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Comment by kungito | Hacker News Reader

I have no doubt that Google is waiting for more adoption before starting to cut costs everywhere and before you know it your puked out ride will direct you to www.waymo.hr/help to find an article which resolves your issue

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Why would that be any different from Uber? Doesn't Uber also want to cut costs?

Uber has partner drivers which have their own companies, their own rating, and can be punished for their behaviour. Once a company completely vertically integrates (like Google would like), meaning they have their own cars, they no longer want to punish themselves for bad behaviour/cars. Since they have to choose between short term cost of higher maintenance fee or long term cost of loss of quality of service their managers will start to optimize for quarterly results: cutting short term costs. What they want is to first entrench the market, push out competitors, introduce complex regulation and fees which prevents new competitors into the market and then start cutting costs everywhere they can and increase prices.

Since you mention Uber, I can definitely see in my city how the quality of cars decreased and they started using almost inclusively cheap immigrants who realistically couldn't pass a drivers exam in my country and have on multiple occasions driven into wrong directions/ran red lights etc.

I didn't understand any of that.

Waymo is posiionting itself as a premium product. Defending that brand precludes letting the cars go to shit.

Yup. Plus, if Waymo can clean its cars with greater efficiency at lower cost than Uber can, then all other things being equal, Waymo will have cleaner cars.

They may be trying to, but when has Google ever successfully positioned something as a premium product and defended that?

There's always a first time.

Pixel phones? Nest? The Bayview hotel rooms are pretty nice. Hell even Gmail feels pretty premium to me, but I guess this word might be considered subjective.

Also, Waymo isn't even Google. You might accuse me of overstating this, but truthfully they operate as a different company.

Pixel phones have less of a brand than Samsung, much less Apple (not talking about actual product quality, just brand positioning). Nest doesn't stand out, although I don't think any of the smart home things are really established enough to know which are good or bad. I've never heard of the Bayview hotel rooms. Gmail is good but it's not a "premium" feel.

The drivers are not the same people who activate their account.

There are schemes where undocumented immigrants ask someone to activate their account on their behalf. In practice, the person giving you a ride could be literally anyone.

Uber doesn't really have a way to increase profit through messier cars. But they can do things like increase prices after taking over a market, which they have not been at all shy about doing.

> Uber doesn't really have a way to increase profit through messier cars

Don't they? Allowing messier, older, and less pleasant cars would increase the supply of drivers, allowing Uber to place lower bids on those drivers, lower their prices, increase volume and revenue, and increase profit.

They can definitely have more beat up cars which over time I can observe in my city. As for prices, luckily they have a lot stronger competition with bolt and local taxi apps as creating a local taxi app is really not that hard

The standards might one day be a problem. As in, maybe, and one day. Not definitely, and not currently.

Sometimes it's worth not worrying about problems too far in advance.

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