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Waze, a navigation app owned by Alphabet, plans to expand its carpooling service to several cities in the U.S. and Latin America in the coming months, the company told the Wall Street Journal. Waze began testing the service, which matches commuters with others near them going to a similar destination, in Tel Aviv and the Bay Area in 2015 and 2016 respectively.
How it works: Unlike ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, Waze offers true carpooling for commuters. Even its pricing structure—54 cents per mile—is designed to provide a simple compensation to the driver for gas, not a wage. Waze has also built a special app for the service, called Waze Rider. Waze eventually plans to start charging an additional fee to the rider.
Uber competition: In 2013, the same Alphabet acquired Waze for about $1 billion, the search giant also invested in Uber. Since then, the two companies have begun to compete increasingly, in areas such as self-driving cars, and now ride-sharing. Last year, Google executive David Drummond stepped down from Uber's board because of these growing conflicts of interests.