Waymo kills off autonomous trucking program
Google's cost cutters are taking another bite out of Waymo. After being hit by layoffs that cut 8 percent of staff, it now looks like the self-driving truck program—Waymo Via—is dead. Waymo's announcement blog post tries to put a brave face on things, saying the company is "Doubling down on Waymo One," its ride-hailing service, but also mentions that the company will "push back the timeline on our commercial and operational efforts on trucking, as well as most of our technical development on that business unit."
Waymo's focus on ride-hailing makes some sense. The reliability requirements for ride-hailing are much lower than trucking, making it a more lenient business. If you have a truck full of cargo, it's a major issue if something goes wrong and it can't reach its destination on time. The truck routes are many hours long over long distances and usually have some kind of delivery time attached. Your self-driving hardware and software has to work perfectly during all that. Ride-hailing is way easier. Trips are usually measured in minutes and in a localized area where you can easily dispatch support people if something goes wrong. Because the app is a central point of customer bookings, you can easily pause and resume accepting customers anytime. That makes it easy to shut down the fleet to deal with technical difficulties or bad weather. You can also rigidly control your service area and accept or decline trips on a whim. Everyone can just use Lyft instead.
Alphabet—Waymo and Google's parent company—has a penchant for killing off products that aren't actively bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter. That makes Waymo's continued survival at Alphabet a challenge. Self-driving cars are still a money-losing, ultra-long-term research project, with Waymo only bringing in a small revenue stream from the company's tiny two-city service area. Waymo has done well over the years to insulate itself from Alphabet's fickle short-term planning, mostly by raising $3.2 billion in outside funding. The outside investment, which started in 2020, indicates that Alphabet isn't willing to write Waymo a blank check anymore, and the best way to get in your boss's good graces probably is "doubling down" on the company's one revenue stream right now.
- Ron Amadeo (Ars Technica)
Full article link (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/waymo-kills-off-autonomous-trucking-program/)
