Google's Waze plans to shut down its carpooling service, available in the US, Brazil, and Israel, in September 2022, citing COVID-19 shifting commuting patterns
Context & Ripple Effects
Waze Carpool ran a seven-year arc inside Google: it began with a 2015 Israeli pilot that capped drivers at two rides a day and gas-money-only pricing, expanded through an SF-area test charging riders at most 54¢ per mile, and reached a US-wide rollout in 2018 before extending toward Latin America. The September 2022 shutdown across the US, Brazil, and Israel ends that experiment, with COVID-19's reshaping of commutes cited as the cause.
The significance is that this was never a profit-seeking ride-hailing play — the original design explicitly barred drivers from generating income beyond costs — so its demise reads less as a competitive loss than as Google retiring a commuter-matching product whose demand premise (daily office commutes) weakened.
First-order effects
- Riders and driver-participants in the US, Brazil, and Israel lose the service in September 2022 and must find alternative commute arrangements.
- Waze refocuses on its core navigation product, freeing the team from operating a three-country ridesharing marketplace.
Second-order effects
- Commuters who used the cost-recovery carpool model shift demand back toward transit, driving, or commercial ride-hailing, removing a low-priced option from those markets.
- Google consolidates Waze's role around navigation data and advertising rather than transportation services, narrowing what the Waze brand competes on.
Third-order effects
- The shutdown suggests non-profit, commute-matching carpooling — priced at cost recovery rather than margin — struggles to survive when commuting volume drops, marking the retreat of big-tech experiments in peer-to-peer mobility outside full commercial ride-hailing.
- If hybrid work persists, expect other commuter-timed products built on daily office travel patterns to face similar reassessment, making commute density a gating metric for mobility services.
The trend: COVID-19's lasting shift away from daily commutes is unwinding corporate bets on commuter-focused mobility services, with Waze Carpool the latest casualty after seven years of steady expansion.