I think folks are missing the key here. If waymo offers its own app and there aren't any available vehicles when a user wants a ride, user trust is lost, and people don't bother trying it next time.
With the Uber app, Uber will show both options when they're both available. It allows waymo to offer a lower SLA/SLO while still gradually fielding a service. It also allows for easier fallback if a waymo vehicle is taking too long to arrive.
This is fascinating, obviously it makes a tonne of sense for uber as a platform to offer waymo's autonomous vehicles. The first question I had though was "who extracts value here". Does Waymo get to demand human-driver level prices and therefore capture loads of value or does Uber actually capture the value because they're where the customers are. But then I realised... it doesn't matter. Waymo is part of Alphabet, and Uber is sitting at around a $70Bn market cap, surely if this is starting to show signs of success Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber, vertically integrates, gets a great platform, great customer base, has all the customer service infra that google sucks at and they just slowly phase out the human drivers by rolling out autonomous vehicles as they're legalized in each jurisdiction.
I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber obviously cannot spin up an org to replicate self driving vehicles in a few months. By that logic I would say Waymo has all of the power since they could develop their own app and undercut uber on pricing. The customers would instantly leave as it is a race to the bottom with ride share.
The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor. It's why Uber sold its own self driving division and it's something Cruise has said in the past still needs to be figured out.
Uber has pivoted to doing partnerships with any self driving player that is looking for a customer base. Waymo doesn't have the tech nor the desire to figure out logistics to compete with Motional or Cartken in the delivery space, for example. None of these players can instantaneously ramp up to millions of vehicles on the road; they physically don't have enough hardware and the age of money burning for growth at all costs is behind us. I can't imagine Waymo has bigger utilization than Bolt, or even Alto.
The way I see it, Uber is more like McDonalds: "easy" to copy from conceptual perspective but also a globally recognizable brand with an undeniably strong customer acquisition arm.
Waymo still has a lot to prove to themselves in terms of ROI. Customer acquisition would be even more expenses on top of the already expensive tech, partnering with Uber to offload these costs to a proven customer acquisition player makes sense for them.
If no one steps up to challenge Waymo in this space in a reasonable timeframe, Waymo wins. If they do, Uber wins.
Uber's play is as a platform. They win if there are several SDC providers (with working autonomy). As an analogy, they're Android; they want to own the network and have multiple operators plug into the Uber app, while the hardware makers don't want to do the work to spin up an expensive 2-way marketplace. Waymo is playing at the iPhone game. They want to be the biggest market operator, and can get away with not owning the top of the funnel for the time being. If other operators fall far behind in progress, Waymo will spin up the investment to vertically integrate and try to siphon Uber customers off that way.
Many comments saying Waymo could easily spin up an Uber-replacement app are missing one key point: integrating with Uber allows Waymo to have a slow rollout / soft-launch.
They can start adding support one city at a time. And for the Uber user, the Waymo option only pops up for you if the ride you requested is within the Waymo range and they have cars available.
This way they can also collect tons of data about how users respond to the offers, affinity to driverless cars per region, price elasticity, etc. And then dial the supply up or down as they wish. They can even start covering a city with just two cars if they wanted to, and then build popularity and word of mouth.
On the other hand if they started with their own app, the lack of car coverage in most areas (due to low car supply, pending regulations, etc) would quickly frustrate users who would then switch to another app, so user retention would be a nightmare.
Not to mention side-stepping all the customer-facing operations of running such a business, which Alphabet does not have an affinity for.
I think my confusion is more about Uber’s incentives here. They’re providing a ramp-up platform for Waymo as you described, but as soon as it hits any scale Waymo can easily part ways.
> The collaboration with Uber gives Waymo’s self-driving technology a second path to commercialization. As Katherine Barna, head of PR at Waymo, told TechCrunch, Waymo is “building a Driver, not a vehicle.” That “driver-as-a-service” model is similarly how Waymo intends to commercialize autonomous trucks, and it means that the company can lease out its AV technology, rather than being the owner-operator of that technology.
Waymo wants to be both owner-operator of their vehicles for their Waymo One taxi service and be a “technology provider” for other ridehail companies. I wonder if the latter is a more lucrative business model. Less operational costs due to someone else running the service, ability pass on liability to them and they can just develop/maintain the tech.
i think the main goal of licencing would be less capital costs. buying cars isn't cheap, especially not at scale - licencing their tech to somebody else means every car they put on the road is $150k waymo doesn't have to spend.
