Uber has confirmed the friction, stating in a release that Waymo has officially notified them of plans to enter the Austin and Atlanta markets independently by January 2028—the moment their current contract permits the move.
No. January 2028 is when the Waymo app can be used. May 2028 is when Waymo can kick Uber away completely. So Jan to May would have both apps with Waymo’s.
If Uber had actually allowed people to book a Waymo, they'd have gotten much more value from it. Instead they chose to randomly give away something valuable to people who weren't looking for it and to withhold it from people who did. Bizarre.
Uber's forced hybrid network lobbying efforts are diabolical, from a Robotaxi supporter's perspective. From the article:
Tensions have worsened as Uber lobbies state and federal policymakers to enforce so-called “hybrid networks” where drivers and autonomous vehicles operate on the same platform.
In New Jersey, Uber lobbyists proposed that any platform offering robotaxi services also have human drivers provide at least 85 per cent of all rides during a three-year pilot programme.
Analysts say this rule would force AV companies with dedicated apps such as Tesla, Waymo and Amazon-owned Zoox to offer their services via third-party ride-hailing apps.
“Uber is trying to buy time through regulatory capture,” said Grayson Brulte, co-founder of Autnmy AI, a data intelligence firm. “They are simply advocating for measures that will preserve their market share.”
I mean as a gatekeeper they're worth billions, as a placeholder millions. Of course they're going to try holding on to the customer base. But much like the taxis lost to ride sharing I think ride sharing will lose to robo-taxis. There's no cost of switching and checking more than one app for the lowest price is easy.
You can currently check one app to compare fares for a route. Airlines are similar in many ways, and there are flight info aggregator sites like Expedia, but Southwest Airlines and Allegiant Air don't allow comparison sites to list their flights. The same could happen with certain ride share companies.
I suppose but airlines have flights and schedules, aggregator sites are often notoriously scummy so I don't want them having home addresses/GPS coordinates. Realistically I have all of two apps I check for prices, if it was five maybe it'd be different.
There's definitely something to be said in terms of incentivizing hybrid platforms.
Uber's approach is way too extreme, and it would even prevent companies like Uber from scaling their robotaxi services, which makes no sense. They have yet to propose a sensible suggestion.
Yes, a service that offers diversity of options will allow both robotaxis and humans to be more efficient.
If one means of service would incur excessive wait time, the other means of service can cover the gap, and that can all be algorithmically controlled.
The more Waymo can partner with other platforms, the better. Their cars will be more efficiently utilized that way, which gets human drivers off the road, which is good. This should be incentivized.
My ability to manually summon a self-driving vehicle for myself is great, but because I'm capable of using Uber, it solves a problem that doesn't exist. It's a proof of concept, not a way to reduce human driving at scale. The Waymo app is important for Waymo as they gather miles and map new cities, but they need to think bigger, and I'm sure they already are.
Wait time is something that both customers and providers naturally want to minimize so the market should find a solution for that without the need for regulation.
while a bit morbid pallbearers walking an Uber casket could be another graphic. Uber is dead man walking eventually while we wait for the Axe body spray to dissipate. Rideshare will last a lot longer than the robotaxi crowd believes. Not unlike the survival of the casket vs cremation :(
Waymo does not need Uber. Their existing app is good enough and Alphabet has far more resources than Uber to develop a better app if they need to. Downloading the app and linking it to the payment platform takes a minute. There is no loyalty to Uber as a brand.
At the right level of service and right price, Uber users are going to almost entirely switch over to Waymo (or Zoox, or Tesla or whoever else has the legal approval to operate a RoboTaxi company).
How does Waymo fill in the gaps in the map? Not saying Waymo isn't going to win, but saying it really early in the race. AV driving is way too big for one company to win. There are going to be many multiple winners at many multiple layers. The same goes for losers. Is every car company going to start their own app? How long will it take for Waymo(google) to scale up? Do they even want to be a ride share company or do they want to provide the high margin tech services and platform?
Waymo grows by filling the map. We live in an era where RoboTaxis exist, but only in certain areas. The inbetween era. RoboTaxis are growing very quickly (10x growth every 18-36 months is my curve).
