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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

Do you expect the demand for Tesla's robotaxis to be high? I don't see it.

If they actually worked right now, the demand would be high. Demand is certainly high for Waymos. Even if they worked worse than a Waymo I think the demand would still be very high. But it's hard to tell if (or when) it will work well enough to actually be a real product.

that's why I said "Tesla's robotaxis".

They have not proven they are waymo level or near it, or that they will ever be there given the lack of lidar.

The question is what 'high' means in context of revenue.

Uber, the globally available taxi company, is valued 8 times less than tesla. If you are now able to kill all the costs for the taxi driving and reduce the cost for the car also, how much revenue is left?

Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a normal taxi to kill taxis. The margin of that company can't be that much more than a company like uber.

And uber itself will also invest in this, as every other car company. XPeng and co everyone who is building or working on this, will not just idly looking and waiting for tesla to just take 'whatever this cake' will look like.

For me it becomes a complet game changer if it becomes so reliable so extrem reliable, that i can order a car at night, a fresh bed / couch is then in the car and i can lie down while it drives me a few hundred kilometers away.

>Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a normal taxi to kill taxis. The margin of that company can't be that much more than a company like uber.

This just isn't true. If you're a woman, choosing a slightly more expensive robotaxi over a ride share where you might meet your end is a valid choice.

Robotaxis as a business has to be lower than a taxi as long as robotaxis are not known for being the better driver.

And woman have used taxis plenty of times especially because or for security. So I don't think your argument is very strong.

At the end of the day, you're still trusting a misogynistic man to get you from point A to point B. One drives the car and works as a gig worker and wears a flannel shirt, and the other sits in an office at Waymo HQ, wears a patagonia vest. Both are still part of the patriarchy and have very little interest in making sure you're safe, unless there's money to be made.

As much as I want to assume this is a trolling response, I'll pretend it is in good faith. The person you replied to is not speaking about nebulous dangers of "the patriarchy". They are talking about the risk of being verbally harassed, or physically/sexually assaulted by the driver during or directly after the ride.

https://www.wctv.tv/2026/01/14/rideshare-driver-arrested-aft...

https://www.wkrn.com/news/local-news/nashville/woman-shares-...

What the hell are you talking about?

> has to be cheaper than a normal taxi

... plus 24/7 shifts of human drivers

> Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a normal taxi to kill taxis.

I'm not sure that's true. Self serve checkouts are killing the checkout. Washing machines killed the washing board. Something can be the same price or dearer if it's more convenient.

That comparison has the problem that it is not comparable. A robo taxi is not much different from human taxi. I can not see much of an improvement for the rider. Whereas washing machines are an incredible time saver and self checkouts can be faster (especially if you use these little hand scanners).

> self checkouts can be faster

Are you sure? They are great for reducing personnel cost for the shop operator, but a cashier scans so much faster than you do. If you want to optimize for speed, the human cashier would still be better.

> Even if they worked worse than a Waymo I think the demand would still be very high.

They may already work better than a Waymo. It's hard to tell. It's certainly there using the public version of FSD. There's awkwardness, but the same can be said of Waymo. What I don't know is how many mandatory edge cases remain to be handled before they can set it free.

Probably not a great strategy to piss off every blue voter in the country and then try to setup a business in cities.

I don't see the demand for their robots to be high either tbh, but they're betting on them. It's not going to work.

Hyundai is partnering with Boston Dynamics to deploy 30k robots a year.

Amazon is looking to replace 600k employees over the next decade.

Why do you believe demand for humanoids isn't high?

"...demand for their robots..."

Demand for Tesla products is tanking.

Demand for humanoid robots not made by Tesla may rocket. Who knows.

If the humanoid robots are no better than the cars, it's unlikely. Unitree and Boston Dynamics are pretty much there in terms of solving the hardware problem, and the rest is software and the hardware manufacturing learning curve.

The Chinese are massively out-manufacturing Tesla in the electric car market - would you bet on Tesla somehow being better than the Chinese at manufacturing?

The rest as I said is software; given Tesla's consistent lack of success in "Full Self-Driving", would you bet on them outengineering the rest of the world in the software aspect of robotics?

