That's about right. Running a fleet of autonomous vehicles is an expensive proposition, and probably will be for years after they start working. Waymo outsources some of that to Avis Rent-A-Car, which already has garages, maintenance facilities, parking lots, car washes, etc.

It's quite possible that when automomous vehicle operations start working, the big players will be car rental companies. It's a natural extension to their business.

I have a hard time believing that anyone on HN legitimately things that companies like Hertz and Avis will be able to become efficient in the ridesharing market before one of the two TNCs become efficient in the fleet management market (which is a subset of the rental car market that overlaps with TNCs once they choose to have their own fleet.

One set of businesses here has modern engineering practices and the other set are dinosaurs. Furthermore, rental companies have more employees dedicated to sales than to fleet management and their entire current customer base is rental car consumers. They literally need to redirect money to R&D long term where that R&D serves no benefit to their current customer base. Wall Street will punish the stock of rental car companies short term for spending R&D on becoming ridesharing businesses that serve a customer they don't yet even have mindshare with. With the TNCs however, wall street won't see any problem with them building out their own fleet. The only condition where wall street looks down on the idea of own fleet management is if they believe a franchise model with third party fleet managers make sense. Either way the TNCs own the relationship with the customer and therefore has all the power.

I would not be so sure. Avis, in particular, is actively pushing for a flow where you book online, use "secret" promo code to get full insurance for basically zero, pick up car directly on parking lot with keys inside, and drive away. It takes literally 5 minutes and a single employee to check your driving license and contract. Hertz is trying to do same, though less effectively. Their websites and apps are still horrible, and it's perplexing why, but the cost of building decent apps will be immaterial compared to the cost of the vehicles, and from that, building actual on-demand short-term rental network does not seem so unlikely.

I suspect this is what Waymo plans to do with Chrysler. Waymo will be the brand of AI driving the car, and probably own the app/marketplace, but the car companies will take care of building/capitalizing the fleet (and probably maintaining it, too).

The upside is that they keep 100% of fares, benefit from the economies of scale of having a large fleet, and can run the cars 24/7.

Cars can be leased, reducing capex, and maintenance can be handled by specialised companies.

Overall it seems that this upside far outweighs the downside.

Do they need to own the car. They could just run not in use consumer cars.

Are people prepared to do this?

I get my car to drive to me to work and then it goes out and operates like a taxi while I'm working. I'd be worried it comes back damaged or vomit all over the place.

No thanks.