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Comment by simpleintheory | Hacker News Reader

I think the most interesting part is that the article says that Waymo's handing its operations to Moove. It seems like Waymo's trying to become a software provider while having other companies handle the capital-intensive parts.

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> having other companies handle the capital-intensive parts.

Waymo definitely wants to outsource the areas where they don't have special expertise (i.e. Waymo is 100x better at driving, but not 100x better at washing and vacuuming cars). I'm not sure how capital-intensive regional operations are. The vehicles are definitely the largest capital expense. This is more like an AirBnB property owner hiring a cleaning service.

Also, contracting out the menial labor makes Waymo's labor practices look much better. They can tell their engineers that all employees make a living wage and get excellent health insurance.

When the actual labor is done by part-timers with no health insurance making not much over minimum wage.

The pivot has already happened. They’re handing over Austin and Atlanta to Uber, and now Phoenix and Miami to Moove. The only places they will continue to own operations for at least the next year are SF and LA.

Pivot to what exactly?

To owning just the self driving stack and not the physical operations of running a robotaxi service.

Capital-intensive, or labour-intensive? If I were a provider of 'special smart sauce' that goes on a common piece of equipment, I'd be trying to focus on making it so I could provide the sauce rather than dealing with all the real-world issues that come with all the real-world people using the saucy equipment.

Depends.

Chick-fil-A grew into a pretty big business by vertically integrating outside of just selling sandwiches to Waffle House.

So sometimes it's worth owning sauce distribution too. ;)

Seems smart. They'll continue to have all the leverage since they own the tech and will offload all the operational risk

Compared to software, hardware sucks.

Mother nature OS is by far the worst to develop for.

It does not suck! Hardware just barely works.

I design motherboards for industrial computers for living. Last gem: radio module draws 5 amps while transmitting instead of specified 2 amps. Trust nobody!

This makes sense. If they don't outsource, they need to run millions of cars. This will cost Alphabet hundreds of billions capex, which is not cheap even for them. This is not just the money problem, but also has significant implications on their speed of business expansion. Let's say Google decides to pour tens of billions every year on Waymo, it will takes tens of years to expand into all of the major US cities. They probably don't want to give the competitors that much time.

This seems much more scaleable. Car share services (eg. Evo in Vancouver) seem like good partners as they already have the fleet management services and a recognizable (and hopefully trusted) brand.

I'm not sure about other car share services work, but in the case of Evo they have existing relationships with the cities that make up Metro Vancouver. I wonder if this would ease rollout as you'd already know all the required people to talk to within municipal government?

B.C. in particular went out of their way to ban autonomous vehicles a few years back, so I'm sure waymo's in no rush to talk to local partners there.

Ugh, don’t remind me of the lost decade or so during which the local taxi lobby captured the regulators and prevented the entry of Uber. It wasn’t until the provincial government was about to be blown away anyhow that they cashed in their chips in a few ridings where the majority of cab owners live…

I have no doubt that BC may be a nice place to live for a variety of reasons, but it will be the last place to have autonomous vehicles.

That is very unfortunate. I'm confused why they wouldn't want to get involved in trials and investigate all the benefits. Do you know the rationale behind the decision?

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