I expected this deal to happen right after Dara became CEO, and definitely after Uber sold off their self-driving division. This is why I've owned Uber stock since the IPO, despite the ongoing volatility.
Uber is a software-powered company, but their business model is squarely a marketplace. Running a marketplace is an economics problem, not a technical one. The actual dollars are made from the neverending work of balancing cost of acquisition from both sides of the market, while keeping all the logistics from overwhelming the operational costs. This is true whether it's finance (e.g, health insurance), goods (Ebay), or services (Uber).
There's a big huge gap between this and say, SaaS (trading money for bytes in a specific order and occasional human help) or a super hard hardware problem. When a company tries to have both, they often get stuck with two mediocre businesses rather than one amazing one.
The other key component is just Dara's style specifically. His past successes comes from in other marketplaces (Expidia), and he knows that running marketplaces is all about shaping deals to feed both markets. Despite the history between the two companies, if a deal is obvious, he'll find a way to make it happen. Google isn't prepared for a huge push into a consumer transport service, and Uber isn't willing to bet $20B on a tech hardware moonshot. The gravity for this deal makes it inevitable.
From personal experience: I can say that I never worked for Dara, but I did work for his cousin, and the whole family has the same style. They are very effective at execution, especially when it comes to shaping deals like this. This will work to the benefit of both Google and Uber.
Google owns a bit over 5% of Uber at 70B and a very high percentage of waymo at 30B evaluation. (last measured) so incentive is for Waymo to succeed / grow.
It seems counter intuitive to me that they do a strategic partnership with Uber given low switching cost of using another app if it had meaningful cost benefits to the consumer. Additional Google owns the Android platform so could leverage that to it's advantages as well.
But Uber is already in a world of low margins marketplace matching. The deal is likely highly favorable to Google in that it need only compete with the the humans so can start to recover some of it's investment without having to directly compete on a platform basis which would be expensive per city high density rollout.
Google won't have the same driver density as Uber for a long time and for an app to be your go to ride system it had to always be fast to get a ride.
For high utilization on Google side also benefits being part of Uber platform of on tap riders.
All said, the existence of Lyft and numerous other transportation apps globally impacts the value Uber can extract. More autonomous vehicles will quickly follow Waymo and an integrated network will dominate at some point. Just like Amazon using its own delivery infra once it reached a certain scale.
I don't see this being a long term relationship. Once a given density is reached Google can leverage Android / Google maps / cost competition to push people over and why would Google / Waymo continue to pay Uber market place margin on "it's phone platform". Google will be leveraging said platform to compete with integrated networks like Tesla, Amazon zoomx, cruise, wherever apple lands and others globally.
Interesting thoughts. I was actually going to say that _Uber_ had the advantage in this deal, since it owns the customer relationship and can shape demand toward or away from Waymo.
Google has a distribution channel via Android, but I don't think it's strong enough (otherwise Stadia would still be around). They'd still have to build a destination for consumers to remember, in addition to the interface, matchmaking, billing, etc.
I guess in any deal like this, there's the potential for advantage and disadvantage from both angles. As Clay said, a good compromise is one where both parties are dissatisfied.
Are you sure? Below lotsofpulp pointed out that they're not listed as a major holder [1] and there was news in 2019 about them considering selling their stake [2]
Not the critical aspect of this announcement, but they are explicitly expecting autonomous food delivery. That makes sense in principle, but in practice… This will be all the wrong kinds of exciting for a while.
If you are a designer with a taste for spilling soup, cold pasta, and involuntarily calzone pizza, I recommend you start looking at options there, because:
- Restaurants operators do not want to leave their kitchen; if there’s a terrasse, waiters already go near the street, but it’s not true for everyone: drive through probably aren’t close enough without the car having an articulated arm.
- Food is messy at any conceivable temperature, and anything that looks even slightly gross is a huge No-No: human drivers have to deal with so many ways to preserve the food not to get yelled at, and all that knowledge is going out of the window without them.
