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Comment by ragazzina | Hacker News Reader

>The upside is cheaper mobility for everyone

Why should Google leave money on the table? They will raise the price until it's just below what people are already paying.

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Not an expert but in general that's usually not how tech works. It generally gets commodified and cheaper : TVs, mobile phones, computers etc etc. They're either becoming cheaper or you get a way better product for the same price (think of today's TVs that make the 80s tvs look like something from the middle ages). Yes Google in the initial decade will possibly have a big head start but in the end Tesla and a bunch of Chinese names will also run robo taxis in the U.S. So my take: efficiency and competition should bring prices down in a non broken economy.

>not how tech works. It generally gets commodified and cheaper: TVs

Hardware gets commodified and cheaper, not services usually. Do you pay less for cable tv now compared to 20 years ago?

Its complex. Cell phone plans became way cheaper in my country than 20 years ago, they used to be shockingly expensive. People old enough will remember SMS weren't cheap and a single minute of call was shockingly expensive. I'd same similar thing happened with the internet, you can now get a basic plan for cheaper than 20 years ago. Is it as cheap as it should be? Probably not.

It's interesting this hasn't happened with cable I somewhat agree with you there. However you have alternatives that are just as good like Netflix and cost 20 bucks or less if you can live with ads.

Agreed, I think it's a mistake to treat "cable" as the entire product category here. It's a (dying) subset of the product category, not the whole category. Like internet and cellular service, SOTA television content as a whole hasn't ever really been cheaper than it is today.

The US is unique in its "cable" and telecom approach (maybe shared with some other Western countries).

In most APAC and African countries cell plans are extremely competitive and data is SUPER cheap. Same with streaming services.

Because they aren't going to be alone doing this for very long. Competitors will just undercut each other until just above the cost threshold. And people will simply pick the one that gets them from A to B fast and cheap. I've never cared about who drives my Uber/Taxi, what car shows up, etc. It's just a service that I buy without knowing any of that. It's only a problem if they don't show up.

The cost threshold should be pretty low. No fuel (only electricity), and no drivers. Those are two of the larger cost factors here.

If robot driven cars are more expensive than human driven cars then the solution presents itself.

You are right, the clear solution is to eliminate all human drivers.

- ChatGPT

That's only until they destroy driver's livelihoods, once they get rid of the competition they can name their price.

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