Hacker News Reader

Comment by underyx | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com