Uber vs Lyft vs Waymo vs Model Y robotaxi ride share price and wait times comparison shows Tesla is buying adoption

Tesla's newly minted Robotaxi ride share platform that operates in cities like Austin or San Francisco with 2026 Model Y vehicles has managed to undercut the competition in terms of pricing by a factor of two or three.

That includes both the established players like Uber or Lyft and fully autonomous, driverless rides by Google's Waymo. Waymo has been more expensive than Uber or Lyft for a while now, but its prices are dropping fast, and the difference with Uber has fallen from up to 40% to 13% now, or just 2% for shorter distances up to six miles or so.

Tesla Model Y robotaxi ride prices

• $8

Nobody can match Tesla Robotaxi ride share prices, though, as the Model Y trips it offers in San Francisco are priced in the single digits for the first time. The average Tesla robotaxi ride there costs just $8, while the next cheapest option, Lyft, costs double.

According to an average ride share price study, Tesla charges only $1.99 per km ($3.20 per mile), while Waymo's average rate is nearly three times that. That is from an average of 94,348 rides where the data includes both the trip price and the wait times for the respective ride share service.

Tesla robotaxi ride share wait times

• 15 minutes

While Tesla knocks it out of the park with its Robotaxi platform pricing, a Model Y ETA is around 15 minutes upon request. In comparison, the other pure robotaxi player, Waymo, makes passengers wait a bit over five minutes on average, nearing the ETA of Lyft.

Needless to say, Tesla operates way fewer robotaxis than Waymo, with about 156 Model Y units driving around the Bay Area on FSD (Unsupervised) software. Waymo, in contrast, has over a thousand automated driverless vehicles, so it is only natural that its wait times are lower.

Tesla is expanding its Model Y robotaxi count quickly, though, and has even started offering unsupervised rides without a safety monitor in Austin, like Waymo does. As time progresses, tips Tesla's AI chief, the share of those unsupervised rides will become larger, as will the fleet count, and the process has already started.

In a nutshell, Tesla is offering unbeatable ride share prices to spur faster adoption of its Robotaxi platform app and services, just as Uber or Lyft did in the beginning, compensating for the typical disadvantages of the newcomer, like an insufficient number of cars and hence longer wait times. A survey of the study's respondents, however, shows that robotaxis are no longer considered a novelty, at least in the Bay Area, as nearly half expect one to turn up upon a ride share request, boding well for the future of autonomous, driverless car share services.

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