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I'm not sure why you think having a large fleet of vehicles is problem. Rental car companies already exist.

As far as fueling/charging- Even if you had to pay a few people in the short-term to do the work, it isn't a high-skill job. Being generous, I can't fathom a situation where it could cost more than $2 per car in physical labor. Assuming you could drive more than 200 miles on a charge, that is less than a penny per mile in cost. Also, there are already gas stations in some states with people that will fill your gas tank for you. I am also sure an autonomous solution would be devised if that became a limiting factor. You could pretty easily design a purpose-built system for it.

I agree that regular maintenance needs to be performed, but I don't agree that the companies themselves need to solve the problem on their own. This seems like it would be something to easily contract out to a local company to handle. For standard maintenance and cleaning, there are plenty of companies that clean cars and plenty of companies that perform maintenance on cars already. It should just be a matter of getting contracts in place and making sure that they have software to do their jobs.

I didn't do the math to figure out the cost of a human driver vs the total taxi cost, but even if true the cost isn't trivial. Truckers, for example, can make upwards of $80k per year and that's not even at 50% utilization for the vehicle. If you assume a taxi driver would make $40k/year and they have 50% utilization of the car (I'm making up numbers for the sake of discussion), that is still a significant amount of cost. I would be surprised if maintenance and fuel would be $40k per year regardless of vehicle.

Rental car companies do not need to either pay for the labor or the fuel to power their vehicles, and actually make a lot of extra money with "prepaid" or "return it empty" schemes. By churning their vehicles on a regular basis, they avoid many of the ongoing maintenance issues that would impact Waymo with their customized vehicles.

You're right that a Waymo would probably outsource the interior and (probably) mechanical maintenance to local providers, but they would need to deal with that in every city and with the additional technology involved in self-driving, you're probably not going to trust that the local shade tree mechanic will be able to handle that. So you have at least two problems now.

Over The Road drivers do make surprisingly good money, but that is a skilled job with a significant amount of training and regulation. In-town cabbies are often people with few other opportunities and are easily exploitable. The taxi cab business is notorious corrupt and is a big part of how Uber/Lyft could easily replace these services.

Fuel alone is easily $10,000 a year for a taxi.

The biggest expense people are not seemingly considering is the depreciation of the vehicle. taxis don't last long because the drive so much and so much stop and go. There could easily be $10,000 in depreciation a year.

The diver does things a robo car will not be able to do like help people with their bags, clean the car, responds flexibly to situations as they arise.

Using $10,000 as an example.

Assuming super expensive fuel and terrible efficiency...

Gas car - 20 miles/gallon, $4.00/gallon ($4.00/20 = $0.20/mile. $10,000/$0.20 = 50,000 miles)

Electric car - 200 miles/74kWh [Tesla M3], $0.25/kWh (74 * $0.25 = $18.50. $18.50/200 miles = $0.0925/mile. $10,000/$0.0925 = 108,108 miles)

So assuming a gas car since the miles are the most expensive there, you would be looking at 50,000 miles for $10,000 in fuel. That checks out for me.

Using that assumption.

Uber charges $0.78/mile and $0.27/minute.

Assume only 75% of driving is charged to the customer (going to a fare, going to a charger, etc), that gives you 37,500 miles.

Assuming 45 miles per hour (probably too high) at $0.27/minute = (37,500/45)60 = 50,000 minutes of driving $0.27 = $13,500

37,500 miles * $0.78 = $29,250

So $42,750 in rev. - $30,000 in fuel, insurance, maintenance, and depreciation, you're still $12,750 in profit. Again, is pretty much giving every disadvantage possible. In an electric car scenario you could easily drive 200,000 miles on $10,000 in electricity. Which would multiply all numbers by 4.

I'm not trying to take your numbers too specifically, just illustrating for the sake of discussion.

> Next you have to keep these vehicles fueled - either gasoline or electricity, so you are going to need to pay people to handle that.

I don’t understand how someone who could solve the self driving problem could solve the “plug the car in via simple robotics after it parks itself” problem.

They are also able to park near the city where parking is cheaper, though I guess it could also turn out like it does in China (if anyone is out at 2AM and see all the taxis pushed over to the side of the road with sleeping drivers).

Anyone who lives in a city with a heavy taxi presence already isn’t going to be deterred by these challenges, just the Americans and some other drivin heavy countries will need to adapt.

There have been modern electric cars available for, let's say, 15 years now and I haven't seen a single practical automated charging system.

There have been plenty of proposals, like Tesla's snake robot or inductive undercar charging plans, but no actual production-ready solutions. But even if you had the magical autocharging robot that will not help with gasoline powered vehicles (like all of Waymo's) and you still would need dedicated real estate and charging stations to recharge these vehicles.

I’m pretty sure once self driving cars are really a thing for all consumers, it will coincide with the move over to EVs en masse (2030?).

The only reason no one finds automated plug-in charging necessary right now is simply because those cars don’t really need it yet.

Aren't these all issues that car rental agencies have?

Somehow they turn a profit on renting you a car for $80/day which I imagine is less than a tax takes in for fares per day.

They do, but they buy or lease ordinary unmodified vehicles for a year or two then flip them at auction. Zero overhead here except for the buying/disposing of vehicles.

$80/day is probably a decent estimate, but once you include the optional insurance upsells and other add-ons (full tank of gas?) I bet they make way more than $80/day per car.

They also have very limited liability for what the driver does in their car while Waymo basically has unlimited liability.

I mean, some of them do. Hertz's recent bankruptcy[1] and outlandishly...audacious[2] stock offering is one counterpoint. But it was a crazy year+

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bankrupt-hertz-shares-soar... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-18/what-it-m...

I’m sure the costs Uber offer are accurate and not incredibly subsidized: https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/vehicle-solutions/

So $260-270/week? Not sure if they have any extra fees applied, however.

Did you miss the /s tag?

You are actually trusting Uber's calculation, especially when they recently had to spend $250 million[1] to try to recruit new drivers?

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-spending-250-million-...

I’m not sure what your piece of data has to do with how much Uber says you can rent a car for to drive for them. It seems like you want to really really believe that rental car prices advertised anywhere are complete fiction.

I clicked on the link and got "Sorry, there are no offers available in your area. Please try again later".

So their rental business is limited, at best.

Now is a horrible time to rent a car since there is an industry wide shortage.

> Did you miss the /s tag?

My browser’s search function spotted only one instance of that string, and it was this question.

All of these maintenance issues exist with regular taxi fleets driving equivalent miles, though. The main difference is the taxi driver salary vs the cost of the self-driving tech plus some support and extra interior cameras and this should be in favor of self-driving cars. From the customer's point of view, self-driving cars might be slower but safer.

It depends on who owns, maintains, and is paying for the vehicle and license/medallion to operate.

The whole system - whether Uber/Lyft drivers who "relied on their unfamiliarity with capital depreciation calculations"[1] or traditional cabbies who, let's be honest is not a glamorous job, is tenuous at best. Cutting out the lowest cost factors and replacing them with technology and also incurring the fleet costs doesn't really seem like a great business.

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/10/unter/#bezzle-no-more

Yeah, can't agree more. The main thing stopping self driving taxi services is maintenance and cleaning.