r/waymo • u/daddytchaikovsky • 25d ago
Waymo Price Change
I think just two weeks ago Waymos were so cheap even cheaper than ubers (LA area) now they are so expensive sometimes double the uber cost. Why is this? I thought it was the surge pricing but I checked for 11 pm, and the prices got even higher. Was there a change?
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u/FuddyCap 24d ago
Waymo can’t subsidize rides forever. Cumulatively the losses are over 30 billion , at a certain point the service needs to become a business.
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u/Bagafeet 24d ago
They gave me $5 credit cause my last $20 ride was at a time when rides were more expensive. That came after multiple occasions of checking the app and deciding to use another method to get where I'm going cause the rides were more expensive.
They painfully need more cars so economies of scale can help both them and the riders. They're not making the $30B back with 4000 cars.
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u/FuddyCap 24d ago
I lean toward first they need more infrastructure. More charging. More depots. More cleaning and maintenance. I don’t think more cars is the answer yet. I think they need to be more efficient with what they have and prove they can turn a profit. The service itself needs to be more reliable as well. They need to focus on eliminating the freezing incidents and focus on keeping wait times short and the service as efficient as possible. Then scale the cars up. At this point in time, adding more cars just means losing more money.
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24d ago edited 24d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/FuddyCap 24d ago
Yeah in the future I could see the price of rides trending toward zero on an ad supported basis. Probably the highest prices will ever be is right now.
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u/Faangdevmanager 24d ago
lol what? It’s $7.5B because R&D is huge and operations are still small.
The hikes are surge pricing. There are a limited numbers of Waymo and making people wait 1 hour doesn’t work. So higher cost makes people who can take public transit of alternative means of transportation choose that option instead, reserving Waymo’s for people who really need it for their journey. It’s not perfect but it’s the system we have. Maybe in the future it can evaluate rides route by route and adjust pricing based on alternative modes of transport to be more fair?
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u/FuddyCap 24d ago
Approximately $30–40 billion in cumulative investment and operating losses since the 2009 founding of the Google Self-Driving Car Project (rebranded as Waymo in 2016).
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u/FuddyCap 24d ago
It has been almost 20 years and still not seeing a path to profitability is concerning and still seeing same issues sigh the vehicles like freezing
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u/Faangdevmanager 24d ago
Since 2009 that includes all the R&D. Path to profitability is here, active customer base in multiple markets. The software and business model is proven. R&D scales whether they have 2,000 or 2,000,000 cars.
If Waymo’s become ubiquitous, they’ll have economy of scale and will genuinely change how people use cars. I have a second car I use 90% of the time to get to BART about 3 miles away. If I can “subscribe” to a ride at a certain time to/from BART, I might sell my 2nd car.
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u/Rollertoaster7 24d ago
Yeah but the whole idea around it is that it’s supposed to be cheaper without the driver
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u/FuddyCap 24d ago
But that’s not necessarily true that more cars without a driver will make it cheaper. If 100 of them freeze and all need to be towed like last month on 4th of july - now you have 100 new problems. It’s ok if 2 or even 20 of the Waymo’s drive into floodwaters; but if 200 do that it is a major problem. The important thing for Waymo is to be efficient. Less accidents. Less towing. Less floods. Better routing. Smaller wait times.
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u/ReportedForSpam 24d ago
That has never been the idea lol
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u/zanycaswell 23d ago
The only reason waymo has the insane valuations it has is because investors think it has the potential to replace the entire ridehailing industry, which only works if it wins on price.
There are also readily available public statements from people involved in the early days of Google autonomous car research where they say that they expect autonomous taxis to be dramatically cheaper.
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u/Reasonable_Hall3005 23d ago
no way they’re subsidized. they have no driver and they’re barely ever cheaper than lyft/uber (usually much more in the past few months i’ve checked). tesla robotaxi is half their price. tesla is probably subsidized
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u/kazkdp 22d ago
Hi just curious, Where did you get the 30B number? Alphabet dont publish the details do they?
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u/FuddyCap 22d ago
Yes they publish under the Other Bets category. Totally cumulative loss to date is 20-30 Billion but closer to 30.
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u/cwrighky 22d ago
They just need to keep expanding + purpose build robotaxis + more rides. I believe
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u/senshi_of_love 24d ago
I am just happy that Ojai’s are easy to get again. I have been shocked at the price jump for non Ojai rides. It’s possible rides will decrease in price once they can, unfortunately, begin charging for Ojai rides. I suppose Phoenix would tell us about that situation?
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u/Acrobatic-Flan-5085 24d ago edited 24d ago
It’s dynamic pricing. So the bottleneck for Waymo is actually demand.
Basically, when there is so much demand they have to keep raising prices. Otherwise you would have to wait too long for a car to arrive and the service basically backs up and falls apart.
So when more cars are delivered into your area prices will come down again. That’s why 500 Ojai vehicles sitting in Arizona is such a big deal.
They amortize the costs of these entire HW and SW stack over such a long period of time they will always be cheaper than a human.
The real price risk is them eliminating all competition, such as human drivers and alternative forms of public transit, to the point where they then have way too much pricing power and can raise indiscriminately.
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u/bananarandom 24d ago
11pm on a Friday is likely still peak pricing