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Comment by pnloyd | Hacker News Reader

Ya, getting self driving cars for the automative industry is the equivalent of rockets landing themselves for the space industry. How do you compete with that?

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If you can’t compete then legislate... keep an eye out for incumbent friendly legislation in the coming months and years, no doubt preceded by a lot of FUD.

Uber lobbying for increased regulation as a barrier to competition would be the highest of ironies. I want to believe they would know how bad it would look and stay away, but I think the more likely reason it won't happen is that they're working on their own self-driving tech.

By finding things that self-driving cars can't do such as load your luggage, open the door for you, make sure your car is absolutely spotless.

There's always a way to compete; it's a matter of finding out what people will pay for and people have a long history of paying premium prices for premium services.

It's the 80/20 rule of disruption. Those things are good, but driving from A to B is 80% of everything people really care about.

The flip side of that argument is that everybody and his little sister will dogpile onto the 80% part. The 20% is where the real money is likely to be. It will be a much smaller market, but likely more profitable.

Find your niche.

> By finding things that self-driving cars can't do such as load your luggage, open the door for you, make sure your car is absolutely spotless.

I'm not really sure any of those is intractable for self-driving cars; opening doors is trivial.

I understand that! The point is having a human driver get out and open the door for a passenger, or perform any of these additional services is part of the premium service I alluded to.

Some people will always use the valet even if free parking is available. Those are some of the potential customers I see.

Yeah, but while that might be relevant to the “human involved personal transport industry”, it really doesn't help automotive industry players that aren't competitive in the self-driving space, because once SDCs are good enough, even people providing car-with-included-footman service will use self driving cars to carry the passenger and footman, the latter of whom can then focus on customer service, rather than driving.

The post I was originally responding to was discussing the advantages of SDC over a "real" taxi and asking how it was possible to compete with that, implying that competition was not possible. My response was about ways that a human-driven taxi could compete.

In a general sense, I don't care about the specifics, I just find the thought that you can't compete with something to be intellectually lazy. Discussing the automotive industry at large is diverging from the point I was trying to make.

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