Which seemed like an iffy bet. Someone who invents self-driving robo-taxis isn't going to want to give away their profit margin to Uber. Why would they? You can just open up the Waymo app and order, well, a Waymo.
Yeah, and building their own... seemed like a classic mistake where they confused the talent to replace the taxi dispatch telephone number with the talent needed top make a self-driving car, which are two very different things.
Well this doesn’t jibe with the current reality that Waymo is teaming with Uber right now. To make Waymo economically viable, it needs to be almost 100% utilized.
Also because people hate using multiple apps, you need an “aggregator” (see Stratechery). If I go to a city and I need a ride from
the airport, my default is going to be to open Uber - not to say “oh yeah, Waymo is available when I fly into ATL but not when I fly into JFK”. Uber was even available when I flew into QXP from San Jose Costa Rica (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quepos_La_Managua_Airport).
Also many businesses have “Uber for Business” where business travelers can automatically get their Uber rides charged to the company instead of having to do reimbursements. How many companies are going to establish relations with Waymo to and tell their sales people/consultants - “use the Waymo app in cities where it is available otherwise use Uber”?
Just like I’m not going to open some taxi app when I fly into DCA. But I will open the Uber app and choose a taxi (with the standard taxi regulations) if it is more convenient.
Business travellers is a lot more lucrative for companies than consumers.
But getting back to Waymo and utilization, if you know you need both enough capicity to handle peak utilization and want to have capacity to handle steady state, you are going to have Waymo as a baseline and people that will come out when they think it is worth it based on current surge pricing.
Having enough Waymo cars available to handle peak capacity would be about as dumb as Intuit having enough server capacity in a Colo to handle tax season instead of using AWS and autoscaling.
Uber is also managing maintenance for Waymo in the cities it is available.
When in Israel some people insisted on using the Uber app. Well, all Uber did was dispatch a Gett taxi.. with a 15% surcharge. And it turns out they also de-prioritised Uber's requests.
So anyone who actually knew what they were doing would just install the Gett taxi app, which was cheaper and better than Uber. If such an app existed in DCA, I would certainly install it. But I wouldn't bother with an app at all in DCA, since they already have an excellent and affordable taxi system. (Taxis in DC are cheaper than Ubers, particularly during surge pricing; if you want an app, install Curb.)
"Uber for Business" is an even more giant scam, where it costs more than Uber does personally. At the last place I worked, employees were advised to go ahead and set it up but switch to Personal and just request reimbursement because of how large the price difference was.
But you're right, Uber will always have a niche of people who are unable to install or use anything other than the Uber app and want to be blissfully unaware that better alternatives exist.
Let say “Uber for Business” is more expensive and you work for a large company that has enough business travelers where they have their own check in terminal out of SEA like where I worked when I did a lot of business travel (worked remotely and flew into SEA a few times). The time saved by both the business travelers and the reimbursement team would have been well worth the extra cost. Especially when either the client was paying for travel anyway (the consulting department) or sales was bringing in tens of millions in revenue.
Even if I had been aware of getting a taxi directly when we went to DC last month or had been aware of the DiDi app in Costa Rica or the local app in Israel, as a tourist, I am still going to use Uber because everything is one central place, I am on vacation so I’m not that price sensitive and especially in Costa Rica, I know my Spanish is still rough and the Uber app automatically translates to English.
I would personally be very annoyed if my company asked me to reconcile Uber rides to save a few bucks when I know how much money I directly and indirectly make the company when I’m on/over a project.
When I've worked for a large company, I had to spend more time on expense reports, not less. However much I was being paid seemed to have on relevance to how much time I had to spend on keying things into Concur (and no, we didn't have admin staff who would do it for us).
If you're not "price sensitive" on vacation, good for you. If I'm on vacation in Israel (or DC), I would prefer rides that show up faster and are cheaper. If you prefer to use the Uber app for everything, that's fine, but I doubt there is much of a use case for "people who don't want to install an extra app and are OK with paying 15% more for everything".
If you have mastered the art of user acquisition where you can get enough people to install an extra hypothetical Waymo app that is only useful in a few cities, not available during peak times with the value proposition that it may be 20% cheaper, you should really be starting your own business.
Well funded startups haven’t been able to beat the incumbents profitably. How many people that can afford to fly from the US to Isreal or anywhere else that requires crossing an ocean are going to be price sensitive enough to research the local ride sharing spp they never heard of to save a few dollars?
Even working for a startup, once you take into account all of the other costs if business travel, is saving 15% on Uber rides really meaningful? Before working for AWS (no longer there), I worked for a 70 person startup and even there they didn’t quibble about spending money for minor quality of life improvements. This wasn’t unicorn by any means. Just a run of the mill enterprise SaaS company in the medical industry.
I'll simply leave this on the table: Gett is completely dominant in Israel versus Uber, and Uber is stuck playing second fiddle to Gett where they simply resell Gett's service and have to do so at a markup. Because they can't drivers even interested using the Uber app, because the Gett app is better. (Note: Uber completely gave up in 2023, and you can't book at all in Israel using Uber anymore.)
It would appear that competitors to Uber can indeed exist. And yes, after flying to Israel I still care about cost (or my employer does). Two weeks on the ground can cost as much for taxis as the flight would.
If Gett has nationwide coverage for a whole country yes. If my Spanish was better (working on it, we are planning to snowbird in San Jose in a couple of years), I would use the DiDi app while there.
But that’s completely different than using Waymo in the few cities where it is available and still using Uber everywhere else in the country and constantly not having rides available during peak times.
Waymo would never have enough cars to handle peak capacity that are just sitting idle most of the time.
Why would Waymo want to maintain a large fleet when they want to focus on the technology? Self driving != self maintaining. Isn't Waymo and Uber partnering? [0]
Uber currently doesn’t maintain a large (or any) fleet either. I wonder how much the marginal gains from not paying drivers is shaved off by fleet maintenance of expensive cars.
Nope. They shift all of the costs of owning a vehicle onto their drivers.
They will be happy to lease a vehicle to you as the driver (with a predatory, abusive contract), but even this is almost entirely operated by third parties.
I suspect the plan was just to buy, merge, or partner with whatever company succeeded in self driving first. For a lot of startups, acquiring market share is the hard part, the technology is relatively easy. Obviously that’s not the case with full self driving vehicles, but the rest of Uber’s technology is fairly straightforward.
