Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 916 posts

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

#721

Post by kortilla »

mbesto wrote: post #323
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.

> 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 It's a criticism, because this same segment also realizes that a Waymo ride is WAY cheaper to operate than a human driven one.

It’s not, or at least it definitely wasn’t a year ago. Those cars were something like $700k each and then there is a lot of software dev and AI infra to pay for. They were charging more than Lyft and were still losing money per ride.

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

#722

Post by mortenjorck »

dheera wrote: post #550
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.

Charge back with your credit card if Lyft isn't willing to help you. Keep businesses in check.

If you really want to delete the app, a chargeback is the surest way to permanently remove yourself from the platform.

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

#723

Post by ninetyninenine »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #682
ninetyninenine wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driving is not grueling work. Imagine a utopia where people aren't needed for any work at all! No job for you. Only AI robots taking care of rich people while everything else burns. Just make sure you're one of the rich ones and everything is A-okay!

Sitting for extended periods of time is bad for one’s health. Also, being in a vehicle is the highest morbidity/mortality risk thing people do. More time on the road = more chance of injury.

Agreed. But it’s not grueling. Programming you also sit for long periods. Programming usually isn’t considered grueling.

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

#724

Post by franciscop »

Shank wrote: post #714
franciscop wrote: post #591

Reading the comments here, the experiences people are sharing feels out-of-world since I live in Tokyo and it's unthinkable to have a bad experience in a Taxi/Shareride like that. They've always been very professional, the highest quality I could expect. Cars always clean, driver always polite, etc. Sure, there WILL be some edge case out there, but I've ridden taxis and Uber many times here and not a single odd exper…

> I live in Tokyo I also live in Tokyo and surely you’re not expecting Japanese taxi standards to be remotely comparable to US Uber or Lyft, right? It’s a race to the bottom in any major US metro. Japanese taxis are refined and designed around passenger comfort. There is a specific model of car for Taxis. In the US you’re rolling the dice on what Uber or Lyft offer.

I'm not from the US, I'm from Spain and while they are better in Japan than in Spain, it's not like the "out-of-world" difference that I'm seeing in these comments. That's why I'm confused, I expected the US to be similar to Europe in these regards. I have taken Uber a couple of times while traveling to the US (long ago though), and while they were dirtier than in other countries it wasn't that bad as the comments suggest.

So either things have gone dramatically downhill or I had a "good" experience in my brief US rides relatively speaking.

As a non-American, I am not sure why it's so crazy to think standards would be high in other countries? Grab standards and quality in e.g. Taiwan, Thailand, etc IS within the same order of magnitude as Japan and those are much poorer countries than the US.

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

#725

Post by analog31 »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #259
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's my rampant misanthrope leanings, but even in more trivial things like choosing automated kiosks other staffed in CVS, I'm just more comfortable not having to make small talk with a person, worry if they're having a good day or not etc. I'd happily pay 20 percent more to Waymo for that personless experience too.

It's interesting how American cultural expectations of forced social interaction may be having the effect of promoting automated systems as a reaction. As someone who lives in Spain and has lived in the UK, the idea of choosing self-checkout at a supermarket to avoid small talk with a cashier sounds alien to me; we simply don't do that here. While cashiers will certainly chat with certain customers while scanning the…

I'm not an introvert by any means, but I still choose whichever system is likely to work better.

At the supermarket, if I'm doing my monthly giant shopping trip and filling the car with non-perishables, I go through the attended checkout. Those people are quick and accurate, and there are two of them -- a checker and a bagger.

But if I only have one or two items, there's no line at the self-checkout, and I just throw the stuff into my backpack.

I wonder if a lack of class divisions is what encourages small talk in our society.

One thing about automated systems is that they have to work perfectly or they don't get used. I thought about this when taking the tram from the terminal to the parking facility at O'Hare Airport. I honestly don't know if the tram has a human driver or not. If that tram has a breakdown, it cause instant gridlock throughout the airport. And the way you make things work better (in the traditional quality control sense) is to make them more predictable.

And admittedly, I'm not shy, but I'm just a bit muddle-headed. With an app, I can see every detail of my request on the screen (and be looking at Google Maps on another screen maybe, or other information sources) before I click "accept." This makes it easier. But when I click "accept," I really don't care if the car that shows up has a human driver or not. I'm also pretty much oblivious as to whether it's a Mercedes or a Chevy.

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

#726

Post by mft_ »

icelancer wrote: post #563
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You think? Checking for significant differences between before and after images doesn’t even need AI. Have a triaging system, something like: image diff -> AI assessment -> human assessment -> car drives to human cleaner. In time you can streamline significantly.

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

#727

Post by Zak »

Henchman21 wrote: post #367
Zak wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not who you asked, but social anxiety seems like a good reason to have this preference. I also dislike ordering food by phone for practical reasons. Call quality might be bad, person's accent might be hard for me to understand, I might be hard for them to understand, the chance an error will go unnoticed even if they read back the order is higher than a website where I can read it myself, and in many cases I have…

Its an understandable reason but I don’t think I agree its good. One should not have significant social anxiety around simply talking to someone over the phone. I can’t wrap my head around why this is okay. But I have to admit it is a thing that is actively happening and that “phone culture” such as it was, is dying or already dead. I feel like I have strayed far from the topic, but honestly if this is what smartphon…

It seems a little presumptuous to declare what other people should and should not be anxious about.

I'd advise therapy to anyone who has so much phone anxiety they would hesitate to call emergency services in an emergency or who misses out on significant opportunities as a result. A mere preference for ordering food delivery on a screen driven by social anxiety does not rise to the level of a problem in my mind. Nearly everyone is irrational about something, usually several somethings.

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

#728

Post by noosphr »

ghaff wrote: post #383
sagarm wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Black cars existed before Uber and Lyft -- in fact, that was how Uber started. Uber, in fact, still offers black cars (professional drivers) as an option.

But a lot of people basically wanted VC-subsidized cheaper cabs. Even if the easier and more reliable ordering was a bonus.

In 2010 getting any taxi in the us by phone was a crap shoot. Hour long waiting times with the car always being just 10 minutes away. Multiple calls. Unpredictable pricing.

Uber just worked.

People forget just how terrible taxi companies were when they were the monopoly.

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

#729

Post by derwiki »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #687
nottorp wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder... are the passengers recorded while in a Waymo? Does Google ever delete those records? Being Google, I bet they don't.

Yes, I assume these are recorded to prevent vandalism. To be fair, someone might get legitimately sick in the car (ex. child). So Google can review the tapes and decide if it was intentional or not. Regarding retention of these video recordings, you should check the Waymo user agreement in your area. You might even have the right to ask them to delete it earlier.

Would a CCPA delete request handle it? Or are they compelled to keep the video for legal reasons

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

#730

Post by sgarland »

The novelty aside (I don’t live in a service region for Waymo, so I can only try it if I fly out to SFO for work), I will happily pay a premium to have a consistent experience where I don’t have to potentially deal with an obnoxious driver. That sounds misanthropic, I know, but for every good experience I’ve had where the car was clean and the driver was either silent, or interesting to talk to, I’ve had five others where that was not the case.
Post reply on HN