You want economics? Here's a nasty person on the economics:
cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below
the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away."
—Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, May 28, 2014
And from The Economist, September 28, 2025:
Waymo is a case study in automation
AUTONOMOUS TAXIS are taking over San Francisco. Although Waymo, the world’s most famous robotaxi company, only launched there in 2023, it may now have more than a fifth of the city’s ride-share market (which includes Uber, but not traditional cabs). Wherever you look one of the company’s white Jaguars whooshes past. Tesla’s robotaxis have joined them, though with a supervisor in the driver’s seat. Before long Zoox, a driverless-car firm owned by Amazon, will set taxis free in the city.San Francisco’s robotaxi boom raises a question: when technology automates a profession, what happens to human workers? You might think that the city’s drivers are doomed. In fact, so far, the rise of autonomy has played out in two different ways. First, it has raised overall demand for taxis in San Francisco, limiting job losses. Second, it caters to a lucrative corner of the market rather than to the masses.
Take the size of the market first. We find little evidence Waymo has put many humans out of work. According to official data, in 2024 the number of people in San Francisco working for “taxi and limousine service” firms grew by 7%, against a year earlier. Total pay in the industry rose by 14%. Figures from the city suggest the number of old-fashioned taxi trips is about the same as it was last year. It can still be hard to find a yellow cab at peak times. “As self-driving cars enter the marketplace, they will actually expand the market,” David Risher, chief executive of Lyft, a human-powered ride-hailing firm, recently suggested.
The extra riders come from different places. Waymo claims that some people visit San Francisco in order to ride their taxi, which would represent pure additional demand. More likely is that residents are using private cars less often. When the alternative was a Lyft or an Uber, people may have preferred to drive themselves. The risk of having to listen to bad music or engage in awkward conversation was too great. In a driverless taxi you can sit in silence. There are signs that San Franciscans are changing their behaviour. Spending on taxis appears to be growing especially quickly compared with that of residents of other cities. And since Waymo’s launch the number of private cars, adjusted for population, has fallen.
Autonomous taxis are nonetheless a long way from being a mass-market product. Waymos are comfortable and generally clean. But they are perhaps 20-40% more expensive than a Lyft or an Uber. They are also slow.
Unlike human-piloted taxis, autonomous ones rarely break traffic rules; you cannot tell a robot to “step on it!” They also get confused and stop in the middle of the street....
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Back to Kalanick:
"We're at the very beginning stages of becoming a robotics company," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said at the Vanity Fair Summit in San Francisco in October. "As we move toward the future, autonomy is a pretty critical thing for us. It's existential."
Uber and former Googler Anthony Levandowski stole trade secrets from what became Waymo though to my knowledge they did not experience the promise and limitations of training the AI that Waymo did. From a 2017 post:
"When Google was training its self-driving car on the streets of Mountain View, California, the car rounded a corner and encountered a woman in a wheelchair, waving a broom, chasing a duck. The car hadn’t encountered this before so it stopped and waited."