Can anyone in Phoenix answer if Waymo is cheaper?
Is Waymo hoping people will choose Waymo for safety?
* You don't need an army of marketers/hr/legal/support staff for your drivers
* You don't need to dodge ambiguous contractor vs. employee laws
* You don't have any risk about individual drivers being bad actors or acting fraudulently
* You can predict, with great accuracy, how many cars will be available at any given time, whether or not they'll want to do another drive after (they will), and where they want to end up
* Your cars meet a minimum level of safety (if it works) that humans can't guarantee, especially in regards to distracted, tired, drunk, or whatever driving
Given how much effort is spent on attracting and retaining drivers, I'd say Waymo has many competitive advantages lined up. If it works.
I mean sure, there is a camera. But that is hugely different than a person (both positive and negative)
I suspect that a well-defined retention and usage policy could satisfy most business. In fact they might prefer it to having a driver listening in.
You could also pay people to manually remote into car cameras for a brief quality check after every ride. Wouldn't be that expensive. An interesting problem to solve though.
The obvious advantage will be price, if Uber even still exists.
With Uber/Lyft, you never know who you're going to get and what the experience will be like, and as someone that easily took 200-300 Uber rides per year pre-covid, I've seen some shit.
It also lets you a. optimize exactly where cars are driving to maximize ride share revenue, b. have the cars ready to pick someone up 24/7.
It's going to be a much more efficient use of car capital than hiring a person to drive it.
They also don't source their cost for CDV, which is substantially lower than any other number I can find cited in paper. Further, the current regulatory framework includes huge wealth transfers/incentives for car ownership, so it's not a fair comparison. For instance, the $130/yr cost of a parking permit in SF is a huge wealth transfer to car owners as that is substantially below what the market-price would be for that permit.
https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det... shows Uber generated $65B gross booking in 2019, and we know substantial fraction of that goes to the driver.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/networth/article/For-a-... says driver takes about ~60% of the booking.
So this is a question of whether the capital cost / the engineering cost / operating cost for autonomous vehicle is higher than $65B * 0.6 = $39B per year for the same number of rides.
The engineering cost will be amortized over long enough time that it's likely not a significant factor in the long run. So, the limiting factor will be the capital cost (for vehicles and its support infra) and the operating cost. As you say, at this point we don't know for sure - one thing we know is that the capital cost and the operating cost likely will see significant reduction thanks to the economy of scale.
if FSD actually ends up working on most roads, I don't see why not. there's no inherent reason why engineer headcount would scale linearly with the number of cars.
as for the cost savings, they don't necessarily have to beat uber's pricing today. they could alternatively try to drive uber's costs up by lobbying hard to get drivers classified as employees and catch some PR points at the same time.
My take is that this will become widely available in the next 5 years. The future is bright!
In the long-term, the obvious benefit is the price. In the next 5 to 10 years I don't expect it to be cheaper than Uber, even if their cost is half of Uber's.
Long term it should be possible for the service to be cheaper than manned since they don't have to pay a driver.
Cars with different seat configuration — I would love to sit with my family, friends, not on separate rows.
Smaller cars for one-two passengers, brand it Eco friendly, I would certainly select Firefly over usual car.
https://www.google.com/search?q=driverless+car+interior&tbm=...