About "5 years away", I've been reading the same dream of all cars being self driving for so many years. I distinctly remember an after-work party in 2010 where a coworker with a phobia of driving going on about how self driving cars would soon be driving him around. Everything I hear today has been repeated for so long.
"Level 3: Within known, limited environments (such as freeways), the driver can safely turn their attention away from driving tasks, but must still be prepared to take control when needed."
L3 on the other hand may be a good and useful system to, say, automate freeway driving but it's basically useless as a system for replacing taxis.
So 10% of the time you pay the normal taxi price that you pay now, and 90% of the time you get the super cheap self driving price.
That's still awesome!
So all these humans are just hanging around waiting for it to snow so that they have the pleasure of driving other people around? The market will react instantaneously?
Or are they doing other gigs in the meantime, like delivering people's lunches, laundry, groceries et al?
Maybe they will have other jobs. Most uber drivers work part time anyway, so that's not any different.
Maybe you have to pay people a premium to be an emergency driver.
Or maybe people will just drive less when it is snowing. Most of the time when I am using transportation, I don't 100% NEED to go on the trip. Maybe Ill just buy groceries tomorrow instead of today.
But even so, if 90% of the time, transportation prices are near 0 $, that is still crazy distruptive.
The market can easily solve any of the problems you are bringing up, just with behavioral/price chances.
And trucking isn't even affected by any of the issues you brought up. An x% chance of being a day late is easily worth 90% shipping cost decreases.
Thats difficult. People who talk about "self driving cars 5 years away" aren't usually talking about mythical level 5 self driving that is actually 40 years away. They are talking about level 3, which basically means, "end to end travel, in 90% of situations".
Just like how 1/10 times you might not be able to flag down a taxi cab, today, 1/10 times you won't be able to get the self driving taxi to go EXACTLY where you need to go.
But it will work for most situations, most of time, and thats good enough. (IE, imagine if 90% of taxi drivers or truck drivers were made obsolete. That is industry destroying)