A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

That being said, OF COURSE driving goes up when you tell someone: "here, have this luxury that you can't normally afford for free for JUST one week". The novelty factor alone will lead to unnecessary trips and over consumption. Not to mention the guilt factor of having a chauffeur sitting in your driveway doing nothing.

Congestion charges, and utilization taxes are going to be in our future (and we should have them now). Sure I can send my car to the store and have someone tuck the gallon of milk I need in the trunk but does utilization make me decline that use right now? Can I tell my car to go pick up the milk at 5am so its waiting for me when I wake up to pour in my coffee or cereal and have those charges be drastically lower?

Do we deliver vehicles with "compartments" for commuting? Where I have my own, isolated, seat to take me to and from work with stops in between for other drop offs and pick ups? Is this a service people are willing to use (ridesharing to get in carpool lanes is already a thing in many metro areas).

What happens when amazon/usps/fedex can send a truck with "lockers" on it to my neighborhood and I can "summon it" (last mile) when I'm available? Sure I have to walk to the curb to pick up my stuff, but it going to be safer than leaving it on my porch all day. Lower loss rates. It came to my neighborhood in the dead of night, and is driving a minimal distance during peak hours.

Does an always connected world let us change the notion of "delivery". The idea that "3 people in your neighborhood are waiting on orders this evening, do you want us to bring your groceries then" is new. Now we are sharing the charges for congestion and use.

It isn't a question of will there be problems its a question of what new solutions do we put in place and do they make our lives better. I suspect that the answer is yes, there is a lot to be gained with the technology.

Using robotaxi network will be much cheaper than total cost of owning a car, mostly because cars are dramatically underutilized.

On average a car is used 1-2 hrs a day out of 12-16 hrs it could be used as a robotaxi. To start off we have 5-7x price difference.

Then most use is not shared. Assuming robotaxis will be used by 2 people on average, it's another 2x cost difference, 10-14x combined.

The cars will be much cheaper. Think $25k Toyota corolla, not $45k SUV or pick up truck. Fleet operators will ask for cars that are cheap and reliable, not for luxurious interior.

The cars will last much longer. 500k miles vs. 100k miles of a typical car for personal use. 500k is already a reality with Teslas (https://qz.com/1737145/the-economics-of-driving-seven-teslas...) and Tesla is working to make 1 million miles cars.

Not to mention that GM spends 3 billion dollars on advertising each year, which goes to increase the cost of your car.

It'll be a no-brainer to pay $200-$300 per month for (effectively) unlimited robotaxi service than $400 per month for a lease + $100 month for insurance + fuel + cost and inconvenience of refueling.

Furthermore, you won't be able to buy those cars.

Consider the following scenario to its logical conclusion:

Tesla (or whoever) introduces a robotaxi service.

A car that costs $30k to make can be sold for $40 k to you or put to use as a robotaxi and make $100k - $300k over its lifetime (big spread because it's hard to predict how the pricing will pan out).

Why would Tesla sell a car to you for $10k profit if they can make $70k profit?

For the first 10 years they'll be busy making cars exclusively for robotaxis and they'll prioritize grabbing market share. There will be no $40k self-driving Teslas to buy.

But won't GM or Ford or Toyota sell me that car?

In 2008 car companies went bankrupt because of 20% drop in car sales.

If robotaxis take off, they'll shrink car market by way more than 20%, permanently.

I can't see how this won't end up in bankrupting pretty much every car maker as we know them.

Those that will have self-driving technology will also switch to making robotaxis exclusively.

Those that don't will either become OEMs to the kinds of Waymo (and eventually be bought by them when they vertically integrate) or go bankrupt.

Privately owned cars might become like yachts: sold in very low numbers to multi-millioners.

I want transportation. You want transportation. Everyone wants transportation.

You, me and everyone else wants to go to the beach, get food delivered, get 1 day shipping from Amazon, eat bananas grown in Chile, drink coffee harvested in Africa, drink wine grown in France, go to a baseball game or visit relatives for Thanksgiving.

All are optional activities you can do without. Are you doing without them?

I need transportation. You need transportation. Everyone needs transportation.

You, me and everyone else needs to go to work, go to a hospital etc.

Reducing transportation is not an option. You'll not give up on things enabled by transportation.

So the next best thing is making transportation cheaper and more efficient.

We've optimized food production to produce 10x more food using the same amount of land. It was a good thing because the option of starving or killing 9 out of 10 people is not very appealing.

Robotaxis will allow us to optimize transportation to better use the roads and cars. High utilization of the roads (as long as it doesn't become a crippling congestion) is a good thing. It means we're using a fixed resource to provide as much of what people want at the lowest possible price.

And since people bring buses as some alternative to robotaxis: a self-driving bus is also vastly superior to regular bus and when we have density of 100k robocars in a city the size of SF, it'll be a no brainer for fleet operators to have part of the fleet be minivans and buses, taking 16+ people, for the times of congestion.