| > you end up needing like 30 drivers for 100 vehicles? What? That's literally insane compared to the current standard of 100 drivers for 100 vehicles. They're literally reducing 70% of the labor cost compared to uber/lyft/etc. It's pretty reasonable to expect that this will improve over time as well. This is exactly how you want a startup to roll out a new technology. * Build a pretty good base implementation * Do things that don't scale for the edge cases * Reduce the things that don't scale over time Even if they can only improve this to 10 for 100, that's still a massive improvement. In my area, a small, rural city, this would literally be a game changer. Right now, there's a single Uber within 15 minutes - if I'm lucky. Meanwhile, cruise could drop a handful of car in town, let them idle (at no cost), then pay a driver for a few minutes of intervention every now and then. This also enables intercity transit. Most of that is highway miles. Outside of the start and end, those are easy and predictable. You could have dozens/hundreds of miles where Cruise can compete with the cost of privately owned vehicles. Lastly, this makes it feasible for Cruise to reposition cars between cities without huge costs. Currently, that's basically impossible. Any human driven car needs to offer the driver a ride in the opposite direction. |