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Comment by msoad | Hacker News Reader

And if it does happen, you will not be the one owning and profiting from those cars...

Well, you could do it to defray some of the cost of the car by making use of its idle hours, but it probably wouldn't make sense to buy a car just (or even mostly) to rent it out, for much the same reason that individuals don't do it today.

Plus, when Teslas are usable as self-driving cars, the value of the rides provided will drop precipitously -- that figure would be more like $5000, and you'd have to lock up usable hours for it and perhaps pay some penalty to renege on specific hours.

Those two effects are mutually opposing forces - are car owners willing to take the risk of someone contaminating their car by smoking, spilling, eating, puking or having sex to earn a pretty penny?

If the interiors of said cars were built like Honda Elements, Toyota FJ Cruisers, or police-spec Chargers, why not? Any crap that passengers leave can be hosed out.

I think all robotaxis will have inward facing dashcams that transmits into a vault in the cloud in near real time. If the car comes back undamaged, the video is deleted.

People who hire robotaxis might need to have money in escrow if they don't have enough reputation.

> If the car comes back undamaged, the video is deleted

Lol

Escrow really doesn't exist on a personal level today - why would people suddenly go from the current situation to being perfectly find putting hundreds/thousands of dollars in an escrow account in the future? What do we do about people who can't afford that?

We have the equivalent for car and room rentals. The escrow is just a hidden feature of our credit cards.

If you try to rent a car without a credit card, you are usually required to put down a deposit.

Note that in my country, it's rare for hotel rooms to require credit cards or deposits. (Debit cards are required so they can charge you later if necessary, but they don't put a hold on them.) There's certain chains that do, but it's mostly an American thing.

Renting a car requires one, but there's also more generally a high barrier to renting a car - plenty of forms, showing your license, booking in advance, etc etc. There's also no choice. The same is not true for getting in a taxi. Why would I put down a deposit to ride in an automated car, really?

Personal escrow is very common today, through credit card deposits.

Yeah, I don't see why companies like Uber and Lyft would, so to say, share a piece of the pie, instead of buying these types of cars themselves.

I could see competing products (Apps) with less infrastructure launching this business model though. So I guess it might exist in one way or another in the end.

I was going to post a response on how they wouldn't have enough money from private sources to build that many taxis but it seems it'd cost only ~$23 billion to replace every single taxi in the United States with a Model S. That's shockingly cheap.

Right! Why would I buy a car when I can get a self-driving car to pick me up and drop me off when I need?

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