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Long before Musk said that, in 2017, I did a back-of-napkin calculations for economics of robotaxis. Here are the numbers: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/
by kjksf 7y ago
Long before Musk said that, in 2017, I did a back-of-napkin calculations for economics of robotaxis.
Here are the numbers: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/ac23f6cdd3b543b3b89d9f68e00435b8/predicted-cost-of-robo-taxis.html https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/ac23f6cdd3b543b3b89d9f68...
With very conservative numbers I got yearly profit of $20k. Over 5-10 years it's $100-$200k. This is after paying off the car, insurance and operating costs.
So yeah, a car that potentially makes you $200k is worth at least $100k + $30k price of the car, given that it's money for almost no effort and you also get to use the car for yourself.
You're free to disagree with some of my assumptions but those are the numbers that other people are getting as well, when they bother to actually do an analysis as opposed to argument-less dismissals.
- peteradio 7y agoHow many robotaxis need to exist before the market is saturated?
- marvin 7y agoProbably on the order of the number of taxis, delivery trucks and semitrailers in existence, plus some more to allow for increased demand when the cost of taxi transport gets closer to the marginal cost. It's a big potential market, and extremely lucrative if a single company gets there some years before the second-fastest competitor.
- rodgerd 7y agoThe fact that your numbers suggest 10 hours of constant chargeable activity with only one 15 minute clean suggests they are nonsense. And I don't really feel the need to treat every brain fart of Musk's seriously. After all, he was supposed t deliver cars that could drive themselves from the factory to the customer in 2016. Edit: Oops, 2017. My mistake; I sometimes lose track of CEO fantasies.