The seemingly never-ending reprimands and reminders of your parents to just take the cab or other means of transport, rather that Uber and Lyft since they are expensive. Mothers always know best. But not this study.
Obi, an app responsible for aggregating real-time pricing and pick-up times across various ridesharing platforms – think of Agoda, except that this is for hotels, or Expedia for lights – found out that Waymo and its self-driving cars are consistently and significantly more expensive than Uber and Lyft rides.
Obi shared their findings exclusively with ridesharing media. Based on a month’s worth of data collected between the 25th of March to the 25th of April, a month after, in California, by pulling out almost 90,000 “offer records” coming from Waymo, the “standard” offering of Lyft, and UberX, revealing that Lyft still offers the lowest average pricing at $14.44, with Uber’s pegged at $15.58.
Waymo? Well, the app found out their pricing is at $20.43.
But wait, there’s more. The shortest Waymo rides are also showing some interesting figures. They were priced 41.48 percent and 31.12 percent in recent times, which is higher than Uber and Lyft, respectively.
Furthermore, that gap shrank as the rides got longer. In rides that last between 4.3 kilometers and 9.3 kilometers, a Lyft costs $2.60 per km, an Uber costs $2.90 per km, and a Waymo costs $3.50 per km.
Whoa. Surprising for you? Surprising for the proponents of the study, too.
Ashwini Anburajan, Obi’s chief revenue officer, told Ridesharing Forum this was somewhat surprising given the early popularity of Waymo’s service. In May, this company said in its statement it is providing an estimated 250,000 paid trips per week across its first four cities.
“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’s not going to be happening, at least in the near term,” Anburajan revealed.
She added that this is winning customers in favor of Waymo.
“There’s something about being in the car alone” winning customers over, she told this team, pointing out, “It is there for you to, like, kind of live in a little bubble and get from point A to point B, and be very comfortable doing so.”
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