In San Francisco, people wanting to get from point A to point B have a few fairly unique options. There’s Uber and Lyft, both headquartered in the area and also available around the world. Then there’s Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary, providing driverless rides in just a handful of US cities (coming to more places this year). Then, starting last fall, Bay Area denizens also got access to electric automaker Tesla’s ride-hail service, which operates as a “robotaxi” in Texas but as a more traditional service, with drivers behind the wheel, in California.
For months, the new and futuristic “robotaxi” services felt like a novelty. Tourists gawked and climbed in for joy rides, but Waymo tended to be slower and more expensive than the human-driven alternatives.
Now new data and analysis from the ride-hail price aggregator company Obi finds that the novel services’ prices and wait times are getting more competitive in the Bay Area. It could be a sign that the tech is moving closer to its promise to provide cheaper and widely-available rides—which might eventually put human drivers out of business.
Obi last checked in on ride-hail pricing last spring, and found that Waymo rides were priced 30 to 40 percent higher than Uber and Lyft. But as of November and December 2025, Waymo has started to catch up: Its rides were 13 percent more expensive than Uber, and 27 percent more expensive than Lyft. Waymo is particularly competitive outside of rush hours, the analysis found.
The price gap between the human- and robot-driven services gets even smaller as the rides get longer—convenient, because Waymos just started driving on some highways in November. Waymo riders pay $3.67 per kilometer for rides between 4.3 and 9.3 kilometers (2.6 to 5.8 miles), compared to $3.60 for Uber and $3.14 for Lyft.
Perhaps even more notable than the tightening price war is Waymo’s more competitive wait times. Last spring, Obi’s analysis showed the self-driving car service with consistently longer wait times than Uber and Lyft. Now, Waymo’s ETAs are consistently shorter than Uber’s and closer to Lyft’s. (A notable exception: Waymo wait times—and prices—spike between 4 and 6 pm.) “Consumers don’t like to wait. It’s an on-demand service for a reason,” says Obi CEO Ashwini Anburajan. “Seeing wait times come down creates a more equal playing field between all three.”
Then there’s Tesla’s service, the outlier. Tesla’s Bay Area ride-hail operation runs with less than 200 vehicles across roughly 400-square-mile service area, and while the company has said its cars use its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) driver assistance feature, the cars do not drive autonomously.
Read the full article here