New Data Shows Robotaxis Competing on Price—and Speed
In San Francisco, people wanting to get from point A to point B have some pretty unique options. There’s Uber and Lyft, both based in the region and also available worldwide. Then there’s Waymo, Alphabet’s subsidiary, which offers driverless rides in just a handful of U.S. cities (and will be available in more places this year). Then, starting last fall, Bay Area residents also gained access to electric automaker Tesla’s ride-sharing service, which operates like a “robo-taxi” in Texas but like a more traditional service, with drivers behind the wheel, in California.
For months, futuristic new “robot taxi” services seemed like a novelty. Tourists gawked and rode for rides, but Waymo tended to be slower and more expensive than human-operated alternatives.
Now, new data and analysis from rideshare pricing aggregator company Obi reveals that prices and wait times for new services are becoming more competitive in the Bay Area. This could be a sign that the technology is getting closer to fulfilling its promise of making rides cheaper and widely available, potentially putting human drivers out of business.
Obi last checked ride prices in Hail last spring and found that Waymo ride prices were 30 to 40 percent higher than Uber and Lyft. But since November and December 2025, Waymo has started to catch up: its rides were 13% more expensive than Uber and 27% more expensive than Lyft. Waymo is particularly competitive during off-peak hours, according to the analysis.
The price gap between human-driven and robot-driven services narrows even further as trips get longer — which is convenient, because Waymos just started running on some highways in November. Waymo riders pay $3.67 per kilometer for trips 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 are Waymo’s more competitive wait times. Last spring, Obi’s analysis showed that the self-driving car service had consistently longer wait times than Uber and Lyft. Now, Waymo’s ETAs are consistently shorter than Uber’s and closer to Lyft’s. (One notable exception: Waymo’s wait times and prices increase between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m.) “Consumers don’t like to wait. It’s an on-demand service for a reason,” says Ashwini Anburajan, Obi’s CEO. “Reducing wait times creates a more level playing field between the three. »
Then there’s Tesla’s service, the outlier. Tesla’s Bay Area ride-hailing operation has fewer than 200 vehicles in a service area of about 400 square miles, and although the company has said its cars use its fully autonomous (supervised) driving assistance feature, the cars do not drive autonomously.
