People on here used to buy servers themselves (very few of us still do), most now rent via cloud.
Why should transportation be different?
Good question, and for many it will not be, and rentals are acceptable.
But also for many, renting a car has a huge ICK factor. It is one thing while traveling to rent from an agency who has (purportedly) thoroughly cleaned and inspected the car before you get it. It would be quite another to rent cars like scooters, where the previous user likely smoked, left wrappers and food debris, and who knows what else, even damage. Plus, most people who own cars keep a fair amount of stuff in the car for their specific convenience, and have their own settings, etc.
The fact that the likes of Zipcar, Turo, and the lot have not entirely taken over urban transport but instead remain niche players shows the extent of this preference.
For suburban and rural markets, it just gets more extreme. How quickly could a rental service be able to deliver a car; could it reliably do it in less than 5-10 minutes for people to run an errand? If not, unless they are insanely cheap, ppl will likely want to own their own. Perhaps it'll be more of a hybrid, households owning one car and renting the spare for specific trips?
To take off as a real replacement for ownership, self driving cars likely needs to meet at least these criteria: 1) overall cheaper vs ownership for average mileage/year, maybe 12kmiles/yr. 2) consistent delivery of car to rider in <5-10min, 3) a way to ensure the cars are always clean when they arrive (how? route them all through a cleaning station first?/lotsa cameras in the car to monitor cleanliness?/ability to order replacement car in <3min?).
Seems the short rides
, if they are cheaper than ownership, .
A lot of folks are relearning lessons on this front in Cloud right now.
Google doesn't do retail other than Chromecast and Pixel phones, and that is already annoying to them as it is because it involves something Google is notoriously bad at - actual customer support.
Starting up a car brand is orders of magnitude worse.
For one, people actually need to trust your brand to survive for at least five to ten years - cars are an investment, and a car that I can't trust to get safety-relevant spare parts (brake rotors, brake pads, axle bearings) all of a sudden is essentially an oversized paperweight. For a company such as Google, this alone (remember Killed By Google) is a huge obstacle to overcome.
Then, you need production. Sure, you can go to Magna or other contract manufacturers, or have an established large brand build vehicles for you, or you say you have to go the Tesla route and build everything from scratch. Either way has associated pros and cons.
And then, you need a nationwide network of spare parts, dealerships, repair shops and technicians that can fix the issues that people will get alone because the wide masses abuse cars in ways you might not even dare think about while testing, or because other people run into your cars and so your cars need repairs.
Even being a derivative of an established car brand can be a royal PITA. Let's take Mercedes Benz as an example with the 2003-2009 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. On paper, it's a Mercedes vehicle, with a lot of the parts actually originating from stock Mercedes cars - but most dealerships will refuse to work on it. Either because they lack the support to even properly jack the car up, or because they lack the specialized tools for the AMG engine, or because they cannot even order the parts as Mercedes gates repairs for that thing to special shops. Or, again Mercedes, with Maybach luxury cars. The situation isn't as bad as with the McLaren, but their cars are challenging in another way - the S 650 Pullman weighs around 3 metric tons empty and is 6.50 meters long. Good luck finding a jack even capable of lifting that beast, most Mercedes sports-car shops don't carry jacks that are normally used to lift Mercedes Vito transporters!
Even Tesla, and they've been at it for the better part of two decades, still struggles with that. Their shitty spare parts logistics actually drive up not just insurance prices for their own customers, but for everyone - hit a Tesla with your Dodge and be at fault, and now your insurance has to pay out for months of a rental car because Tesla can't be arsed to provide the body shop the Tesla ends up at with spare parts in any reasonable time.
Established car brands however have all of that ironed out for many, many decades now. American, Asian, European, doesn't matter. And the spare parts don't even have to be made for cars: ask your local Volkswagen dealer to order a few pieces of "199 398 500 A" and one piece of "199 398 500 B" and you'll probably have a lead time of less than a day, at least in Germany - for the uninitiated: that part number belongs to the famous sausage, the second one to the accompanying curry ketchup, with more sausages being sold each year than actual cars.
And established car brands also bring something to the table: their own experiences with integrating smart technology. Yes, particularly German carmakers are notoriously bad in that regard, but for example Mercedes Benz was the first car brand in the world to get a certified Level 3 system on the road [1] and are now working on a Level 4 certification [2]. That kind of experience in navigating bureaucracy, integration and testing cannot be paid for in money.
tl;dr: I see no way in which Waymo goes to general availability regarding selling cars. They will run their own autonomous car fleets in select markets where they can fully control everything, but seeing Waymo tech generally available will be as part of established car brands.
[1] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren...
[2] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren...
Those bits should be easy, unless the OEM was tragically stupid. Where you'll get into trouble is when you need replacement computer bits; those are often tricky for mainstream brands, but if your niche brand ECUs all fail around the same time (wouldn't be the first time for a Google product), and the OEM isn't around to make new ones or make it right, off to the junkyard with all of them. If it's just normal failure rates, you can probably scavenge from totaled vehicles at junkyards even after new parts become unobtainium.
OEM style lighting will also probably get hard to find. Ideally a niche maker would lean towards standard parts there, but that's not the fashion of the times.
Well... just look at Tesla. A lot of their parts don't come from the classic supplier-OEM delivery chain model, but Tesla makes as much as they can on their own. It saves them a bunch of money, both when it comes to the profit margin of the supplier, and being at the whims of their supplier, but it is nasty for the customers when there simply is no parts OEM that one could go to when the vehicle manufacturer goes out of business or refuses to support the car any further.
> Where you'll get into trouble is when you need replacement computer bits
Oh hell yes. New EU law is particularly to blame here. OBD diagnosis always was nasty enough, you virtually always need to buy expensive diagnosis software and hardware (e.g. Mercedes XENTRY, VW ODIS, BMW ICOM)... but the newest requirements enforce live digital signatures and anti-tamper checks. Nasty as hell. And the buses itself... it's no longer just one CAN bus doing everything, not since the Kia Boys, it's multiple buses of different speeds, some using encryption on the wire, all making diagnosis, troubleshoots and repairs much more difficult than it used to be.
And that is before getting into the replacement parts issue itself that you wrote up.
Tesla did it, and is more valuable than most other car brands added together. They had a novel product: a good EV that was fun to drive. Is that a unique situation? Could a truly autonomous car launch do it?
Your arguments make sense in themselves, but maybe underestimate the revolutionary value that a level 4 car would provide.
Half of Tesla's value is hopium, the rest of it is pure trust in that the current government will continue propping Elon up (even if he personally ran afoul of the Dear Leader). A lot of the promises Elon made, particularly when it comes to FSD, had to be tracked back and I don't see them ever coming to fruition - at least not for the cars that don't have LIDAR hardware.