Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway
techcrunch.com413 points by achristmascarl 3 days ago
413 points by achristmascarl 3 days ago
As a Waymo-booster on HN for a while now, here's my latest anecdote. I tried to figure out how to take Waymo to LAX even though it's not actually in their territory yet just because I value the experience so much. I was borderline going to take it within walking distance (about half a mile), but got lazy at the last minute. I took Lyft instead, and, as if the universe cursed my laziness, I booked a "comfort" car for $3 more than the base level Lyft. At first I was going to get a Tesla Model Y to take me, but that cancelled. Instead, what must have been a first generation Honda Pilot picked me up, suspension creaking and muffler that had seen better days. Did Lyft recognize what they sent instead of the "comfort" they promised and therefore charge me $3 less? Of course not. When I tried to contact customer service I ran into what I'm sure plenty of HN people have, which is a dead end where you report the issue and they (programmatically?) adjudicate the complaint on the spot. Their determination? I wasn't entitled to a $3 refund. Ironic that the rideshare app with human drivers doesn't allow me to contact their customer service whereas Waymo has no problem with it (yeah, yeah, I get it, "we'll see once they reach a huge scale." But today the experience is so much better than Uber or Lyft that while it lasts I will bask in its driverless glory).
I've had a couple bad experiences with Lyft recently, including one time the driver must have clicked that they picked me up while a block away, because I could see the lyft driving to the destination without me. I tried to get a refund since I was obviously waiting my start location the whole time, but the system claimed the drive went from start to finish (even though I wasn't in the car), so no refund.
Same thing happened to me, and the support system automatically decided nothing was wrong whatsoever despite my phone certainly sending a very different location from the driver. And the madness was I couldn't even book another ride as I was technically in one.
So I ended up getting it resolved via the security panic button which did put me through to a real person who was empathetic to the issue.
Is this some sort of a scam? The driver cannot even mark the ride as completed without being in the area right? So they have to drive it anyway. I can’t imagine they would be on the platform for long if this happened on a regular basis. I would say it’s probably an accident but how could this behavior be accidental? Someone might accidentally say that they picked you up, but they couldn’t accidentally then drive an empty car to the destination.
My experience in DC is GPS can be spotty due to the buildings and the app glitches when it says you are in one spot but you are not there.
Also DC has rules for certain streets on what side of road you are allowed to be picked up on.
Has anybody tried "driving" for one of these companies using GPS spoofing? You could fake the location of your phone. I suppose it'd only work a few times before the number of reports gets you banned, but I wonder whether on a laragr enough (and automated) scale it would be profitable for scammers
I had a driver commit GPS spoofing on me: I was standing outside and there were no car to be seen anywhere even though the app showed the driver was there and had been "driving" to it
I tried to report a security incident to Uber, but not sure what happened. It would likely be easier to complain today, as now all taxis (which Uber technically is in Norway) need to be part of a Taxi dispatch central
Given that they track you every inch of your route, it'd be a pain in the butt to attempt to fake it.
I've gotten a refund on food before because my driver picked up my food and then went spend a half hour in a gas station before returning to their route even though my home was 2 minutes away.
>Given that they track you every inch of your route, it'd be a pain in the butt to attempt to fake it.
Pain for a single app developer when no such app exists, but a spoofing app will dutifully draw anyone any number and length of travel.
Uber lets you enable a PIN for each ride. The driver can't say they picked you up until they punch in the random 4 digit PIN the app gave you for the ride.
I don’t know why they don’t require it. Every Uber in Porto Rico uses the PIN but I’ve only had one in the mainland USA ask for it.
This is good, but why can't these firms determine when your phone and the drivers phone are far apart?
It's not unusual to call a taxi for another person. Or to make a multi-stop journey where some people get out before others. You can even send a parcel across town in a taxi.
Checking phone proximity might be helpful in some cases, but it's not a silver bullet.
I never give location permissions to any app if I can avoid it (indeed I don't even have the spyware app if I can avoid it; e.g. I use the web to order an Uber)
That's must be annoying to say the least. In India drivers require an OTP to start a ride.
The OTP is the same for a user across rides, so I have mine memorised which is nifty. No fiddling with the phone during boarding.
On security: exploiting this would require the driver to stay in my vicinity the next time I book a ride, and also get the ride assigned to them. In a high population density area, it's rare - I've never had the same driver twice.
Uber in India gives me a different OTP for each ride. A different ride-hailing app I use occasionally uses a PIN tied to a user.
