1. Driverless Uber means that you don't have to pay for an expensive human driver 2. I expect that the number of driverless taxis will be far more than the current number of taxis+Ubers/Lyfts, because suppliers are limited only by the capital costs of the cars. 2. As a passenger relying on driverless taxis, you no longer have to pay car insurance. 3. You no longer have to pay for parking. 4. You no longer have to find parking. 5. Businesses will no longer have to pay for parking. 6. You don't have to pay Uber for the entire trip -- you can get a taxi from home to a bus stop or light rail station.
The benefit of renting a driverless taxi over owning a car is that most commuters are only using their cars for an hour or two a day. This turns car renting into a by-the-hour spot market, which is far more granular than renting a Hertz car for a month.
But I think that freedom from parking will be the really big incentive that pushes driverless cars forward. Cars are really big, land in cities is really scarce, and car storage is a really wasteful use of land. We currently have homes and malls and offices surrounded by miles of parking[1]. I expect most of that parking to go away within a decade or two of driverless cars becoming popular, as owners reclaim it for more profitable uses of the land. And without abundant free parking, driverless cars & taxis will become more popular.
1. https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/newshour/app/uploads/2...
If you Uber everywhere, you need to pay someone else to drive you around all the time, that wipes out any possible cost savings.
Get rid of the cost of the person driving you and it will almost certainly be cheaper to rent than buy unless you have a very high utilization rate for the car.
Add in surge pricing, surcharges for dead-ending routes, etc and you have a cab. Useful, but inferior to controlling the car.
If it were more cost effective to rent cars, we’d be going to Hertz every month. By the time you build in the overhead, profit, risk, etc, you always pay more. A middle of the road car costs <$0.60/mile to operate, insure, fuel and maintain. Uber is easily 10x that, even with Uber losing money on almost every ride.
I’ve been in the business of centralizing technology services for twenty years now. It’s a clear cost savings when you’re offering something that is a commodity that can obtained on the open market. It’s clearly cheaper to rent email. If you have the volume and capital, it’s clearly cheaper to own the fiber between facilities.
Outsourcing business process is only cheaper as long as your use profile is static — the change orders kill you. Transportation and people are similar to that. Taking the bus to work is often a money-saver. But paying a $30 uber tax or overpaying for Amazon groceries is just a drag. A family of 4 probably saves enough in paper towels alone to make 1 car payment.