Waze is an incredibly popular, and smartly done, app. For those unfamiliar, Waze uses information collected by your phone and reported by drivers to assemble real-time maps of an area, spotting slow traffic, accidents, police speed traps (much to the chagrin of the police), and other problems on the road before you come to them, and plans out routes automatically to avoid those hazards. But Google has grander ambitions for its app, seeing it as an Uber killer. But is it?
There are parts of Google’s plan, as covered by the Wall Street Journal, that are sort of brilliant. If it’s updated accordingly, a person who needs a ride pulls out Waze, finds a car heading in the same direction, and hails it for a ride, giving Waze a sort of crowdsourced carpooling functionality. You do pay, but not at a rate that Waze users could make a career out of shuttling you around. Essentially you’d be paying whoever picked you up gas money, up to 54 cents a mile. Nor, for now, does Google take a fee.
That said, you can likely already see the problem in using an app to either pick up a total stranger or get in the car with one. Uber already has some fairly serious problems with fraud, road rage, and general creepiness, issues they’ve been bad about addressing and seem to think is best solved by getting rid of the drivers. Granted, this is a problem that could potentially be solved with, say, a “trusted friends” list, but even then, your trusted friend might show up with his good buddy Creepy Bob, something Google will need to deal with before this goes live.
The ultimate goal, of course, is to get Google’s self-driving car onto the roads as a sort of tiny bespoke bus service. It seems likely Google will be aiming at public transit, as areas without transit could likely use the self-driving vehicles the most. Still, it looks like there will be a long way to go before you carpool to get everywhere.
(Via The Wall Street Journal)
