“To put it bluntly, we are cooked.”
Time’s Up
Uber drivers are anxiously awaiting a future in which autonomous ride-hailing vehicles could make their jobs obsolete.
As The Register reports, some drivers are already fearing the worst.
“To put it bluntly, we are cooked,” one person posted in an Uber forum dug up by the newspaper. “We’re done for. In the age of artificial intelligence and automation, we’re the first to be impacted in a major way.”
Self-driving taxi outfits, most notably Google-owned Waymo, have steadily grown their fleets of autonomous vehicles. According to its most recently published figures, the company is giving over 100,000 paid rides a week in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.
Worse yet, the company’s luxurious vehicles are making it hard for human Uber drivers to compete.
“If you’re riding around in an Uber X, you’re in an old Prius, or maybe a Tesla,” one driver told The Register. “It’s super nice leather, cushy seats, great suspension, big tires. Uber is not going to be able to do anything once Waymo starts under-pricing them.”
Undercut
If tech companies can build truly safe and reliable robotaxis, it will unquestionably pose a threat to the millions of taxi and rideshare drivers in the United States and worldwide.
But exactly when robotaxis might start undercutting the need for human drivers remains an open question. Despite its aggressive marketing and over 100,000 weekly rides, Waymo is operating at a loss of around $2 billion in the first half of this year, as the New York Times reported last week.
That’s not to mention nagging technical issues plaguing robotaxi services in busy cities. Case in point, General Motors massively cut spending on its autonomous vehicles division Cruise.
The company was once a viable Waymo competitor, but thanks to a disastrous year, including an incident involving a woman being struck and pinned down by one of its vehicles, it’s a shadow of what it once was.
In other words, even today’s most impressive robotaxi ventures are basically elaborate tech demos. What the services will look like in reality is anyone’s guess.
“The Waymo cost of that whole vehicle, with all the spinning thing you see on top of the car, is about $300,000,” former Uber chief business officer Emil Michael told CNBC in June. “That’s not going to replace a driver financially anytime soon.”
More on self-driving vehicles: Mercedes Exec Blasts Tesla for Reckless “Full Self-Driving” Rollout
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