Waze could become a car sharing app
The company Google has new plans for its application Waze , the well-known community GPS where drivers alert other users of road hazards. Now, as a direct competition to Uber, Google wants their app to serve carpooling on regular trips like commuting A path that opens up a whole new world of app options Waze , but that will make you participate in a very saturated market: that of applications for private transport and taxi
At the moment it is only a pilot project that will be carried out in the bay area from San Francisco, California (United States). Here, hundreds of Google workers have already begun to participate through a new companion app to the service Waze call Waze Rider, with which to find drivers and trips.
The idea is simple. Waze is already capable of guiding the user to their destination on a regular basis, even scheduling their trips. Well, if any of these established trips is on the way to the destination of another user, this can join the trip and share the cost of gasoline Something that is not It makes a lot of difference with respect to the current operation of the application, which already allowed you to schedule stops and see which other friendly users were on their way to their different destinations.
That's right, Google wants to differentiate itself from Uber, application from which he was an investor, proposing a somewhat different business model. Apparently, Google wants to prevent drivers from engaging professionally in transporting people thanks to the benefits of this practice (carpooling as it is known in the Anglo-Saxon language), That's why he's proposing very bare benefits that go solely to sharing the cost of gas (about 56 cents a mile, according to The Wall Street Journal). At the moment, Google does not make money with this project, since there is no profit margin or commission for the company, according to The Wall Street Journal.
If all goes well, this project plans to expansion to the entire city of San Francisco by the fall, so its aspiration is to grow and serve thousands of people.Of course, for this it must compete with other similar transport applications that already share the bulk of users in that North American city. We are talking about the aforementioned Uber, which continues to make this city its forte, with very competitive prices in its races, and Lyft , another Californian company that, where appropriate, is focused on requesting official taxis from mobile phones with reduced costs.
This San Francisco trial, however, is not the first that Waze has carried out with this approach to car sharing. In Israel, where this application originates from, they have been sharing a car for a year now through Wazethanks to the success of the initiative. At the moment, in the United States, drivers can only make two shared trips a day, focused on trips to and from work, although anyone can be a companion and find the trip that best suits them.
