I don't see how this will fly even with robot taxis. Not for too long at least. I think self driving cars will be commoditized easily. Any new player can simply leverage the technology. The economy of scale is simply not there in this business, compared to the leverage Google and Facebook have. There is hardly any network effect, and it is still highly capital intensive even with robot cars. So while they may succeed in being and maintaining their status as multi-billion dollar companies, I am not seeing how they can go much further in the long run.

Too early. They'll run out of cash long before 'robot taxis' will save their asses.

> But robots totally flip the market on head.

Yeah, as in people will be able to mod their existing cars to be self-driving and then rent them out AirBnB-style when they aren't using them. There's even a distributed storage system already built to handle that ... people's driveways and garages.