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it's interesting how optimistic long term visions conflict - if you really think autonomous cabs will become widespread then by implication you are also saying

• rcxdude 6y ago
  Yeah, exactly. I did a fairly deep dive into what path the car industry is going to take with respect to electric cars (especially what a mass market electric car is going to look like), and it all had a huge asterisk associated with it of "but mass car ownership might stop being a thing before any of this happens", at which point thing change drasticly, because then you have a much smaller market of probably more specialised, expensive cars which are designed for way higher duty cycles than most consumer cars.
  • swagasaurus-rex 6y ago
    In poorer nations autonomous cars could take much longer for mass adoption due to different, sometimes harsher road conditions, and lack of reliable road-map data. In addition, self-driving vehicles would be pricier. For a poor nation, that price tag might be higher than human labor.
    • mxschumacher 6y ago
      yes, making autonomous driving work in central Delhi or Agadir will be much different from a US highway. Maybe it's too cyberpunk, but I can already see the headline of road pirates capturing autonomous cars and taking them apart for spares. Those sensors, the GPU and computing units are quite valuable.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • TheDong 6y ago
        Your impression of Delhi and Agadir doesn't seem right to me. By the numbers, Delhi has the highest crime-rate in india, but it has a 5 times lower rate of crime than San Francisco does. And also, self-driving cars will all have enough cameras and be constantly connected to a server that theft will be far less likely for them than regular cars... and regular calls already seem to get by just fine without people stripping them to the bolts.
        • strangeattractr 6y ago
          Unreported crimes aren't factored into the stats you quote.
          • sudosysgen 6y ago
            That works on both sides of the equation, as someone who lived both in NA and Morocco. There's similar levels of unreported crime.
        • ohgodplsno 6y ago
          You seem to think that data being sent to a server will stop physical theft. That's an... Optimistic point of view to say the least.
        • mxschumacher 6y ago
          I meant the kind of traffic they have, I've driven there, it's unique!
  • mxschumacher 6y ago
    I should probably dig a little more into the microeconomics, but for me as a consumer the only difference between an autonomous car and an (human) Uber is price. If we assume that the price of the car stays the same, insurance and fuel still have to be paid and the cab app gets their cut - how much of my ride is really attributable to the cost of the human driver? So how much human labor can be automated away to the benefit of consumers? Not much I think. Given current hardware prices, it seems like the car itself will be a lot more expensive; so how many trips need to be taken so that the variable cost advantage exceeds the increased fixed cost? Driving is a ubiquitous human skill and tens of millions are looking for work, I believe it will be difficult to undercut them on price. Drivers also often do more than merely drive - they help with the luggage, they clean the car, they can talk about their city. Long-haul trucking is a different story, there is a massive labor shortage and letting big rigs go from one warehouse to another without the need of a driver looks like a huge opportunity.
    • freeone3000 6y ago
      Significantly more than half of your ride fare on Uber goes to the driver - between 70 and 130%. Human costs are vastly the most expensive part of hailing a ride, and will remain so as long as minimum wage exists. The same argument for human drivers also applies to human dishwashers and human launderers, and yet, most of us are fine using machines for this purpose. Whether or not this will cause financial disaster for people relying on it for a source of income is irrelevant when replacing jobs with technology.
      • aidenn0 6y ago
        But what fraction of the money that goes to the driver is spent on depreciation and maintenance?
        • sudosysgen 6y ago
          Don't forget insurance/liability, gas, security, and cleaning up after passengers, too!
        • 6y ago
• swagasaurus-rex 6y ago
  The earnings, much like BTC has, would likely approach just above the cost of fuel and maintenance. The real winners are the automakers that build the part-time robotaxi investment vehicles (literally), and the consumer who now pays way less for a frighteningly AI-driven future.
• Fricken 6y ago
  By the time autonomous vehicles are widespread we will be into the age of embodied intelligence and there'll be way cooler shit to build and sell than cars.
• lathiat 6y ago
  The Tesla robotic Uber thing can totally work but it's not going to work if everyone with a car now, tries to use it. It'l flatten out to find the break event point. But that's a normal market effect and the same as Taxis which traditionally (at least in many places) had quotas to stop people not getting enough jobs to fulfill their wage (Taxi 'Tag' or 'Plate' or 'License'); or similar effects on the number of Uber drivers which obviously are not restricted so you have a sort-of imperfect market effect there where it's not worth more drivers joining as they won't get paid enough and some will leave.. or part of why supposedly surge pricing will drive drivers to leave to further away areas to take more jobs, etc. Not a market expert but just wanted to note that while, in effect, you are right.. it's not really surprising, unexpected or unprecedented and not a pyramid scheme :)
  • ralfd 6y ago
    It can work for Uber, because this is Ubers core business. It can work for Tesla, because they have a market share of <0.5%. Toyota, Volkswagen or General Motors would maybe have less revenue with shared cars utopia.
