andrewducker | Interesting Links for 06-05-2023

1. For the first time ever, the Green Party run an English council: (tags:politics green uk england )
2. the bumbling WW2 German espionage attempt that was stopped in its tracks at Edinburgh's Waverley Station: (tags:wwii history spying germany uk viaDanielDWilliam )
3. Is there anything finer than watching the Conservatives descending into civil war?: (tags:conservatives politics )
4. The Harmful Side Effect of Cleaning Up the Ocean: (tags:ocean waste cleaning life )
5. If you can't fart in front of your partner, what the hell are you doing together?: (tags:relationships )
6. Science Fiction Movie Lettering: (tags:movies scifi font )
7. Babylon 5 animated movie on the way: (tags:movies Babylon5 animation )
8. Essays on Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies: (tags:movies font scifi viaFanf )
9. Waymo are running a successful driverless taxi service. Why is it expanding so slowly?: (tags:driving automation business )
10. Republican protesters being arrested ahead of coronation: (tags:monarchy protests OhForFucksSake )

So Waymo can scale up quicker once more of the following are more true than they are today

1) experience with scaling up so they know how to do it quicker, cheaper, more effectively
2) reducing the mapping costs as part of the initial set up
3) lowering the capital cost of new vehicles and depots
4) lowering the maintenance costs per vehicle
5) having more reliable and more trusted technology so they can reduce per ride or per vehicle support cots
6) having better cash flows from operations e.g. being profitable or at least positive cash generation

And their nearest competitors will be watching them closely for some second-mover advantage.

The top reply to the comment I linked to is from someone who works on Waymo, who says:

I would only caution that people shouldn't overindex on mapping costs. When you're talking about entering a major metro area, you need lots of vehicles and depots and so on anyway just to provide the eventual service. So the upfront initial map build out is certainly a component of starting in a new geography, but I think people assume it is somehow dominant. It's not.

The current approach then for ride hailing, which requires depots, means that:

> just turn on the tap, buy a million cars and cover the whole country

is not happening anytime soon.

So it sounds like buying depots and setting up the infrastructure to run from them is the big blocker.

But also, from what I can understand, they don't make a profit, so until they can work out how to do so (at scale) they aren't going to do that.

Best I can find on that is: "the company’s “Other Bets,” which include Waymo, lost a staggering $4.8 billion in 2020 and $5.2 billion in 2021" - but I'd love to know about them specifically.

I get the impression that the mapping took time rather than being a huge cost.

You can have a positive cashflow without making a profit, particularly if a lot of your costs are things like depreciation of vehicles or amortisation of capitalised R&D costs.

Also helpful would be if Waymo's fixed costs were a relatively large part of their cost base. Again largely thinking of R&D costs of operations. So that as operations scale the fixed costs are spread more thinly.

I can see a situation where Waymo go from being very unprofitable to generating a fair bit of cash quite suddenly.

Interesting Links for 06-05-2023

9 WAYMO

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