Tesla's biggest factory is in China.

Tesla is good at building big factories. The Cybertruck (total sales ~46k) factory was designed to build 250k units a year and later 125k. Meanwhile BYD outsells Tesla in China and globally.

Over the last five years Tesla has made a profit of about $41 billion while BYD has had a loss of about $13 Billion. Would rather be the Apple of electric cars than always selling them at a loss.

From 2028.

And this is about industrial robots, which is much easier to handle than what household robots supposed to be about. Will we ever see a robot that will be able to take grandma to the tub and clean here, to then carry her up the stairs to bed, without killing her? I doubt it.

And finally: Boston Dynamics has actual working products for ages now. They don't need to cheat by using RC toy remote controllers to control their robots. And they are doing serious expectation management. This is completely different league than what Musk is doing.

Also, I don't think it's desirable to have robots taking away human work without first solving the question "and what are we going to do with all the unemployed?".

Of course it will be high. Transit is a huge market. They would just need a small share of Uber, lyft, regular taxis, public transit.

Private taxis don't compete with public transit. They operate in completely different spheres

As a blanket statement that's not true with NYC being the most obvious (but not the only) counterexample.

Do you commute to and from work every day by taxi in NYC

Early on in Uber's life, I went to a presentation they held where they showed there was a U shaped curve by income of who used Uber. Upper middle class people used them as discretionary entertainment vehicles but Uber had a substantial lower class population using them as necessary transport when working graveyard shifts in locations public transit didn't go.

So yes, there's a surprising contingent of people who commute to work every single working day using hire cars.

> Upper middle class people used them as discretionary entertainment vehicles but Uber had a substantial lower class population using them as necessary transport when working graveyard shifts in locations public transit didn't go.

This is information that suggests that Uber does not compete with public transit

When I was a child visiting my grandma in a large city in England, we would often take the bus to the supermarket, but use a taxi to come back with the shopping. In the 1990s some local taxi company even had a special phone by the supermarket entrance with a single button to dial to request one.

I think my grandma could easily afford this, but there would have been others considering dragging the shopping onto the bus.

Just a guess but she probably would have taken the buss back if you weren't there? Like, she wouldn't want to bore you waiting for the buss or try to time it shopping with a kid.

I think it was the weight of the shopping. My food would have increased what needed to be carried, but I was too young to be much use carrying it.

The point is taxis supplement and can replace public transport for low-income or unable-to-drive people in some situations — not necessarily every day.

The cost of owning a car dwarfs the cost of an occasional taxi ride.

Unless you're truly car sharing with a bunch of other people going the same way, I don't see how that makes sense. You have to wait for the car to arrive and you're paying a premium for it.

First of all, some people do commute via ride hailing apps, yes. Second of all, transportation is a much bigger category than simply taking people to and from work.

To what extent by your estimation do taxis compete with public transit in New York City? The comment I was responding to said that New York City is obvious proof that taxis do, in fact, compete with public transit. That is what is being discussed here.

To the extent that millions of customers use them every month to move around NYC. In reading this thread it appears you may have some narrower definition of "compete" than everyone else here.

Typically this word means that the product or service broadly serves same market in some way that overlaps. It isn't typically used so narrowly to imply that the products/services are directly replaceable in all ways.

Most wouldn't because it's expensive. But at scale automated vehicles should be dramatically less expensive, in the range of 50-60¢/mi conservatively, and at that level it is going to be quite compelling to a lot of people since it's a private vehicle (no taxi driver) and it's reasonably affordable, a 1 seat ride, etc.

It's possible they'll be even cheaper but that range is the cost according to the IRS of operating a typical vehicle all in, and that seems like a reasonable guess of the cost of an autonomous electric vehicle with far lower probability of crash than a human (all the savings basically going to profit margin).

At ~60¢/mi, there'd be a lot of people who would save money on balance using autonomous taxis to get everywhere vs owning a private vehicle (10k mi/yr would cost only ~$6k/yr, a pretty low cost of ownership/use for a private vehicle).