OTPs are a simple solution to fraudulent rides that it's surprising it's not implemented universally, given all the complaints in this thread.
An OTP that's reused?
It solves the problem for 99.99% of the time. Drivers are not going to memorize your OTP; and it is unlikely that an OTP list will be leaked/used anytime soon.
Maybe, but there's OT in OTP. So if it's not changing then it's not OTP, just P.
For that driver, it's effectively an OTP although probably not very pseudorandom.
It changes every time. You can also just have it at night, which I have. Prevents drunk wrong riders.
I mean it _technically_ isn't an OTP, but you know what I mean - just a code only the user knows that they need to share with the rider.
The threat model is sufficiently low to justify the much better UX of not having to look the code up everytime.
The acronym you are looking for is "PIN", a Personal Identification Number.
I’ve heard the story from the other side as well: App reports ride is arriving, people get in, they go the wrong way and see their original ride stating that you are not there and leave again.
So it may not be intentional. Just coincidence and poor verification.
I waited 40 minutes for a Lyft at an airport because the driver made up a story about an accident and traffic, in the airport. No one else seemed to be affected by this traffic- so eventually I tried booking an Uber. It arrived 3 minutes later.
20 minutes after that the Lyft driver keeps texting me “where are you?!”. Their turn to wait!
Saw later they just started the ride without me and drove to my hotel.
Lyft said “this trip was completed, no refund”. Welp, app deleted.
I've had several cases of drivers just not picking me up. Reading their time to move anywhere at all, driving away and keep getting further and further away, it driving towards me only to turn some other direction. I always just cancel on them and have never had to pay a cancellation fee. I think once or twice they "picked me up" a block away. I'm pretty sure I was able to cancel or end the ride on that too, definitely was never charged though I don't recall if I had to use the support. But I never let it actually complete the trip when I wasn't riding. But I was always very miffed when anything like that happened as I did not appreciate them wasting my time.
Charge back with your credit card if Lyft isn't willing to help you. Keep businesses in check.
If you really want to delete the app, a chargeback is the surest way to permanently remove yourself from the platform.
In my experience, you should prepare for retaliation when you do a charge back.
Companies that cheap out by not performing the basic obligations of business end up paying more for small claims court - provided their ripped-off customers actually take them to small claims court. Did you?
> Their determination? I wasn't entitled to a $3 refund.
Frustratingly, Lyft’s position on this is that if you don’t like the car that arrives you should reject it when it arrives, otherwise you’re not entitled to a (even partial) refund, even when they know on their end that the car they sent doesn’t match what you paid extra for.
This seems... interesting, legally speaking. I imagine the idea is that you're implicitly accepting alterations to the previous contract by opting to take the car? Would that argument hold water, legally?
If I've learned anything from watching startups on HN, the US is a lawless wasteland where as long as you've got a couple of billion in VC funding you can do anything. I eagerly await the first murder-for-hire startup.
I ran into a similar arbitration with a condo I rented for a long weekend. There was a significant issue and they weren't able to provide another place. We stayed there and had contractors in and out for the next couple of days. They refused to refund me, so I tried through my credit card to get a refund and they said "well you should have just left, then we would refund you. But since you stayed, the contract is fulfilled."
Credit card disputes don't always match up with the law, so I wouldn't put too much weight on this from a legal standpoint, but good anecdote nonetheless.
Especially since you may have no time to wait for another car. There’s an element of “duress” here
Yes, when you’re tired after a flight with heavy bags, you’re very much being forced to compromise. Any consumer could easily argue why they didn’t have a choice and had to go with what was available.
It’s plain bait and switch.
You paid a premium for promised X, specifically. Y showed up. This is the equivalent of buying a first class ticket, and getting put in economy.
Someone should class action this bs.
Uber has done that to me. You pick a class but what you get seems unrelated.
I need more space for luggage and such and ... some "mid-sized" SUV picks me up that has about as much space a regular sedan anyway ... often the same type of vehicle that picked me up the previous day as a regular vehicle.
I paid extra and scheduled an Uber with a child seat. After waiting 30 minutes, when the car showed up, there was no car seat so the driver canceled right away and drove off. Lesson learned.
I'm pretty sure by now the various "classes" of service offered by Lyft and Uber are instead just ways for the customer to donate money to Lyft and Uber. There's no difference in what kind of yahoo shows up in what kind of beater.
