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Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

Oh, no. GM doesn't expect you'll be able to buy your own for 10-15 years. They're focused on robotaxis.

Robotaxis are geo-fenced. They're worth ~$200K apiece (that's a very loose figure). Autonomous vehicles will require a fair bit of maintenance and oversight before they're idiot proof enough put in the hands of private owners. Initial commercial deployments will certainly be in fair weather cities.

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If GM can make more money operating a robotaxi fleet, why would they ever even offer them for sale?

There are a lot of medium sized cities in the US with crappy public transportation systems. Maybe these cities could subsidize on-demand rides in robotaxi fleets operated by GM and Uber and other companies rather than owning and operating a fleet of buses running on a limited schedule.

Because other will sell autonomous cars. And the first on the market will certainly have a big advantage.

Also, would you rather take an autonomous cab in a car you own and trust (or that your friends own), or in a car you've never tried ?

I wonder if we'll ever own autonomous cars, or if we'll buy a license to use them like we do with software.

It's a good question. GM is projecting they'll be able to get rideshare costs down below $1 per mile around 2025. They believe that when they can do that they'll be able to collect 20-30% margins through a scaled robotaxi service. It would be a waste to sell a vehicle at a 5% margin when it's worth so much more as an autonomous fleet vehicle.

The robotaxi fleets only need so many cars, and they could always start off selling vehicles at a larger margin to those that really want them.

They're throwing away money if they never sell the cars.

How do you get to 20-30% margins off of $1/mi costs? Uber and Lyft are already <$1/mi for pooled services and around $1-1.50/mi for non-pooled services in low cost markets. Price competition should make anything beyond classic transportation margins of (negative) - ~5% standard for any self-driving taxi service. 20-30% gross margins might be standard but operating margins at that level seem like a pipe dream.

They also mentioned data monetization as an unspecified portion of those 20-30% margins. Robotaxis will gather a lot of data, around 4 terabytes a day. Enough to hypothetically run a real time virtual simulation of a city, if 1000s of sensor riddled robots are all prowling the streets, seeing, recognizing and classifying everything. I can think of all kinds of ways to monetize data like that, both good and terrible.

Check out their investor presentation which compares their idea of AV ride-sharing with existing ride sharing services:

https://www.gm.com/content/dam/gm/events/docs/5265893-685163...

> If GM can make more money operating a robotaxi fleet, why would they ever even offer them for sale?

Because they can make even more money doing both. I don't think the independent must-own types will magically change their ways, and taxis don't solve many people's needs. Why not sell em too? It's like asking if they make more money leasing why do they sell also.

Because selling has better cash-flow properties than renting, and by selling GM can push some financing requirements into smaller and more dispersed entities.

Besides, a bigger market does not mean it's more lucrative. Competition on ride-sharing will probably be much more intense than on car manufacturing, and GM may be completely unable to succeed on that new market.

Automakers sure do make a lot of leases though.

(re your comparison of selling and renting)

Yes, they do. If they do sell the cars, it will probably be for the reasons I pointed.

I'm not saying they will sell them. But the ROI one is a likely possibility.

As I understand it, from an automaker's perspective a lease is a sale. They're just selling it to a third party instead of the leasee.

Centennial, Colorado, is already testing subsidized rides (using Lyft) just as you've mentioned, only with human drivers.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/11/what-public-t...

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