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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Well currently Waymo is about double the price of Uber. But yes hopefully one day it will be cheaper.

> Well currently Waymo is about double the price of Uber.

This is not accurate in my experience in SF. Most of the time, the price is comparable to UberX and during peak-times, the price is upto 20% higher than UberX.

I spent a week there very recently (like 3 weeks ago) and checked the prices a lot. It was always around 50%-100% higher than Uber. It was never even close to 20% higher.

I took a couple of trips for the novelty value (as someone else mentioned, it's by far the best tourist attraction in SF at the moment!). The experience was really great - very relaxing - but there's no way I'd use it if I just wanted transport. I can see women paying a premium for it out of fear of taxi drivers, but that's not really an issue for me. I would maybe pay a small premium to avoid awkward lack of conversation, and the bad driving of typical taxi drivers, but not 50%!

That wasn't my experience in August, the prices were pretty much at parity whenever I looked.

This post compares prices in LA: https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/s/sU6l51A0XD. It's inline with what I mentioned above.

They could be scaling price with demand similar to Uber. Could be demand for Waymo was higher than demand for Uber at the time you checked.

Right this second, 11 am Tuesday after Veterans day, 2024, a trip to the Palace of Fine Arts would cost me $15 on Waymo, $24 for a wait and save on Lyft, and $17 for an UberX.

Also no pressure to tip with Waymo.

Right this second, 6pm on a Friday night, the Marina, Waymo was $30, Lyft was $25, and Uber was $20.

9pm, Saturday night, Uber and Lyft to Hibernia bank is $12, Waymo is $17.

> But yes hopefully one day it will be cheaper.

I also hope it will be cheaper, but it's definitely worth paying more for Waymo because of the better experience: safer, smoother, quieter, no weird smells, or conversation, etc.

If anything Waymos are much more likely to have weird smells than Ubers since the robot can't smell. Nothing is stopping someone from scrapping some dog doo off their shoe onto the carpet to the pleasure of the next rider.

Unless the weird smells come from the driver. If a customer causes a smell the car will be cleaned and the customer fined. If the driver is smelly - like from sitting in a car all day - there's nothing to be done.

Who can tell who caused the bad smell? If you have a driver they'd know but how will Waymo know which of the 20 or so riders dragged in dog doo, maybe the doggy doo accumulated through the first 10 rides. Who foots the bill then?

The same way as with car shares. You blame the person before the person to report it and have cameras.

but anyone who gets into a Waymo that smells like dogshit can get out, report it, and wait for the next one. Are you describing a real problem or just one you imagine?

In these scenarios you do understand that there will be a non zero number of smelly Waymos, that was my entire point, also until someone reports it you really won't have that smelly Waymo fixed.

They are definitely cleaner right now, but that's probably mostly because only rich people and tourists currently use them. If they ever become cheaper than an Uber I would expect them to become smellier too.

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