It is going to be competing with other taxi/ride share services with all the cost advantages of SDC vehicles while its competitors are paying human drivers (and have basically no fat to cut from their current pricing)
It's going to be a very long time before self-driving cars are cheaper than cheap cars with human drivers. It's very possible that Uber might reach an acceptable level of self-driving capabilities before Waymo's paid off its investment in its first crop of self-driving cars.
Huh? How much does a full time driver earn? Let's say $30000 for the sake of argument. A car that is run as a taxi or rideshare service full time will last maybe three years. So that eould mean $90000 for the driver plus around $40000 for a decent car. A mass produced self driving taxi car that costs more than $130000 seems very unlikely.
If you want to make up unrealistic numbers, sure, then unrealistically a self-driving car is cheaper.
But with a self-driving car, operational costs like registration, maintenance, fuel/charging, and insurance, would all have to come out of Waymo's pockets instead of the driver's $30,000k. If the car is being driven 24/7, then maintenance costs will be much higher because of the increased wear and tear, and insurance for self-driving cars will be magnitudes higher than it is for human (commercial) drivers. Plus, there's the maintenance costs for the self-driving tech (LIDARs, software systems, etc.) The insurance alone would likely wipe out savings from eliminating human drivers, and the combined maintenance+insurance costs definitely will for the foreseeable future.
The average Uber drives a $30k-40k car (assuming it was purchased new). So you're looking at a $100k difference in costs in acquiring the car (using your $130k price). If the SDCs only last 3 years, that means you only have 3 years to make up the $100k difference, so each SDC would have to make $33k/year more than the comparable human-driven Uber car competitor to break even (since operational costs per car will cost the same or more as paying a human drive would have). $33k/year is roughly 3000+ additional rides/year assuming $10/ride average cost. Assuming 10 rides a day based on media reports, that would require Waymo to at least double the rides each vehicle does every day. And Waymo can't just increase the price on its SDC rides, since if it makes them much more than $10/ride, people will just drive cause it's much cheaper and faster, even including gas and parking.
And remember: in all of the numbers above, Waymo is bringing the costs in-house, except for the vehicles themselves, so there's no markup. Retail costs for similarly specced SDCs cars would be much higher because each respective vendors will want their profits.
So yeah, while I don't believe Uber will achieve self-driving, I think that it's going to be a long time before self-driving cars are cheaper than human-driven cars once all costs are taken into account.
I am not sure if you read my post correctly. Was doubting my parent's point that self driving cars would be too expensive. I was trying to estimate an upper limit below which a self driving car would be cheaper than a car and a driver. So if a self driving car is cheaper than that it should automatically be economical. And I think that a car costing 130k in series is extremely expensive. That gets you a lot of hardware.
coworker, works his normal shift five days a week. will uber when he gets off work for two to three hours each day and some on weekends. his claim is over six hundred dollars a week plus he claims fifty four cents per mile on his taxes.
he seems seriously happy with the arrangement. he does mention you get into some sketchy parts of town on occasion and will turn off the app after a drop in one and go live when he is in the clear but he has yet to have an issue. he does not expect to drive forever, he is simply piling away a down payment on a home.
It's going to be a very long time before self-driving cars are cheaper than cheap cars with human drivers. It's very possible that Uber might reach an acceptable level of self-driving capabilities before Waymo's paid off its investment in its first crop of self-driving cars.