I live 15 minutes from downtown Phoenix, and it took them 2 years to expand to my location. Over 4 years after Waymo launched beta testing here..
Waymo cannot take me on the freeway (backstreets only)
Waymo cannot go to the entire city of Peoria, Surprise, Goodyear..
Waymo cannot go to the entire western half of the state.
If you live 30 minutes from the downtown city centre, there is a 30% chance Waymo can go there. Waymo serves higher-end areas only today (Scottsdale, Tempe, Chandler) - if you live in a poorer area, no Waymo for you.
I have family who lives in Scottsdale and Surprise, Waymo can't take me there.
My dentist is less than a mile from my house, Waymo can't take me there - but can take me to a fashion mall in chandler.
Is it better than Uber/Lyft? Experience wise, sure, but their snail's pace expansion is disheartening. Not to mention the freeway issue.
It will be more profitable for them to deploy cars to new cities at a premium than to deploy them to existing cities to capture more of those cities' markets. We won't see affordable driverless taxi service for many years unless competition appears. After Uber and Cruise imploded, I don't have much hope for that.
Is that true? There's a ton of overhead required to have any presence in a city (all of the fueling/cleaning/repairing/storing/etc depots) that you need to amortize over lots of cars. If they can keep the cars busy, I think they'd much rather have 5,000 cars in one city than 500 cars in 10 cities (with 10x the overhead).
They have a big upfront cost to add a new city, but once they add it, their marginal revenue per car will be higher there (partly because they can be sure to keep those cars busy and partly because they can charge a higher premium).
They have to prepare the infrastructure anyway in all the cities to get to the scale they want to get to, but each new car built is going to be sent to the least scaled city so far.
Does that make sense from a consumer brand perspective though? If everytime I check Waymo there's no capacity or it's super expensive, pretty soon I won't even bother checking it.
