It's FT Alphaville's scoopage, not ours:
Alphaville has long held the suspicion that, despite the hype, the economics of a self-driving fleet of taxis, as an alternative to owning a car, simply won’t work.
A new paper out
Monday, written by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and exclusively shared with FT Alphaville, agrees. It
suggests that, at current prices, an automated hive of driverless taxis
will actually be more expensive for a consumer to use than the old-world
way of owning four wheels.
Drawing on a wealth of publicly
available data, Ashley Nunes and his colleague Kristen Hernandez suggest
that the price for taking an autonomous taxi will be between $1.58 to
$6.01 on a per-mile basis, versus the $0.72 cost of owning a car. Using
San Francisco’s taxi market as its test area, the academics examined a
vast array of costs such as licensing, maintenance, fuel and insurance
for their calculations.
The news comes as the arms race to
deliver an autonomous taxi service reaches full-speed in Silicon Valley.
Both Lyft and Uber have committed hundreds of millions of dollars to
developing the technology, with Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi
declaring at a recent FT conference
that “if there’s one big goal for Uber it’s to replace car ownership”.
Along the same lines, Alphabet-owned Waymo has been operating a
robo-taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona since December.
A robo-taxi service have two main economic flaws, according to Nunes and Hernandez.
First
is what the two academics refer to as “capacity utilisation” — the
amount of time an autonomous vehicle is carrying a customer. According
to the paper, the taxi occupancy rate stands at 52 per cent in San
Francisco. Whereas in car ownership fuel and usage are directly
correlated, a taxi is only being used around half the time....MUCH MORE
