Closer to guaranteed range. With a fleet of EVs it's possible that a frosty morning or long weekend where everybody wants a trip out of town might drain them all in sync in a way ICEs would be less impacted by.
And then at the intersection of these two: flexibility recovering from some incident. Assume some "night crew didn't refuel" situation, sending out a fleet of ICE cars half empty and planning to refuel them all between trips is fairly simple, but sending out a bunch of half empty EVs and trying to somehow add an unplanned recharge midday is at best logistically more difficult, and at worst, causes other cascading problems.
And obviously it's within reason -- if you're shredding tires, you're wasting a lot of energy doing that.
Rolling resistance is a bigger source of loss under 30 mph.
> The most efficient traversal for a fixed time interval is fast acceleration / deceleration with a reduced top speed
Wouldn't it be increasing speed for half the trip and decreasing it for the other half?
Capital costs matter, and how quickly you get ROI matters.
Even if you saved thirty seconds on each ride throughout a day, that doesn't translate to more profit. It translates to the ability to take on extra rides. Which in total, is maybe one or two. You're talking about an extra $30 or so in revenue. Subtract off normal overhead and you're looking at maybe ten dollars of extra profit per vehicle per day at best.
You're also assuming the service runs at capacity at all times. You will infrequently be at capacity. Arriving ten seconds sooner doesn't matter if you just have another car you can dispatch for another rider, and optimizing how and when to bring cars in and out of service becomes the bottleneck.
There are so many inefficient aspects of a naively designed ride sharing service that can be optimized for real meaningful profit. And almost all of those things can be done without changing the way the car handles in any way. Just making sure you have vehicles in the right places at the right times, or fueling vehicles at more opportune times, or choosing more optimal pickup and drop-off locations could increase the number of rides you can perform, which is what translates into profit.
With the Uber, the driver is responsible for the car, and the smart drivers get it that wear and tear is bad. Of course, many uber drivers are idiots who don’t math well, and are basically burning equity at a loss.
The only way aggressive driving becomes profitable is when you've exhausted your supply of cars. Even then, it's not clear to me that you'd increase profit in that time by driving faster, since one car over the course of a day might squeeze in one or two extra rides at most. Just having more cars that sit idle until needed would accomplish the same thing with no extra risk.
In fact, the biggest area for optimization is getting the car to the next rider from the end of a previous ride. But that's not about being fast, that's about positioning idle cars in the right places to minimize distance to potential riders. If pickup distance becomes a hard bottleneck, it's again about capacity, not speed. Most of the between-trip driving is not on highways and back roads, it's through dense areas with lots of stop signs and traffic lights, so increasing speed isn't even really feasible.