The evolution of transportation-as-a-service

The race also includes GM, Tesla, Faraday Future (underestimated, but extremely well financed), Zoox- a stealth unicorn and Apple, among others.

While we'll see autonomous taxis operating in some capacity soon, they have to work extremely well and be profitable to justify an aggressive rollout, and that's likely more than a decade out. It's anybody's guess as to what the playing field will look like then.

Many analysts and speculators are getting ahead of themselves by conveniently ignoring just how much of the technical problems of autonomous vehicles need to be solved before these vehicles are ready to venture beyond very carefully managed services operating only in optimal conditions.

One guess: the routing problem(the vehicle routing problem) is a core computer science problem, for decades. Tons of research have been done about it. I don't expect Google or Uber to have any breakthroughs there, because it's pure luck. But maybe they will, or maybe they'll will ackuire someone. Let's put it down to pure luck.

But assuming no brekathrough happens: one company that has tons of experience in that field is UPS, they are just finishing building a new system for running their vehicle-routing for 50K routes in the US daily, ~120 points per route, i.e. 600K customers daily. They invested ~$300 million in that system(and they employe hundreds of phd's) and they say it will give them a savings of less than 1% of revenue - just to get a sense how mature those systems are.

On the other hand, it seems that have larger access to customers could enable much more ideal routes, both in cost, customer time and maybe social factor(if social matches will be part of ride sharing). So i believe that to be key to winning.

And i don't think anybody can beat Google in marketing to android users, and even in the US, with iPhone's 40% share(but more wealthy users) - that's avery big advantage for Google.

On the other hand, i think Google prefer not to start a huge service that employs many people, and than have self-driving cars make them unemployed and suffer the huge reputational damage. So they won't go into true shared taxis like ridewithvia.com seems to be doing very sucsessfuly, and instead stick with wazer-rider , enabling drivers to give a lift to poeple for some very modest fee.

So to a certain extent, the winner in that battle would be determined by which approach of those two will win.

True. It's cool.

You what else is cool ? an RV. everybody dreams of owning an RV. almost nobody does.

If it will be successful, many will be sold and the price will come down quickly.

I don't know why AI should stay expensive.

iPhones are successful, many have been sold, yet the price has not gone down quickly.

For autonomous cars, the best-case component price estimates I've seen for solid-state LIDARs, assuming mass production, is $1000. I believe you need four of those, and then you need ultrasound, radar and super-hi-res cameras. And a big honking computer to process all that data. It's probably at least a $10k premium over the normal car just in additional hardware costs, and that's assuming mass production.

Then there's the cost of all that software development that companies will want to recoup, plus the cost of collecting and live-updating a vast data set of roads, pedestrian paths, local wildlife/other hazards, roadworks, local laws and regulations etc. in every big city and small town in all the world, to assist and confirm the information gathered by sensors in the car.