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Re:U.S. Judge Rejects Uber’s Proposed $100M Settlement with ... by MagnumOpus on Friday August 19, 2016 @05:52AM (#12318946)
Yes it is.

First, efficiency of utilisation: Driverless cars can be driven around the clock (modulo maintenance and refueling time), so car depreciation/maintenance gets amortised amongst more passengers.

Second, efficiency of scale in maintenance: It is extremely unlikely that the maintenance costs that uber drivers take on - buying parts retail and taking their car to the nearest garage for repairs - are lower than what would be a dedicated factory-like maintenance shop for thousands of automatic cabs.

And third of course: direct wage costs of the driver once you subtract car maintenance from fares is still a lot bigger than zero, so eliminating that saves money.

Re:U.S. Judge Rejects Uber’s Proposed $100M Settlement with ... by dagw on Friday August 19, 2016 @07:18AM (#12319253)
Driverless cars can be driven around the clock

So in theory can normal cars. Many taxi companies (and I'm assuming at least some Uber drivers) share one car between 2-5 drivers to maximize the time on the road.

The other aspect you're not considering is that even after you take economies of scale into account a driverless car will almost certainly cost more than the market price of the current median Uber car. I'm guessing that $3000-5000 will get you a perfectly Uber-worthy car that will give you years of fairly trouble free use. What will a driverless car cost?

And that is ignoring the fact that most Uber drivers would have owned and maintained a car even if they had had a different job, so the only 'cost' is the marginal cost of extra maintenance being used as an Uber car causes.

Also I wouldn't be surprised if maintenance costs will also be higher at least in the short-to-medium term due the complicated and experimental nature of the components involved.

So even if there are long term savings I imagine that they will take a long time to materialize and even longer to show up in fare-prices, unless Uber decides to subsidize driverless fare to kick start the market.

Re:U.S. Judge Rejects Uber’s Proposed $100M Settlement with ... by kesselvon on Friday August 19, 2016 @01:36PM (#12321805)
Taxi's drive around looking for fares. Uber can better optimize the time used through an algorithm. I'm betting there's a lot of time wasted for cabs that rely on street hails.
Re:U.S. Judge Rejects Uber’s Proposed $100M Settlement with ... by abricot on Friday August 19, 2016 @06:06AM (#12319001)
Note, that most of those points: Buying parts, cars, repairing is stuff they don't pay a dime for now. They only pay a wage to drivers. The structure of their cost changes completely - which is very hard to make any sane calculations on.

And if they are not first with driverless cars, big national cab-companies are also in the run.

Re:U.S. Judge Rejects Uber’s Proposed $100M Settlement with ... by mcintyre1994 on Friday August 19, 2016 @07:19AM (#12319262)
The latest Tesla masterplan includes a global fleet of self driving taxis too.