- Customers do not want to leave their sofa. Period. Sometimes, they can’t. Always, they don’t want to — “playing video games” is the traditional excuse for “I can’t right now!” but bowel movements, or other reasons for priority hip movements, or just plain not paying attention. Your car will wait while the food gets cold. And losing money because hangry people inexplicably can’t pay attention to their notifications is not the worst part: their expectations will always be worse. The worst Karens are not the ones at Starbucks, upset that their name is spelled wrong: it’s those you haven’t seen yet because they can’t go to Starbucks because their lack of emotional balance keeps them at home most of the time.
Anyway: exciting concentration event (Alphabet is buying what’s left of Uber for pennies in a year), but there are still miracles to pull off. I, for one, will bow in silence when I finally get to see how one of the few geniuses we have left will fix this.
I still don’t understand the strategy for Waymo. After running that taxi service in phoenix for this long they resorted to partnering with Uber, it’s a huge failure. What does Uber bring to the table at all? An app that is easily replicable and with google’s reputation they can easily get customers off of Uber to their own platform. It’s a colossal failure. I was really hoping they would use Waze for this purpose. In fact it already has ride sharing and so thought that is the next natural direction. The ceo needs to go at this point. He is really taking the ship down.
It's a signal that ride share apps won't be 100% autonomous anytime soon.
If you're a consumer and you want to go from point A to point B you don't want to have to think about whether your route will be in the AV coverage area, or if AVs are able to operate in current weather conditions, or if there are enough AVs available.
You just want to press a button and have some vehicle take you from point A to point B, whether that vehicle has a human behind the wheel or not.
getting their technology working profitably at scale is obviously the first step and it is taking much longer than expected.
> app that is easily replicable
Waymo already has their own app and will continue to. the problem is that if you only have limited service in one small market then nobody has that app installed.
business travel is a large and highly profitable segment of ride sharing and it is dominated by Uber because it has the largest install base.
> What does Uber bring to the table at all?
demand. Waymo only has to accept a ride request if it meets their profitability metrics so this deal is all upside for them. if they have more profitable demand through their own app then they use their fleet for that and if not they fall back to Uber and get some free advertising to Uber customers in the process.
Waymo is a technology provider. Uber has lots of existing users and no ability to do autonomous driving. This way, Waymo gets to enter their cars in Uber's app and make a similar kind of revenue as a driver would. All Uber does is take their cut and supply passengers.
So Waymo doesn't have to duplicate all of what Uber already does, Uber users just order their ride as normally and maybe get a little cost benefit out of there not being a driver or a need to tip them, and Waymo gets to focus on the cars and the driving and rolling out in more cities.
I don't see how Waze or Google factor into this. Not really a competitor to Uber or taxis in general.
I think they’re accepting the fact that it’s crazy tough to gain market share and requires MILLIONS in ad spending. Sometimes it’s better to have a small piece of a large pie, especially when trying to bootstrap its brand, instead of taking a much bigger slice of a minuscule pie
Google doesn't even want to have human interaction, and Google's reputation for sure didn't help it in chat and social network spaces either.
And I'm sure Google doesn't even want to work it with restaurants and drivers, because you can't just put an AI algorithm to deal with their issues.
Small businesses go through a lot to just edit their own listings on local businesses, I wouldn't wish Google to be the middle man for my deliveries.
Just spitballing - I'm sure they can do the app part easily, but I think the harder part is legislation. And I don't know if Google is in much of a position to just start popping up in cities as transport competition like Uber did, whereas it might be an easier sell if it's just a new service in Uber which already exists that has the technology supplied by Google/Waymo.
>What does Uber bring to the table at all? An app that is easily replicable
What? Building an app is the easy part of building an Uber. It's the difference between building a twitter clone (weekend project) and having it beat twitter (hasn't been done yet)
Uber brings the most successful marketplace for riders/drivers and operating with local regulations globally to the table
With Google's reputation, I'd expect them to provide terrible customer support and then also just let the whole thing stagnate after the initial splashy rollout and it had to be maintained.
Not sure if that is the case. Imagine all ride hailing and cab services in a few years are based on Waymo tech including Waymo's own fleet. Waymo would be the clear winner.
I guess Uber gave up on their own autonomous vehicles. Interesting that it seems like Waymo who took the most cautious approach seems to be the last real contender standing.
People here arguing about whether "Google could / could not bang out an Uber app in a weekend" are apparently completely unaware that Google has already done this.
Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving customers already in Phoenix, AZ.
Imo, the fact that Uber knows this, and is still partnering with Waymo is a sign of weakness bc Waymo's intention is very clearly to own the customer eventually.
At the moment - self driving technology is as good as LLMs are. When they work, they work wonderfully and when they don't, they don't but the problem is that there's no sure shot way of knowing when they'll work and when they won't.
One thing that hasn't been addressed, given the limited test markets, is whether autonomous taxis actually will actually be popular and preferable among consumers. Theoretically having a car that drives itself seems like a great product/service, in practice it's more clunky and awkward than you would hope. From the experiences I've had, a human driver is undoubtedly the better option. Many things happen on the road were a driver may be forced to speed above the speed limit, circle around the double yellow line, reverse on a one way street. Be a passenger in an autonomous car within an urban setting and you'll know immediately why a human driver is the superior service (and likely to remain so). The "potential" future of every car becoming autonomous driving on highly controlled roads being able to drive in the highest level of efficiency isn't a likely scenario.
So they're going to make the cars they're already running in Phoenix available through Uber. Is this because they don't have enough users already? Are they doing it so that they can then expand into other areas without having to spend money on advertising/operations? What's the game plan?
What does Waymo get out of this? It seems to me like if the value proposition in self driving is there (privacy, consistency, etc), people would be willing to download another app? Especially once word of mouth goes through.
Plus currently the Waymo app has neat features (when the car is on its way to you, it shows you stuff like when it's stopped at a red light or whatever) that Uber probably can't replicate due to API access issues.
This may just mean that Waymo is outsourcing its Chandler AZ self-driving operations to Uber. That makes sense for Waymo. Have details come out about which way the money is flowing?
For Uber, it's all about maintaining the stock price.
I am happy to see movement from any big player on autonomous driving. I still believe Tesla will win this war but I am happy to see healthy competition in this space, happy that partnerships forming to make it happen.
I think this makes sense for the both. Waymo's technological advantage won't last forever. Unless they can overtake the entire automaker industry in a foreseeable future (which is extremely challenging goal even with Google's money), it's probably better to put path dependencies on your potential future customers and make it much harder to change. Uber desperately want to reduce its spend on drivers, so this also aligns well with their goal.
[+] [-] elromulous|2 years ago|reply
With the Uber app, Uber will show both options when they're both available. It allows waymo to offer a lower SLA/SLO while still gradually fielding a service. It also allows for easier fallback if a waymo vehicle is taking too long to arrive.
[+] [-] SilverBirch|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makestuff|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lhorie|2 years ago|reply
Uber has pivoted to doing partnerships with any self driving player that is looking for a customer base. Waymo doesn't have the tech nor the desire to figure out logistics to compete with Motional or Cartken in the delivery space, for example. None of these players can instantaneously ramp up to millions of vehicles on the road; they physically don't have enough hardware and the age of money burning for growth at all costs is behind us. I can't imagine Waymo has bigger utilization than Bolt, or even Alto.
The way I see it, Uber is more like McDonalds: "easy" to copy from conceptual perspective but also a globally recognizable brand with an undeniably strong customer acquisition arm.
Waymo still has a lot to prove to themselves in terms of ROI. Customer acquisition would be even more expenses on top of the already expensive tech, partnering with Uber to offload these costs to a proven customer acquisition player makes sense for them.
[+] [-] krebby|2 years ago|reply
Uber's play is as a platform. They win if there are several SDC providers (with working autonomy). As an analogy, they're Android; they want to own the network and have multiple operators plug into the Uber app, while the hardware makers don't want to do the work to spin up an expensive 2-way marketplace. Waymo is playing at the iPhone game. They want to be the biggest market operator, and can get away with not owning the top of the funnel for the time being. If other operators fall far behind in progress, Waymo will spin up the investment to vertically integrate and try to siphon Uber customers off that way.
[+] [-] DSingularity|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zodzedzi|2 years ago|reply
They can start adding support one city at a time. And for the Uber user, the Waymo option only pops up for you if the ride you requested is within the Waymo range and they have cars available.
This way they can also collect tons of data about how users respond to the offers, affinity to driverless cars per region, price elasticity, etc. And then dial the supply up or down as they wish. They can even start covering a city with just two cars if they wanted to, and then build popularity and word of mouth.
