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Comment by martythemaniak | Hacker News Reader

Right now, Waymo looks like it wants other companies (Honda, Chrysler, Jaguar) to provide it with dumb boxes on wheels. Waymo wants to play different dumb-box-on-wheels providers against each other so it can get the cheapest box-on-wheels.

Waymo then installs it's fancy software on these boxes and uses it's Google connection (Maps, Waze, etc) to put people in those boxes and charge them a hefty profit, at least for a few years while it's the only provider. Waymo wants to be in control and collecting profits, while manufacturers subsist on small margins.

Obviously, this isn't a good situation to be in for Honda etc

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This is a great description of what Waymo is doing, and why Honda/GM etc. don't want to become a commodity provider (thus letting Waymo capture most of the value).

From Waymo's perspective, that's exactly the scenario they want. Focus all your resources on developing a tech advantage that others can't match, and have others in the ecosystem serve the lower-margin stuff.

If this sounds familiar, recall Google Search and Web Content.

It doesn't seem that unreasonable for waymo to expect that car companies would want to sell cars - that's what Honda has been doing for the last 60 years.

If you fast forward, and assume that at some point most cars would be self driving, then you can see why Honda would want to sell more than just the dumb parts.

Aren't cars today mostly "dumb" boxes anyway? (And yet there seems to be enough competition in the field)

I'm thinking what sells will be different when most cars are self-driving. For one, most people probably won't own a car. The buyers will be companies like Waymo, Uber, and Lyft. That's a very different dynamic. Basically saying Honda doesn't want to sell a commodity with small margins.

If you're just hailing a ride, you care a lot less about the brand of car and it's amenities. You care more about the overall ride share service, price, etc. Very little of which Honda would have any effect on if they don't have some skin in the self-driving tech.

True, it might squeeze the profits from some car manufacturers.

I do see a future in very high end & privately owned cars, which will quite possibly generate even higher margins for some manufacturers. Plus there will be a whole new world of innovative design opportunities in the self driving cars realm, in which the self driving part might end up being be the boring and somewhat commodity part.

Cars today have 10's of microprocessors in them and hundreds of millions of lines of code. Not exactly "dumb", but I take your meaning to be "absent AI features".

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