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Comment by strulovich | Hacker News Reader

Aren’t Waymo prices above Uber’s? That’s what I’ve seen in SF.

That is to say that I don’t think the economics work. You’re better off offering free Ubers. And I doubt that will solve many issues.

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Waymo charges more than Uber to supply constraints, not bad unit economics. People (like me) are willing to pay extra for the product Waymo offers, and Waymo is itself supply constrained and has no direct competitors offering driverless rides, so they get to do a bit of monopoly pricing.

What's the product vs an Uber? Genuine question.

No human in the car?

This is only a product for anti-social nerds. Most people will not pay a premium for this (this isn't waymo's product).

Edit: lots of people commenting on here how they're normie and they would still prefer waymo. Read what I wrote again - I didn't say normies wouldn't prefer, I said normies wouldn't pay a premium. So unless waymo is planning on being a luxury car service (which it's not) that can't possibly be their intended product/market.

huh, definitely will pay more for not having a driver to be constantly on the phone.

They absolutely will. I'm a very social person but when I'm going home from a date with my girlfriend I always want a Waymo just because I don't want a 3rd person involved. And sometimes I'm having a bad day and don't want to have to make small talk. And it's nice that I can talk on the phone without disturbing someone.

Safety is normally ok in an uber but in a Waymo it’s much higher. Whether I’m talking about driving safety or personal safety from the/for the driver, you pick. But generally you can charge more for a safer product.

yes yes you are the product.

This comes up in conversation at office events, every woman in our office always agrees they will choose waymo over uber every time, due to the lack of (presumably male) driver.

My extremely social not-tech nerd wife that hardly uses FSD in her car got HOOKED on Waymo after the first ride. Same with my parents.

Drives better, isn't distracted, doesn't get lost, care are always clean, will always take you where you want to go day or night, and yeah, no human.

Yea, it not that most uber/lyft drivers are bad (most are good), it’s just that all Waymos provide a good experience.

It’s the same reason many people will prefer a chain restaurant to an unknown mom & pop. By knowing what you’re getting, you’re willing to give up the potential for something nominally better to avoid something much worse.

    > car[s] are always clean

This is a real surprise to me. I don't write that to doubt you. How do you think it works in practice? My point: If you have a human in the car, they can keep a closer eye on the car between rides and keep it clean. Without a driver, you lose that. How does Waymo know when a car needs to be cleaned?

Waymo regularly brings the cars in to central service depots for cleaning and battery charging. Also, as a passenger you can report that a car is dirty and it will be pulled out of service for immediate cleaning (and you get a small credit towards your next ride).

Waymo has done a great job of making its rollouts into new cities smooth. I have to wonder what will happen once they pivot to profitability in a few years. Will they be willing to lose revenue pulling so many cars out of service? Will they optimize the human costs by not having so many humans on staff?

Maybe they'll kill Uber first and then drop the quality.

"Doesn't get lost" is generous. they always cause so much caos in SF

I don't have to listen to the driver argue with his girlfriend across the entire span of the bay bridge, I don't have to worry the uber reeks of week (or worse, cigarette) smell on the way to an interview etc etc. Given the choice I will choose driverless every time.

Do you report these complaints using the Uber app? To be clear: I have no experience riding with Uber.

I have written about this before in similar discussions. I think men just cannot comprehend how much women are willing to pay to guarantee that they can avoid a scary situation in a car with a stranger driver. Ask any woman: Have you ever had a scary experince in a car with a stranger driver? Probably 100% will say yes. I would say Waymo's primary customer will be middle to high income women in urban environments.

Also middle/high income parents. Shuttling kids to and from school and activities is the real killer use case for driverless cars. They're actively working on getting this legalized.

    > Waymo charges more than Uber to supply constraints

To understand this better, is Waymo limited in each location by the number of cars they are allowed to drive? Or, is Waymo too slow to expand the number of cars on their side? As an outsider, if you have very good demand for your product, why not expand? I must be missing something obvious. (Again, I don't write this to doubt your explanation.)

There is a limit on how many they are allowed to operate.

I tried to research this limit. Here is what I found about San Francisco:

    > Waymo is not subject to a regulatory cap or hard limit on the number of cars it can operate in San Francisco.

