Alphabet’s Waymo tests pricing, teams up with public transit
Phoenix-area volunteers are prepping the service for a launch by the end of the year
For the past year, Kyla Jackson has been one of the only teenagers in the world who gets a ride to high school from a robot.
When she’s ready to start her day, Kyla summons a self-driving car using the Waymo app on her phone. Five minutes later a Chrysler Pacifica run by the autonomous vehicle arm of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., stops at her home in Chandler, Ariz.
She slides open the door, fastens her seat belt, and hits a blue button above her head to set the car in motion. It’s a minivan covered in goofy-looking sensors, but it’s the coolest ride at her school.
The Jackson family, along with some 400 neighbours in their Phoenix suburb, are volunteers in an ongoing test of Waymo’s autonomous ride-hailing business, which is expected to launch for paying passengers in the area by the end of the year.
The Jacksons, who Waymo made available for this story, have largely ditched their own cars and now use self-driving vehicles to go almost everywhere within the 160-square-kilometre operating area: track practice, grocery shopping, movies, the train station.
Kyla acts like a diva with a private chauffeur, laughs her mom, Samantha Jackson, in an interview in Chandler. Access to robotaxis has even managed to convince this 17-year-old to put off an American rite of passage: getting her driver’s licence. As Kyla puts it, “What’s the point?”
All rides are free for volunteers, but the Waymo app recently started to show hypothetical prices.
A view of the app by Bloomberg offers the first indication of Waymo’s early experiments with pricing.
A ride to Kyla’s nearby school shows up as $5 (U.S.), for example, while a longer18-km trip lists a cost of $19.15. That’s similar to the cost of a ride from Uber Technologies Inc. or Lyft Inc., and cheaper than a local taxi.
A Waymo spokesperson says the placeholder price is a way to solicit feedback from volunteers and “does not reflect the various pricing models under consideration. It’s certainly got the Jackson family wondering how the service they’ve come to rely on will soon fit into their lives.
Waymo’s Early Rider program in the Phoenix area is the furthest along among the company’s 25 test cities. The Google offshoot has logged about 13 million km in fully autonomous mode and is now starting to test cars in Phoenix with no backup safety driver behind the wheel, something the Jacksons have experienced just once. If the public launch is successful, Waymo would be the first autonomous ride-hailing business.
“We’re just getting started,” says Waymo chief executive officer John Krafcik, who spoke with Bloomberg last week at Alphabet’s X lab in Mountain View, Calif. It’s the semisecret facility where delivery drones land on the rooftop and engineers in the garage below tinker with Waymo’s next vehicle, an autonomous Jaguar I-Pace.
Krafcik’s goal is to build what he calls “the driver,” an integrated suite of hardware and software that makes self-driving possible, and then to put the technology to work across four areas of transportation: ridehailing services, trucking, personal vehicles, and public transportation. The strategy leans heavily on partnerships, especially for vehicles.
“Car companies make cars, and that’s what they should do,” Krafcik says. “Self-driving companies should make drivers.”
Waymo has reached deals to buy as many as 62,000 plug-in hybrid Pacifica minivans and 20,000 fully-electric I-Pace SUVs to build out its fleet over the next few years. It’s getting ready to launch the first commercial program in Phoenix and is waiting to hear back from California regulators on its application to begin testing without safety drivers in its hometown. On Tuesday, Waymo is announcing a partnership with Valley Metro, the agency in charge of public transportation in Phoenix, to begin shuttling people to and from public transportation. The program will start with Valley Metro employees and expand over time. The pact may later extend to Phoenix’s RideChoice program, which negotiates deals with taxi companies and subsidizes rates. The idea is that, if done right, self-driving cars could increase access to buses and trains in sprawling cities like Phoenix. “Personal auto mobility has changed the world in some fairly negative ways,” Krafcik says. “We can get the world back to a better place.”
That utopian vision has been undercut by the emerging impact of ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft on mass transit. A new report by Bruce Schaller, a consultant and former traffic-planning official in New York, found that 60 per cent of app-based rides drew people away from otherwise using public transportation, biking or waking. For every mile of personal driving replaced by a ride-hailing app, customers added 2.8 miles of driving.
If self-driving cars make ride- hailing cheaper and more convenient, the research suggests, it could take a wrecking ball to public transportation. Strangely, the head of Phoenix’s public transportation agency agrees with that assessment.
“It will absolutely happen,” says Scott Smith, Valley Metro’s CEO. “But I’m not scared, I’m excited. There will be a reduction in bus use, in subway use in some areas, but expanded use in others. This is real. We’ve got to be a part of it.”
Some local bus routes are inefficient, Smith says, carrying just a few passengers in a vehicle built for 40. The partnership with Waymo could instead provide cheap connections to Phoenix’s high-capacity corridors of express buses and light rail. An autonomous car could drop you at one station, and another could arrive just in time to pick you up on the other side of the city.