Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Higher willingness to pay does not matter unless the market is segmented. Incorrect. > unless they explicitly make an expensive "oft-cleaned" tier and a less expensive "less-oft-cleaned" tier, That's exactly what I'm saying would happen. We already have it with Uber Black. > You're assuming that the cars today don't get maximum utilization, and that with more utilization you'd see dirtier cars. No, I'm not assuming…
> That's exactly what I'm saying would happen. We already have it with Uber Black. But I'm saying we _don't_ have that for Waymo, and it's very unlikely to happen, for many reasons. A big reason is simply that managing a fleet in heterogeneous fashion as you're describing (different cleaning schedules for the cars) doesn't really make sense IRL. It's a purely imagined scenario on your part. > Incorrect. Pray tell how…
Of course it does. Pre-Uber, we had both standard yellow cabs and black car services at different levels. (The main reason you see relative homogeneity within yellow cabs is that the government forces it by setting prices, not because of anything intrinsic about a fleet. Black cars are excluded from these rules.)
In shipping we can pay for different speeds and types of handling. On planes and trains we have different class tickets. In the rental car market, we have Hertz and we have rent-a-wreck. And even within Hertz, there are different car quality levels, which somewhat decreases flexibility (since you need to have more cars on hand than you would with a homogeneous fleet), but it's worth the upkeep to charge the wealthy customers more. Etc.
> Then please explain how cars would get dirtier as the service scales up? If today is already seeing the cars at full utilization, barring a cost-cutting measure that determined that cleaning less frequently would be a significant cost savings (which is a big assumption on your part), then we should be seeing roughly how clean the cars will be into perpetuity.
1. Tech prices come down, so the average customer willingness to pay for cleanliness comes down.
2. Services often launch with non-scalable attention to detail to control the initial public impression (eating the cost), and then relax over time.
3. Segmentation that's not feasible at the current scale but will be in the future.