it's interesting how optimistic long term visions conflict - if you really think autonomous cabs will become widespread then by implication you are also saying that car sales will be drastically lower. Tough to be serious betting on both.

The math of "you'll pay more for the car but the car will go out and make money for you as a robotic Uber" sounds like a pyramid scheme to me; if too many people do it, it can no longer work.

I disagree, largely because you've cherry-picked parts of the overall strategy. The world is obviously not going to go from purely human driven to 100% autonomous overnight. There will be an intermediate phase where initially some few cars will be autonomous and privately owned, and for those owners making use of the car's full lifetime to serve as a taxi would be a no-brainer. It could pay off your (very expensive) Tesla in the matter of a year or two.

After the market for on-demand autonomous taxis is oversaturated, Tesla's plan is actually to stop selling vehicles altogether, or reduce it drastically. Musk has said that FSD vehicles will likely not be for sale after this point, so the "consumer-operated robotaxi" is inherently an intermediate solution.

Vehicle ownership will drastically change in nature after the advent of AVs. Tesla isn't going to be unique to having to adapt to this.

> It could pay off your (very expensive) Tesla in the matter of a year or two.

.. while lota of people unknown to you sit with their butt in your precious expensive car. People who themselves can't (or want to) afford such a car.

Not gonna happen. Nobody will throw that much money behind such an expensive gadget, being happ about their precious toy and then let complete strangers user it most of the time.

Do you rent out your home via Airbnb when you are 2 weeks on vacation? Very few people actually do that.

The entire point of Airbnb was to let people rent out their spare housing capacity - it just became so wildly successful that people used the system to become pseudo-landlords.

My car sits idle 22 out of 24 hours a day. If someone else handled the insurance issues and found drivers willing to pay to use it outside of the times I utilize it, I'd have no qualms about lending it out for an appropriate price. The low end estimate for an Uber driver after expenses and Uber's cut is $8.55/hr. If my car averages half that it's $35k/yr that I don't need to do anything for.

Yes you do. You will need to share your car with strangers. Some morning you will open the door, see an oily stain from a thai takeaway lunch in the driver's seat and the last 3 people who rented the car will all claim it wasn't them.

Have the car drive to a cleaning station between rides.

But really, for $35,000, I would not mind investing in a $300 seat cover.

I could just about believe that this could be a novel kind of finance - someone who couldn't afford to buy a fancy car for themselves could afford it if they offset the cost by renting it out. You accept the butts as part of the cost.

There would have to be a cleaning service after every (n?) ride and ideally some form of (expensive) insurance. Unless there is some high level of surveillance of the driver with a rating system which in itself is a huge drawback.

I agree this whole thing (ie a large percentage giving up ownership) is way more complicated than it sounds.

At that point it will be just another smart investment and not a “shiny toy”.

Ok but then you are not renting out your car that you are really normally using yourself, but are participating in a taxi scheme. That's ok, but let's be honest about it. And why stop at one car? Keep investing, soon enough you'll have 10 cars on the streets raking in money for you. Similar with Airbnb which is more a professionalized hotel business platform than renting out your place while you are on vacation.

Correct. It’s more like a bring-your-own-car ride sharing (which already exists here, SnappCar) but a lot nicer in all aspects.

They estimate covering the cost of the car in 1-2 years, so you won’t be expanding your fleet that fast... there is a lot of discussion about this online, a lot of comments here cover that too. It’s just a step, eventually they won’t sell cars to consumers anymore.

Yeah, exactly. I did a fairly deep dive into what path the car industry is going to take with respect to electric cars (especially what a mass market electric car is going to look like), and it all had a huge asterisk associated with it of "but mass car ownership might stop being a thing before any of this happens", at which point thing change drasticly, because then you have a much smaller market of probably more specialised, expensive cars which are designed for way higher duty cycles than most consumer cars.

I should probably dig a little more into the microeconomics, but for me as a consumer the only difference between an autonomous car and an (human) Uber is price. If we assume that the price of the car stays the same, insurance and fuel still have to be paid and the cab app gets their cut - how much of my ride is really attributable to the cost of the human driver? So how much human labor can be automated away to the benefit of consumers? Not much I think.

Given current hardware prices, it seems like the car itself will be a lot more expensive; so how many trips need to be taken so that the variable cost advantage exceeds the increased fixed cost?

Driving is a ubiquitous human skill and tens of millions are looking for work, I believe it will be difficult to undercut them on price.

Drivers also often do more than merely drive - they help with the luggage, they clean the car, they can talk about their city.

Long-haul trucking is a different story, there is a massive labor shortage and letting big rigs go from one warehouse to another without the need of a driver looks like a huge opportunity.