I just calculated it for 40 cents per mi and just the basic commute to my company would cost already 40 euros.

But I calculated traveling 2 times a week, of course at the commute time everyone else commutes and public transport costs 50 Euros per month.

My company car though costs 200 Euros + 100 Euros energy.

Im pretty sure cybertaxi can't and will not provide 40 cents / mi in high demand times, for middle class paying more mone for the convinince of having your own car is still cheap and if i need to do anything further away like any trip, it will be expensive again.

And all of these cybertaxis have to live somewere.

The math doesn't make sense already.

The problem is that the automobile based transportation system doesn't scale because the road dimensions are fixed.

So even if prices plunge, thus encouraging people to take more self driving cabs vs other things because of the fixed road size you immediately induce severe traffic, which discourages people and sets a ceiling on adoption as people pick more efficient alternatives.

I imagine this seems "true" to people who don't consider public transit an option for whatever (class) reason.

As others have said, they definitely compete in the same market.

Actually taxis are defined to be part of public transportation and are also regulated as such.

>Uber, lyft, regular taxis

Waymo is already there, just needs to scale and they are already cooperating with Uber.

>public transit

Unless Musk develops the shrink ray it will never compete with actual high throughput public transit, for the same reason if jets flew themselves we wouldn't commute by air. The cost of drivers per fare is less than in a private car, so the benefits for a bus are lesser. Modern metros are already autonomous.

Also the US is essentially the only country with failed public transit, outside of Africa. If he thinks he can expand his robo taxi fleet to China or Europe or hell even Russia he's got screws loose

Tesla is already valued 9x higher than uber.

Uber makes money on every ride.

Teslas Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a taxi with a human and i don't think they will be able to have a lot higher revenue per ride than uber. Not 9x

And if Tesla starts to deliver a robotaxi, all of this revenue has to be shared between taxis, uber, Tesla, Waimo, Zoox, Rimac, Cruise, Baidu, WeRide, ...

So how huge is the market for Tesla to be valuated 9x higher than Uber?

We can even combine a big car company, a robotics company, a solar roof company, battery storage company, ETruck and a robotaxi company and STILL don't get to the same valuation than Tesla currently has.

Teslas share price is math for stupid people.

>> i don't think they will be able to have a lot higher revenue per ride than uber. Not 9x

Why would Tesla need to have higher revenue per ride than Uber? The value of a company is driven (ultimately) by its profit, not its revenue. And Tesla doesn't have to give the majority of the fare to the driver.

Tesla has to pay for the operational and maintenance costs of the vehicle which Uber can offload to the drivers (most drivers barely break even after taking these cost into account), on top of all the ride management infrastructure that Uber deals with.

Higher costs means higher revenue is necessary to break even. It's basic math. Don't even need to get to first order principles.

Yes, and Uber pays ~80% to the drivers, so that the drivers can pay for those things...

And, also, Tesla car owners will be able to use their POVs as part of the Robotaxi network, for which Tesla will get a cut of the fare.

It would be high if it worked, but it doesn't.

demand for any robotaxis will be high. Just look at the number of Uber drivers whom the robotaxis will replace. Plus leased robotaxis or personal/reserved ones - whatever shape it'd take replacing at least some percentage of personal cars.

There is only a "small" issue - to make those robotaxis, i.e. the self-driving system for them. Almost 20 years in, Google/Waymo is way ahead of everybody and is still not there yet (i believe we will get there anyday now - which maybe next year or in 10 years - especially giving all the avalanche of investment in AI. Though i'd have expected that 4+ years in we'd see a lot of autonomous platforms/weapons in Ukraine, yet it hasn't happen too yet)

That means a lot more capex though (as it is drivers bring their own cars) and I'm not sure how much enthusiasm there is for more of that right now

Nothing prevents the drivers to long-term lease a robocar like a personal vehicle and send it to work for Uber during the time when they don't need it.

Currently an Uber driver can drive at any given moment only one car for Uber. With robocars, a driver can invest in 2, 3 or more robocars and send them to work for Uber. Similar to how people buy multiple properties to rent out on AirBnB.

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