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Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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