"Who would have imagined that demand could be so elastic?" Any New Yorker paying attention. When a taxi medallion was "worth" $1 million, it was pretty obvious that their was some monopoly pricing going on. It will be interesting to see if I can buy a robotaxi for personal use and then rent it out while I am not using it.
> they could be on the road 20 hours a day, and probably remain usable for 10 years.
Doubt it. I think cars used full time for rideshare/taxi service last 3-5 years. 20 hours on the road per day at just 20 mph average is still ~150,000 miles per year.
They're EVs and ought to handle city driving a lot better than ICE cars. EV batteries are lasting longer than expected too. I've seen some estimates that battery packs could last a million miles.
> The technology took way too long to arrive thanks to government, lawsuits, and paranoia.
I don't think this is true at all! Why do you think this is true? I worked at Nuro and Cruise, and the technology was simply not good enough until around ~2024. That's when Waymo became open to the public (and a year after Cruise had to remove its vehicles from the road).
The main thing keeping AV back right now is that the vehicle cost for something like a Waymo is simply too high to make the economics work compared to Uber, and something cheap like a Tesla is just not safe enough (by safe enough I mean that it is not better than the Xth percentile driver across relevant driving domains, I don't know what percentile Tesla indexes themselves to and reasonable people can disagree).
There have been some high-profile government permit denials in NYC and DC, but that is not the story in the vast majority of the country.
"Who would have imagined that demand could be so elastic?" Any New Yorker paying attention. When a taxi medallion was "worth" $1 million, it was pretty obvious that their was some monopoly pricing going on. It will be interesting to see if I can buy a robotaxi for personal use and then rent it out while I am not using it.
Elon abundifies everything he touches.
A quibble:
> they could be on the road 20 hours a day, and probably remain usable for 10 years.
Doubt it. I think cars used full time for rideshare/taxi service last 3-5 years. 20 hours on the road per day at just 20 mph average is still ~150,000 miles per year.
They're EVs and ought to handle city driving a lot better than ICE cars. EV batteries are lasting longer than expected too. I've seen some estimates that battery packs could last a million miles.
> The technology took way too long to arrive thanks to government, lawsuits, and paranoia.
I don't think this is true at all! Why do you think this is true? I worked at Nuro and Cruise, and the technology was simply not good enough until around ~2024. That's when Waymo became open to the public (and a year after Cruise had to remove its vehicles from the road).
The main thing keeping AV back right now is that the vehicle cost for something like a Waymo is simply too high to make the economics work compared to Uber, and something cheap like a Tesla is just not safe enough (by safe enough I mean that it is not better than the Xth percentile driver across relevant driving domains, I don't know what percentile Tesla indexes themselves to and reasonable people can disagree).
There have been some high-profile government permit denials in NYC and DC, but that is not the story in the vast majority of the country.
The cybercab is trying for even better economics than you're imagining, too. https://www.austinvernon.site/blog/cybercab.html
It's going to be glorious!