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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

I do not see how the existence of autonomous taxis is any different than the existence of taxis.

The existence of taxis is (obviously) not enough to curb car usage growth.

EDIT: Some specificity: How would robotaxis replace commuting for millions of people in a way that reduces car rides? The taxi has to move at least from the storage to the rider pickup to the rider dropoff. Without sharing, that's actually more miles and the same number of cars.

Instead, if it picks up two people per day, that's more miles, fewer cars in existence (since both riders dont need a car), but the same number of car trips (plus the to/from storage).

With taxis (robotic or otherwise) the number of miles driven is just going up unless people change their lifestyle. That doesn't do anything to curb care useage.

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> I do not see how the existence of autonomous taxis is any different than the existence of taxis.

Cost. The cost of an Uber is way too much for daily travel (vs owning your own car or public transport).

A human-driven taxi needs to pay the driver's salary within an 8 hour shift. An autonomous taxi can run (almost) 24/7, 365 days a year. Which do you think will be the cheaper fare?

Another scenario is someone simply renting out their own car as an autonomous taxi whenever they aren't using it themselves (which is most of the time). Then it'll always be cheaper than current-day taxis because it's just a low-effort bonus source of income to the car owner.

I think the difference in cost between a maybe minimum wage driver and a computer is far less than maybe people assume.

And, for a car driven any reasonable amount, most of the cost is in the mileage.

> Which do you think will be the cheaper fare?

Neither, any savings will trickle up to the investors. The price of robotaxis is going to be just below the limit where it would make sense to own a car.

An autonomous taxi isn't going to make many more trips per day. Every hear of "rush hour?" Turns out most people are moving around the city at the same time of the day, then much less trips in the other parts of the day. (except lunch hour when again all the same people are going to lunch). In the middle of the day the trips people make tend to be different (more likely shopping or delivery: different car type than commuting).

I think most people will try the taxi, but if you already own a car (that is transit doesn't make sense for most trips) you will discover it isn't much cheaper than owning your own car, and your own car is waiting outside when you want to go (one big advantage of owning a car over transit is the car is ready when you want to go instead of having to call or hope one is waiting - if cars need to wait outside your office all day in case your kid gets sick that increases costs). Instead you can just buy a self driving car and then leave your things in the car if you go shopping over lunch - something you cannot do with a shared car.

The idea is that the cost of autonomous car use will be much lower than taxis, because there are no labor costs. If you have to get to work every day, taking a taxi (if you can even find one) is much more expensive than buying a car and amortizing the cost across its lifetime. As the price of autonomous taxis fall, that will reverse.

That doesn't mean I agree with the GP's point about it lowering car usage overall. The reduced cost of auto taxies also pushes against your reluctance to take one, though perhaps not all the way to "use my car whenever I leave the house" levels. I also think that once people begin replacing their cars with autonomous taxis, they'll sign up for all kinds of taxi subscriptions that will further reduce that reluctance. After all, driving your car now isn't completely free: it still costs you gas money, plus the hassle of actually driving it. And other forms of transportation aren't free either. So the bar here isn't 0.

This is fair. I was unclear about the distinction between fewer cars (supported perhaps by cheap taxis - robotic or otherwise), and car useage (not supported by cheap taxis of any kind).

Once human-driven alternatives (eg. rideshare, taxis) are out-competed by autonomous taxis, what would be the incentive to keep those prices low? Especially if Waymo is the one service with suitably performant autonomous vehicles

Exactly. People imagine some sort of future SciFi benevolence from PCs that is not going to happen.

> The idea is that the cost of autonomous car use will be much lower than taxis

I see this all the time and I just do not believe it is true. Uber/Lyft/etc undercut taxis for users to take market share, and have drastically raised prices to become marginally profitable.

Autonomous cars are more expensive, and the labor in non-autonomous cars is not the majority of the costs. In NYC, a 1hr Uber could easily cost $100 against a minimum wage of $15.

The idea that a taxi trip becoming cheaper than a car owners marginal car trip would require dramatic dropping of taxi prices. Even halving is not really going to do it, and I don't think removing the driver even halves the costs.