I pretty much just use it to book black cars these days - at least in my local city where those require licensed livery drivers. Good experience there for the most part. Most of the time I’m using Uber it’s either a business expense to the airport or I’m booking for a large party anyways.
That and I guess UberXL - otherwise it’s pretty fungible.
The interesting bit is that black is often pretty much the same price a UberX about a third of the time.
What does "licensed driver" mean? The driver has a valid driving licence?
Assuming OP is in the UK, they're talking about hackney carriages which are subject to more stringent regulation than other private hire vehicles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackney_carriage
I think this would be similar to the medallions of yellow NYC cabs
It won't be a full-blown Hackney license, Hackney licensing is because unlike these "ride sharing" apps and what the UK would call a "mini cab" service, which require only a "public hire" license - the Hackney license authorises you to literally pick up strangers on the street, which was of course a completely normal way to use a taxi in a major city decades ago and is still somewhat common at say airports. That's what the glowing "Taxi" sign on the roof is for.
This needs more driver quality insight because e.g. passenger gets in your vehicle, you drive them to some secluded spot and their body is found the next morning - there's no records for murder cops to start from, unless there was a witness there may not even be a description of your vehicle. The UK has had this happen, but it's very rare because the sort of person likely to escalate to murder is not going to get licensed.
In contrast a mini-cab or Uber-style driver has records of who was dispatched to pick up somebody, where they were picked up etc. So if you take to murdering your fares the murder detectives will show up at your door with company records implicating you.
It's also impossible to book an Uber with 2 child seats so, i guess i'm effed then.
search "mifold grab and go booster" on amazon
Uber operates in 71 countries. That booster seat is available in 1 country. So it solves 1.4% of the problem.
Also that's a booster seat, not a child care seat, so can't be used if your kids are under 4.
Same here. To alter-quote The Simpsons, "My eyes! The classes do nothing!"
Shortly after pandemic, I noticed "corridor fees" on vastly different routes which, mysteriously, bumped-up the price by the same percentage across each route--but only after the ride had completed. The price I was quoted was not remotely close to the price I was charged.
I did the customer service messaging thing. The first time, they removed it. The second and third time, they declined to remove it.
I now "decline" riding Uber unless there's no other option.
As much as I love to hate on Uber and Lyft, tacked on fees like this are often due to state / federal government, and the rideshare service hands are tied. Uber tags on a very long list of random fees when I Uber out of SFO, but when I investigated them, they were all random taxes from the city / state.
If they want to jack up the prices they can just increase them - they don't need to add random fees.
Not knowing what you'll pay for something until the moment you actually pay is considered normal only in the US.
Where I am, Uber shows a price, I pay that price. Whatever fees are included is not my problem.
The main problem here is that the stated and billed sums were much different.
Sure the state and Uber can add whatever fee they like. But not after I accept the ride.
SFO is not really municipal. It's a private commercial property.
If we don't like we can choose a competitor /s
Uber seems wilfully deceptive in so many ways. The initial listing of rides including details of vehicles and prices, which looks like an actual offer, but the app then goes off to try and find something similar. Try being a shop, selling someone an item and then going out back to rummage around and see if you actually have anything like what you sold. And then the 'fixed price' you agreed on gets arbitrarily changed on half the trips if traffic gets worse or the driver takes a different route. If I book a trip from the airport, the airport's charge for rideshare lane usage isn't an "unanticipated expense". It's just skeezy.
I believe they bin vehicles by available seating and not by things like luggage.
+1 So you may get say a 7 seater where the seats are folded in the trunk, so you can carry 7 people XOR 5 people + light suitcases
There is no option to say “send me a mini van”
There is a newer option that is closer to that - "Uber XXL." (https://www.uber.com/newsroom/airport-travel/)
...XOR?
So it can carry the 2 extra people, it can carry some luggage, it can't carry both, and it can't carry neither?
^ Pedant detected
I suppose, but I only responded because they went out of their way to say xor, and put it in all caps too.
XOR in common programmer speech is ambiguously used to mean XOR or NAND, so I think their use of XOR was casually correct, while not technically correct.
While NAND is technically correct, it's just not commonly used as a grammatical conjunction.
Before Uber and Lyft destroyed the functioning taxi market, you got Mercedes by default for a traditional, regulated taxi in many EU countries.
You didn't have to argue, interact with a surveillance company, interact with customer service etc. All you needed to do is pick up the phone and get a luxury ride without tracking or surveillance.
