[shostack]

May I ask why you need to trust this from that standpoint? With other Google services I agree with the concern. In this case, if they discontinued, you revert to your old way of commuting. I don't imagine anyone doing anything stupid like selling their car over this.

It's like Shopping Express for me. Was AMAZING while it was free and I used it every week. Now I don't because the fee is in place. Since Amazon pantry is not a good fit for my needs either, I just do things like in ancient times and pick things up at the grocery store while I'm out running errands and spend a few more minutes.

[LordKano]

I didn't flesh out my thought process but I'm thinking that there has to be some real reason to go with this over Uber or Lyft.

Obviously, no one should restructure their life around the availability of this kind of service. I'm just saying that this feels like bandwagoning to me. I can't be the only one thinking that this isn't going to last long. Uber and Lyft will be in that business until they close up shop or are regulated out of a market.

If you're going to try a non-traditional taxi-type service, why go with Google over one of the existing players?

[shostack]

Hard to say at this point given that this hasn't launched yet. I'll need to see what it looks like when it does its pilot in Israel.

Google's long-term play has a decent chance of involving self-driving cars and monetizing via advertising and data with some fee from the ride. Nothing says "open up your wallets" to large brick and mortar advertisers like "we literally drove the customer to your doorstep."

Getting users hooked and getting this tested via commute data is a great approach before branching out to something else. It also lets users browse the web, and Google likely has clear visibility into the search behavior of users searching while in their rides to determine the incremental ad revenue this enabled.

Google doesn't need to offer this for free to provide a great experience at a lower price than any current competitors like Uber or Lyft. They have substantial revenue from other areas to fuel this and so can price their competition out of the market. Other companies do the same thing to squeeze into a dominant position in a market they want to enter.