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.