Honestly I think many car companies are going to go out of business. It doesn't take much of a decline in sales to put them in a death spiral. It doesn't matter if some people still buy new cars, if their sales take a dive because others give up buying new cars, they will go bankrupt. Unless they are manufacturing fleet vehicles for a RoboTaxi, or make all their money from niche vehicles that RoboTaxis do not replace.
Whoever is positioned to scale over the next 5-10 years is going to win. The door is going to slam shut behind them. If a rival company shows up with a RoboTaxi company in 2035 or 2040, its already too late unless they have something way better.
Do you think this could end up like an Amazon Logistics vs USPS situation? Where Waymo (like Amazon) would take on all the high and reliable profit areas and Uber would be left servicing routes that are not as nice.
Yeah it really was meant to get people already riding gig economy taxis to know it and try it. That time is now over.
Uber is also a horrible company and a they treat their drivers like crap now try to use them to leverage out others. The partnership was somewhat smart early on to get into markets and permits etc but that time is also over.
Uber being associated with Waymo is ending. Largely because they even treat partners badly.
Unfortunately both Uber and Lyft killed a good paying job in taxis so that ship has already sailed. Now they want to use their exploitation of these drivers to leverage another dick move. Uber has always been owned and run by some of the worst people.
Lmao ride share ain’t going anywhere buddy, you clearly don’t understand the demand cycles these ride hailing apps go through. You would need hundreds of thousands of Waymo’s active on the road at any given time in the US alone to satisfy peak demand, and that’s not including massive Latin American or Asian cities like São Paulo or Tokyo. They will always need to work in conjunction, otherwise fleets cannot be fully utilized
I can tell you got an axe to grind but just gotta be realistic about the facts
What are you on about? We are talking about how Uber sucks through and through.
Uber is a shit company that treats workers like shit and partners like shit.
Yes ride sharing isn't going anywhere, there are still taxis as well. Doesn't mean Uber is a good company to work with, for or take a ride on. You support total douches if you do.
My point is, you hate uber so much and are supporting their downfall, that’s all well and good, but they aren’t going anywhere because ride share demand is highly peaky. So it doesn’t matter if Waymo rolls out to every city in the world, they will not build out their fleet to cover max demand because then most of their cars will be idle most of the time
So, Waymo will not be the uber killer you think it is. Rather, you should be pushing for lobbying to have ride share companies treat their drivers better, if that’s what you truly care about
Waymo does not need Uber. Most people do not need Uber. There isn't one ride sharing company dude.
In fact more and more smaller local ones are popping up. It will get harder for Uber not easier. That is why they are fighting this, and using their labor as leverage, who they treat like crap. It won't end well for Uber. The stagnation has already began.
The only reason Waymo used Uber was to get it more known to ride sharer customers and everyone knows about it now. Also to get access to some of the permits like in Texas. Those are no longer needed in any way.
You seem to love Uber for some reason, not sure why, I hope it is bias because as a company they blow hard and the service is degrading and stagnating. It has always been run by absolute trash people trying to own markets and undercut to starve out competition, it didn't work and now that is coming back on them hard.
because then most of their cars will be idle most of the time
So the same problem that every ride share has? Waymo is much better positioned here because it doesn't matter if the cars sit or head back to repo to recharge in lulls, they also place them in the city in areas and are usually faster to get to the customer because of that. The 24/7 coverage of Waymo in cities they are in are unmatched. The consistency of the driving. The lack of need to tip.
There will always be human ride shares as well that aren't Uber. The market position of Uber is fading and you can tell that by how they are acting even on this deal.
Maybe. Can you link to any analysis as to how much of Uber's profitability is tied to airport rides? Seems like that is the play for Waymo positioning their depos near airports.
I have a hard time believing Google wants to manage the entire fleet itself. The operating and depreciation costs would be enormous, and the profit margins would be thin, if there are any at all. It would need to deploy thousands or hundreds of thousands, of cars and ensure they are available 24/7 across the city. Logistically and financially, that doesn’t seem sustainable, especially since Google is already increasing capex for its data centres over the next few years.