• jsight 6y ago
  Ha, I remember thinking that at Tesla's (very weak, IMO) autonomy day. It seemed like their supposed business model was basically made up on the spot and didn't really make good business sense.
• darawk 6y ago
  Not if you keep the tech. to yourself. Which is why you would do a robotic taxi. You avoid giving out the technology, and so you can charge a premium for your taxi service, while still undercutting traditional taxis.
  • chopin 6y ago
    But price and convenience need to cross some thresholds before I abandon my car. I think this is a difficult problem as you have surge demand at least for commuting. So we can't get around with 1/10th of cars which are driving all day.
    • darawk 6y ago
      > But price and convenience need to cross some thresholds before I abandon my car. Ya, but at least for me, convenience is already there for Uber. Price is the only thing that keeps me from abandoning my car for it.
• snoshy 6y ago
  I disagree, largely because you've cherry-picked parts of the overall strategy. The world is obviously not going to go from purely human driven to 100% autonomous overnight. There will be an intermediate phase where initially some few cars will be autonomous and privately owned, and for those owners making use of the car's full lifetime to serve as a taxi would be a no-brainer. It could pay off your (very expensive) Tesla in the matter of a year or two. After the market for on-demand autonomous taxis is oversaturated, Tesla's plan is actually to stop selling vehicles altogether, or reduce it drastically. Musk has said that FSD vehicles will likely not be for sale after this point, so the "consumer-operated robotaxi" is inherently an intermediate solution. Vehicle ownership will drastically change in nature after the advent of AVs. Tesla isn't going to be unique to having to adapt to this.
  • ganafagol 6y ago
    > It could pay off your (very expensive) Tesla in the matter of a year or two. .. while lota of people unknown to you sit with their butt in your precious expensive car. People who themselves can't (or want to) afford such a car. Not gonna happen. Nobody will throw that much money behind such an expensive gadget, being happ about their precious toy and then let complete strangers user it most of the time. Do you rent out your home via Airbnb when you are 2 weeks on vacation? Very few people actually do that.
    • dmix 6y ago
      There would have to be a cleaning service after every (n?) ride and ideally some form of (expensive) insurance. Unless there is some high level of surveillance of the driver with a rating system which in itself is a huge drawback. I agree this whole thing (ie a large percentage giving up ownership) is way more complicated than it sounds.
    • jiofih 6y ago
      At that point it will be just another smart investment and not a “shiny toy”.
      • 6y ago
• Spooky23 6y ago
  Frankly, it always sounded like a solution looking for a problem for me. Transportation is like electricity, it’s all about peak demand. I’m writing this at midnight on a Sunday... there’s no demand for transportation. Come 7-930AM, demand is 1000x more. There’s no self driving taxi that makes sense as car replacement. We already have busses, which are already really cheap and can get cheaper if cars are too expensive to buy.
  • pas 6y ago
    Current peak demand in cars is limited by roads, and ... always will be. (Hence Musk trying to dig tunnels for more roads.) Which might be okay if throughput is kept high, and folks can read/eat/sleep while ij traffic.
    • Spooky23 6y ago
      No, that's a constraint on infrastructure. A taxi, robot or not, will never be able to meet peak demand... they'll be provisioned to meet 60-80% of peak demand and surge peak pricing. That's the key part of the robot car business model -- these companies want to soak you for using public infrastructure. The Musk tunnel thing is totally different, it's an extreme version of Washington Beltway congestion pricing that charges you $3-60 to waste less time in express lanes.
      • pas 6y ago
        If sitting in rush hour becomes even easier (and even more profitable, if you can work while going to a meeting), we'll have more of rush hour sitting. It's enough if just ~20% of those who participate in traffic are doing so with a "self driving car", if they otherwise would have opted not to do so, we'll have even higher peaks. Surge pricing might not matter much, because it's in the interest of the fleet operator/owner to get maximal utilization, to get maximum profit. After all Uber does surge pricing to motivate more drivers to come online, but if you have a constant supply (constant number of self-driving cars in the fleet), then you can simply use it to maximize profit. (Or to manage perception, ie. to show that yes there are cars available, sure, it comes at a high price, but they are "available".) --- > these companies want to soak you for using public infrastructure Yep, US cities are so burdened with problems (a nasty set of incentives) that public transit is non-viable, which drives even more subsidization of the sprawl, which then breeds these companies that try to "solve it". (I mean Uber/Lyft successfully increased the supply of taxis, which drove prices down. Yaay, great, but this just meant more congestion, more pollution, more sprawl, nothing fundamentally solved.) And of course at this point properly pricing externalities is an insurmountable political challenge, because people are so wedded to their way of life.