[CPLX]

> Once you have a self-driving fleet sure, you can start printing money

Why?

Are drivers who make $10-15 an hour so ludicrously expensive that saving that money fundamentally changes the business?

Are the carrying costs and maintenance costs and depreciation costs of self-driving cars likely to be lower or higher than the cost of a 2017 Toyota Camry? How about the regulatory and insurance costs?

Is there likely to be some magic secret that allows one company to dominate self-driving cars, or will it resemble the historical markets for transportation devices, whereby there are dozens of companies who make different offerings of similar technology, and a network of component suppliers and hardware and software companies that contribute?

I guess it captures a unique place in our imaginations, but this topic has an unusually severe infestation of magical thinking for some reason.

[krakensden]

I can see an argument that a vertically integrated car manufacturer and taxi service provider would be hard to beat. Still makes Tesla and GM the companies to worry about, not Uber. The manufacturing part is much harder than the app part.

[fmihaila]

> Is there likely to be some magic secret that allows one company to dominate self-driving cars [...]?

I actually agree with you that this is not a given, but it wasn't clear from my phrasing. I should have started my comment with "Even assuming you will print money with a self-driving fleet, etc".

That said, whoever deploys a self-driving fleet first should enjoy a significant cost advantage against human-driven taxis, at least for the initial period before competitors finalize their own transition. Insurance costs should get lower if SD cars prove to be safer (if not, they wouldn't pass regulation), and taxi customers are very price sensitive, so the $10-15 per hour cost advantage will certainly matter. Taxi drivers hate the price competition from upstarts already. If anybody figures out how to make those prices economical, they win, at least until the market commoditizes itself at a lower price level.

[elif]

Given your $10-15/hr rate, the monthly insurance costs for a vehicle are paid for in less than a day. As SD cars prove themselves, they may even have lower insurance costs than humans.

Since drivers can't work 24 hours per day, you are paying depreciation on ~three 2017 Toyota Camry's, not one.