The race to self drive software

GreatApe

What if instead of full self drive software the tech companies or car companies or Uber just hire people to remotely drive their taxis?

Business model: As now
Imagine a model 3 let's say it costs $100,000 over 1 million miles
$50,000 car $25,000 electricity $25,000 maintenance
$750,000 to pay a human driver to drive for 50,000 hours to cover the 1 million miles
Total cost about $850,000 or 85 cents per mile with Uber charging say 15 cents to make $1 a mile

Business model: Car is driven by customer. Car driven by remote employee between customers
Model 3 still costs $100,000 but employee cost is reduced to $75,000 as the customer is driving 90% of the miles
Total cost $175,000 or 17.5 cents with Uber charging 15 cents = 32.5 cents

The cost of a taxi goes from $1 to $0.325 per mile
Electric taxis become very profitable
Many people do many more miles in this shared electric taxi
Could even be something like 20 cents a mile plus $1 arrival fee
So longer trips cost less per mile.

There are small problems the primary one is What if you lose internet connection?
Well there are no customers in the car because the customer drives so it's empty so it can just pull over and park until it does have internet connection.

Charging can be done by the remote driver driving to an Uber owned super charger
The driver automatically is given the next customer to customer drive job to do they don't sit idle waiting for half an hour for a super charge.

Ectophile

What if the customer doesn't have a driving licence?


How much is it going to cost in insurance bills to allow anybody who does have a licence to drive the car?

GreatApe

Ectophile wrote: »

What if the customer doesn't have a driving licence?

How much is it going to cost in insurance bills to allow anybody who does have a licence to drive the car?

Look up zip car they have about 3,000 cars operating in London
You can rent their cars by the minute
They do it by you sending them a photo of your driving licence to confirm your ability to drive

You need to walk to the car and park it up they are common enough that if you want a zip car there is one within a ten minute walk of most of London

This way with the remote driver the car comes to you and you just get out when/where you need and the remote driver drives it to the next customer

No idea how much the insurance would be
Could be averaged across drivers or might be based on age etc
It wouldn't be excessive no reason why it would cost more per mile in insurance to use this type of car Vs your own

It would be in the price of the taxi
If you don't want to drive a human driven taxi can pick you up
But that human driven taxi will be normal price
These would be less than half price
Also you can have 5 passengers this way while a human driven is limited to 4

As a guess the insurance cost of this car would be around 4p a mile
Perhaps half that actually considering the huge number of camera it would have so solving who is at fault will be easier thus less costly to process

Also I'd imagine there would be an excess
Just like with zip car
But you could pay a little more to insure for the excess

GreatApe

Robo taxis without the need for a robot
Customer driven 90% of miles
Remote human driven 10% of miles
Gets the human driver cost down about 80%

Maybe this is how Tesla or Google will start
Their cars will self drive, empty, to the next customer
But the customer drives themselves
When they get out the car drives to the next customer
And so on