I have a pretty fair knowledge of the Google car and the Stanford cars that came before it. The equipment at scale isn't really that expensive and can be fairly easily retrofitted onto existing cars.
Even if it ends up costing 50k and an extra 20k per year in maintenance (which is probably too high for a computer and a few actuators and sensors) taking driver labor out of the equation results will result in vast cost savings as a percentage of total operation costs.
>theft insurance will likely be higher
Theft will be nearly impossible for an average criminal. Remove human controls and you've instantly defeated 99% of car thieves.
But as I mentioned, 5 drivers per car is overestimating considerably the actual number of drivers you need for practical coverage. You don't need your full fleet 24/7, the demand just isn't there for it around the clock.
Call it three drivers for practical coverage. Now we're at
$120k for labor (3 x40k). But we've added 50k to operations in other areas. So now we're saving 70k in overall costs. Which is good, but a long way from 200k.
If you just needed 1 driver for the car, then there's a net loss with the driverless version (with these theoretical numbers anyway).
Perhaps the most efficient method would be a base fleet of driverless cars that operated 24/7, with peak times adding in cheaper cars with human drivers....
I have a pretty fair knowledge of the Google car and the Stanford cars that came before it. The equipment at scale isn't really that expensive and can be fairly easily retrofitted onto existing cars.
Even if it ends up costing 50k and an extra 20k per year in maintenance (which is probably too high for a computer and a few actuators and sensors) taking driver labor out of the equation results will result in vast cost savings as a percentage of total operation costs.
>theft insurance will likely be higher
Theft will be nearly impossible for an average criminal. Remove human controls and you've instantly defeated 99% of car thieves.