[Fricken]

The thing is these rideshare companies: Lyft, Uber, Ola, Grab and Didi Mechagodzilla Chuxing, these companies all exploded out of nothing, they're all so young.

The software they run on is complex, but not so complex that it can't be replicated.

So if you're a company with the secret sauce, that being a validated autonomous OS, you would most definitely want to run the consumer facing end of the business yourself, because that's where the real profit margins are hiding. Back-end software, fleet maintenance, and harware: this stuff is all eventually going to become commoditized. Customer experience will be the differentiator.

A thing to keep in mind is that a fleet of sensor riddled robotaxis will gather far more granular data about the world than just a standard human driven taxi, so the potential is there to take fleet management logistics to another level that no conventional rideshare can hope to compete with.

Really, if you let your imagination run wild with what can be done with that kind of data about the world, well, oh my gosh. You're building a live action parallel universe made out of networked lidars and running annotated data through pattern recognizers.

The privacy implications would make the hairs on your back stand-up if conceptualizing the astronomical amount of data that's going to kicked around hasn't already made you dizzy. It varies from company to company, but a typical test vehicle gobbles up something in the neighbourhood of 4 terabytes a day. In the future that number will go up. Thousands and thousands of Robotaxis.

[notahacker]

The evidence for the real profit margins being in the customer facing bit isn't strongly supported by the current market being so competitive that the companies run at VC-subsidised operating losses in most markets whilst fighting endless legal battles. If the secret sauce that changes all that is the self driving tech, the profit remains all in that. Ride locating software is relatively straightforward for a company with Alphabet's resources to develop, the business side less so, especially when its core businesses are notoriously poor at customer service and making far too much money from an existing search near-monopoly to want to risk attracting complaints about anti-competitive behaviour in new markets. And they could still can collect all that juicy data if other entities paid them enormous licence fees to run the consumer facing bit of an autonomous vehicle operation, maintain the vehicles, obtain permits in 1001 jurisdictions and design cars and ownership models to consumer preferences

Unique, regulated and highly complex software and hardware components seems far less likely to become commoditized than ridesharing apps that essentially already are, and of course viable markets for the driving tech exists even if the driver can't be dispensed with altogether.