4 ms·

I saw a transit enthusiast YouTube video try out Waymo from the most distant part of the network to fisherman’s wharf in SF and it cost twice as much as an Uber

• homefree 2y ago
  The wait times have gotten better, they're getting freeway approval shortly which will be nice, the price is still at a premium (but worth it imo). I only take Waymo in SF now. The only time I take Uber in the bay area is to the airport (and when they approve Waymo for SFO I won't take Uber then either).
  • BurritoAlPastor 2y ago
    I generally find that Waymos are cheaper than Uber/Lyft including tip. I’ve also seen that, although Uber and Lyft peak times seem correlated to each other, they seem uncorrelated to Waymo peak activity. But this might be stabilizing as Waymo ridership increases.
    • homefree 2y ago
      Ah I guess I almost never tip uber (unless something exceptional happens) - holdover from the Travis era.
    • gambiting 2y ago
      >>Uber/Lyft including tip. The real question is why tip on either of those? You pay through the app, the driver is compensated for their time, why tip extra? If you feel that Uber/Lyft are mistreating their drivers, stop using their service, not pay them on the side?
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
• orangecat 2y ago
  I saw a transit enthusiast YouTube video try out Waymo from the most distant part of the network to fisherman’s wharf in SF and it cost twice as much as an Uber, had a longer wait time for a car, and cost about double. That's literally an edge case. For shorter trips, I've found it to be slightly cheaper (especially factoring in the lack of tips) with maybe a slightly longer wait.
  • fallinghawks 2y ago
    I've taken Waymo only twice (I try to avoid SF), from the ferry building to Chinatown, then back. Both times it was more expensive than Lyft with tip, but only by $2-3. It's good to know it can be cheaper.
    • brokensegue 2y ago
      lyft charges more for nicer cars so a fair comparison might be to lyft's more premium service
      • dangus 2y ago
        This comparison doesn’t work. Not all Waymo riders actually want the premium cars and we can’t assume that’s why they are choosing Waymo. We have to assume that some and perhaps most riders would prefer to pay less to ride in a cheaper car but are mainly choosing Waymo because its autonomous (cool factor, the no-human factor). Also, California mandates autonomous vehicles be fully electric by 2030. So Waymo literally has to be driving some kind of EV to comply very soon. Jaguar’s I-pace was a poor-selling EV SUV from a struggling company with a lot of leftover inventory, so it’s almost a guarantee that Waymo got a great fleet deal on them.
        • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
          The cars are comfortable, even if they aren’t popular. If I had to choose between a beat up Prius uber-X or a Jaguar for a few dollars more, I’m definitely choosing the latter. I had a Mercedes (older cheaper model with mechanical issues) Uber-X fall apart on my ride in Orange County last month (my son and I were dumped near a nice mall at least), also I bet the Waymo doesn’t smell like cigarette smoke.
• agildehaus 2y ago
  Both the longer wait time and the double price can likely be explained by the lack of highway. Highway is coming. And scale will make it cheaper. It's only cheaper than Uber sometimes currently. That will change.
  • dangus 2y ago
    Will it change? Uber drivers are already paid low wages and any price competition can lower their wages further. Waymo has to pay for things that “come with” uber drivers: the cars, storage for the cars, employees to clean and maintain the cars, extra infrastructure to support the self driving cars like cellular data for each car, data centers, engineers, customer service to interact with police and resolve edge cases (will never go away). Waymo also has to pay all these people healthcare benefits and pay W2 payroll, not a thing for Uber. Waymo is like a professional moving company competing on price with an army of lowest bidder independent contractors who already have a beat up graffiti van.
• VirusNewbie 2y ago
  In LA, wait times were the same as Uber and the price was the same as well (for a nicer car some of the time).
  • ajmurmann 2y ago
    I've used Waymo in both LA and SF and lived it. However, wait times in LA varied hugely. Downtown LA one evening was over twenty minutes and a few hours later less than five. I wonder if they just don't have enough vehicles there and because it's such sprawl it can easily happen that no car is nearby.
• whyenot 2y ago
  My experience using Waymos in SF is that they are a little less expensive than an Uber. The other advantage is that you aren't stuck with a driver who hits on you or wants to share his opinions on the best way to slaughter goats.
  • muchosandwich 2y ago
    I've also had an Uber driver talking about butchering various farm animals. I vastly prefer Waymo because it's a much calmer experience.
    • Mistletoe 2y ago
      Hopefully you guys are giving bad ratings to these insane people that think talking about slaughtering methods is appropriate cabbie talk?
    • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      I had an Uber driver fall asleep on me while driving. I can’t wait for Waymo to come to Seattle.
  • acchow 2y ago
    Waymo is significantly more expensive than UberX nowadays. People are happily willing to pay for the better experience (and tourists probably the novelty)
  • dangus 2y ago
    And uber is profitable. Waymo burns $2 billion a year.
• jonathantf2 2y ago
  Miles?
• radpanda 2y ago
  Waymo rides are also potentially slower because they strictly follow speed limits. Not really problematic in downtown SF but it’ll be interesting to see how it’ll be received by riders when they expand to highway driving where most people generally expect to drive over the speed limit.
