Uber says they want to replace 1 million drivers with driverless cars. At the current estimated cost per car, that would amount to an investment of $50 billion. Tack on a $5 million umbrella liability insurance bill for 1 million cars and you can see how ludicrous this idea is at 90 cents per mile
Can’t wait for uber to send the driverless car a message saying you took a long way and the pax is not happy. or you did not accept a ride, and your rating is going down and was giving you a 10-minute timeout
Uber has personally paid 100 million dollars for some of the cars it was first reported two months ago, and they were the Mercedes and then change to Ford and then Audi
The infrastructure necessary to house and maintain the number of cars they are talking about is astronomical. The number of people that will be needed to perform maintenance will be huge. The value of the vehicles after their useful lifetime will be virtually zero. There is absolutely no business sense in attempting to create, maintain and operate a fleet of autonomous vehicles with the magnitude being suggested. Uber is a technology company, not an asset-heavy transportation company. I can not see Uber, with or without partners, getting to the point of having such a substantial vehicle fleet. Just not going to happen
Everything will be automated and run 24/7- Uber model is to get rid of the costly drivers and replace with a distributed algorithm that once implemented marginally cost zero to roll out (apart from the cloud server)- they will start in selected cities and then expand. The car will be EV and will require no maintenance at all and batteries technology will give us 400 miles full charge- and as per the service in the vehicle, an AI will provide recommendations as to where to go for drinks, dinner… Basically Uber used the drivers as a dry run for their system.
I can’t wait to see 20 driverless Uber cars pull up outside a nightclub venue are 2 am, and a cop shines his light in the car to tell the car to keep moving. Or the pax isn’t standing where the pin says he is. Or the car drives way up into the Hollywood hills on one of those super narrow steep cracked roads in the rain and has to turn around. Or a pax gets into a car after the previous pax threw up. Can’t wait.
They are going to succeed. Because the price is not going to be .90 cents. They will raise the price and explain that the cost of maintenance. What will they accomplish? Getting rid of you and me and not have to be a liability.
So, what have you accomplished as a driver? Momentarily pay bills with a high mileage car that is worth nothing but repairs.
Uber won’t need as many driverless cars as they now have. Currently, the average driver spends, what? Maybe 3 hours a day on the road? Driverless cars can go day and night. Still, need some minimum number for peak times.
I randomly ask customers how they would feel if they ordered an Uber and a driverless car showed up. Of about 100 people the only one said they would be ok with that! The others all said they wouldn’t get in.
Because we’re in the guinea pig stage, so nobody wants to be part of the failed tests. Give it time, it’ll put us all out of work soon, and you’ll be using it just like everybody else and talking shit about how dumb people are for trusting a human behind the wheel.