Your attitude is like looking at the wright brother's plane and being upset it can't make a transatlantic flight yet.
Give it some time
The bigger question is "has the self driving issue been solved in clear conditions." Is there any real evidence someone has a self driving car that is better than human drivers?
I see a lot of promises.
Robotaxis are geo-fenced. They're worth ~$200K apiece (that's a very loose figure). Autonomous vehicles will require a fair bit of maintenance and oversight before they're idiot proof enough put in the hands of private owners. Initial commercial deployments will certainly be in fair weather cities.
There are a lot of medium sized cities in the US with crappy public transportation systems. Maybe these cities could subsidize on-demand rides in robotaxi fleets operated by GM and Uber and other companies rather than owning and operating a fleet of buses running on a limited schedule.
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/11/what-public-t...
Because they can make even more money doing both. I don't think the independent must-own types will magically change their ways, and taxis don't solve many people's needs. Why not sell em too? It's like asking if they make more money leasing why do they sell also.
https://www.gm.com/content/dam/gm/events/docs/5265893-685163...
They're throwing away money if they never sell the cars.
Also, would you rather take an autonomous cab in a car you own and trust (or that your friends own), or in a car you've never tried ?
Besides, a bigger market does not mean it's more lucrative. Competition on ride-sharing will probably be much more intense than on car manufacturing, and GM may be completely unable to succeed on that new market.
(re your comparison of selling and renting)
I'm not saying they will sell them. But the ROI one is a likely possibility.
It's hilarious how far ahead of ourselves we've gotten on this topic. "Can it drive in the snow yet?" Umm, how about we get them to drive from Redmond->Seattle in clear conditions and minimal traffic before we start talking about whether it'll get me to the ski resort.
Same here. I live in the midwest and our two-car family always owns at least one 4x4/AWD vehicle for the winter. The other is usually optimized for MPG/reliability (things that go down when you start adding heavy parts - like the kind needed for AWD).
This seems like a good analysis, but are there particularly good reasons to believe we will be able to produce a car that drives through an urban environment, at any cost?
But I'm still inclined to think that generalized door-to-door autonomy without a competent human present is still a long way out.
https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-google-arizona-phoenix-dri...
You have to do something well to redeem that or sales will be a flop. It doesn't look like self driving cars will be much cheaper, better handling, cheaper to own or more luxurious than normal car so the only thing left is for them to drive as better than most people.
The kind of review you want is "this thing costs $10k more than a Prius but being able to sleep off a hangover on your way to work is worth every bit of that $10k"
2) Better than the worst isn't good enough because good drivers would buy them too.
Waymo was reporting 0.2 disengagements per 1000 miles last year, but people like to nit pick those because they're not all downtown miles.
For context humans have 0.006 accidents per 1000 miles driven, and that's counting all the simple miles we drive on highways. So last year Waymo was within a factor of 30 of average human performance, assuming each disengagement was an accident.
If you allow for the fact that with so few disengagements, some of this is noise, and that most of these disengagements would probably not result in accidents, but are rather drivers being cautious and the cars are probably better a year later, I'd say they're probably knocking on the door of human safety at least.
Obviously hard to really say without more data, but the data makes me bullish rather than bearish.
http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/vancouvers-rainy-wea...