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Waymo has long been considered the US leader in self-driving vehicles, and parent Google before it when Waymo wasn’t yet a brand. Well, I guess there are many people who have considered Tesla the leader for the past several years, but that is based on the assumption that Tesla’s approach is fundamentally better and all the improvements it’s making will suddenly make it leap ahead of Waymo very soon. The problem is that people who have believed that have generally been waiting for that leapfrog moment for almost a decade.
Anyway, getting back to Waymo, one issue the company has had is that its self-driving vehicle system — hardware and software — isn’t exactly cheap. Put another way, it’s expensive. (This is one of the arguments Tesla bulls have had against it.) The various sensors, the expensive cars, the years of R&D — it all adds up to a lot more than a human driving people around in a Nissan LEAF or Toyota Prius. So, how will Waymo ever compete?
The general idea is that Waymo will just drive costs down as it scales up service, and that will eventually lead to lower costs than a human driver requires. But there’s another option that has gotten almost no attention — charging more for a better experience and more features! Perhaps for a better overall service, people will just pay more.
