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Comment by billjings | Hacker News Reader

I have a good friend who's a Lyft driver. According to him, all drivers are rated on cleanliness by passengers; if you're dinged for a weird smell, there are lasting financial consequences (even if it was for reasons outside of your control, e.g. using a Lyft provided rental while repairing from a traffic accident).

We'll see how Waymo handles it! It will definitely be Waymo's problem to solve, though.

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Their policy from an email sent out Oct 2023:

> Many of our riders choose Waymo for the clean and consistent vehicle we offer. To ensure every rider gets this experience, we’ll be applying a vehicle cleaning fee for riders who leave a mess behind in the vehicle, such as vomit, excessive trash, and smoking odors.

> For those that self-report their mess during their ride (not including smoking), the fee will be $50. For issues that go unreported, we’ll charge riders $100 for the first violation and increase the fee for subsequent violations. Repeat trash and smoking related violations may also impact your account standing.

That’s an awesome policy. Compare to car share services (in SF.. apples to apples) such as Gig Car and Getaround which allow unsupervised general access (i.e. no driver there to witness car treatment)… those are generally pigsties. Blunt ash all over the dashboard, used kleenexes in the door handles and cupholders, trash on the floor. It always blew my mind that the perpetrators weren’t fined into the dirt. Good for Waymo.

Considering that I’m in a social bubble of considerate people all of whom wouldn’t leave a single bottle cap in a car, this makes me despair at how people must be outside of my bubble.

A very small percentage of people will trash a clean environment.

A much larger percentage of people will add trash to an already trashed environment.

I'd say the vast majority of people don't litter or trash things, but the few that do ruin things for everyone. It only takes a few bad apples (on in this case trashy people) to ruin something for everyone else.

Its like living with 4 roommates, but one of them leaves their shit everywhere. It could make the whole place look unkept for everyone else.

And because we generally don't want to pick up after other peoples shit/mess things may be left trashy for a long time before anything gets cleaned.

Plus there's a camera in the car. Pretty easy to keep riders accountable, and solve any dispute.

Compare that to other car sharing options (e.g. Zipcar, where cars are usually a mess, but there's no way to keep users accountable).

Hmm zipcars in my area (London) are usually clean.

I wish it was the same here. In NYC (Brooklyn specifically) it's 50/50.

I haven't used Lyft in awhile but as an Uber rider what I can tell you is, if that company has a similar policy, it hasn't worked for me. The quality and cleanliness of the vehicle, and the quality of the driving, has been vastly inferior for me in San Francisco than Waymo has been.

I travel a lot for work so use Lyft a lot and I can say the same. Its not every time, but maybe 1 in 10 times I'll get in a car that smells like absolute shit, smoke odor, unclean, etc.

I think theres a stigma against reporting drivers so most people don't, but then that leaves the people who don't care about these policies to continue giving people bad experiences.

I feel that. With about that same frequency, I encounter a vehicle or a driver or driving that's just dreadful. But, I don't report it or even ding the driver because I feel like that's a hard job that I don't wanna do, and I feel bad. I dunno, maybe I should.

I think the difference is that as an individual driver you have an incentive to keep your car clean, so that Lyft continues to dispatch riders to you. For Waymo the selective pressure is less direct and also spread across their entire fleet. They can accept a level of dirtiness, given some probability that the rider would reject the car x cost of rider requesting a (partial) refund x etc. etc.

More cynically, there are simply too many people that won't take care of "public" property. If every 3rd rider (exaggerated for rhetorical purposes) trashes the car, it's gonna be dirty no matter what.

Assuming the cars have internal cameras they should be able to surcharge riders who trash the cars.

That doesn't cover all the normal cleaning needed just from people being in the cars, on top of environmental stuff (sand, dirt, mud, leaf debris, pollen...)

Like others said: the second they have run drivers out, the cars will stop getting cleaned obsessively because you won't have a choice.

Same thing that happened when Lyft and Uber when they ran the taxi industry out of business.

Same thing that happened when Zipcar was established. Cars went from being spotless and well maintained to damaged, dirty, and half the dash being lit up.

> you won't have a choice

I will have a choice. I will choose one of the competitors.

> Same thing that happened when Lyft and Uber when they ran the taxi industry out of business

There's still a taxicab industry in San Francisco. It became better after competing with Lyft and Uber.

I don't know how many people there are who won't take care of public property, but whatever it is I doubt it's 1 in 3.

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