On a recent trip to Phoenix, AZ a friend of mine used Waymo for a short trip. This was at my suggestion. It was a short ride at just 1.53 miles to the Phoenix Art Museum from their hotel. He reported a good ride and enjoyed the humanlessness of it all. The car shows up, you get in, it drives you, and you get out. And…it’s a nice new Jaguar.
One problem with this ride was it brought them to the back door of the Phoenix Art Museum. They wanted the front door. I take this as a GPS issue rather than a Waymo issue. I experience these small GPS anomalies in over 50% of my Uber or Lyft rides. The GPS is close but not exact. I can anticipate the errors and get clarification from the customer. Or, on a pickup, I can see the customer standing nearby. In Boston there are always people standing nearby but some are looking at their phones. That’s my customer. This won’t work for a blind person. Neither they nor the vehicle can see.
Here is the receipt from that Waymo ride. It’s simple. It’s an 8 minute, 1.53 mile ride for a price of $10.31.
How does Waymo calculate their price? Is it time and distance? Or some other algorithm? We don’t know. Searching my database of rides for 2026 I find 44 rides between the distance of 1.4 miles and 1.6 miles. That’s close enough for our purpose of rough comparison. Let’s take a look.
Below is a listing of 19 Uber X rides that were lower in price than the $10.31 Waymo ride. They vary in distance. Some more than the Waymo distance and some less.
The 24 rides listed below were all billed at more than the $10.31 that Waymo billed for about the equivalent distance.
