>Why does China’s near abroad matter to them? Why do they care about national unity? Why would they want unobstructed access to the deep-water Pacific?
Are questions that answer themselves. But they are the wrong questions.
It’s not China that’s the hostile actor here. It’s not China that’s meddling in distant affairs. This very thread pertains to an unilateral, unprompted hostile action by the US against China. And note that it’s not Trump’s doing. He’ll just do more of it, more openly.
And all of this is very much in line with America’s (at least) seven decades old strategic posture:
Taking out 95%+ of ledging edge semi that adds trillions to western hi tech and supports strategic industries seems worthwhile. Doesn't have to be invasion, but I'd expect grayscale shenanigans on island power grids etc now that there's less reason to hold back.
There is absolutely no way they are remotely close to being revenue positive (unless you're asking strictly if they are charging more than the gas they're burning without counting anything else). They have like 700 very expensive taxis and a burn rate measured in billions of dollars per year.
> (unless you're asking strictly if they are charging more than the gas they're burning without counting anything else).
Yes, I assume they're asking about the operating margin. That's the number everybody cares about. If it's positive, then Waymo can theoretically become revenue positive by adding more cars and regions to their fleet.
That number needs to include car depreciation + any remote 'safety drivers' + the maintenance depot overhead + fuel and insurance + any other costs that scale with the number of cars then.
Exactly. They have revenue in the low 6 figures per vehicle annually, so they probably need to get the number of operational employees per vehicle down to around 1/10. Seems feasible, but they're probably not anywhere close to that yet.
On the other hand, HN has consistently underestimated them for the last two years or so as they've begun to commercialize. Their trajectory has been 10x growth in rides served per year for a while now. At the current scale it's hard to imagine they could grow another 10x in the next year without being close to break even on operating cost.
10x growth would be ~$1B revenue, 7000 cars. Let's assume it requires doubling head count from 2500 to 5000. That's $130K/car, $250K/employee. sounds break-even-ish.
I think it is likely true that only 17 chargers have been built so far. The government subsidized chargers near me were only recently had their locations announced. It is possible the installation could get done fairly quickly now that sites are chosen.
What is relevant is not $5B so much as how much of that $5B has been used already as several commentators on the (better than I would expected for the National Review) comments section of that page note.
I think there probably is an actual niche for space-based solar, depending on how retarget-able it is. Imagine being able to beam 24/7 power to remote mining or military installations, or if you could really steer it, beaming it the receiving station with the highest power prices. If it's competing with diesel that needs to be flown in (or trucked through hazardous terrain), it would be much easier for it to be competitive.
So you would build a solar array in space at enormous cost and then need to truck or fly in a receiver, and build it. Versus trucking and building a solar plant with batteries on site. I still don’t think that it’s ever going to make sense.
Have you seen an EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) for a new mine in pristine wilderness? They take tens of millions of dollars and the better part of a decade. Mining companies would throw money at you if you could turn "ship in and burn a bunch of diesel on-site" or "clear 200 acres of wilderness for solar panels" into "build a small collector on-site one time" in their EIS. That being said, there aren't that many new mine sites going up in the world.
I suspect we could get collectors pretty small and efficient if they were optimized.
I'm skeptical. How much of that EIS cost is the generators? Diesel is well understood, reliable, and in the grand scheme of thing shipping it in isn't that big of a hassle.
Obviously if you are mining something you already need to have shipping concerned worked out. You aren't flying ore out by helicopter. Getting Diesel delivered for your generators will be more expensive than your local gas station, but it's hard to imagine a space solar solution ever being competitive given that you need to build a constellation of the things, launch them into space, and then maintain the array and the ground stations. You also have to convince the mining company that not only will your brand new technology be reliable, but that your business model is sound enough that you won't be out of business a couple of years into their mining operation.
The idea that the company will be doing revenue service in 2 years is complete hogwash. This reeks of investor scam. They would have to be launching prototypes 5 years ago for this to even be in the realm of reason.
Finally: How in the world is the EIS going to be any easier for "we intend to hit one spot on Earth with intense microwave radiation for years on end"? I feel like that is going to raise a lot of flags over at the environmental regulator's office.
> it's hard to imagine a space solar solution ever being competitive given that you need to build a constellation of the things, launch them into space
Someone has to do that, once. Yes, that company will need to sell their offering to many different clients over a long time to recoup those costs. One single mining site is not covering the cost of the initial space deployment, obviously.
> The idea that the company will be doing revenue service in 2 years is complete hogwash. This reeks of investor scam.
Well I certainly agree with that. I'm not defending this particular company.
> How in the world is the EIS going to be any easier for "we intend to hit one spot on Earth with intense microwave radiation for years on end"?
Compared with "we're going to do a billion small explosions of fossil fuels and emit the combustion byproducts into the air for years on end?" All you've done is write a scary-sounding description. Plenty of things that sound scary end up being safe in the end. It doesn't take much imagination to see a possibility that this technology could easily be the best option for delivering power to a highly protected area. Literally any technology sounds ridiculous if you describe it like that.
"You wish to sail a ship up stream by lighting a fire under its decks, I have no time for such nonsense." - Napoleon Bonaparte on the use of ironclads
The economic side of Waymo still makes absolutely no sense to me. Uber, with no heavy capital investment, has been pretty much unprofitable for over a decade. The car companies are low margin. The taxi companies are low margin. Alphabet has like 30% profit margins. Waymo's business proposition is 1) to own a very capital-intensive fleet of bespoke cars with no resale value, 2) employ an extremely expensive team of engineers to develop autonomous driving for them, 3) use this incredible capital investment to try to undercut an industry that is already barely or not at all profitable and earn back their 10s of billions of dollars in investment (and 10s of billions more of costs in the future), one taxi ride at a time.
And that's completely ignoring their issue with surges, as their robot car supply is inherently fixed - they either don't intend to handle surges, or intend to have low utilization of their fleet.
The business case of their robotaxi service is simple, they aim for substantially lower costs compared to traditional taxi services and personal car ownership.
The cost per vehicle could get to something like $50k in the long-term, labor costs could get to maybe 2 people per 10 vehicles and utilization would be substantially higher compared to personally-owned cars.
The vehicles are / will be designed to last for a long time, Dolgov used 400k miles in his napkin calculation.
They can charge more because the user experience is better, so not only lower cost per mile but also higher price.
Cost of developing the technology will become negligible with scale, it's a fixed cost.
They're not just competing with other taxi services, but with all types of road transport. It's a technology that has the potential to be used by most people on the planet, daily.
Regarding surges, there are multiple ways to deal with it, for example surge pricing (which would motivate people to use the service when utilization is low) or using free capacity for delivery.
Their unit costs are at least break-even in San Francisco, and this is with their 5th gen vehicle, 6th gen is supposed to be much cheaper.
I am expecting Waymo to launch their own autonomous vehicle with a simplified body, no steering wheel, etc. They can bring down the cost as they scale. Resale value is not something they should be concerned with, it's a specialized transport that can be utilized for a fairly long time.
Wait - they're 'profitable, excluding all of their employee costs'? Does that just mean they're charging more than the cost of their electricity to generate the tokens?
Presumably this would mean also earning more than the amortized cost of all the hardware they’ve purchased too which is a much higher bar than just electricity costs.
