[Lorianne]

Maybe this is so and I just don't have the foresight to see it ... I'm probably permanently stuck in self-drive.

[gaijin]

Gummint records of:

Everything you bought
Everyone you texted, called, emailed or chatted with
Everywhere you went

A digital PARADISE for a socialist busybody.

“THIS time we’ll get it right.!!!!”

SURE.

[GnuThere]

I was kind of out of the loop on this and thought it seemed like something for younger people, but used Lyft for the first time on a trip to Denver when my friends said it would be about 30% less than cabs.
It worked out fine, with all of the drivers arriving pretty quickly - the only driver that worried me was one who had to rely on GPS to go a few blocks down the street, ha.
So I’m a late adopter for sure, but will probably use it in the future.

[kvanbrunt2]

well not the self drive stuff. but my brother laid off — now drives for uber. i use them for various transports. the most is when i leave my truck in the burbs to get worked on and get a drive home for 25 bucks. cab would be 50-75. i think bro was flashing $200 plus for a day and he leases the car from uber. and he does work at it. my drives have always been super.

[socialism_stinX]

As a former software developer, I think it will take much longer than some people expect to develop autonomous vehicles that can drive on all kinds of roads in all weather conditions. Assuming that the rapid adoption of PCs, internet, and smart phones will also happen with autonomous vehicles seems to be false logic. That is because autonomous vehicles will need to have essentially perfect driving performance to avoid class-action lawsuits by accident victims, which could easily bankrupt the manufacturers of these vehicles. While for example, if 0.1% of smart phone calls fail because they’re dropped or the sound is unintelligible, that is acceptable performance in many areas. But if even 0.01% of trips by autonomous vehicles result in a collision, that would be disastrous for the vehicle manufacturers (not to mention the passengers of the vehicles). So I think this is a very rare case where financial people are actually over-estimating the capabilities of scientists and engineers. I would bet quite a lot that fully autonomous vehicles won’t have more than a 5% market share in 20 years, and that will be mostly in controlled environments in inner cities where they may replace most taxis.

[adorno]

"We model a scenario in which a fleet manager could generate profit of $14,000 per car over three years, nine times what [a manufacturer] currently makes from selling a car,"

Problem for the current ride-hailing services, such as Uber and Lyft, is that, they won't even be in the loop in the future.

Once ride-hailing becomes serviced by autonomous vehicles, a large part of the consumers who purchase cars won't be purchasing them anymore, and will be hailing those autonomous vehicles as the need arises.

So, if the automakers end up not selling cars or their sales volume decreases to the point of their near extinction, THEN, those automakers will have no choice but to become ride-hailing services themselves, which could mean that, once they become the fleet operators themselves, they might decide that they can cut out selling vehicles to Lyft and Uber and the other ride-hailing services, which would then cause those companies to close shop. IOW, we could end up with the automakers becoming the flee-operators with their own vehicles doing the servicing.

I wouldn't put my money on Lyft or Uber or any other "non-manufacturer" ride-hailing service. In the long term, they might not be there.

[Alberta's Child]

This says more about the sorry state of the taxi industry than it does about ride-sharing. My assessment of the ride-sharing industry is that doesn’t seem to lend well to a highly profitable operation over time. Uber is basically an app for gypsy cabs, when you think about it.

[central_va]

Robo car technology is just a higher form of cruise control. It may have it’s place on the low traffic volume interstate environment but not universally. It would be nice to have an RV motor home drive itself while you slept in the back cruising down I-95. But general use, no way. The problem is FedGov will force nascent not ready for prime time technology on the people. They will eliminate the self driving option altogether forcing us to buy high tech, high maintenance robo cars. Driving is too expensive already.

[bert]

The lesson learned is that Randy and his ilk are likely to get lost and are late in coming