To be clear, the regulator in question here is California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which is a state-level regulator. Apparently, SF local officials would like to limit the number of vehicles but it not allowed by division of powers.

AIUI the issue is just scaling pain. No one has ever run a global network of first-party-owned taxis before, and they're learning by doing, at the same time as they're also solving problems in ML/robotics to make the robotaxis work more reliably in more contexts, and also figuring out how to manufacture reliable robotaxis at scale.

Waymo is more until you factor in the tip for Uber. Ive also found that waymo is a lot more correct in estimating time to pickup in SF. Because Uber/lyft drivers can turn you down (presumably) I find that "your Uber can be here in 4 minutes" when I open the app turns into "but it will actually be 20"

Who tips on Uber? One price up front and paid, that is the deal. Anyone tipping on something like that is their own fault.

I dunno. Hard to say "I tip my Uber driver because I understand how little the drivers get paid" if I'm also moving to waymo instead. Hard to find ethical consumption under capitalism.

But since you asked in kind of a flippant way: who tips on Uber? People who aren't sociopaths, I'd say.

>who tips on Uber? People who aren't sociopaths, I'd say.

Non-americans don't. To me, being socially expected to tip for a Taxi feels like a parody from a sketch comedy. ditto for tipping barbers or expecting tips over 10%. The only time I've tipped a Uber was when me and my friends were at risk of losing a train. The driver (unprompted) went pedal to the metal to make it on time, so afterwards I gave him a couple of bucks.

Tip culture is bad for rideshare drivers in aggregate anyways. The apps carefully manage the pay of drivers on each market so necessary supply is guaranteed at minimal cost. If a expectation of tipping exists, the platforms simply pay less. Now drivers also have maximize for tips instead of just driving the goddamn car.

Fair enough- outside of the US, workers may get paid fairly. In the US, many service workers are in a system where the employer has externalized the cost to pay those employees to the customers. The system is awful, but I'm also not going to not tip if I can afford it.

FWIW, the real problem isn't tip culture, it is the power imbalance between labor and the company that is using that labor (without employing drivers), but I dunno how much of an audience that kind of argument has on this particular site.

My country has stronger worker protections (for now) than the US, but employers would be happy (and do try!) to externalize pay to customers via tip. It doesn't work because people find it insane and refuse the US inspired nag tip screens.

The US will never fix the externalization of salaries until the public refuses to tip at ridiculous percentages and situations. You'll see a 40% tip expectation at restaurants, your local dentist will install a tip screen. Just tip 10% at sitdown places and refuse emotional blackmail. If you feel any guilt, just make the habit to tally the dollar amount of "normal" tips and make monthly donations to your local food bank.

EDIT: My point is that tipping culture is unrelated to worker rights. Many countries with large informal economies (i.e minimum wage isn't enforced for most people) have no expectation of tipping. The reason Norwegians don't tip drivers isn't because they have a wonderful safety net, it's because there's isn't a social pressure to do so.

Mixing charity and payment of services is stupid and a moral hazard. Servers have shit wages in the US by law because people tip and the same is true (via algorithm) with rideshare drivers.

> outside of the US, workers may get paid fairly

I don't think that's why there is little tip culture in eg east Asia. It's just... the price the business expects you to pay is mostly advertised upfront, it's known to everyone involved, why would you pay more if you got exactly the service you have ordered? It simply does not make sense.

I'm not a sociopath but I believe the concept of tipping to be terrible. Everything should be in the price. up front. what's advertised should be what leaves your account. If you get bad service, don't use them again or leave a bad review. Get good service then thank them and leave a good review. The rest of the world works this way and it is simpler and less stressful.

Not tipping being "sociopathic" as if you are even actually using that word correctly must be the most American thing I have ever read. Most of the world does not tip like this.

I think Uber just lies about estimated pickup times and Waymo doesn't. Partly because I've never had an Uber arrive faster than their estimated time, whereas Waymo arrives early pretty routinely. And also several times now I've had Waymo say "it'll be 20 minutes" so I book Uber because it claims a much shorter wait time, and then Uber winds up being about Waymo's estimate anyway.

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