[kungito]

I have no doubt that Google is waiting for more adoption before starting to cut costs everywhere and before you know it your puked out ride will direct you to www.waymo.hr/help to find an article which resolves your issue

[dventimi]

Why would that be any different from Uber? Doesn't Uber also want to cut costs?

[kungito]

Uber has partner drivers which have their own companies, their own rating, and can be punished for their behaviour. Once a company completely vertically integrates (like Google would like), meaning they have their own cars, they no longer want to punish themselves for bad behaviour/cars. Since they have to choose between short term cost of higher maintenance fee or long term cost of loss of quality of service their managers will start to optimize for quarterly results: cutting short term costs. What they want is to first entrench the market, push out competitors, introduce complex regulation and fees which prevents new competitors into the market and then start cutting costs everywhere they can and increase prices.

Since you mention Uber, I can definitely see in my city how the quality of cars decreased and they started using almost inclusively cheap immigrants who realistically couldn't pass a drivers exam in my country and have on multiple occasions driven into wrong directions/ran red lights etc.

[rurp]

Uber doesn't really have a way to increase profit through messier cars. But they can do things like increase prices after taking over a market, which they have not been at all shy about doing.

[jfoster]

The standards might one day be a problem. As in, maybe, and one day. Not definitely, and not currently.

Sometimes it's worth not worrying about problems too far in advance.