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Comment by omneity | Hacker News Reader

Uber moving strategically into the beginning of their late game. Interesting times.

I suspect that Uber's main added value is a "safer" way for Waymo to increase the reach of their technology with lesser blowback against their own reputation (Uber did this, Uber did that ...), and to make it more mature, even more than the money potentially being exchanged here.

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> a "safer" way for Waymo to increase the reach of their technology with lesser blowback against their own reputation (Uber did this, Uber did that ...)

They are still Waymo-branded vehicles. Attempting deflection wouldn’t go well. This is a risky integration pursued for scale.

I think it also helps Waymo fill in the gaps between markets that they support. Customers get an app that works pretty much anywhere, and Waymo can drop into any given market with 10k self driving cars pretty much overnight.

This. Spinning up an Uber app clone is easy, actually running the service and having it available everywhere is hard and not something Google is likely to be good at.

Do we have a proof that this means that they're ready for the late game, as opposed to just investors being desperate?

> proof that this means that they're ready for the late game, as opposed to just investors being desperate

Whose investors? Uber isn’t taking technology risk. And Waymo has worked in Phoenix for years. Partnering with Uber is a show of confidence in that it suggests their demand limited.

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