  • thot_experiment 2y ago
    On most trips people do speeding saves an irrelevant amount of time. If somehow you encounter zero traffic from Palo Alto to SF and you go 15mph over the limit the whole way it makes the trip about 5 minutes shorter. You have about 50% more KE at 80mph as you do at 65mph btw, if you find yourself needing to dissipate that energy rapidly.
    • radpanda 2y ago
      Sure, there’s the math, but there’s also the human nature part of it. If you’re sitting in the right lane doing the speed limit, watching dozens of cars consistently zip past, it feels like you’re “falling behind” all of that traffic. I wonder how that will be received by the riding public.
      • potato3732842 2y ago
        When I'm traveling substantially below traffic speed I'm also decently concerned about becoming the scene of the accident. Sure it won't be me paying for the accident but I'd just rather not risk it.
        • riskassessment 2y ago
          This is often repeated, yet despite the studies on speed differentials being dangerous I am still skeptical of the more specific claim that driving the speed limit specifically when others are speeding increases your risk of getting in an accident.
          • 2y ago
• TulliusCicero 2y ago
  I mean yeah, right now they've hit the point of being quite safe, but they're not necessarily as fast as human drivers. They'll keep making incremental progress and will get there eventually, probably. So far, every time there's been self driving car progress, someone's been like, "okay yeah, but can they do <the next thing they're working on> yet??" like some weird gotcha. Tech progress is incremental, shocking I know.
• Ferret7446 2y ago
  > One shouldn’t underestimate how economical real human operators are That's such a silly statement. One shouldn’t underestimate how UNeconomical real humans are. In the past 12,000 years, human efficiency has improved, maybe, 10x. In the past 100 years, technological efficiency has improved, maybe, 1,000,000x. Any tiny technological improvement can be instantly replicated and scaled. Meanwhile, every individual human needs to be re-trained and re-grown. They're extremely temperamental, with expensive upkeep, very short lifespans and even shorter productive lifespans. In fact, humans have improved so little, that every time, they scoff at the new technology and say it will never take off, and they're still doing it 12,000 years later, right now, right above this post.
  • consteval 2y ago
    The misconception here is that technology just magically runs on its own. No, it’s created by and maintained by humans. You’re shifting the cost of a driver to software engineers, data analysis, people mapping out roads, etc. This is why Uber doesn’t make any money, despite being more expensive for the customer as compared to traditional taxi services. Coordinating Ubers across the country costs a lot of servers and a lot of engineers. Sure, the system is automatic - maintaining it isn’t. So you end up with a lose-lose-lose scenario. The ride is more expensive for the customer. The driver makes less money. And Uber bleeds hundreds of millions a year. Technology is neat, yes, but often we don’t stop and think “wait… does this make sense?” We don’t know if autonomous cars make any economic sense. They could end up not. It doesn’t help that 99% of tech companies in the transportation space are just making trains with extra steps. Like, guys - have we even done feasibility analysis?
• Mawr 2y ago
  Fascinatingly, every argument you make is wrong. > it cost twice as much as an Uber Surely incidental since the typical price per ride is about the same. Generally though, the relationship between the cost to operate a service profitably and the price presented to the user is very complex, so just because the price happens to be x right now doesn't tell you much. For example, something like 30% of the price of an iPhone is markup. > while having a longer wait time for a car Obviously incidental? > It also couldn’t operate on the highway so the transit time was nearly double. Obviously easily fixable? > One shouldn’t underestimate how economical real human operators are. There's nothing to underestimate, human drivers don't scale the way software drivers do. It doesn't matter how little humans cost, they are competing with software that can be copied for free. > Waymo can’t share the business expense of their vehicles with their employees They can share parking space, cleaning services, maintenance, parts for repair, etc. > I’m sure it’ll improve but this tells me that Waymo’s price per vehicle including all the R&D expenses must be astronomical. Obviously, they're in the development phase. None of this matters long term. > They are burning $2 billion a year at the current rate even though they have revenue service. "The stock market went up 2% yesterday so it will go up 2% today too and every day after that." > Plus, they actually have a lot of human operators to correct issues and talk to police and things like that. Said operators are shared between all vehicles and their number will go down over time as the driving software improves. --- To sum up, every single part of what Waymo is trying to do scales. Every problem you've mentioned is either incidental or a one-off cost long term.
  • dangus 2y ago
    The number one tech bro blind spot is the assumption that everything in the physical world scales with software and that every business and type of cost benefits greatly from economies of scale and the removal of human labor. There are a great number of examples where that’s not true. Cookie store chains like Crumbl are a really good example. All the economies of scale stuff with them backfires. The product is too low price and too simple to make in batches, so the businesses with the best margins are ones that avoid traditional brick and mortar rent and don’t hire employees. In the same way, an uber or taxi’s labor cost seems like it’s a huge scaling problem that needs to be resolved but really think about the costs involved with creating that scale to replace them. Let’s not forget that at Waymo they still need a human to clean, fix, and charge/gas up, interact with customers and police, resolve driving edge cases, etc, all costs that a human driver essentially includes with their pay and does for “free.” Then you’ve got car storage and the capital expense of the vehicle that the uber driver heavily subsidizes and splits between business and personal use. Basically, Waymo is looking to compete using their very complex and sophisticated solution in a market where its competitors are hiring lowest bidder temporary contractors.