I haven't personally done the math but my understanding is that the current (possibly subsidized) rate for Lyft/Uber is in the $1.00 to $1.50 per mile range. The IRS rate for car usage is about $0.53/mile.

Presumably the cost for a heavily utilized vehicle is going to be lower per mile. OTOH, any commercial fleet service is going to have costs on top of the base mileage cost. (The $0.53 figure also ignores any distance the vehicle might have to travel to pick you up.)

So it's probably reasonable as a back-of-the-envelope swag to assume that, if a fully autonomous vehicle were available today, you could probably undercut a "ridesharing" service by about 50%. It's definitely not suddenly going to be almost too cheap to meter just because you take the driver out of the equation.

I think it could eventually be much cheaper but I don't know about 10:1.

If autonomous cars don't crash, the insurance will be super cheap. If they are electric, then maintenance and operating costs should be very inexpensive.

When cars don't crash, they don't need to be designed to crash, so you can start building the cars out of lighter materials. When the car is far lighter, then the drivetrain can be simpler and energy consumption should be less.

I could see taxis serving city centers that are more like a golf cart than a Crown Vic. So the cars should be cheaper to buy or lease as well.

Some of the same technology that's needed for autonomous driving could be applied to the maintenance and repair side as well. So when the cars do break, I think they could be repaired inexpensively by other robots.

I can imagine all the people involved in the taxi industry being replaced by taxi.py.

All you need next is to build A near B and you can take the person out of the car entirely. They can walk to their destination, and the car can be made out of aerogel and powered by fairy dust and the ride sharing software is simpler, the logistics are easier to manage, wear and tear is reduced, and the companies can have a valuation into the stratosphere.

> I could see taxis serving city centers that are more like a golf cart than a Crown Vic.

http://www.tqsmagazine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/john...

> All you need next is to build A near B

That will never happen. When my car can drive itself, I'm moving further out of the city.

Maybe you'll do that, but the net effect would still be a greater migration into the city, because people would be able to have all the benefits of urban living and all the benefits of car mobility, without having to cover the high monthly cost of a downtown parking space.

Just leave your car parked out in the suburbs somewhere, program it to move to another parking space at least once every 72 hours so it doesn't get towed, then call it to come in and pick you up whenever you want to use it.

"Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future."

>When cars don't crash, they don't need to be designed to crash

No matter how good Waymo's driving is, unless they're the only things on the road, their cars will need to be collision-safe.

Using china as an example, taxis (and Uber equivalents) are much cheaper there to use than the USA while non labor costs (gas and cars) are actually more expensive than in the states. So I would guess labor is a large part of the cost, or it doesn’t really make sense. Maybe not 10x cheaper, but half as much is probably reasonable.

50% of rideshare rates with a driver seems like a very reasonable ballpark. There are reasons it might be somewhat more or less but it's probably pretty close. Which means you probably change car ownership outside of dense areas where it's already marginal a lot less than many assume. I might use my own car less at those rates but I'd absolutely still own one for a variety of reasons.

In china I didn’t own a car, it was about 2X the cost to buy one (for what I wanted() vs. the USA, plus parking was a PITA in a city like Beijing where it was often illegal (parking in the second lane each way of a 4 lane street). In many places, car ownership and use fees are a lot more than the USA, but somehow taxis are very reasonable as alternatives.

Having move back, I now own a car that I have to fill up with gas once every couple of months (I don’t drive it much, but with a baby uber isn’t an option)

In NYC, another large cost is the real-estate to park the vehicle when not in use (~$300/mo). This could presumably be reduced or eliminated as well.

What if you go with small electric cars? Does that cut the cost further?

Electric and small/utilitarian vehicle economics can apply equally well to a car you own or a rideshare service with a driver.

You can run a car for longer with no driver and of course the human capital involved is none. But the flip side is that the cars wear out quickly.

A lot of taxis are already run 24 hours a day, switching off between drivers at shift changes. The per-mile gas, maintenance, and depreciation (ignoring any fixed per-day or per-year costs) are already much more than 10% of the total cost of a ride.

I came across a (possibly outdated) Uber pricing model for LA of a $5.60 minimum fare and a $0.90 per mile charge, and among other fees, NYC cabs are $2.50 per mile. Compare both of those numbers to the IRS mileage rate of $0.53 per mile to get a very rough lower bound on some of the costs.

The fare for NYC is incorrect -- $2.50 is the base price and $0.505/mile and $0.50/minute the car is stopped (i.e. in traffic if they're waiting). There's also a $1 surchage between 4-8pm on the weekdays.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/passenger/taxicab_rate.shtm...

>$2.50 is the base price and $0.505/mile and $0.50/minute the car is stopped

Sorry, I was going off "Plus 50 cents per 1/5 mile" to mean $2.50 per mile. Where are you getting $0.505/mile from your link?

Lol I read that completely wrong. Time for more coffee, I suppose -- that definitely means $2.50/mile.