Google tells me that Uber takes a 25% cut for human-driven rides. So a rider's fare is 3:1 driver to Uber. If (just to make the math easy) you need to pay a ro

Google tells me that Uber takes a 25% cut for human-driven rides. So a rider's fare is 3:1 driver to Uber. If (just to make the math easy) you need to pay a robot a third of what you need to pay a human, I wonder whether the negotiation would come out closer to 1. One part Uber, one part driver (so Uber's cut maintains its value) or 2. Still one part Uber, three parts driver, but the values are all lower and the total volumes higher. I'd think it would need to shake out closer to the latter case than the former to keep Uber in the game, for a few reasons: - Self-driving car companies are software companies. They can make Uber clones, given enough resources and time. - There isn't really a two-sided marketplace bootstrapping process. These companies have enough capital to put a lot of cars on the road, and I don't think the economies of scale are actually that big -- there isn't much cross-benefit from scale in disconnected cities, and inside a given city you need 4x as many cars to halve wait times so the scale benefits tail off sharply. And I bet there's little brand-loyalty. - If there are few self-driving car companies in a market, they'd have relatively large market power, so they could dictate rates more effectively than an atomised driver pool. Shrugs, it could happen if the rates were low enough, but I suspect it won't. But I'm probably greatly underestimating the benefits of partnership -- dispatching is probably easy, and AV companies will necessarily be savvy with regulators, but customer-interaction and "app surface-area" are likely places where the existing players have a real leg-up. That said, the labour market is pretty porous in the Bay Area...