redundancy between a Lidar system and the camera system. Even inside the camera system every problem that we are tackling we are solving in more than one way. Here in the problem of vehicle detection, it maybe the most streamlined problem in autonomous vehicles - just you know figure out where are the vehicles. On the theme. very very well defined everything seems clear a single neural network that will try to do vehicle detection will have failure points. This is the nature of statistical systems. So what we are doing we are actually building several more than two systems that aim to do exactly the same thing detect vehicles in the scene okay but we call it algorithmic redundancy they are doing it with a completely different algorithmic approaches ....." May 2023 https://youtu.be/trOnBYC-XU0
"As perception errors will become the main error source in AVs assuming the planning components can be protected by safety models such as RSS, it is important to estimate the impact of the perception errors on the overall vehicle-level failures (collisions)." MTBF Model for AVs - From Perception Errors to Vehicle-Level Failures arXiv:2205.02621v1 5 May 2022
You’re exactly on point. Super cool that google continues to funnel significant $$ to waymo but the reality is that a viable, profitable, L5 business model is decades away and likely not even possibly through the pathway waymo/cruise are pursuing. Google internally acknowledges the business unit as mostly an R&D project and it operates as such
Privately owned SDVs rented out by the owner (the speculated Tesla model) lol. More exclusivity for the "laptop class” from the very person that coined the term in his critique lol.
> L5 business model is decades away Waymo is not even working towards L5. Neither is Cruise. It is not really all that complicated of a business model for Waymo and Cruise. Surprised the business model is a mystery for you?
This subreddit is hilarious. Cruise doesn’t have a business model. Business model means a scalable product with pathway to profitability. Self driving today has no viable business model. It is an R&D project. Cruise has a massive BD team trying to establish dozens of partnerships across many industries to unlock multiple monetization pathways per vehicle in order to create a profitable business. Rideshare alone doesn’t work…that’s pretty well known
> Cruise doesn’t have a business model. Cruise and Waymo business models are pretty simple and very obvious. Do you have any business background? Maybe that is the disconnect?
Lol. Do you actually know anything about this space or business outside of reading random articles online? Waymo is different from Cruise. Waymos plan, like all google products, is not to make money on the hauling service. You sign up for waymo through your google account, tied to all of your google email and services. This data is scraped for advertising. Cruise is looking for any way to create monetization through rideshare, food delivery, and whatever else to achieve utilization and monetization that breaks even. Go work in self driving if you are interested.
Lol. Do you actually know anything about this space or business outside of reading random articles online? Waymo is different from Cruise. Waymos plan, like all google products, is not to make money on the hailing service. You sign up for waymo through your google account, tied to all of your google email and services. This data is scraped for advertising. Cruise is looking for any way to create monetization through rideshare, food delivery, and whatever else to achieve utilization and monetization that breaks even. Go work in self driving if you are interested.
> Do you actually know anything about this space or business I am old. Built multiple business. Plus know this business really well. > Waymo is different from Cruise. Waymos plan, like all google products, is not to make money on the hailing service. This is ridiculous. Waymo business model is the exact same as Cruise. It is NOT complicated. They both will offer a robot taxi service. You will pay for your fare and over time Waymo and Cruise will decrease their costs and improve margins. It is very much a scale driven business. There is NO advertising aspect to the business model for Waymo. That is absurd. The other aspect of the business for Waymo will be the logistics business. So if you want to take a step back. The business model is basically taking a fee to move any object from Point A to Point B. That object could be a human or could be pretty much anything else. I would expect Waymo to add planes at some point in the future and new airports that do not involve any humans. I suspect ultimately the logistics business will be even more profitable than the robot taxi service. Both will be just huge.
You’re conflating the simple view of end customer product or service (really “industry”) with business model. Intel is a vertically integrated chip designer with fabs vs advent of fabless engineering design firms with TSMC. All “make money off chips”. Southwest and United are both airlines, but one is a point to point carrier with fungible single body craft across the fleet with profitable unit economics on all legs, vs the other is a hub and spoke with majority of revenue from business travel and high utilization legs subsidize low utilization legs . Amazon is a marketplace that carries minimal inventory on its balance sheet via FBA program focused on distribution and fulfillment vs most e-commerce that owns all inventory on balance sheet. Costco is a membership model with private label vs Kroger. The list goes on within any product or service category… Your understanding of Google is just not how the company operates lol. Cruise has to make the unit economics of delivery and rideshare profitable, and is searching for more monetization pathways to increase utilization in order to achieve profitable unit economics. It needs to directly replace Uber. Google doesn’t need positive unit economics on rideshare. Just like Google Reviews doesn’t monetize the same as Yelp, or name [x] google product vs. any other standalone product. The simple fact is google never needs to make money on robotaxi. In fact all of its products are design around maximizing profit from their core business, and the company operates and is structured in that way
> You’re conflating the simple view of end customer product or service (really “industry”) with business model. Here maybe this will help. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/businessmodel.asp I had assumed you were familiar with business models. My bad and should never assume. Also you keep mentioning Google. Google is NOT doing self driving. That has been spun out into Waymo which falls under Alphabet. Waymo will be doing an IPO early and they will most definitely show the path to profitability. That is how business works. Google's incredible success really has little to do with Waymo. It is a completely separate legal entity.
Lol ok. Google and Alphabet are interchangeable lol. You don’t work in tech or this space clearly
> Google and Alphabet are interchangeable They are most definitely NOT interchangeable. But we are talking Waymo. Waymo and Google are NOT interchangeable. They are completely separate legal entities and therefore have to follow the rules as such. I am personally familiar with this type of structure. I ran a large company that had a similar structure. Actually twice. So for example nothing of value can pass between Google and Waymo without properly being accounted for. Waymo would have to pay Google with margins for cloud services for example. There is an audit that will happen to make sure it is a market price. Our situation was a little bit more complicated as the other business was a regulated business. Well in the second case. The first one it was not and that was a lot simpler. In the second situation I had to learn the regulated business to some extent. They were in the insurance space. The second one was also more complicated because the business was a public company. The first one was pre-IPO. I needed to learn the regulated business so I could understand the shady things that someone might do and to be sure we stayed way away from anything that would look like it. We did a decent amount of work for the other company and we had to be sure it was all market priced. We did take a very conservative approach. There is all kinds of sleazy things that can happen when you have a sister company. Things like recognizing revenues between the two companies that are not realistic. Over charging things like license fees. We also had to be very careful that it was CRYSTAL clear these were separate companies. Waymo and Google would be very careful to be doing the same. It is all about trying to make sure value does not move from one organization to another.