Significantly more than half of your ride fare on Uber goes to the driver - between 70 and 130%. Human costs are vastly the most expensive part of hailing a ride, and will remain so as long as minimum wage exists.

The same argument for human drivers also applies to human dishwashers and human launderers, and yet, most of us are fine using machines for this purpose. Whether or not this will cause financial disaster for people relying on it for a source of income is irrelevant when replacing jobs with technology.

The statistics, based on https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-how-much-uber-driv...

> Uber drivers typically collect $24.77 per hour

> From that, Uber takes $8.33 in commissions and fees

> Vehicle expenses like gas and maintenance cost drivers about $4.87 per hour

> That leaves drivers with $11.77 per hour

Now, the maintenance and amortization will be higher for autonomous vehicles. Somebody will need to clean these vehicles, scrape the ice off, refuel, monitor them, deal with anomalies and false alarms, etc - all of which is now taken care of by the driver. Autonomous vehicles will likely end up being cheaper, but it's not as clear cut.

At $11.77 per hour, if you have to hire one person to handle all of that for every two vehicles, it's still a huge savings. It would take a very false-alarm-heavy system to require that level of attention.

But what fraction of the money that goes to the driver is spent on depreciation and maintenance?

Here's one breakdown:

https://uberdriverlondon.co.uk/is-it-worth-driving-for-uber-...

I think the interesting number there is 23 000 GBP/year, which is effectively the cost to Uber of having a human driver for one car operating 60 hours per week.

If a computer can drive a car for 60 hours a week, it saves money for Uber if the amortized cost is less than 23 000 GBP/yr.

If a computer can drive a car for more than 60 hours a week, it saves money even if it costs more than 23 000 GBP/yr, although i don't think it's linear - demand is concentrated at a few times of day, so one car on the road 24 hours a day is not equivalent o four cars on the road for six hours each.

In my country, the government's "generous, all things considered" cost of operating a private car* is 45p per mile - which covers not just fuel, but also depreciation, insurance and suchlike.

Meanwhile, a 12-minute, 4 mile Uber journey would cost me £2.43/mile

Of course, the big unknown here is one of driver utilisation: How many miles does the driver drive to pick me up, and how many minutes are they waiting for the next ride to come in?

* Well, it was considered generous the last time I asked a car owner about it. I'm sure a Lamborghini costs more.

Don't forget insurance/liability, gas, security, and cleaning up after passengers, too!

You could incorporate augmented reality into car windows etc to talk about the city too. All of what you mentioned are solvable problems via tech.

The driver is a huge part of the cost of a taxi ride (even with Uber subsidising them unsustainably with investor's money). An autonomous car company can price a journey at about the same as a bus ticket for a point-to-point on-demand journey and still make money hand over fist with their first generation hardware. Even for commuters this could be substantially cheaper than a car.

The running joke at Waymo for a long time was "How many engineers does it take to operate a self driving car?"

> Drivers also often do more than merely drive - they help with the luggage, they clean the car, they can talk about their city.

They commit sexual assault, submit fraudulent reports of rider damages, ...

In poorer nations autonomous cars could take much longer for mass adoption due to different, sometimes harsher road conditions, and lack of reliable road-map data.

In addition, self-driving vehicles would be pricier. For a poor nation, that price tag might be higher than human labor.

yes, making autonomous driving work in central Delhi or Agadir will be much different from a US highway.

Maybe it's too cyberpunk, but I can already see the headline of road pirates capturing autonomous cars and taking them apart for spares. Those sensors, the GPU and computing units are quite valuable.

Your impression of Delhi and Agadir doesn't seem right to me. By the numbers, Delhi has the highest crime-rate in india, but it has a 5 times lower rate of crime than San Francisco does.

And also, self-driving cars will all have enough cameras and be constantly connected to a server that theft will be far less likely for them than regular cars... and regular calls already seem to get by just fine without people stripping them to the bolts.

I meant the kind of traffic they have, I've driven there, it's unique!

Unreported crimes aren't factored into the stats you quote.

That works on both sides of the equation, as someone who lived both in NA and Morocco. There's similar levels of unreported crime.

You seem to think that data being sent to a server will stop physical theft. That's an... Optimistic point of view to say the least.

The Tesla robotic Uber thing can totally work but it's not going to work if everyone with a car now, tries to use it. It'l flatten out to find the break event point.

But that's a normal market effect and the same as Taxis which traditionally (at least in many places) had quotas to stop people not getting enough jobs to fulfill their wage (Taxi 'Tag' or 'Plate' or 'License'); or similar effects on the number of Uber drivers which obviously are not restricted so you have a sort-of imperfect market effect there where it's not worth more drivers joining as they won't get paid enough and some will leave.. or part of why supposedly surge pricing will drive drivers to leave to further away areas to take more jobs, etc.

