Comment by eldaisfish
3 years ago
If one takes a moment to think about the value of a private car participating in a public taxi fleet, the idea collapses completely. Public transit is difficult, so is a taxi fleet. A part is labour - drivers specifically - but equally large portions are maintenance, insurance and related things.
Even if Tesla developed robo taxis tomorrow, there are numerous legal, regulatory, liability and willingness hurdles to overcome.
There is also the issue of which markets robo taxis would address. Old-world cities tend to have good to excellent public transit. The value is largely in limited regions - north america being one.
True but that's still a huge market and if it were demonstrably safer than people driving you could work through the insurance and liability issues in fairly short order.
Also even European cities with great transport are often choked by cars and parking issues. London in particular seems to have issues with the volume of vehicles that could be at least partially helped by car share robo-taxis.
There were tons of potential issues but it still formed the ideological core propping up any semblance of rationality to Tesla's pre-crash stock price. IMO it's still way over valued but it's at least no longer larger than every other major car manufacturer combined.