Waze is a popular navigation and crowd-sourced police avoidance tool, but most people probably don’t realize that the app has had a carpooling arm for the last six years. Waze’s business has expanded recently to the point that the Google-owned organization’s carpool arm is not as popular as it once was. As a result, the company is shutting down the service to focus on its other products.
Waze’s carpool services were available to people in Brazil, Israel, Mexico, and the United States. Though it is shuttering the feature in those countries, users can still use the app for traffic information and navigation tools. Waze’s data shows that people are driving up to 15% more than before the pandemic, so there are still plenty of opportunities for the company’s navigation and infotainment app
A Waze spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company wants to focus on traffic and decongesting cities. Waze also focuses on reducing the costs of various mobility solutions and improving safety and availability.
When it started, Waze’s carpooling function offered a service that didn’t exist, but that quickly changed when Uber