From a customer's perspective, it isn't clear that a hardware/software taxi driver is in any way better than a human taxi driver, particularly with (human) driver assist preventing collisions and all the other warnings provided by a modern car.

In both cases someone else is driving for the customer. With a human driver (plus driver assist braking and collision warnings) you have the most flexible, sophisticated intelligence on Earth driving. With a robotaxi you have something inferior. But maybe it's a lot cheaper, right?

The robotaxi can only compete on price because that's its only advantage. If you own a car that drives itself, that's a different story. Everybody can see the value proposition.

But is the robotaxi actually cheaper at all? We would have to look at the cost of the hardware (how often do lidars fail and how much do they cost to replace?) and the cost of the software development and the cost of the fallback human remote operators (fleet monitoring and teleoperation) and the years of huge R&D investment (billions of dollars) to evaluate whether a robotaxi fleet is indeed cheaper. So how much cheaper is it, exactly? 5%? 10%? 15%?

As a customer, would you pay a little more to have the most flexible, sophisticated intelligence on Earth (human brain + driver assist) or would you want to save a few dollars and risk having some dumb piece of software strand you in the middle of the road somewhere?

We all use Google Maps or Apple Maps when driving and most of us have seen these systems do boneheaded things. Just imagine the dumb things a robotaxi could do. It's hard for a normal person to be excited about this. I don't know a single person who is excited by robotaxis.