The Revolution of Self Driving Cars Is Not Going to Be Easy

Would you leave a tip for your driverless taxi? This past week a security researcher named Jane Wong shared leaked screenshots apparently showing the autonomous taxi service is planning to experiment with letting riders leave a tip. Before your temperature rises too much, it’s important to note that the tips would go to charity, and you can select the charity … so we can all just calm down a little. The positive PR is probably one big reason Waymo maybe be trialing the feature.

Creating a new market is hard and the company has been losing a reported $2B in the first half of 2024 alone trying to make it work. Along the way, people are revolting … like last week when a crowd of people trashed an idling Waymo vehicle in the middle of a Los Angeles street. This perhaps is the cost of progress and to be expected with something as disruptive as driverless taxis. It doesn’t seem to be deterring the company from forging ahead and expanding their operation to 10 new cities in 2025.

In a sense, they are following a technology model for disruption that is well worn. One player spends and loses billions to create and owns a market. All other players unwilling to lose so much money drop out. And eventually, the biggest company dominates. There are literally TV shows (Super Pumped and The Playlist) explaining how it works.