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Comment by jahlove | Hacker News Reader

doesn't the ride cost go down substantially if they ever get autonomous vehicles on the road? I believe that is the end goal.

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In short, no.

I read this in literally every HN discussion of ride sharing, but there's literally no reason to think that ride sharing companies will have any special role to play with autonomous vehicles if they materialize (which seems extremely doubtful in the short or medium term) and there's even less evidence that it will be cheaper.

I still can't figure out why people don't realize that low income humans are cheap. An autonomous car, if such a thing is ever in the real world, will at least for a long time be a complicated technically advanced computerized machine.

Like here's a pretty straightforward machine that rents for $125 a day: https://www.adoramarentals.com/p-~nkd4skit/NIKON-D4S-KIT

For reference that's about the same price as the cost of hiring a minimum wage employee for an entire work day.

Now tell me if the guts of a self-driving car are going to be cheaper or more expensive than a standard DSLR camera.

There are a ton of factors that make your DSLR to Autonomous Car comparison flawed.

The utilization rate of the camera is going to be far lower than the rate of the car. The camera may sit on a shelf for weeks before being rented for a single day, so the per-rental price must be relatively high. The market is small. Also, cameras are comparatively easy to break, and the technology goes out of date extremely quickly as compared to a car.

I think the greatest fiscal advantage to autonomous car fleets is the likely high utilization rate.

> There are a ton of factors that make your DSLR to Autonomous Car comparison flawed.

Indeed. The biggest one of course being that there’s no such thing as an autonomous car.

Snarky but inaccurate reply. They do if you're a resident of Phoenix. Prices are equivalent to Uber but it's still too early to conclude what's behind those prices. Are they sustainable at scale? Is it just to avoid having the price floor drop out from them if they're viewed as purely a discount option? Is it to dissuade having too many users on the system all at once?

The way you can tell if you're looking at a driverless car is to check and see if there's a driver in it.

Maybe they'll lobby for higher minimum wages?

> low income humans are cheap

This is far too broad a statement to possibly be true. It really depends on the situation.

Your analysis fails to account that the demand for that camera is smaller, more variable, bursty, provides temporary exclusive ownership, & has a market that will bear that cost (professional photographers, filmographers, etc). That's why it's so expensive. The majority of the fleet of self driving cars would be rented out for nearly 16 hours a day 7 days a week with a fairly reliable income stream across many many users. Additionally you get multipliers by picking up extra passengers (shared ownership) which is win-win (lower cost for individual rider, better margins and revenue for fleet owner).

A Nikon 4DS is also almost the cost of a LIDAR sensor while the cost of the LIDAR sensors are dropping quickly & will probably continue to do so due to economies of scale; the cost of the 4DS has reminded at 6k even long after being discontinued. Additionally, the 4DS has direct user wear & tear handling meaning on average it will wear out faster (drops, throwing it in a camera bag, etc) than a LIDAR mounted to the car.

You can rent rooms and regular cars for cheaper than that day rate on the camera. Not a proper comparison, in my opinion, even if I agree that the self driving car costs might not make sense initially.

I'm not sure I see the advantages Uber and Lyft have in the race to make AV's.

Intel and Nvidia have a hardware advantage. Ford, GM, Tesla etc have the advantage of making their own vechicles. Google is Google.

What do Uber and Lyft have that makes it likely they can figure it out before the market is conquered by others?

Maybe their assumption is that if driverless tech is widely available then their brand names will get them more business?

Uber and Lyft only have ~2 years of cash on hand. The end goal is further than the runway. Waymo has Alphabet pockets, Tesla has billions of dollars in assets to make products to sell to backstop their FSD aspirations (and think what you will in the HN echo chamber of Autopilot, investors value it's future capabilities at something above 0).

Even then, unless Uber and Lyft develop self driving in house and don't license it out, i think in the majority of the country, most people would buy a car with self driving tech instead of using Uber or Lyft. Most people in america live in suburbs, where having a car on hand is much more convenient than ordering one all the time. My bet is that self driving tech will lead to more people moving farther into the suburbs rather than less.

Not sure if i would call this a good business strategy. Bet my whole business on some tech that might be 5 or 15 years away to truly start being profitable.

Will they own those cars? Today, they rely on driver's providing their own cars. What will be the capital costs of purchasing and maintaining the autonomous fleet?

This is the part I don't get. Right now they rely on their employees to buy, maintain, and depreciate their own cars. The natural next step would be to let people lend their cars to Uber/Lyft when not in use.

But they're sinking tons of money into self-driving, which means they would bear the costs of buying and maintaining their fleet. That's a completely different business model, and seems like a tough pivot. And as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, other companies are better-positioned to do this, with better manufacturing, more sensor data, more experience, or all of the above.

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