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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Which cities in which countries and climates have robotaxis (or have had robotaxis) now?

It felt like there was a lot of buzz around it a while back but then it only happened in a couple of cities which were just US cities with favorable climate. Did it ever move beyond that? You'd think that if the market is really competitive, then operators would bring it to cities where it doesn't exist, rather than just all competing in the same small handful of cities?

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I actually think robotaxis will never really catch on widely in the US outside of big cities or maybe very poor people with no other option or misc use cases like if you own a car and drop it off at the dealership or if you’re out with friends and want to go home early. Most of the US is designed for you to own a car and drive it everywhere, just because cars can drive themselves now isn’t going to make self driving taxis more convenient than driving yourself without changes to how cities are already set up. Eg if you use a taxi you have to drag all your stuff with you and it’s less convenient if you live in a place where parking is effectively guaranteed. I think it will displace the existing app based taxi market and regular taxis by offering lower prices but greed will prevent companies from pricing them low enough for them to truly get people to stop driving personal vehicles. They’re really going to do well in parts of the world where taxis are already very popular because parking is limited or expensive like Singapore, Japan, China, and Europe.

I was thinking that elderly passengers could be one use-case where robotaxis catch on. Although I guess you'd still be poor in this circumstance, since otherwise you could just own a self-driving car. Or have the self-driving car from one of your adult children drive you around when they are at work. And so I just talked myself out of robotaxis being a very big market for the elderly.

Accessible taxis already exist and are probably better for elderly people since they have a drive to help you get in and out of the taxi

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