Not a market expert but just wanted to note that while, in effect, you are right.. it's not really surprising, unexpected or unprecedented and not a pyramid scheme :)

It can work for Uber, because this is Ubers core business. It can work for Tesla, because they have a market share of <0.5%.

Toyota, Volkswagen or General Motors would maybe have less revenue with shared cars utopia.

Frankly, it always sounded like a solution looking for a problem for me. Transportation is like electricity, it’s all about peak demand.

I’m writing this at midnight on a Sunday... there’s no demand for transportation. Come 7-930AM, demand is 1000x more. There’s no self driving taxi that makes sense as car replacement. We already have busses, which are already really cheap and can get cheaper if cars are too expensive to buy.

Current peak demand in cars is limited by roads, and ... always will be. (Hence Musk trying to dig tunnels for more roads.)

Which might be okay if throughput is kept high, and folks can read/eat/sleep while ij traffic.

No, that's a constraint on infrastructure.

A taxi, robot or not, will never be able to meet peak demand... they'll be provisioned to meet 60-80% of peak demand and surge peak pricing. That's the key part of the robot car business model -- these companies want to soak you for using public infrastructure.

The Musk tunnel thing is totally different, it's an extreme version of Washington Beltway congestion pricing that charges you $3-60 to waste less time in express lanes.

If sitting in rush hour becomes even easier (and even more profitable, if you can work while going to a meeting), we'll have more of rush hour sitting.

It's enough if just ~20% of those who participate in traffic are doing so with a "self driving car", if they otherwise would have opted not to do so, we'll have even higher peaks.

Surge pricing might not matter much, because it's in the interest of the fleet operator/owner to get maximal utilization, to get maximum profit. After all Uber does surge pricing to motivate more drivers to come online, but if you have a constant supply (constant number of self-driving cars in the fleet), then you can simply use it to maximize profit. (Or to manage perception, ie. to show that yes there are cars available, sure, it comes at a high price, but they are "available".)

---

> these companies want to soak you for using public infrastructure

Yep, US cities are so burdened with problems (a nasty set of incentives) that public transit is non-viable, which drives even more subsidization of the sprawl, which then breeds these companies that try to "solve it". (I mean Uber/Lyft successfully increased the supply of taxis, which drove prices down. Yaay, great, but this just meant more congestion, more pollution, more sprawl, nothing fundamentally solved.) And of course at this point properly pricing externalities is an insurmountable political challenge, because people are so wedded to their way of life.

Not if you keep the tech. to yourself. Which is why you would do a robotic taxi. You avoid giving out the technology, and so you can charge a premium for your taxi service, while still undercutting traditional taxis.

But price and convenience need to cross some thresholds before I abandon my car.

I think this is a difficult problem as you have surge demand at least for commuting. So we can't get around with 1/10th of cars which are driving all day.

> But price and convenience need to cross some thresholds before I abandon my car.

Ya, but at least for me, convenience is already there for Uber. Price is the only thing that keeps me from abandoning my car for it.

By the time autonomous vehicles are widespread we will be into the age of embodied intelligence and there'll be way cooler shit to build and sell than cars.

Ha, I remember thinking that at Tesla's (very weak, IMO) autonomy day. It seemed like their supposed business model was basically made up on the spot and didn't really make good business sense.

The earnings, much like BTC has, would likely approach just above the cost of fuel and maintenance.

The real winners are the automakers that build the part-time robotaxi investment vehicles (literally), and the consumer who now pays way less for a frighteningly AI-driven future.

Really though how realistic is your business model ... if you wanted a autonomous network to replace Uber Currently 30 million cars on road . you would atleast need 10 million cars assuming each car costs 100k ( optimistically with lidar tech factoring in capex for factories and you dont have major product revisions ) thats 1 trillion in capex ... now you if you had the revenue of apple in 2020 ~ 0.25T$ you could expect to be cashflow positive in 7~8 years (assuming exponential ramp up of production and 0 competition) ... all of these thing need to happen for this taxi service X to succeed ,i think to get all these things right is highly unlikely and i feel Elon knows this aswell so he took the path of simpler tech and trying a software service model which is infinitely more scale-able .

Uber 2019 revenue $14.15 billion, divided by your estimate of 10 million cars is $1415 per car per year. I would suggest you're estimating at least an order of magnitude too high for the car count, since they can more or less operate 24x7.

That would bring the capex down below $100 billion - less than Google's cash on hand. And you'd be starting with the most lucrative cities while staggering it out, and have a very good idea of your payback by the time you've spent serious cash.

