It will be more profitable for them to deploy cars to new cities at a premium than to deploy them to existing cities to capture more of those cities' markets. We won't see affordable driverless taxi service for many years unless competition appears. After Uber and Cruise imploded, I don't have much hope for that.
Is that true? There's a ton of overhead required to have any presence in a city (all of the fueling/cleaning/repairing/storing/etc depots) that you need to amortize over lots of cars. If they can keep the cars busy, I think they'd much rather have 5,000 cars in one city than 500 cars in 10 cities (with 10x the overhead).
They have a big upfront cost to add a new city, but once they add it, their marginal revenue per car will be higher there (partly because they can be sure to keep those cars busy and partly because they can charge a higher premium).
They have to prepare the infrastructure anyway in all the cities to get to the scale they want to get to, but each new car built is going to be sent to the least scaled city so far.
Does that make sense from a consumer brand perspective though? If everytime I check Waymo there's no capacity or it's super expensive, pretty soon I won't even bother checking it.
