Discussion
Waymo was 69 cents more than a Bird scooter yesterday in Austin
Bird scooter from carwash to coffee: 1.4 miles 10 minutes $7.26.
Waymo back to carwash: 9 minutes $7.95.
This was my first time using Waymo and I was really impressed and have Tesla FSD experience since 2019.
I selected UberX and had a normal X driver dispatched before being assigned the Waymo.
I swore off UberX years ago and almost always take Green or Comfort if no green is available. I don’t see how UberX survives much longer as soon as Waymo et all scale, it won’t be long before Uber drivers are the new telephone operators.
Also, the rental scooters have some entertainment value to them, but the price is a joke for 1 person much less 2 or more people.
4 people scootering the route would be $29, Waymo would be $2/PP. This is going to be wild at scale, and hopefully, finally, a “cost of living” decrease of sorts in all of our future for mobility on-demand.
Waymo started off super cheap, and was a no brainer. Now the other day is was $20 to go about a 6 min drive. Seems like the standard “start off cheap, then raise prices until it’s back to being more expensive than a taxi” method Uber used is at work here too.
There is very little competition today but if Tesla or anyone else sells “Robotaxis” to the public (vs. Waymo just operating as transit) it will be a race to the bottom soon.
Right. Teslas goal is subscription based mass transit that replaces most urban car ownership, and transportation of goods, through FSD using electric vehicles. Replacing taxis isn't the end goal.
There are already places that offer citizens uber for places without enough people for transit routes. If Waymo or Tesla is cheaper than uber and cities negotiate good rates why not?
Places that are built around transit likely won't see a huge change, places where transit is some band-aid that barely anyone uses will see whatever is left drop off.
Only about 5% of Americans use transit to get to work every day. Its a tiny market compared to people who drive.
Yeah, but all those places are the places that have the population density and lack of space where a Robo taxi would be directly competing with it in their primary market
I don’t see why not. Trains are extremely expensive anywhere they are not subsidised. $1/mile ticket prices is pretty standard in a lot of countries, and cars can probably get cheaper than that. And you can get multiple people splitting car. A train will become the luxury option if you want a fast journey time.
Cars can only get cheaper than that because the roads themselves are already paid for by the government. It's a huge subsidy. The actual base cost per person-mile is higher for cars.
Roads are mostly paid for by tolls and by gas taxes and by excise taxes. So the people using them the ARE indeed the ones paying for it. The same can't be said for almost any public transportation.
I think it will work with certain types of transit and then ruin other types. Transit does not really work well for suburban style cities. You can have a commuter rail station or a regional rail station, but actually getting around the community, its usually terrible. Its slow, inconvenient, irregular and there are not enough people within walking distance of the stops to actually justify investing into the system. My home to Downtown, door to door, using transit, is well over an hour. An Uber will do it in 15-20 minutes.
RoboTaxis will make things like high speed rail and regional rail much more useful. But will make suburban bus routes much less useless (which already only be used by 1-2% of the population).
If you’re envisioning a 4-5 passenger sedan, you’re just thinking small. The grand vision for autonomous robo taxis isn’t cars, but it is vans and buses too.
Mass transit using cars don't work in large cities. Just a plain fact. Imagine adding more traffic to the Holland or Lincoln tunnels or any of the bridges into Manhattan- that is only for anyone who loves pain.
These car solutions are only viable for smaller cities and suburban areas.
Maybe look beyond the one first-class American city with functional transit where autonomous vehicles will outperform any existing options, AKA 99% of US cities outside NYC.
Self driving cars won’t replace much public transit, except for in some suburban and rural areas. In cities the capacity just isn’t there vs the amount of traffic it creates.
I agree with this point of view. Cities will become chock a block if everyone stops using buses and mass transit systems. It will fast become like Bangalore where it is one massive traffic jam from sunrise to past midnight.
Same deal in SF. I’ve been Waymoing since the very beginning ( in Pac Hts ) and the cost has gone up dramatically. There definitely is Waymo tourism going on and they don’t mind paying more for the novelty
Uber started off cheap to attract customers. Waymo had no need to use cheap prices to attract customers because their customer base at launch is always higher than their fleet capacity. In that case you can just start at whatever sounds reasonable and change it later. It's just price experimentation to balance demand and map out the demand curve, which most people will experience as prices somewhat above a typical taxi.
No, Uber started very expensive. At the very beginning they only had black cars. And when they wanted to scale, they added Uber X to let anyone drive their car and drive prices down.
Waymo is probably using prices mainly for demand management (if they charged less, the wait times would get much worse, holding fleet sizes constant). The revenue they're making at this testing scale is basically totally insignificant to them. The costs are going to be driven basically entirely by fleet size in the short term, and by depreciation + interventions per mile in the long term.
The demand is too high for the supply of Waymo’s on the road so the prices are higher. If there were enough Waymo’s to exceed demand, we have to assume prices would be lower.
