[timewarrior]

My understanding is that in a reasonably stable state, an autonomous car would run on battery, charge itself and cost 40k. If a car has a life time of 5 years and electricity costs 4k/yr + 2k maintenance (lower for electric cars), we are looking at operational cost of 14k/yr per vehicle.

Right now an Uber driver who is probably online 60 hours a week, needs to support a car priced around 25k (amortized over 5 years), gas (which is more expensive than electricity), maintenance and 50k-70k/yr driver income. Assuming lower end we are looking at 5k car + 10k fuel + 5k maintenance + 50k driver income. So cost to support a driving car is 70k/yr for lower hours of operation.

So we are looking at a 5x cost and lesser hours of operation with human driving vs autonomous driving.

These are off the napkin numbers so please don't take them literally. It is meant to highlight that driver income is the biggest factor.

Whoever has self driving tech, they can start undercutting Uber with the most profitable markets (NYC, SF, Boston, LA etc) and expand from there.

I feel that we are at least 5-8 years away from main stream self driving. But I could be wrong.

[nindalf]

Great comment.

Let me take a stab at it as well, because I think it could be simpler.

Let's assume the driver drives the exact same model as the autonomous one, except he saves $10k upfront on the sensors. So his costs are 12k/year. A decent alternate job would pay $10/hour, and a person could probably work 9 hours a day * 6 days a week * 50 weeks, which comes to $27k. So for the taxi driving gig to be worthwhile, the driver needs to make somewhere in the region of $35-40k ($27k + $12k).

As mentioned earlier, the costs of the self-driving car is $14k/year. So that's a difference of 2.5x-3x. Still significant enough that the a taxi company that offers rides at 30-40% of the cost of its competitors will just win.

[spikels]

I have gone through a few different versions of these calculations and got similar results. Even if the driverless tech costs more it is still around half the costs of a human driven car.

On factor I have not seen fully addressed is the ability of driverless cars to run near 24/7. Given than demand is variable and human drivers could share cars like taxis what is the worth in practice?

[nindalf]

I think having access to rides at all hours is helpful. You might not take many rides at 2am, but when you do, its something pretty important. Having a safe option that's available at any time of day or night will make self-driving equal to or better than actually owning a car and far superior to conventional taxi rides.

[mattdeboard]

Couple of great comments in the thread. Thanks.