On the other hand if they started with their own app, the lack of car coverage in most areas (due to low car supply, pending regulations, etc) would quickly frustrate users who would then switch to another app, so user retention would be a nightmare.
Not to mention side-stepping all the customer-facing operations of running such a business, which Alphabet does not have an affinity for.
[+] [-] kevinventullo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ra7|2 years ago|reply
> The collaboration with Uber gives Waymo’s self-driving technology a second path to commercialization. As Katherine Barna, head of PR at Waymo, told TechCrunch, Waymo is “building a Driver, not a vehicle.” That “driver-as-a-service” model is similarly how Waymo intends to commercialize autonomous trucks, and it means that the company can lease out its AV technology, rather than being the owner-operator of that technology.
Waymo wants to be both owner-operator of their vehicles for their Waymo One taxi service and be a “technology provider” for other ridehail companies. I wonder if the latter is a more lucrative business model. Less operational costs due to someone else running the service, ability pass on liability to them and they can just develop/maintain the tech.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/23/waymos-self-driving-cars-w...
[+] [-] notatoad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lchengify|2 years ago|reply
Uber is a software-powered company, but their business model is squarely a marketplace. Running a marketplace is an economics problem, not a technical one. The actual dollars are made from the neverending work of balancing cost of acquisition from both sides of the market, while keeping all the logistics from overwhelming the operational costs. This is true whether it's finance (e.g, health insurance), goods (Ebay), or services (Uber).
There's a big huge gap between this and say, SaaS (trading money for bytes in a specific order and occasional human help) or a super hard hardware problem. When a company tries to have both, they often get stuck with two mediocre businesses rather than one amazing one.
The other key component is just Dara's style specifically. His past successes comes from in other marketplaces (Expidia), and he knows that running marketplaces is all about shaping deals to feed both markets. Despite the history between the two companies, if a deal is obvious, he'll find a way to make it happen. Google isn't prepared for a huge push into a consumer transport service, and Uber isn't willing to bet $20B on a tech hardware moonshot. The gravity for this deal makes it inevitable.
From personal experience: I can say that I never worked for Dara, but I did work for his cousin, and the whole family has the same style. They are very effective at execution, especially when it comes to shaping deals like this. This will work to the benefit of both Google and Uber.
[+] [-] xnx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdale|2 years ago|reply
It seems counter intuitive to me that they do a strategic partnership with Uber given low switching cost of using another app if it had meaningful cost benefits to the consumer. Additional Google owns the Android platform so could leverage that to it's advantages as well.
But Uber is already in a world of low margins marketplace matching. The deal is likely highly favorable to Google in that it need only compete with the the humans so can start to recover some of it's investment without having to directly compete on a platform basis which would be expensive per city high density rollout.
Google won't have the same driver density as Uber for a long time and for an app to be your go to ride system it had to always be fast to get a ride.
For high utilization on Google side also benefits being part of Uber platform of on tap riders.
All said, the existence of Lyft and numerous other transportation apps globally impacts the value Uber can extract. More autonomous vehicles will quickly follow Waymo and an integrated network will dominate at some point. Just like Amazon using its own delivery infra once it reached a certain scale.
I don't see this being a long term relationship. Once a given density is reached Google can leverage Android / Google maps / cost competition to push people over and why would Google / Waymo continue to pay Uber market place margin on "it's phone platform". Google will be leveraging said platform to compete with integrated networks like Tesla, Amazon zoomx, cruise, wherever apple lands and others globally.
[+] [-] morley|2 years ago|reply
Google has a distribution channel via Android, but I don't think it's strong enough (otherwise Stadia would still be around). They'd still have to build a destination for consumers to remember, in addition to the interface, matchmaking, billing, etc.
I guess in any deal like this, there's the potential for advantage and disadvantage from both angles. As Clay said, a good compromise is one where both parties are dissatisfied.
[+] [-] jefftk|2 years ago|reply
Are you sure? Below lotsofpulp pointed out that they're not listed as a major holder [1] and there was news in 2019 about them considering selling their stake [2]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36043796
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36044335
[+] [-] amelius|2 years ago|reply
But I guess they don't want to wake up the regulatory watchdogs.
