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A comment on Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber is going to trial, judge rules. Parent comment

Re:Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber is going to trial, judge rules by Fricken on Friday May 12, 2017 @12:19PM (#14325303)
Many analysts have crunched the numbers, and come up with similar results, but Brad Templeton has been thinking and writing about Robotaxis longer than anyone else, so I'll link to his numbers:

http://ideas.4brad.com/robotaxi-economics

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Re:Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber is going to trial, judge rules by ghaff on Friday May 12, 2017 @01:12PM (#14325761)
Those numbers seem quite consistent with what I wrote. Costs per mile of a "normal" car today of about 50 cents/mile. (Which is approximately the IRS reimbursement rate so that seems very reasonable.) So that would be a good ballpark. Which is 1/2 to 1/3 of Uber today.

Sure, you can speculate about optimized taxi designs (which aren't especially relevant to non-core urban areas with high car ownership today) but small electric vehicles could exist without self-driving too.

IMO this is an academic exercise for at least a couple of decades in any case but it's an interesting thought experiment.

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