Comment by matthewdgreen
2 days ago
You’re experiencing the early pre-enshittified product. Ubers used to be cheap and excellent too, but then they started optimizing for profit. I assume this will happen even faster for Waymo, just because tech firms have more experience now.
Uber was never child friendly.
in LA all my friend's little kids take uber and Lyft rides to catch Pokemon. don't know what hellhole you live that's worse than LA
Not yet enshittified > currently enshitiffied
If they get worse, I’ll. Choose something else if I want.
They’re not in my area today, but just because they may get worse does t mean you should avoid them today.
All the while though, they’re taking the air out of the room for any alternatives you might choose in the future. It only gets really enshittified once market dominance has been established.
Are there any alternatives?
Both Uber and Lyft and over decade old, and until Waymo came, there were no real alternatives to them.
Waymo should charge dirty customers more to pay maids to clean it.
they kinda too, they will charge you $50/$100 if you make the car dirty
https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/14248697?hl=en
Which point would you expect to deteriorate?
not op but cleanliness would be my first expectation
I've seen many reports of dirty waymos on reddit recently for example.
second I'd assume they would start charging you for point 3, "loading delay fee" when you take too long to load, after all that's missed profit from other rides.
after that point 1 and 2, with you getting either a Jag (nice car), a Zeekr (unknown to me, Chinese company), or a Ioniq 5 (much cheaper feeling car than a Jag, with hard plastic everywhere). You want the jag? Expect to pay for it. So suddenly all cars aren't the same, and only some are comparable to Uber Black.
To summarize:
Point 4, followed by 3, followed by 2 and 1 (which imo are just one point). 5 I don't expect to change unless they have to start cost-cutting on compute and sensors, but I HIGHLY doubt that.
Wouldn't it be more likely they would charge for "leaving trash in car"?
Shouldn't cost much to check car using cameras after each ride.
1 reply →
Being pedantic, even if you have to pay for a type of car, you still have no variance to expectation when you know what you are getting. I think that point was more about the variance in driving, driver etc rather than car type.
Re: enshittification in general. I think the incentives are better aligned for self-driving. Eg. charging people who create trash etc can also make the company money whilst improving overall experience.
With non self-driving, you have to rely on user ratings etc to penalise a specific driver, which seems inherently more fuzzy. The company has conflicting goals of keeping enough drivers (drives costs down etc), whilst guaranteeing a certain experience. It is difficult to create a system for drivers to “improve” (eg. Clean their car) and for a company to directly encourage that, whereas it’s easier to just charge people who litter more etc in a fully automated system.