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Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway

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Re: Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway

#561

Post by pempem »

wileydragonfly wrote: post #406
overfeed wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's retain a sense of proportion here; it was $3.

At $3 your credit card company is just going to comp it to you and move on.

Many, Many millions have been made on pennies pulled from consumers daily.

$3 in a personal vacuum is one thing (and still adds up if you consider each service that could do this) $3 across 20% of users, lets say, globally, daily. Adds up.

Consumers have the ability to also contribute to and define how engagements with businesses look. If the government won't help us, we have to continue on our own.

Re: Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway

#562

Post by bsder »

Dusseldorf wrote: post #480
bsder wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's interesting how American cultural expectations of forced social interaction may be having the effect of promoting automated systems as a reaction. That's not it. The issue is that it is FAR easier for me to interact with automation than some completely incompetent service worker. Yes, I get it. The service jobs pay so poorly that nobody competent wants to work them. However, at the end of the day, I simply wan…

Gotta disagree here. Running a checkout lane isn't exactly rocket science, and as such the vast majority of the experiences I have in staffed checkout lanes are neutral to good. When using automated checkout on the other hand, if I even so much as move the wrong way, the system stops and makes me wait for a staff member who is busy dealing with 6 other red-flashing checkouts. When they finally make it over to me, I'm…

> if I even so much as move the wrong way, the system stops and makes me wait for a staff member who is busy dealing with 6 other red-flashing checkouts.

This is completely the fault of the store.

This is on irritating display with the HEB grocery stores in Texas. Go to a standard HEB and self-checkout has exactly the failures you are talking about. Go to a Central Market HEB (the upscale, Whole Foods-like version) and the self-checkouts don't do ANY of those irritating things (alcohol being the exception).

Funny that.

Re: Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway

#563

Post by icelancer »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #545
fnordpiglet wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are excited by driverless cars but it also means a car with no social barriers and no person who considers the cars condition important. For now they’re well surveilled and a premium vehicle. Soon they will be filthy pods in a race to the bottom with all the charm of a public bathroom. They’ll be cheap, but you’ll get what you pay for. Private driverless cars will be the premium alternative.

Why do you assume the surveillance will go away as they become cheaper? The taxi company know who is in their car and they have access to interior cameras if something happens. In many respects, it is going to be even more difficult to take a dump in one and get away with it than if a human was driving it. They have your credit card number and visual evidence of what you did, they will just charge your card automatic…

Because if they ever become super popular, it will be prohibitively expensive to actually police all the surveillance. Likely to store / process it all. AI does an alright job summarizing videos today (Gemini Flash) but it has to get a lot better if they're going to actually police at scale.

Re: Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway

#564

Post by bsder »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #496
bsder wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's interesting how American cultural expectations of forced social interaction may be having the effect of promoting automated systems as a reaction. That's not it. The issue is that it is FAR easier for me to interact with automation than some completely incompetent service worker. Yes, I get it. The service jobs pay so poorly that nobody competent wants to work them. However, at the end of the day, I simply wan…

> The issue is that it is FAR easier for me to interact with automation than some completely incompetent service worker You are comparing good automation with incompetent service worker. It's obvious what the conclusion would be.

> You are comparing good automation with incompetent service worker. It's obvious what the conclusion would be.

Sure. But the problem is that I so rarely interact with a competent service worker nowadays that even poor automation sadly wins the comparison most of the time.

Re: Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway

#565

Post by icelancer »

kanbara wrote: post #438
1024core wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day I almost got ran over by an old lady in her old Volvo wagon at a stop sign. She seemed to have gotten confused a little and was turning left but couldn't figure out the right move to make. People behind her honked and she decided to just go for it. I happened to be in the crosswalk and just happened to look over at the honking, and saw her coming, so managed to jump out of her way. She was easily over 9…

this is 10000% the wrong approach— the approach is to build better, more walkable cities, with better zoning, and public transit so elderly or disabled people aren’t left out of society. these people shouldn’t be behind the wheel of a car; to me one of the biggest annoyances with american life

Between inventing better FSD cars and rezoning cities / completely upending urban lifestyles, I think the first one has a better < 100 year time horizon while we push for the second one.

