Guo Yipu from Haidian Bridge
Quantum Bit Report | Public Account QbitAI

Commercialization comes as fast as a tornado.

Waymo, a sister company of Google, has finally started charging for its self-driving vehicles.

The milestone was announced yesterday by Ruth Porat, CFO of Google parent company Alphabet, during an earnings call on Thursday.

The fees are for users of its "Early Rider" program in suburban Phoenix, and Waymo expanded the number of participants in the program in the third quarter, the CFO said.

This also means that Waymo is ahead of rivals such as Uber and General Motors Cruise and is the first to bring driverless taxi services to the market.

It seems that the first group of people who tried it out in the suburbs of Phoenix no longer have free crabs to eat, just as you who have become accustomed to Didi + Meituan + Ele.me + ofo Mobike no longer have the free services you used to a few years ago.

How much does it cost to take a Waymo?

Although some people have already paid to ride in Waymo's self-driving vehicles, Ruth Porat said the pricing model has just begun testing, and it will not be known for a while how much it will cost to call a Waymo driverless car.

However, ARK Investments once predicted in a report that self-driving taxis could cost around 35 cents per mile, including a 5-cent "driver fee" paid to a remote operator who monitors the vehicle's operating status and intervenes when problems occur.

If converted into RMB, it is about 1.5 yuan per kilometer, of which 0.21 yuan is the "designated driver fee". Compared with Didi Express's 1.6 yuan per kilometer distance fee + 0.5 yuan to 1 yuan per minute time fee, considering the price difference between China and the United States, it seems a lot cheaper.

Commercialization of autonomous driving

However, Waymo, which has always been accustomed to "getting up early and arriving late", did not get the first place in the commercialization timetable for autonomous driving.

Just nine days ago, on October 19, Drive.ai, an autonomous driving startup company in which Andrew Ng participated, began its commercialization process and opened its autonomous driving pick-up service to the public in Arlington, Texas. Everyone in Arlington can take delivery of the car by downloading the Drive.ai APP.

Of course, this is because the Arlington government paid for it. Drive.ai signed a commercial contract with the Arlington City Government and prepared five vehicles to provide services to the city for one year.

In addition, at the Baidu AI Developer Conference this summer, Robin Li announced that Baidu's Apollo self-driving bus has also begun commercialization, with commercial operations in Beijing, Xiongan, Tokyo and other places.

Autonomous driving companies have all begun to make preliminary attempts at commercial operations this year, which makes people feel that we will be able to go out and drive a driverless car soon. Congratulations to those friends who have not yet learned to drive.

One More Thing

However, if commercial autonomous driving really becomes popular in the next few years, I'm afraid driving schools will have a hard time.

What do you think will be the next viral trend on the internet: “Drivers will be replaced by AI” or “Driving schools will become history”?