The autonomous taxi boosters also seem to overlook what happens to unattended, unmonitored public infrastructure in urban areas of this country. The reason I stopped using Zipcar in NYC was because they were typically trashed inside by the previous drivers. Now imagine an autonomous taxi that gets turned over 10x as often. Good luck.

There seems to be an implicit assumption in a lot of cases that robo-taxis will drastically slash the price of taxis relative to today. Maybe cut the prices by 50% at best? That's about the delta between me driving my own car versus getting an Uber into the city. It's enough to get me to drive but is certainly not in too cheap to meter territory. And being able to have the vehicle I want with various stuff stored in it today is useful as well.

Here are a couple of possibilities. Working aged person sends their car to their elderly parent's place so that they can use the vehicle to do their groceries. Families with kids in various activities can get the car to deliver and pickup all the kids at the appropriate times without needing multiple vehicles if the parents need to accompany some of the children. Car pooling becomes more acceptable because you can sleep during the detours to pick people up.

In reality, I don't think it is useful to try to enumerate these small immediate changes that are distinct from the availability of taxis. The long term cultural shift of having autonomous vehicles may lead people to fundamentally share vehicles in a different way. This may lead to a situation where fewer vehicles are driving more miles.

> Car pooling becomes more acceptable because you can sleep during the detours to pick people up.

Only if it is always picking the same people up. Otherwise this is a big negative. People often need to arrive someplace on time. If my car had decided to take a detour to pick someone else up and made me late for my early meeting I'd be mad. Car pools work - to the extent they do - because it is always the same people who need to arrive at the same time.

I think I did the monthly costs to do short commutes with just uber or taxis and it is easily in the high hundreds or low thousands a month (for me, doing a 20ish minute commute each way)

If it ended up being in the low hundreds, well, that's lower than a lot of people's car payments. Couples or roommates could share a car for non commuting purposes or trips.

You factor in intelligent ride sharing and you could halve the number of cars on the road most days.

> If it ended up being in the low hundreds, well, that's lower than a lot of people's car payments. Couples or roommates could share a car for non commuting purposes or trips.

So the leap here is based on "Autonomous taxi companies will charge less per ride than rideshare"?

perhaps.

Is it really the case that those charges are high because the drivers are getting paid so much, or because the vehicles and things like deadheading are expensive? Uber’s been driving driver compensation down for years but there’s only so much room for further reductions and it’s not like the hardware or support for self-driving systems is free.

yeah, I'm not familiar on the economics of it, and I'm not saying you should buy stock in autonomous vehicle companies. This was more of musing that in theory, if the economics of ride sharing are low enough, it could compete with people buying or leasing cars.

Once there is adequate competition, autonomous taxis should be much cheaper.

This can be said for taxis as well, though, right? What's the difference?

Uber tries that, but it turns out in many places you can't offer human-driven taxis much cheaper once you put them on equal footing regarding insurance and other relevant regulations and stop running the service at a loss.

No need to pay a human and fewer total cars because they can operate mostly 24hr/day

Most traffic occurs during the morning and evening commute, you'll need roughly the same number of vehicles for those surges unless those norms change as well.

Can't taxis already operate 24hrs a day? Just rotate out the drivers.

They can, but nobody wants a ride except drunks. Which is one reason why taxis look so bad: when a significant portion of your clients are drunk (throwing up in the back, peeing on the seats and all the other things they do) you don't want a nice car. Nice taxis don't work those shifts. If there is a big shared car market (I doubt it) you will see cars for different times of the day as a profile for potential drunk rider.

Except that our experience shows that over time competition decreases and things like regulatory capture happen so it becomes harder for anyone small to enter into competition and then prices get hiked up.

And the cars and autonomous driving software itself is becoming more expensive and more subscription-based over time so those rents are going to have to be passed on to the consumer. Large autonomous taxi services may be able to strike better deals or even build their own software/vehicles if they're big enough, but you're not going to be able to compete with them effectively by purchasing a Tesla (and presumably consumer prices will rise as there's less individual-owned vehicles and companies go seeking after only the highest margins and abandon the toyota-corolla market to the robotaxi corporations).

It's a lot harder to artificially constrain autonomous taxis with taxi medallions.

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