- Apart from self-driving cars, Google will soon pilot a carpooling service in Israel.
blog.wsj.com: Google has thrown its hat into the hotly contested ride-sharing ring when it launched a pilot carpooling service for commuters in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Monday.
The service, which went live on Monday afternoon, is being offered through the navigation app Waze, which Google bought in 2013 for about $1 billion, and through another app called RideWith — a new app offered to passengers who are not Waze users.
The service pairs commuters looking for a ride to work or back home from work on RideWith with drivers using Waze going in the same direction.
To avoid regulatory hurdles such as the ones facing Uber, Waze will limit drivers’ ability to generate income by connecting them only with passengers who wish to join the route they take to work and back, and limiting the driver to two rides a day. Drivers will only be able to pick up passengers if they leave from their home neighborhoods and drive toward their workplaces, or the other way round.
Passengers can pay drivers for the ride through their credit cards linked to the app, but only for gasoline and wear and tear. The prices will be determined through the app based on indices for the cost of gas per kilometer and indices for wear and tear.
Google will take a cut of the fee paid, with the percentage still to be determined.
The pilot will focus only on commuters, so that Google doesn’t clash with regulators and taxi services, they way Uber has.
Google was careful to say that its carpooling test in Israel is not a competitive play against Uber. “RideWith is an experiment in the Tel Aviv area that doesn’t compete with Uber: it’s a platform built to enable local drivers to help each other during busy commute hours,” a spokesman for Google said in an email.
In its initial phase the RideWith pilot will service commuters only in the greater Tel-Aviv area.
Haaretz previously reported on the Google Waze pilot.
