This is all predicated on someone thinking that the rideshare buisness is profitable. It hasn’t shown that it is. Uber is also losing money on every ride, isn’t profitable, and still has multiple rideshare options, and side hustles of food delivery and freight. Same is true with every other similar company the world over. Nowhere is there the indication that the industry will be profitable anytime soon. People have assumed that if you could just stop paying drivers, the profits will come. They might, but fully autonomous cars don’t exist, and also, they seem much further off than they did just two years ago. Even Andrew Ng publically suggested that pedestrians should just change their behavior, because the AI doesn’t work, and won’t work for a very long time.[0] So betting on magic cars to save the industry is a bit iffy.
It’s certainly plausible that at some point, the companies simply burn through all their cash, and investors give up on expecting a return. That would kind of suck, but why keep throwing good money after bad?
People are convinced that autonomous vehicles are a 'data problem' and if we just log enough miles and 'train' our 'ai' enough, they'll be perfectly safe.
I'm of the opinion it's literal fantasy. Maybe in 50 years, heck, maybe in 30. 5-10? I can't see it.
That is a very strong statement -- what odds would you put on a "literal fantasy"? One in a thousand? One in a billion?
I'd back "self-driving, in-traffic, no-safety-driver taxi service available to the public in 5 cities in 10 years" at even money any day of the week (so long as it doesn't mean losing half of any money in escrow to inflation...)
If we define "city" to include real cities like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and DC, I'd take the other side of that bet. Two things will make closing the "last 10%" gap extremely difficult if not impossible.
1) Navigation. The D.C. street grid literally changes daily due to closures, detours, and construction. Google Maps does not keep up with these changes in real time. If self-driving tech can't understand when a construction worker is hand signaling drivers through a single lane for both directions of traffic, it won't work at scale.
2) Weather. Apparently, self-driving tech relies on following lane markings, which routinely are invisible during/after snow.
I don't think it's a strong statement. I'm taking the other side of the "everyone will be flying in supersonic airliners in 10 years" bet in 1960. There is a huge difference between tech that kinda works, and tech that works reliably enough to serve as a basis for transportation infrastructure.
It strikes me as analagous to Amazon. Several years beyond its IPO it did not turn a profit, as all revenue was used toward growth. These companies still grow above 30% per year. Losses are narrowing, not increasing.
That said, I doubt that self-driving technology will be their AWS (the way that Amazon ended up being profitable). Self-driving technology is incremental as it is dependent on extensive, expensive mapping.
No. Amazon didn’t turn a profit, but the way to make the company profitable was obvious. Amazon is a mail order catalog. There are multiple examples of ver profitable mail order catalog businesses for literally a hundred years when Amazon started.
There are no examples of the working rideshare buisness anywhere in the world. It’s very strange, given that cabs are well understood. It’s even more surprising that rideshare companies are promising profitability on autonomous vehicles that don’t exist, and won’t exist anytime soon.
No ride sharing company is claiming that it will be profitable once self-driving tech occurs. They all claim that the platforms themselves will be profitable.
It’s certainly plausible that at some point, the companies simply burn through all their cash, and investors give up on expecting a return. That would kind of suck, but why keep throwing good money after bad?
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-16/to-get-re...