> Would they delay their rollout over the capital costs of a few thousand $60,000 Jaguars?
Yes. Google, better than many others, gets scaling economics.
(And the cost is likely $100+ thousand per vehicle, after sensors and compute, with costs rising rapidly if you try and order too many too fast due to supply-chain bottlenecks nobody has bothered optimizing yet.)
Surely they need the same sensors and compute no matter what car they attach them to - they're either strapping $75k of sensors to a $60k luxury EV, or a $30k economy EV.
Unless they're planning 20mph golf carts to save on long-distance sensors, which as far as I know they aren't.
IMHO it's more likely they have capacity constraints because of all the different parts involved in a roll-out; you can't just double the capacity of a production facility without hiring lots of inexperienced new hires, meaning they can only build the things so fast. You can't roll out to a new city without places to park the cars, and places to charge them, and people to repair them, and places to store the spare parts, and trade routes to replenish the spare parts, and so on.
> Surely they need the same sensors and compute no matter what car they attach them to
Sure. But they may not have decided precisely what mix they need where, yet. More importantly, those suppliers may not have invested in factories that can produce millions of Waymos a year.
Yes. Google, better than many others, gets scaling economics.
(And the cost is likely $100+ thousand per vehicle, after sensors and compute, with costs rising rapidly if you try and order too many too fast due to supply-chain bottlenecks nobody has bothered optimizing yet.)