[pfarnsworth]

Whoever solved self-driving cars could buy 10,000 cars per city. Let's say each car costs $100,000. That's $1B if paid upfront which is never the case, but let's assume.

Now, each of those 10,000 cars could work 24x7. Assuming each ride is $10, and you can do 50 rides in a day (2 trips per hour on average over the entire day), that's $500 per day less electricity and maintenance. That's $5M/day with no employee costs except for maintenance workers. You could scale up by simply buying more cars, and whichever cars aren't needed could roost at homebase, without people picketing or sending nasty tweets saying they don't have enough work.

I doubt you have to pay for marketing costs at this point, word of mouth would be strong enough, and you just develop an app.

[marinman]

While I'm bullish that self-driving will happen in our lifetimes, I think there are a lot of challenges that many are underestimating. This includes the actual technology—this is one of the most important and challenging technological breakthroughs of all time. It's going to take time and be very, very expensive to produce at scale (ie all-electric self-driving cars at $100K a piece).

Even putting that aside, I have questions about the business side of things. Demand for transportation has been pretty consistent with big lumps during the morning and evening commutes.

One of the beauties of Uber's existing business model is that it can theoretically spin up and down drivers as needed with Surge pricing. With a fleet of cars, it's not guaranteed that supply will perfectly match demand most of the time.

The counter to that, which I sort of buy, is that it will kind of be like broadband Internet. We don't even know what demand and opportunities self-driving cars will create. My hesitancy with fully embracing this is that broadband was an acceleration of something new whereas self-driving is a leap to an existing quantity of transportation. It will still change lots of things but it will take longer for things like where you choose to live to change.

Finally, my main hesitancy is the human aspect. For self-driving to make the impact that many want/believe, there's going to have to be a hard line in the regulatory sand where human-controlled cars are outlawed or limited. I don't see that happening in the United States for a long, long time.

[malandrew]

Great points. The other thing I might add, which your points support, is that the longer the roll-out of self-driving cars takes, the less likely it is to be disruptive to TNCs.

[timewarrior]

I agree. The user behavior has already been developed. And Uber doesn't have any special user loyalty. There is no reason for users to not try another app.

If the tech is indeed safer vs human, it would also have an added benefit of not having safety risks similar to Uber where some Uber drivers have assaulted their riders.

[hndamien]

In the case of Tesla it is the customers that pay for the cars.