Technology and regulatory risks are high for Waymo, but capex is very manageable.

Yes i think i over inflated the number of cars required . https://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/#4 going through the data there are about 5 million drivers in Uber in 2019 . i will admit 100B$ in capex is a reasonable assumption But I cant imagine for practical reasons google , apple , Amazon putting a large % of their savings into still unproven tech with regulatory risk. Keep in mind that they would still have to compete with Tesla at somepoint which has a best car platform vs < X car company> in the market. Not to mention they already have close to 1 million cars with all the hardware(their claim, i still feel tesla TPU v2 with TSMC 7nm is a must have) and they are on track to producing 500k cars in US with these capabilities. while no other car company is even trying to integrate < X lidar autonomy startup> in mass production Today . Not to mention that currently the primary hindrance for Tesla is software which can scale much better in comparison to a ground up redesign of a car plant to accommodate lidar based systems .

I don't think $100bn is reasonable - that's a million cars!

There are only 13k taxi medallions in NYC, which is a good point of reference as the limited supply means they are efficiently utilized.

Extrapolating that out to the general US population yields just over 500k taxis, and that's to completely replace every single taxi in the country.

1. You don't need all of that capital in a first year.

2. If you acheive L5 close to flawless system, you'd have investors bursting in through you doors, windows and any other opening in your house. Imagine, if you could do uber without drivers you could conquere the world.

I’m one of those who will still buy my cars for one simple reason, I’m unable to live in other people’s filth. I’ve rented lost of shared electric cars and sometimes you just want to drive it into the sea.

How much value is there really? The gap between paying a driver and using cutting edge tech is super thin at best. Don’t forget that you also need to buy brand new vehicles and compete with Uber/taxis.

> The gap between paying a driver and using cutting edge tech is super thin at best.

The analogy is that the electric bulb did not replace candle as such but created entirely new possibilities that were unimaginable when the bulb was invented. This is nearly true for any invention and not just self driving cars. Advancements in self driving will change not just how people go to office or dates but will also change how goods are hauled, how docks are loaded, how agricultural products are transported, how fruits are picked from trees and how law enforcement deals with patrolling and so on.

You didn't really answer their question...

The candle was a candle and an electric bulb was an electric bulb. One could do things the other was not capable of.

FSD however, is pretty close to what humans do. It's cost that's the difference.

If you want a more apt analogy, this us more like the invention of a household CFL bulb.

It's cheaper, it increases accessibility and quality in some dimensions, but it's not allowing you to do so much that was utterly impossible before.

The comment you replied to wasn't saying FSD enables nothing new but rather that saying stuff like "change how people go to the office" is rather odd when today right now you can pay people for "FSD" and we already did see the shift from it...

Nobody in the autonomous car industry had produced anything yet. Tesla has the best system of those actually in use.

Their arrogance is about as convincing as that of the rocket companies or car companies that didn't think EV were gone happen.

Saying 'in my industry they are joke' is kind of a joke by itself by now.

Also Tesla wants to operate a taxi services too so I don't understand your argument.

> Nobody in the autonomous car industry had produced anything yet. Tesla has the best system of those actually in use.

Waymo is actually operating a driverless paid service in Arizona [0] with point to point pick up and drop off. Does Tesla actually offer this service today?

[0] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/04/waymo-driverless-...

Operating a incredibly limited test program while burning 100s of millions is not my definition of solving general autonomy.

Maybe if they role out this program to city after city in short intervals and have 10000+ taxi operating I would consider it.

Waymo does some things Tesla doesn't do, Tesla does things Waymo doesn't do. Tesla clearly has no interest in offering a money losing taxi service in one small city. Just as Waymo has no interest in doing all the work to figure out the meaning of obscure signs on roads in China.

The question is, when can I click on an app, get a car and drive basically anywhere. That is 'the solution'.

> driverless paid service

Which works in one small limited area of the earth because of high-def maps, which is not what you would normally call "scalable".

At some point there was also a car company that only sold a single electrical car model, it was pretty expensive and they didn't make that many cars per year, which is not what you would normally call "scalable."

Back to the original goalposts, as far as I know, Waymo is the only company that at this point, does offer a commercial service that's fully driverless. As you point out, they don't cover all of Earth, but neither do any of their competitors. Even Uber and Lyft, with human drivers, don't support all pick up and drop off locations, they only work in certain service areas.

Yeah, that whole car's tech didn't rely on expensive highdef maps.

> fully driverless

Don't they have safety drivers that closely monitor through wireless connection and often take over? While it might look driverless, it is not technically. This is also another reason why it doesn't scale.

Right, because who would digitalize the entire world and take pictures of every house and store front - that'd be insane!