I also have absolute faith in google. Together with Aapl and fb, they make up the big 3 in SV. They are each big for a reason. It’s good to have a stake in all 3.
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First rollout of autonomous driving will be on freeways. So if you have two truck stops right off the freeways you can link them up with autonomous vehicles.
That’s useful for long distance trucking. Useless for ride hailing.
Most ride hailing are short distance rides within cities. Come up to SF and drive around to see how tough it will be for machines to drive. Some roads are very narrow, winding, extreme up and down slopes, and you have random cars double parking. Sometimes you have to wave at the incoming drivers to negotiate who go first.
Think about how hard it will be to do with machine learning. This type of driving won’t be available for another decade at least, easily two decades.
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Invest for the long haul.
There is currently little machine learning in autonomous driving.
Lets take guesses. When will google have the first public beta of waymo.
They can always beta in some artificially small area of a suburb with uniform streets and sparse cars.
My point is looking at ride hailing for business model is looking at the wrong place.
Amazon has fulfillment centers all over the country. They constantly have to “rebalance” their inventory by moving closer to end buyers. I can see amazon link these fulfillment centers with autonomous trucks.
I think the first place to look is freeway driving. City driving will be a gimmick for many years.
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Artifical area is pheonix it is already there.
Out of all the FANGs, google has done the most and is the furthest along in car tech.
Beta doesn’t equal billions in revenue which is what it takes to move the needle for Google.
I remember someone once asked Jobs why Apple hasn’t made something. I forgot what it was. Was it TV or something? Jobs answered there is no route to market, and then went on to do a deep dive of the economics behind and explained why there’s no route to market.
Jobs and Apple think about business model first. Only when it makes sense do they proceed. They don’t do a dozen random moonshots and hope some business models will show up at the door.
I suspect that’s what happened at the Apple car project too. First they thought they can make a better EV but later realize without some autonomous features it’s not competitive. Developing autonomy takes many years even a decade so they shelf the other parts of the project and focus on self driving. I still think the ultimate business model for Apple is to make the whole car, not selling computer kits to other makers.
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you are thinking like wallstreet. The game is more than self driving and hailing. Think all the time you’ll spend in that car. That’s the end game (with no knowledge of internal structure, that’s my guess).
That decade has passed. First darpa challenge was in 2007.
Yawn. If Google’s only play for everything is to sell more ads, then it’s going to run into a wall. Advertising spend is a very small percent of GDP.
If there is no market there, why do we even bother talking about it? Obviously there’s something there. Apple unfortunately has done nothing towards that end. Probably too late. Only chance is to acquire Tesla. It would be a very expensive acquisition.
Tesla has is the Elon brand and his worshippers.
If all Apple makes is a better “dumb” EV it won’t be competitive against other car makers like Tesla. It needs to have more “computers” fused into it. Some sort of smart cars, like smart phones to dumb phones.
Then where is the Waymo taxi I can hail? Why is it still not available?
Did i say advertising? Think services, movies, audio, think opentable, think food delivery.
If ride hail is cheap, students will use it to go to school. They will watch youtube. How many hours does an american use on average driving?
with that trillion dollar market cap, no brainer 
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How much does google charge for those services? I could do all the same things on a tablet if the car is driving itself. Any entertainment built into the car will quickly be dated like built in GPS.
Food delivery will end up being done by drones at a fraction of the cost.
I think $150B would be an enticing price tag.