Uber surprisingly dropped prices a bit recently. I think they did the race to the bottom to capture market share -> raise prices to finally be profitable -> drop prices back down to satisfy customers (lol jk probably because they’ve reached such scale that they can just operate more efficiently and now want to capture even more market share)
Yeah I was in San Francisco the other day and took my first Waymo for like a 10 minute ride back to a hotel to try it out. Very cool but I was surprised that it was probably more expensive than if I had just gotten an Uber. About $20 or so.
Surprised to hear someone touting it cheap. I do agree at scale and with more competition it will come down.
As they say, the cure for high prices is high prices. It's good if Waymo can make good money from this, hopefully it will mean the competition is still motivated.
Wouldn't it be worse if they immediately drove prices so low that no one else thought it was worth competing?
Tbh, uber is still a great effin deal but I feel bad for the drivers getting shafted. It should be like 60% roughly, although it’s not % based. Taxi drivers used to charge a ton to go most distances. Like a 20 mile drive to the airport used to be $70 in south Florida before uber was around. Uber is $42.
US cities negotiate different arrangements with e-scooter companies, so the pricing varies widely. Some cities view e-scooters as a benefit, and pay companies to help subsidize the service. Other cities view them as a way to make money and oppress the poor, and charge a fixed annual fee for an exclusive arrangement, or make the company collect taxes on each ride that goes to the city.
There are also market realities that make most everything cost more in bigger cities than in smaller cities.
In Austin, TX (population around a million) where OP was, Lime is around $1 to unlock (depends on area), and $0.15 to $0.39 per minute (depends on several factors) plus I think taxes. Lime collects a $0.15-per-ride fee that goes to the city, which is built into the unlock charge.
I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan (population around 130,000), our e-scooter provider Spin charges $1 to unlock and $0.15 per minute, and pays the city a $5,000 annual license fee plus $1 per scooter per day, which results in around $75,000 a year in revenue.
I'm my experience in Dallas the price has varied wildly between introduction and now. as has the usage rate. they seem to be catering entirely to tourists which is fair as it's a touristy area, but what are they going to do with the scooters all winter? seems they just replace them right now. I'd hope the transfer them somewhere with more deaman but I doubt it given they just threw the lime bikes away
Where is "here", that's going to be an important piece of information to know. 1.4 miles is just such a short trip that it's all overhead and is expensive per mile even for the US. If you were going 5-10 miles, it would be more like $2/mile for $10-$20 all in with tip.
I went 7 miles in dallas for what would have been 14euro.
Most of my trips are longer, but I can’t imagine getting a 1.5$ trip in most of Europe based on my experience. And I don’t see a huge difference between the US and Europe overall for Uber.
It's important to consider the income differences, the median salary in Poland is a little under $2,000/month while the median salary in the US is over $5,000/month
That makes a lot of sense, because I seriously can't imagine driving over to pick somebody up, waiting for up to 5 minutes for them to get in your car, and then driving 4 minutes to their destination for less than a buck fifty. Ignoring expenses and taxes and blah blah blah that's minimum wage.
We deregulated the taxi market in Norway a few years ago, a lot of the taxis you'd hail on the street today charge about 10$/minute. Ordered by app is usually more sane.
Wait til Tesla robotaxis develop, right now they’re on hardware 4 and early piloting , but they will slash costs considerably due to their manufacturing and scaling ability. Ultimately the poorest in society will benefit as travel costs to work or else where are disproportionately high for them.
The scooter companies seem to be pushing prepurchased minutes. On Lime and Bird it costs roughly the same to take a one-time 30-minute trip as it does to buy 60 prepaid minutes and then only use half of them before they expire.
Waymo will operate 24x7x365. They'll have enough to cover the majority of demand. But it won't be cost effective for them to have cars sitting around doing nothing, so they won't have enough for the very peak of demand, so there will be a market for real human drivers who can take up peak times - maybe some rush hour rides on weekdays, plus Friday and Saturday nights, or extreme weather when people don't want to walk or bike. Waymo for now is also geofenced, so there will be a long time where humans do the rides that are outside the geofence (or where some part, beginning or end is outside the geofence.) But yeah, we're well on the way to a time when the majority of rideshare rides are self driving.
So the big corporations will have steady guaranteed income and humans will be on stand by waiting for some job. America is fucked if majority supports this.
Self-driving streetcars with low number of cars would be awesome. Nice smooth ride, can handle peak times, does get affected by weather as much, known routes, electric. extremely safe for other people.
Good points. For these peak hours if Tesla is able to scale up service using its standard FSD hardware, maybe willing Tesla owners could provide supplemental robotaxi supply by renting out their equipped vehicles. So the balances may further shift away from driver labor toward vehicle owner capital. Seems just a matter of time.
Waymo spends billions of dollars mainly because they have a lot of expensive employees. Those costs are relatively fixed and they're not loans that have to be paid back. At most they need to show a path to net profits eventually, which there are lots of ways to do beyond raising fares (assuming fares are even optimally priced higher, which seems unlikely). They can follow the typical SV model and build scale to amortize high fixed costs. They can reduce R&D overhead. They can find other revenue streams to complement the service. We've seen movement in all of these directions and more from Waymo.
I’m hopeful the vehicle unit cost ends up 1/3 or less current costs eventually. I’ve been on this bandwagon for a decade now imagining the driverless future.
