So there was a recent article (in Slate, I believe?) by someone who had driven for Lyft ten years ago and who did it a little bit this year just to see how it changed. They said that the chief thing was that Lyft's take was significantly larger than it used to be, about 40% of the total fares collected.
Which, like, you're looking at that and it seems reasonable, right? Let's step into our time machine, though, and look at fare breakdowns in the taxi era, where the way you got a ride was by calling up a dispatcher who would send out a car. In that era, drivers got to take home about 85% of the total fares.
So: we've gone from a non-automated system where the driver makes a supermajority of the money, to a more-automated system where the driver is taking in significantly less.
And I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "A ha! The driver is taking in more than half the money! You are simply proving my point~!!1!"
Here's the deal:
* Less importantly: the cost of auto maintenance, something that would have to be carried by the company if the car were self-driving, falls upon the driver
* More importantly: for some reason I cannot begin to intuit, rideshare companies have managed to introduce vastly more overhead costs, even though one would expect that going from a human-dispatch to an automatic-dispatch system would cut overhead.
I suspect that if one of the rideshare companies actually rolled out working self-driving cars (so Waymo, not Tesla), they would somehow find a way to make rides actually more expensive.