Waze’ carpool service is moving out of the bay area to go state-wide, meaning Wazers across California will finally be able to enjoy the same carpool benefits as those who have been using the new feature of the popular Waze app in San Francisco since Waze initially started piloting the new service earlier this year. While all of the locations that it will be available in California aren’t explicitly mentioned, larger metropolitan cities like LA will certainly get a taste of what Waze Carpool has to offer, as will other areas within the state where Waze has a large following of users.
According to the report the Waze Carpool app will go live throughout the state on June 6th, so it won’t be available until then, but the reference of “throughout the state” does seem to suggest that anywhere there are Waze users, the new Waze Carpool app should work, which means that it probably won’t be limited to just larger cities and will be throughout all of California. That’s great not only for anyone who lives in smaller towns around California, but it’s also great for Waze as it will be able to gain even more user feedback from the service now that more users will have access to it.
Those who catch a ride with a Waze Carpool driver will be splitting the gas expenses, which is how the service works from a monetary standpoint in regards to incentive for drivers who are picking up other users, and Waze currently gets no portion of the money received which means drivers get to keep all of the money from the transaction between them and the user they’re picking up. Eventually though Waze says that it does have plans to take a commission for facilitating the service between users, but it won’t be planning to do so until Waze Carpool is at a level of quality for the service that it feels is high enough to institute the commission charge. There is currently no mention of when that may be, so it’s entirely possible that Waze simply doesn’t have an idea. There’s also no mention currently of Waze Carpool expanding outside of California for now, so anyone in other states will have to wait a while longer before they get a chance to test out this new entry in the ride share industry.