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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

From my experience prices for Waymo are at least double that of an equivalent Lyft/Uber ride and wait times are usually 20+ minutes. It is a great novelty but nowhere near where it needs to be to handle real scale.

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Doesn’t match my experience in SF. I see 10% premium over Uber/Lyft, with Lyft and Waymo displaying wait times that are ~3 slower, but actual wait times are the same. (Uber consistently underestimates in my experience.)

I also haven't had Waymo assign a car and then decide to assign it elsewhere sometime before arrival.

I have had Uber/Lyft cars that were going to come to me and then some time before picking me up, they change their mind and I get to start a new wait for a new car/driver... worse, I've had that happen a few times in a row on some occasions.

I've seen more in the 10% premium ballpark for most Waymo rides (for just the base fare, excluding tips). There was a very stormy day once where the price shot up pretty high very quickly, but that's not the norm I see.

As an aside, Waymo does have a feature which allows you to add stops that, if within certain parameters like the trip being within 30 minutes (I believe) that it kinda treats it as one trip which is rather cheaper than multiple independent trips.

So, for example, I had to pick up my kid from school the other day and found out last minute I wouldn't have a car. So I booked a Waymo, selected my destination, and then also selected that it would be "round trip" in the app. The car got me to the school and an option in the Waymo app for "ready for pickup" was available; the car left after it dropped me off. After my kid came out, I clicked that ready button and another car came to the school and took us home.

The price for the round trip was just over $20. The price for two independent trips would have been about $10 more (if I'm calculating & remembering correctly). So another interesting feature on the pricing discussion which, to my knowledge, isn't an option with the other ridesharing/taxi businesses.

This feature exists on Uber and Lyft too, although iirc it’s buried underneath some ads

This won’t last long. Waymo has a treasure chest waiting to be deployed as soon as they start expanding more.

I genuinely expect that there will be a point at which manufacturing becomes the bottleneck.

That's going to be a lot of cars to build.

I really wonder if and when they expand to a lot more car manufacturers and models, just to avoid supply chain issues.

I live 15 minutes from downtown Phoenix, and it took them 2 years to expand to my location. Over 4 years after Waymo launched beta testing here..

Waymo cannot take me on the freeway (backstreets only)

Waymo cannot go to the entire city of Peoria, Surprise, Goodyear..

Waymo cannot go to the entire western half of the state.

If you live 30 minutes from the downtown city centre, there is a 30% chance Waymo can go there. Waymo serves higher-end areas only today (Scottsdale, Tempe, Chandler) - if you live in a poorer area, no Waymo for you.

I have family who lives in Scottsdale and Surprise, Waymo can't take me there.

My dentist is less than a mile from my house, Waymo can't take me there - but can take me to a fashion mall in chandler.

Is it better than Uber/Lyft? Experience wise, sure, but their snail's pace expansion is disheartening. Not to mention the freeway issue.

It will be more profitable for them to deploy cars to new cities at a premium than to deploy them to existing cities to capture more of those cities' markets. We won't see affordable driverless taxi service for many years unless competition appears. After Uber and Cruise imploded, I don't have much hope for that.

Is that true? There's a ton of overhead required to have any presence in a city (all of the fueling/cleaning/repairing/storing/etc depots) that you need to amortize over lots of cars. If they can keep the cars busy, I think they'd much rather have 5,000 cars in one city than 500 cars in 10 cities (with 10x the overhead).

They have a big upfront cost to add a new city, but once they add it, their marginal revenue per car will be higher there (partly because they can be sure to keep those cars busy and partly because they can charge a higher premium).

They have to prepare the infrastructure anyway in all the cities to get to the scale they want to get to, but each new car built is going to be sent to the least scaled city so far.

Does that make sense from a consumer brand perspective though? If everytime I check Waymo there's no capacity or it's super expensive, pretty soon I won't even bother checking it.

It's worked so far. People are willing to pay the premium.

Cruise is still here, they just stopped their unattened car testing.

If they expand their supply, I would expect that to lower prices, not raise them.

> nowhere near where it needs to be to handle real scale.

This is a phenomenally solvable problem. And it’ll scale without requiring more humans to train and monitor.

in my experience the prices are competitive to 10% more and wait times are 5-12 minutes longer than Uber/lyft

the comparisons are worse if i am coming from the outer richmond

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