Re: Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway

#566

Post by AuthConnectFail »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #430
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is anyone surprised that a smaller segment of the market will pay more for a safer ride in a luxury vehicle compared to a base model Lyft (which can be a barely drivable car with rank cloth interior where you can't even fit two people in the back seat)? Next up, some one will post, "First class tickets cost more than coach." Waymo will eventually have Waymo Comfort and Waymo Black.

I'm in LA, so I'm still skeptical about "safer". Granted, that's not a high bar, but I know who's accountable if an Uber/Lyft crashes.

but do you care for accountability or more safety (through lower crash rate)at the end of the day?

Re: Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway

#567

Post by cyberax »

whoisyc wrote: post #470
nixpulvis wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isolationism progresses.

1950: cars give you the freedom to go anywhere you want. Artificial fertilizer puts an end to hunger in industrialized world. Yeehaw! 2000: you are a second class citizen who can’t even get a job in many places if you do not have a car. Also the median person is overweight. But here is this new internet thing that lets you get everything you need in life sorted out with no need for human interactions. Yeehaw! 2025: t…

I don't _want_ to have a random conversation with a person every time I ride a cab. Especially after a long flight and/or early in the morning.

Re: Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway

#568

Post by Exoristos »

joshSzep wrote: post #401
autobodie wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm also tired of people becoming parents without considering the financial aspects ahead of time. If you're making minimum wage and are barely surviving, don't have kids until you're on steadier ground. Young is abolutely the best age to have kids. Ask biology. If you want a society (I do) then you want a society that supports people having children. If you want a healthy society (I do) then you want a society tha…

I’ve been thinking about how modern family structures seem increasingly misaligned with what our biology and history may have prepared us for. It seems likely that nature "intended" families to be multigenerational, larger clan-like units linked by shared responsibility, proximity, and care. Modern norms have instead left many parents effectively on their own, juggling full-time work with full-time childcare. If mult…

"Modern norms" often just means individuals being myopic jackasses.

Re: Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway

#569

Post by cyberax »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #537
camel_gopher wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m seeing more of them with trash. Last one I took had a rolled up bundle of used bandages.

People are excited by driverless cars but it also means a car with no social barriers and no person who considers the cars condition important. For now they’re well surveilled and a premium vehicle. Soon they will be filthy pods in a race to the bottom with all the charm of a public bathroom. They’ll be cheap, but you’ll get what you pay for. Private driverless cars will be the premium alternative.

> For now they’re well surveilled and a premium vehicle. Soon they will be filthy pods in a race to the bottom with all the charm of a public bathroom.

So, like transit?

I will likely have my own personal self-driving vehicle. And I'm 100% sure that there'll be an upmarket segment with slightly more expensive cars that are kept more clean than the rest.

Re: Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway

#570

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

z2 wrote: post #493
rfurmani wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a couple bad experiences with Lyft recently, including one time the driver must have clicked that they picked me up while a block away, because I could see the lyft driving to the destination without me. I tried to get a refund since I was obviously waiting my start location the whole time, but the system claimed the drive went from start to finish (even though I wasn't in the car), so no refund.

Same thing happened to me, and the support system automatically decided nothing was wrong whatsoever despite my phone certainly sending a very different location from the driver. And the madness was I couldn't even book another ride as I was technically in one. So I ended up getting it resolved via the security panic button which did put me through to a real person who was empathetic to the issue.

Is this some sort of a scam? The driver cannot even mark the ride as completed without being in the area right? So they have to drive it anyway. I can’t imagine they would be on the platform for long if this happened on a regular basis. I would say it’s probably an accident but how could this behavior be accidental? Someone might accidentally say that they picked you up, but they couldn’t accidentally then drive an empty car to the destination.
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