The central premise of Robotaxis is that high usage and lower labor costs ultimately make it a cheaper transportation option. It’s still far from the truth, but now there’s data to give you how many ideas.
Obi is an app that aggregates real-time pricing and pickup times across multiple ride hale services, and has published what is called “The First In-Detailed Study of Waymo’s Pricing Strategy.” The company has found Waymo’s self-driving vehicle vehicles are consistently more expensive than comparative offers from Uber and Lyft.
The report, shared exclusively with TechCrunch, is based on a month’s worth of data collected in San Francisco, California between March 25th and April 25th. Obi pulled nearly 90,000 “offer records” from Waymo, the Lyft “standard” offer, to compare prices with ETAs. Next, we compared ride requests from the same time and route. Obi found that Lyft offered the lowest average price for $14.44. The Uber was the next $15.58. The average price for Waymo across monthly data was $20.43.
Obi’s chief revenue officer, Ashwini Ambrajan, told TechCrunch that this was somewhat surprising given the early popularity of Waymo’s services. Waymo said in May that it offers 250,000 paid trips a week in its first four cities. The higher pricing clearly does not dimble that excitement.
“Collogue, there’s the idea that self-driving cars erode driver jobs and put drivers at risk. And I think the irony of what we saw is that running an AV is actually very expensive and doesn’t happen in at least a short period of time,” she said.
Obi found that the average price of Waymo is about $11 more than Lyft and almost $9.50 more expensive than Uber.
“We didn’t think consumers would be willing to pay up to $10 or more,” Umbrajan said. “I think (it speaks to) a real sense of excitement about technology, novelty and sometimes you’re in a car without a driver.”
Obi found that not only is Waymo more expensive, but there is a greater variability in pricing than Uber and Lyft.
Anburajan says one explanation is that Waymo’s pricing model is less refined. Uber and Lyft said it took them over a decade to refine how they raise prices. Also, these platforms are a little more dynamic, with drivers coming in or leaving their own time, or taking part in or abandoning gig work.
Waymo, on the other hand, has a supply of vehicles that are largely fixed but slowly growing (though the pace of its growth could quickly accelerate). This led to what Ambrajan said in the “pure supply and demand” pricing scheme.
It has two major impacts on customers. One is that it tends to be higher than shorter trips than longer trips. Obi found that if the ride stays below 1.4 km, the cost of the Waymolyde would be around $26 per kilometer.
This also applies to Uber and Lyft vehicles. However, Obi found that the shortest Waymo Rides prices are 41.48% and 31.12% higher than Uber and Lyft, respectively. The longer the rides, the gap narrowed. For rides between 4.3 and 9.3 km, Lyft costs $2.60 per km, Uber costs $2.90 per km, and Waymo costs $3.50 per km.
Another impact is that longer waiting times equal more expensive trips. After all, giving the car a long way to pick up customers means there are fewer margins, shorter rides.
Even though Obi has discovered that Waymo has more volatility in latency, it has not yet discouraged Waymo customers, Anburajan said.
In addition to deep dives in the database, Obi investigated riders in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix, Arizona, to better understand the potential driving these trends.
The company found that 70% of users who rode the Waymo Ride said they prefer unmanned cars over traditional ride-sharing and taxis.
Despite that enthusiasm, Obi discovered that being safe is still a major concern for riders. Of those surveyed, 74% said safety was the biggest concern about Robotaxis. Almost 70% of respondents said they believe there should be remote human surveillance of vehicles (already common practice).
Perhaps even more impressive is how people answered questions about whether they were willing to pay Waymo more. Almost 40% said they would pay “the same or less.” However, 16.3% said they would pay less than $5 per ride. Another 10.1% said they would pay up to $5 per ride. 16.3% said they would pay up to $10 or more per ride.
Anburajan said answers like these would help explain more expensive vehicles in Waymo.
“There’s something about getting into a car alone,” she said. “You’re there to live in a bit of a bubble and get from point A to point B and make it very comfortable doing so.”