Daniel in SD
(supervised)
I wish I could read French! Anyway, he posts this table:This isn't like EVs, where the only real downside is range per dollar, and people who are legitimately affected by the downside (as opposed to just being scared of it) are rare. There are a lot of downsides to shared taxis, even if you don't factor in questions about self-driving safety, liability, etc., with cost being the biggest.
People driving more than 300 miles in a day are at least a couple of orders of magnitude less common than people traveling for more than half an hour each way. Even with a 30-minute commute, shared cars start to be problematic in terms of electricity spent, because the odds of the car having a passenger to take during its the 15-to-20-minute reverse commute are low. So you can assume that about 30% of the driving will be just moving the car from one place to another without anybody in the car. That adds to the cost significantly.
Also, self-driving taxis will require lots of extra maintenance, or else they will have all the same problems with cleanliness as taxis and city buses, only worse. People abuse things that they don't own, and if you think that your average taxi is in bad shape, can you imagine if it had no driver? Without cleaning them at least once a day (and maybe more), these things will smell like pee within a month, if not a week. Nobody wants to endure that for even a half-hour commute.
All of those extra costs add up. If taxi costs are any indication, the cost per mile of self-driving taxis, even if you take the cost of the driver out of the question, is likely to be about twice as expensive per mile as owning a personal vehicle, even after factoring in the cost of the vehicle (assuming your car lasts 200k miles). There's just no way that self-driving taxis can be nearly as cheap as driving a car that you own, in practice, unless you're one of those people who buys a new car every three years just to have a new car (and if you are, then you probably won't be caught dead riding in a car that smells like vomit because of the guy it took home from a bar the night before).
The folks who think self-driving taxis will replace personal vehicles clearly haven't done the math. The economics just don't work unless you live in one of those horrible places where you have to pay an extra $300 a month to rent a parking space.
It seems like the only costs here that would apply to self driving vehicles are fuel, insurance, maintenance and lease payments. Insurance will be far cheaper since self driving cars, if they ever exist, will be far safer than humans. Fuel could theoretically be much cheaper since self driving cars can be mostly short range EVs, there's no need to have extra battery capacity when someone is only ordering a 30 mile ride. I'm not sure that keeping the cars clean will be a huge problem. I'm guessing it will be like Uber and Lyft where they'll fine you if you pee in the car. I think traditional cabs and public transit are not a good comparison since they have no way to ban or punish abusive users.