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Comment by rottyguy | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one thinking a targeted convergence with driverless cars down the road (no pun intended)? Once you remove the largest cost factor (the human), does pricing reduce to $.56/mi (or whatever the Standard Mileage Rate, or derivative thereof, is at the time).

Added with Express to overload deliveries to maximize utility (maybe offer riders a discount if they can make an express stop along the way...)

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On-demand driverless transportation from any A to any B at $.56/mile would be truly revolutionary. I wonder how many years off we are from this.

Electric vehicles cost about 1-3 cents/mile for the electricity. They also require so little service, I would assume the cost would be closer to 10-20 cents/mile for a self-driving electric vehicle.

I was baselining from here: http://www.irs.gov/2014-Standard-Mileage-Rates-for-Business,...

but, sure, it would most likely be less.

My mistake!

That $0.56 number includes depreciation. There are other costs like insurance which are non-trivial. Initially at least, it's not going to be much less.

Actually, insurance in driverless cars should be trivial. Accidents should drop to near 0 (over time) due to driver error... at least in theory.

Eventually it might, but that assumes that all cars will be driverless. Even if driverless cars have a 0 error rate, human driven cars will run into them at at least the same rate as they run into static objects.

At any rate, this eventual reduction in insurance is why I started by saying "Initially at least". With time, the cost of manufacturing self driving cars will also go down.

That would be fall the human driver's liability and/or uninsured/underinsured coverage, which is going to be much less than comprehensive insurance.

That's like saying "software should become bug-free over time." I'm not sure it's actually getting worse over time, but it sure isn't getting better. Have you ever had to find a bug in a Wordpress plugin written in PHP by a part-time developer, that generates JavaScript, that in turn generates buggy HTML? I doubt wonky driverless cars trying to optimize a bunch of conflicting metrics (operation cost, utilization, revenue (from fares/ads/analytics), security, etc.), plugged into a constantly updating global mapping system, will have a decreasing number of bugs over time.

Google has an insane level of motivation to wring out any and all bugs from a driverless car. Even a single deadly accident in one of their cars could potentially destroy their entire business. Comparing that type of software to a Wordpress plugin makes no sense. The potential cost of a bug is huge in this case thus you will get very good software with any driverless car.

> That $0.56 number includes depreciation.

Electric vehicles would depreciate at a much slower rate than ICE vehicles, as the only components that wear would be moving parts (electric motor, fans for cabin comfort) and any degradation to the battery pack (Tesla has packs at 500K miles that still have 80% capacity).

Don't forget wear and tear from inside the cabin. I don't envy whoever is in charge with cleaning the inside of a self driving car.

Consider the car has the opportunity to get checked and cleaned every time it refuels/recharges, I'd imagine the vehicles would be in decent shape. Until robots take over <grin>, I'd suspect that human labor would be involved at these stations.

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