Beware the Credit Crash!

westernpromise

GreatApe wrote: »

Competition will mean these self drive computer fleets can not charge monopoly prices. The companies that get there first will have huge profits but the savings even with the profits will be massive. For instance in the USA alone its predicted to be 6 trillion miles by vehicles in 2030. If the fleets charge 3 cents a mile (the human taxi driver charges over 30 cents a mile) that is $180 billion annual revenue with margins in excess of 50% as its just software. A company that had p/e of 15 x would be worth north of $1.5 trillion. And that is just one country. Multiply by 20 x to get world milage and you can see the huge profits to be made by the companies that bring to market a working competitive self drive vehicle.

Even at 0.5 cent per mile x 120 trillion miles done in the world = $600 billion revenue and since its software it will be very high margin. Its likely to be an American company to bring this to market and they tend to opt to do zero margin until they have got a lot of the market share think amazon or uber operating at close to zero or even negative margins for years yo try and grab market share.

These sound like the same arguments that were made for canals, railways, and airlines, all of which were overbuilt, underused and duly bankrupted many people. As a former head of BA said about airlines, Great industry, lousy business.

michaels

Our car will do 100 miles on 25kwh - at 10p/kwh that is £2.50. On E7 it would be even less.

Today it is charging for free from the solar panels where the govt still pays us a subsidy for our production whether we export it to the grid or use it all ourselves

kabayiri

michaels wrote: »

Our car will do 100 miles on 25kwh - at 10p/kwh that is £2.50. On E7 it would be even less.
...

What's the life span on the battery pack, and what does a set of those cost approx?

GreatApe

westernpromise wrote: »

These sound like the same arguments that were made for canals, railways, and airlines, all of which were overbuilt, underused and duly bankrupted many people. As a former head of BA said about airlines, Great industry, lousy business.

Software is not capital intensive

GreatApe

kabayiri wrote: »

What's the life span on the battery pack, and what does a set of those cost approx?

I think it's likely the batteries will last 500,000 miles and so will the cars. These may even increase to 1 million miles for the cars in the fleet that are assigned to primarily motorway trips.

The batteries can be charged and discharged in a way to extend the life. So no full charge to full discharge no heavy charging or discharging. Keeping the batteries in the sweet spot will extend the lives.

If all this comes to pass. Oil prices will collapse to be close to the price of NG

westernpromise

GreatApe wrote: »

Software is not capital intensive

Lots of people buying up JohnnyCabs and competing the price down are though.

These things are always going to revolutionise transport, but oil tankers are slower than Cutty Sark was, and it takes longer to drive into town now than it did to ride a horse in 200 years ago.

Seabee42

The government gets lots of cash out of the motorist its not like that will be taken out of the cost either.


Still I reckon there are quite a few people like me who commutes on the train everyday with the car doing a few local runs in the week and weekend with the odd holiday, so there should be some reduction in car ownership. Plus the benefits of even some car sharing would be enormous.


Still we are currently investing 60-80 bn in the white elephant of HS2 and as you say its out of date now nevermind the changes in self driving.

antrobus

GreatApe wrote: »

Software is not capital intensive

Are you insane?

Have you any idea how much it costs to get code written and tested, and the flippin software actually implemented?

The Co-Op Bank (just to quote one example) spent about £500 m on 'software' that didn't bl00dy work .

GreatApe

westernpromise wrote: »

Lots of people buying up JohnnyCabs and competing the price down are though.

These things are always going to revolutionise transport, but oil tankers are slower than Cutty Sark was, and it takes longer to drive into town now than it did to ride a horse in 200 years ago.

Seabee42 wrote: »

The government gets lots of cash out of the motorist its not like that will be taken out of the cost either.


Still I reckon there are quite a few people like me who commutes on the train everyday with the car doing a few local runs in the week and weekend with the odd holiday, so there should be some reduction in car ownership. Plus the benefits of even some car sharing would be enormous.


Still we are currently investing 60-80 bn in the white elephant of HS2 and as you say its out of date now nevermind the changes in self driving.

Yes I suspect in socialist countries it will be far too tempting to not tax EVs on a per mile basis. Something like 10p a mile will raise a lot of tax. It will be a huge negative economically as they will be taxing productivity but they will do it.

GreatApe

antrobus wrote: »

Are you insane?

Have you any idea how much it costs to get code written and tested, and the flippin software actually implemented?

The Co-Op Bank (just to quote one example) spent about £500 m on 'software' that didn't bl00dy work .

Then they were stupid. Its not an example of software being capital intensive its an example of stupid being capital intensive.

The capital cost of self drive software over 10 billion humans and 100 years will be nothing
Even if it cost a trillion dollars to write and build said software it would be worthwhile. Of course it's likely not even to cost one tenth of that