Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by s17n 842 days ago
That's because the cars are all brand new Jaguars that are impeccably maintained. If Waymo succeeds in becoming a widely used service that is price competitive with Uber, the experience won't be this good forever.
1 comments

This fancy a vehicle? Maybe not, though I don't see why they wouldn't maintain a premium brand of some sort.

More importantly: the fleet is owned and maintained by Waymo. So they can achieve a higher degree of consistency. It is not the fanciness I value, it is the consistency.

Put another way: I can get a fancy car and a good driver with Uber Black. I would rate my waymo experience slightly above Uber Black.

Yeah, Uber used to just be what Uber Black is now, if you remember. I'm sure that both the consistency but moreso the average quality of Waymo will eventually decline (although the experience will of course always be more consistent than Uber). They aren't going to maintain a premium brand because they have billions of dollars of engineering costs that they need to amortize over the biggest possible pool of revenue.