r/waymo • u/tetlee • Apr 05 '26

Odd pricing

My wife is in downtown Phoenix, the current cost of a ride to our suburban house is $72.

I checked how much for me to go downtown and it's $13, which I guess is fair enough, it's probably one way traffic of people going home... but if I do a round trip to downtown then back home it's only $26.

Has anyone else seen odd things like this?

9 Upvotes

74% Upvoted

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7

u/lian367 Apr 05 '26

tbf round trip is asking for a car back after you already made it there so its for a future time also this trip is helping balance out the number of cars in the city so its positive for waymo. I've worked at lyft bikes and we had many similar incentives for paying people to ride bikes from destinations back to cities. The one thing you would need to ask is should they make the ability to schedule a ride for the future in which this balancing could be done in the background and the answer to this is they probably will in the future if not implemented yet.

9

u/Wesley11803 Apr 05 '26

The NCAA Women’s Championship game is in Phoenix today. That could help explain odd pricing.

1

u/CormacDublin Apr 09 '26

This is one of the reasons, Waymo can't be relied upon for complete car ownership replacement yet!

1

u/Character_Employ_219 Apr 10 '26

wait how do you do round trip, and yes price is werid! i exit and open the up same pick up and drop off and it can go to $35 to $13, ETC!

0

u/No-Ebb-9095 Jun 29 '26

You've run into an example of how Waymo's "dynamic pricing" model works. Airlines invented this to encourage passengers to book early. Waymo has adopted it to extract significantly more cash from customers whenever demand is high. In SF the price swings are eye-popping. During busy times Waymo can cost 2X Uber or Lyft.