Comment by Animats
15 hours ago
Good question. We know that Waymo has about one remote operator/customer service rep per 40 vehicles. Waymo also operates vehicle garages for charging, cleaning, and maintenance. Those probably all add up to roughly what it costs a rental car company to operate a car. Maybe more, because there's more complex maintenance, maybe less, because they park themselves.
There's also a huge sunk R&D cost and an ongoing R&D cost that probably dwarfs operating costs. But the per-car cost drops as more cars are deployed.
On the other hand, robot vehicles can have higher utilization than single-owner vehicles. They can be on the road as long as there are customers. Observation of their parking lots indicates most of the cars are out on the road about 12 hours a day.
Here’s the other thing: taxi/rideshare driving can essentially function as a jobs program. It’s a basic job anyone can do without significant training. From a government planning perspective, you can’t just assume that all your displaced labor force can skill up.
What I noticed about China is that they employ a lot of people to stand around in nice looking government (non-police) uniforms and do various menial work or not much at all.
The US does this to a perhaps a lesser extent with jobs like TSA agents.
Sure, I guess you can do UBI, but what if that’s less efficient overall?
Example given with made up numbers:
Status quo, an Uber driver makes $20/hour out of a revenue of $50/hour total covering vehicle operating costs and platform fees.
Self-driving cars: self-driving cars cost $40/hour to operate, UBI pays someone a wage of $20/hour since there’s no job available. This basically means that rideshares now cost $10/hour more to operate than before.
Or, maybe that person on UBI makes $10/hour instead of $20/hour and gets a worse job to cover the difference.
Obviously there are many flaws and assumptions with the way I present this scenario but it’s a really good question to bring up whether putting everyone out of work is actually going to be a net positive.
Regarding what you said about driver hours, it’s not unheard of to run multiple drivers on multiple shifts with the same vehicle. Not all rideshare drivers own the vehicle nor use it as a personal vehicle. But the other factor is that the drivers who do use personal vehicles effectively subsidize the fact that they can only drive it for a human-length shift. Waymo has to buy every car (more expensive than a normal car) and use it only for business purposes while an uber driver can just use the same used Toyota Prius they use to take their kids to soccer practice.
The reason that math works out just fine is because the self driving company makes revenue of $50, pockets $10, its the government that's going to have to figure out how to find $20 to pay UBI. IN other words its not their problem, the math works out just fine for them.
Taxis would be a terrible jobs program because cars are the worst possible means of transportation for everyone except the person in the car.
Run a jobs program building public transit instead. We built an entire nation on unskilled workers laying rail, we can do it again and it will benefit everyone, not just car manufacturers.
I work in self driving and strongly agree with this. I may have had some of the coolaid, but I genuinely believe that self driving cars are the only thing that can pry Americans from their cars. Once ownership falls, people will stop voting against better options.
I totally agree with you here but I decided not to get into this issue as well.