Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft — and people are paying anyway

Summary

A central premise of robotaxis is that high usage and lower labor costs will ultimately make it a cheap transportation option. That is still far from true, but now there’s some data that gives us an idea of by how much. Obi, an app that aggregates real-time pricing and pick-up times across multiple ride-hailing services, has just published what it’s calling the “first in-depth examination of Waymo’s pricing strategy.” The company found Waymo’s self-driving car rides to be consistently more expensive than comparative offerings from Uber and Lyft – and it doesn’t seem to matter. The report, shared exclusively with TechCrunch, is based on a month’s worth of data collected between March 25 and April 25 in San Francisco, California. Obi pulled nearly 90,000 “offer records” from Waymo, Lyft’s “standard” offering, and UberX in order to compare price and ETA. It then compared ride requests from the same times and routes. Obi found Lyft offered the lowest average price at $14.44. Uber was next at $15.58. Waymo’s average price across the month’s worth of data was $20.43. Ashwini Anburajan, Obi’s chief revenue officer, told TechCrunch this was somewhat surprising given the early popularity of Waymo’s service. Waymo said in May it’s providing 250,000 paid trips per week across its first four cities. Higher pricing has apparently not dimmed that excitement. “Colloquially, there is an idea that autonomous vehicles are something that will erode driver jobs and put drivers at risk. And I think the irony of what we’ve seen is that it’s actually quite expensive to run an AV, and that that’s not going to be happening, at least in the near term,” she said. At peak hours, Obi found Waymo’s average price to be about $11 more expensive than a Lyft and nearly $9.50 pricier than an Uber. “I didn’t expect consumers being willing to pay up to $10 more,” Anburajan said. “I think [that] speaks to a real sense of excitement for technology, novelty, and a real preference to sometimes be in the ca...