My experience in my first-world country is that all I needed was to spend 10min on the phone to be told there’s no taxi available, or to be told it’ll take 30min and actually it take 1h30. Drivers aren’t any more amicable than uber drivers either (less, if anything).
Not to speak of many countries where taxis are outright scammers and getting into one is taking a real danger.
The surveillance is exactly why Uber and Lyft works. If drivers misbehave, evidence is all there. I’d honestly trade reliability over a temporary luxury ride in a Mercedes.
>the functioning taxi market
Was it? In many EU countries a lot of taxi drivers act like scammers: take you the long way around, they don't issue you receipt by default because they do tax fraud or steal from their employer, you can't pay by card because suddenly the card machine "doesn't work" so they drive you to an ATM, then you pay cash and they try to keep the change, they don't speak English or even the local language, they don't know the local streets or landmarks you're referring to because they're not from there, etc. All that is super annoying. Multiply it if you're a tourist or on a business trip or job interview.
Ride sharing fixed all that since you just punched in the destination in the app (in your own language) and got the price upfront and shielded you from the antics of scammy drivers and the friction of getting to your destination. That's why ride sharing apps were so successful initially.
It wasn't about the price, it was about the friction or lack thereof.
>you got Mercedes by default for a traditional, regulated taxi in many EU countries
Mostly IIRC Berlin, Brussels, Stockholm and some other rich countries, definitely not EU wide.
In the Mercedes running countries taxi rides are also something you do very rarely because they cost a lot.
The rest are like the poster above me described. In Romania, the taxi drivers tried to strike in the capital when Uber showed up and everybody basically laughed at them.
Before Uber, in France half of the time you got an irascible driver who never had change and whose credit card terminal was non functional.
pfah, I remember my Mercedes trip to Paris airport where I had a physical fight with the driver (10 years ago). SO glad to see the taxi business go down the toilet. Easily over 50% of them were scamming tourists.
Yeah, before Uber and Lyft I would get a Mercedes.
Except that it took forever. I had no idea when anyone would show up. The driver was annoyed and drove like an insane person. The few times I've actually feared for my life have been on highways with taxi drivers. It was incredibly expensive.
Oh, and half the time they ripped you off.
Yup. And there was no tracking. So if that person wanted to say, drive an insane route? Enjoy. Take a detour. Done. Or dump your body in the woods. You were totally at their mercy.
The taxi system was horrible. The pinnacle of protectionism carving out its niche of crap.
Charges for goods not delivered as agreed falls under the protection of the Fair Credit Billing Act. If you made a good faith attempt to resolve with the merchant (which you did) you should use your credit card to charge back the amount (some let you request a partial charge back, but if not you can request a full one and explain in the extra info that you want a partial one).
This might not seem worth it for $3, but if they get a lot of these the credit cards/banks might start giving them a hard time about it, so I think it's worth the minor hassle (everything can be done via the credit card app usually)
And then you're forever barred from using the service.
I once did a chargeback of almost $5k to PayPal when someone scammed me (and PayPal sided with scammer). I still have my account, though I don't use it for anything I'd actually need protection on now.
On the other hand I did get banned from an online local selling site (rhymes with Canary) for charging back a small purchase where the wrong thing was delivered and their system for reporting it was broken and they refused to refund. I even tried having a roommate create an account (same address) and they banned that when they made a purchase.
Why would you want to continue using a service that is ripping you off? If you're at the point where your only recourse is to charge back, that's kind of a bridge burning moment.
> Why would you want to continue using a service that is ripping you off?
For the same reason that I'm going to continue using Uber despite them ripping other people off, as described in this very thread. People systematically overweight their own negative experiences and underweight those of others; I believe that every single negative story about Lyft and Uber I've read in this thread is likely to be true. In other words, they do sometimes rip people off. On the other hand, am I likely enough to be ripped off the next time I use Uber that it doesn't make sense to use it? (And do what instead, walk?) No. It's unfortunate, and I support social solutions to the problem like better regulation of businesses, but if I personally dropped every company I think sometimes rips people off, I would do business with no one ever.
I have many times walked home when I didn’t trust the bus timetable or the taxi equivalent. Always expected to get mugged but it hasn’t happened yet. I guess people often think someone walking is someone to not be messed with. Very place dependent obviously
You get barred from a whole suite of services. Anything Google/Alphabet owns or may acquire in the future. People often don't have a choice here.