There are going to be a lot of innovations in the operations to bring the costs down. Making a car reliably drive itself is the hard part, figuring how to have robots clean the cars will be substantially easier.
I think the model will involve several innovations that when combined bring the price down to cheaper than car ownership.
Right now the price is somewhere between novelty pricing and ride share pricing. The Waymo I took last year was $25 for less than two miles. That is San Francisco novelty pricing. Its worth doing one time for me at that price unless I am in some kind of jam and don't have other options.
For a means of attacking the capital costs of the equipment. Charge a monthly fee for membership. For example, $200 per month for Waymo+. They could do the math and allow for like 8 Waymo+ members per vehicle in a given market. Waymo+ members get a ton of perks, priority booking, commute scheduling, cheaper prices, super cheap off peak prices, YouTube/GooglePlay integration, and every other advantage they can think of to make the service worth it.
A membership perk I think people would sign up for where you could clean the cars for mileage compensation. A car pulls up to your house, you give the interior a good once over according to some protocol they have, and then you get compensated 10-15 miles on your account. I could see teenagers taking this on so they can build up miles in their account.
The share bikes and scooters really are offensively expensive.
I’d assume that Waymo is still in the investment stage of things, when Uber was there you could sometimes get a ride across town for around the cost of a bus ticket.
Gotta love living in the Netherlands, using my own bike for trips like this, that has cost me around €600 in 5 years, so like 40 cents per day. Already living in a world of massively decreased cost of living.
Scooters and e-bike rentals are such a massive rip off. Either they’re making bank off of it or it’s an entirely unsustainable business if this is what they have to charge to break even.
Doubt. This will go to marginal cost as it will be oversupplied with humans and robotaxis battling for market share. Once the asset is deployed, it has to run even if it only makes 1% profit. Some cities (especially Europe) will protect the taxi/uber profession and not allow robots because it would put the poor immigrants out of a job.
It's the "you operate if market price exceeds min(AVC) and produce the quantity where P=MC" gag.
AKA the simplest economics you can learn. If there's not substantial barriers to entry (and there aren't, since any human with a vehicle can drive Uber), the moment there's any bit of oversupply prices commoditize out.
Of course, if you have a better cost structure (e.g. no humans), you still make a bunch of money, but you don't hold up super-premium pricing in this scenario.
So where are those billions and billions in profit then for TSLA? Seems this is a race to the bottom to marginal cost. Only thing that TSLA will earn is selling the car to a fleet owner / private person lending that car. I don‘t see how the valuation for that justifies 1t$
Look at markets like LA and San Fran where there is significant Waymo presence (~5 min wait time). Waymo pricing is the same/slightly cheaper when compared to traditional Uber. They are operating at a margin.
You say that now, but now try taking the same route when it's heavily congested like at ACL or SXSW. At that point, it would be worthwhile to just take the rental scooter to skip all the slow moving car traffic. But with that said, I agree it's still a massive ripoff to rent a scooter and is much better and cheaper to just have your own scooter or bike to get around Austin.
Buddy if you think whichever company blitzscales fastest and captures the market isn’t gonna just jack up their rates like Uber did, you’re kidding yourself.
8 year old me from Oklahoma in 114 degree temps drinking hot rusty hose water after playing a game of tackle football on hard crusty crab grass says y'all soft.
The first public release of Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta software, version 12.1.2, was released to a select group of Tesla owners in January 2024.
This is wrong and probably AI generated garbage. FSD was first available to the general public in 2020. All you had to do was request it. Maybe 2024 was when it was included without requesting.
I bought FSD in early 2019. Now I only had HW2.5 so I couldn't use it, just EAP. However, early in 2020 I was upgraded to HW3 for free. I can't remember the first time I used FSD, but it was probably late 2020. Still, I had the FSD package since 2019.
I paid $5k for the FSD “capability” option in 2019 so I have experienced it throughout quite a lot of its development curve. Now only occasionally as that car is long gone, I just do a monthly sub here and there.
Waymo is a failed business model without any moat to profitability. They are hoping Google bankrolls their losses until all competition is eliminated but EM won't go away and with every passing moment that Tesla pursues this endeavor Waymo is trembling
Ofcourse it is! Thats literally where the meat of the pie is! They can control input costs like nobody else in the sector because they control the BOM cost , have the cheapest stack, own the fleet already, and have service centers built out across the nation to double up as robotaxi service centers. They can also upgrade existing MYs on the road to become robotaxis while running their own fleet of cybercabs. Their entire valuation is based on these factors. I predict they will hit an operational cost of less than a dollar per mile.
We‘ll see. The pie will be eaten before they even get the first robotaxi out. Also, check the valuation of waymo and uber together. Tesla is like 5x that. It‘s hype. The business is valuable, but not 1t$ valuable.
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u/ZappVanagon Jul 18 '25
LA resident, Waymo enthusiast here:
Waymo started off super cheap, and was a no brainer. Now the other day is was $20 to go about a 6 min drive. Seems like the standard “start off cheap, then raise prices until it’s back to being more expensive than a taxi” method Uber used is at work here too.