eh, I read a paper a while back that argued that ridesharing in a world with self-driving cars will be a hyper-competitive commodity market akin to the airlines, and it made a lot of sense. I don't think there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow here, as the services will likely have little moat to defend themselves outside of competing to the death on price.

People online say this but I'm pretty sure it's nonsense. The word right now is self driving cars won't be working for quite a while since they're nowhere near solving for rain and snow.

Lyft's business model is betting that automation will happen at the OEM level, and thus has a slower corporate burn rate. So less of their balance sheet goes direct towards automation efforts. Contrast this with Uber's significant losses in which the company's long term survival is contingent on the automation developed in-house to be leveraged as their own. I'm not entirely sure how Uber's technology would be integrate with OEMs where most (GM/Honda's Cruise, Ford, and others) are developing their own level-3+ autonomy, and how their sensor arrays/networks would be physically installed on cars.

I personally wanted to see the patent lawsuit Google had brought against Kalanick to completion- much of the lidar and sensor technology at stake needs to be either licensed using FRAND terms or have each company using its own disparate systems. V2V may be a desired open standard but I'm less than optimistic about its targeted implementation date being a few years away because of this competition.

Being first won't help much. The technology for full self driving in any area (not just a few cities with good streets) is still many years away. And when it does arrive it will quickly become a commodity, available to everyone.

Then they have to pay for the cars.

They have zero experience in fleet management. Rental car companies or car dealers are probably set up better than Lyft or Uber for self driving car sharing.

what's the cost of the driver? seems marginal compared to the cost of the cars