[+] [-] metadaemon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bertil|2 years ago|reply
If you are a designer with a taste for spilling soup, cold pasta, and involuntarily calzone pizza, I recommend you start looking at options there, because:
- Restaurants operators do not want to leave their kitchen; if there’s a terrasse, waiters already go near the street, but it’s not true for everyone: drive through probably aren’t close enough without the car having an articulated arm.
- Food is messy at any conceivable temperature, and anything that looks even slightly gross is a huge No-No: human drivers have to deal with so many ways to preserve the food not to get yelled at, and all that knowledge is going out of the window without them.
- Customers do not want to leave their sofa. Period. Sometimes, they can’t. Always, they don’t want to — “playing video games” is the traditional excuse for “I can’t right now!” but bowel movements, or other reasons for priority hip movements, or just plain not paying attention. Your car will wait while the food gets cold. And losing money because hangry people inexplicably can’t pay attention to their notifications is not the worst part: their expectations will always be worse. The worst Karens are not the ones at Starbucks, upset that their name is spelled wrong: it’s those you haven’t seen yet because they can’t go to Starbucks because their lack of emotional balance keeps them at home most of the time.
Anyway: exciting concentration event (Alphabet is buying what’s left of Uber for pennies in a year), but there are still miracles to pull off. I, for one, will bow in silence when I finally get to see how one of the few geniuses we have left will fix this.
[+] [-] i2cmaster|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yalogin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wefarrell|2 years ago|reply
If you're a consumer and you want to go from point A to point B you don't want to have to think about whether your route will be in the AV coverage area, or if AVs are able to operate in current weather conditions, or if there are enough AVs available.
You just want to press a button and have some vehicle take you from point A to point B, whether that vehicle has a human behind the wheel or not.
[+] [-] metalspot|2 years ago|reply
getting their technology working profitably at scale is obviously the first step and it is taking much longer than expected.
> app that is easily replicable
Waymo already has their own app and will continue to. the problem is that if you only have limited service in one small market then nobody has that app installed.
business travel is a large and highly profitable segment of ride sharing and it is dominated by Uber because it has the largest install base.
> What does Uber bring to the table at all?
demand. Waymo only has to accept a ride request if it meets their profitability metrics so this deal is all upside for them. if they have more profitable demand through their own app then they use their fleet for that and if not they fall back to Uber and get some free advertising to Uber customers in the process.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|2 years ago|reply
So Waymo doesn't have to duplicate all of what Uber already does, Uber users just order their ride as normally and maybe get a little cost benefit out of there not being a driver or a need to tip them, and Waymo gets to focus on the cars and the driving and rolling out in more cities.
I don't see how Waze or Google factor into this. Not really a competitor to Uber or taxis in general.
[+] [-] aardvarkr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmpz22|2 years ago|reply
Maybe this is just Google finally admitting it sucks at a variety of business processes and needs help.
[+] [-] anaganisk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidcool|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zild3d|2 years ago|reply
What? Building an app is the easy part of building an Uber. It's the difference between building a twitter clone (weekend project) and having it beat twitter (hasn't been done yet)
Uber brings the most successful marketplace for riders/drivers and operating with local regulations globally to the table
[+] [-] Master_Odin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] owaislone|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gitfan86|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whamlastxmas|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the-dude|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mduggles|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkislyuk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonny_eh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fairity|2 years ago|reply
Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving customers already in Phoenix, AZ.
Imo, the fact that Uber knows this, and is still partnering with Waymo is a sign of weakness bc Waymo's intention is very clearly to own the customer eventually.
[+] [-] wg0|2 years ago|reply
Isn't it or something has changed lately?
[+] [-] boh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewDucker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hahaxdxd123|2 years ago|reply
What does Waymo get out of this? It seems to me like if the value proposition in self driving is there (privacy, consistency, etc), people would be willing to download another app? Especially once word of mouth goes through.
Plus currently the Waymo app has neat features (when the car is on its way to you, it shows you stuff like when it's stopped at a red light or whatever) that Uber probably can't replicate due to API access issues.
[+] [-] sschueller|2 years ago|reply
I can see Uber drivers sitting in front of computers taking over from the autonomous system to provide a pseudo autonomous experience.
[+] [-] hardware2win|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnburnsy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|2 years ago|reply
For Uber, it's all about maintaining the stock price.
[+] [-] honeybadger1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] summerlight|2 years ago|reply