Mark, are you sure about this? Assuming they can operate 14 hours per day, $5 net profit above cost of gas and maintenance per trip, with 5 trips per hour. That is $126K/year/car.

Per major metro area they can have 10K cars running in each easily. That means mapping is amortized over many many cars so is not a huge factor.

So just how expensive do you think those sensor arrays are? Its gotta be under $200K per car at scale even with the crazy stuff they have on it now, right?

so its not a slam dunk, but it does look scalable. And of course I expect they plan to operate w/o profit as they scale and at some point introduce a cheaper sensor package that performs similarly once they are solidly OVER performing with the expensive sensors.

I agree because mapping will be expensive... they will likely only do one city at a time, so they can dominate those markets and get economies of scale.

If they dont screw up, it seems they could be the ONLY self driving company that is able to massively scale for a year or two. This would be a massive advantage since the next companies will have a harder time to amortize over many cars since they will be competing w/ Waymo from day one.

..... if they dont screw up! ....