Comment by cycomanic
2 days ago
Are you talking about raw material costs? Or is that one of these extrapolations of if we scale everything to millions of cars and realise no inefficiencies and nobody making any money in the supply chain?
2 days ago
Are you talking about raw material costs? Or is that one of these extrapolations of if we scale everything to millions of cars and realise no inefficiencies and nobody making any money in the supply chain?
I'm talking about the current cost of the self-driving system, that is already produced by companies that charge a significant markup. With volume, it will go down more.
I'm not including the base vehicle in the cost. It's highly variable, and can be as low as $10k for small personal intra-city taxis.
China has already launched a $30k taxi: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2024/05/14/baidu-...
This _completely_ blows any transit out of the competition. Literally nothing can come even close in the end-to-end efficiency.
Why does it blow away any other public transit? That can't be true because if you put the same self driving tech into a bus, you already am an order of magnitude cheaper per passenger (likely more). Moreover let's assume robotaxis are cornering the market and make all other forms of transport non viable. Why would the public then maintain the roads? So at that point at least costs are suddenly going to explode.
Sigh. People are WAAAY too accepting of urbanist propaganda.
Buses are _barely_ more effective than cars. A regular passenger car with 4 people is more efficient than a city bus. An EV needs 2.5 people (these numbers are for the US).
The explanation is simple:
1. Buses have to drive _all_ _the_ _time_, even when there are few passengers. As a result, the average bus load tends to be around 10-20 people. And you can not increase the bus interval to compensate for it because it makes off-rush-hour bus commutes impractical.
2. Buses have INCREDIBLY polluting components: 2-3 drivers for each bus needed to provide the service. They are by far the dirtiest part of the bus. This part can be removed with the self-driving hardware, but...
A full self-driving bus also makes no sense. It defeats the main advantage of self-driving: door-to-door transportation.
That being said, self-driving mini-buses seating 6-10 people are a good idea for rush hour transit.
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