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Comment by leesec | Hacker News Reader

There are 1.4 million Lyft drivers in US and Toronto.

Waymo is going to buy and retrofit and provide 1.4 million cars?

Those 1.4 millions drivers aren't all driving at the same time. They would only need a fraction of that many cars and they could be built over an extended period of time.

Exactly. Also, having self-driving cars does not mean that you only have self-driving cars in your fleet. They could still employ drivers strategically (in areas where demand is high which in turn will increase profitability and distribution to drivers) while using self-driving cars for commutes.

> ...(in areas where demand is high...

or areas/weather conditions which they know are difficult for their autonomous cars to navigate.

OK so Waymo is going to buy and retrofit and provide 500k cars?

Call it 250k/car. $125B. That's not chump change, even for Google (COH ~$100B).

Optimistically with economies of scale you can get that down, but even without it's within the realm of possibility if they've got the technology working.

Self-driving cars will be feasible only if LIDAR/camera costs go down to $10k/car or lower. No one is going to pay $250k for a self-driving car. At $10k/car, it's $5B for 500k cars, something that Google can easily afford.

Google would have to own the cars that this point tho right? They can't just plop a LiDAR on a car and call it self driving. So 10k+ the cost of car. Maybe 50k.

Not really. They could sell their technology to a car company and all cars sold by that company could be self-driving enabled. Maybe we'll get true ride sharing then. I'm at home and not planning to use my car for the day. It could be used to give someone rides without me having to go drive. Waymo/Lyft could still own some cars but not all.

> OK so Waymo is going to buy and retrofit and provide 500k cars?

If they bought Lyft, they wouldn't have to do that all at once; they could just insert self-driving cars as they were available into the pool.

1) The transition doesn't need to happen overnight nor does the transition need to entirely replace human drivers

2) 1 human driver != 1 autonomous car. While cars need servicing, they don't get hungry or tired or have a family to spend time with

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