We are talking about Lyft in this example ("I took Lyft instead") so your point is somewhat moot but a good reason to never charge back Google!
I took Google to a tribunal (think Australian equivalent of small claims) a few years ago, over a defective Pixel they refused to repair 2 years and 1 month after purchase.
Under Australian Consumer Law, I wanted to make the case that a premium phone should last more than 2 years.
Google’s representatives initially sent letters arguing that the license agreement forces me to arbitrate, to which I responded by adding another claim that binding arbitration is an unfair contract provision under the same ACL and should be declared void.
A couple days before the case, I received an offer to settle for a brand new phone and my filing fees, to which I accepted.
No chargebacks, no ban, just the legal system working as it should while being accessible to everyday folks.
That's a fantastic outcome, and honestly, a bit of a unicorn from my perspective here in the US. Your story about the Australian Consumer Law having actual teeth is a breath of fresh air. Here in the US, it feels like we're playing a whole different ball game, and the house (of Google) always wins.
A buddy of mine, let's call him "Dave," had a strikingly similar issue with a Pixel phone a couple of years back. His device started bootlooping out of the blue about 18 months after he bought it. Not exactly what you'd call a "premium" experience. He went through the standard support rigmarole, which I'm sure you're familiar with – the endless chat bots, the canned email responses, the escalations to senior support agents who just read from the same script. The final word from on high was, "Sorry, you're out of the one-year warranty. We can't help you."
Dave, being the stubborn engineer type, decided he wasn't going to take that lying down. He'd read about people having success in small claims court and thought, "How hard can it be?" He did his homework, found the correct legal entity for Google in his state, and filed the paperwork. The filing fee wasn't outrageous, something like $75. He wasn't asking for the moon, just the cost of a replacement phone and the filing fee.
This is where the story takes a decidedly American turn. A few weeks after filing, he didn't get a settlement offer. Instead, he got a thick envelope from a fancy law firm. It was a motion to compel arbitration. Buried deep in the terms of service that we all click "agree" to without reading, there was, of course, a binding arbitration clause. And not just any arbitration, but one that would be conducted by an arbitrator of Google's choosing, in a location convenient for them (Northern California, naturally), and he'd have to split the cost of the arbitrator, which can run into thousands of dollars.
So, his $75 gamble to get a new phone suddenly had the potential to turn into a multi-thousand-dollar boondoggle. The letter from the lawyers was polite, but the message was clear: "drop this, or we'll bury you in legal fees." They weren't just trying to avoid paying for a faulty phone; they were making an example of him.
Dave folded. He couldn't afford to take the risk. So, not only did he not get his phone replaced, but he was also out the filing fee and a good chunk of his time and energy. He ended up just buying an iPhone out of spite.
This is why arbitration on consumers should be illegal - aka, arbitration should only be legal when both entities are approximately similar in power/capability.
The whole reason for existence of courts is to ensure that parties with unequal power can be fairly treated. Arbitration seems to remove that via a loop hole.
Let's retain a sense of proportion here; it was $3.
IMO it's attitudes like this that allow companies to continue ripping us all off for small amounts here and small amounts there. They know it's a small amount and most people won't push back, so they keep getting away with it. I suppose the only thing that stops me from hitting the nuclear button every time this happens is that there are a limited number of companies offering many categories of services, and I'd eventually have to charge back each of them and lose access to an entire industry composed entirely of shitty companies.
It would be much better if companies were inclined to amicably settle small dollar disputes rather than the default which seems to be to stonewall, and then ban when the customer uses the only tool they have to push back.
Give me $3.
Are you going to provide me a useful service on a regular basis? You're really missing the point here if not.
The point is a bad one that should be missed. $3 isn't negligible. It isn't usually [0] worth spending $4 to recover, but it is nonetheless money. People can't just arbitrarily charge each other $3 for nothing.
[0] Game theory says sometimes it makes sense to be unreasonable.
It's not arbitrary. It's part of an ongoing relationship that is worth significantly more. That $3 came out of the trust they have with the company. But even though they're wary now, they still have some trust and want to use the service in the future.
Some random guy asking for $3 is a wildly different situation.
It's not about the $3, it's about the relationship.
A close analogy would be Netflix going up $2. If you keep paying that, it doesn't mean you think the money is negligible, and it doesn't mean you would give that money to someone else. And this holds whether Netflix got consent before the increase or scammed you out of it or anything in between; those things affect the decision but they don't change the fundamental nature of it.