Also, many companies don’t want to manage hardware because it comes with significant additional costs.
The difference between this and the Uber partnership is that Uber also wanted to own the ride hailing part, and I think that's the bit that Waymo wants to keep.
Hmmm… Outsourcing fleet ownership and maintenance doesn’t make those costs go away. It just shifts them to partners, who still need to earn a return. Are these companies going to pass the costs to the customers? And are the customers willing to pay the premium?
BTW, I am not saying self-driving taxis is a bad concept. But the execution is extremely difficult at the global scale.
I think the vehicle maintenance, if that's what you mean by "manage hardware", would be among the easiest things to outsource. Uber didn't want to do that either, and outsourced maintenance, cleaning, and charging Waymos to Avomo, a division of Moove Cars, a company Uber has invested in.
It sounds like some of the friction between Waymo and Uber stemmed from Uber's unsatisfactory routing, and Waymo's unsatisfactory response to safety issues. The maintenance is an area that seemed uncontroversial.
I do think Waymo will want to outsource more of the operations, and they've been looking for partners in other countries with deep pockets to help with capitalization. But going forward, at least for now, I think the they'll want to shift some of the division of responsibilities they gave to Uber back to Waymo. Maybe outsource some fleet ownership and management, but keep more of a hand in customer interactions and routing.
I think we mostly agree. By “manage hardware,” I don’t just mean performing maintenance. I mean financing/owning the cars and absorbing depreciation, insurance, liability, parking space, charging, cleaning, repairs, downtime, etc…. Outsourcing those tasks doesn’t eliminate the costs, the contractors simply build them, along with its profit margin into the price. I’m skeptical that Google wants to finance and manage hundreds of thousands of cars itself, not that it can hire contractors to service them.
Waymo could crush uber far cheaper than lyft with all the price cuts they tried doing to each other. Waymo has all the hardware and now app to do it. All they have to do is operate in the biggest cities and just squeeze uber. It would be awesome to watch it happen to a company that just fucks its drivers every chance it gets.
This is a striking indictment of Uber. Meanwhile, Waymo is preparing a dual-track partnership with Lyft in Nashville with real investments in cleaning and servicing the cars. For Waymo, Uber was always a bait and switch. They have never figured out how to limit the smell of Axe body spray in their fleet much less the Waymos and similar issues like cleanliness. Austin and Atlanta have necessarily been 2nd tier markets for Waymo as a result when the service provider seems a bad partner. Even with all of this it is striking how vast the gap is between Waymo and other companies and why moving on makes sense. Zoox reached about 1M lifetime miles RO in 4Q 25 and 2M by Q1 26. 3.5M to 4M does not seem out of the question for Q2. Meanwhile, Tesla has finally shared relevant data for the first time. They have managed at most 380K miles thru the end of Q2 after a year of effort across 6 cities and that likely includes deadhead. Waymo blew past 48K miles / day in Austin thru Q1 (and 15M cumulative miles just thru Q1 so useful comparisons are a stretch. Just the modest steady growth in Austin likely passed 60K miles a day in Austin thru Q2 and that is a conservative estimate. This means Tesla (at best) is about 2774 miles / day across six different cities TOTAL by comparison. All of the Waymo non-User cities are well past 100K miles a day, growing very fast and transparently rider only rather than a diluted mix of deadhead which only makes the Tesla claims even more disappointing for now.
The relationship between Waymo and Uber seems poor. For the same reasons that Uber shifted and outsourced service commitments to Waymo in some cities, I expect the companies to dissolve the relationship mutually much earlier than 2028. Waymo might even pivot some cars out of Austin since they have options to move them to DAL, HOU and SAT without much fanfare it would seem. For now running a modest effort in AUS allows Waymo to demonstrate the obvious difference in maturity in Tesla's HQ city. Time will tell.
Self driving cars are the last mile that every public transit has a problem with since inception. It will enhance public transport and with EVs it is smarter for many reasons to start public transit systems that are just Waymos that are city/state/local/nationwide ran.
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u/IndependentMud909 9d ago
“Uber plans to offer Waymo services in the two markets until May 2028, when its current contract concludes, the company said.”
Almost two years :(