Simple. Not having a driver in the car. The driver is the only part of Uber I don't like. I feel like if I make them wait 20 seconds they could ding my rating. If I have kids with me, I hate having to get their carseat buckled, knowing the driver probably doesn't want kids in their car anyway. I hate the awkward silence. I hate listening to their shitty music. At no fault of their own, they are the only weak link in the Uber chain. Everything gets better for me if there just isn't a person waiting on me the whole time.

I'd sell my cars in a heartbeat if "Uber minus the driver" existed and was cheaper than owning a car.

Cost, accessibility, convenience, reliability, safety. You can get all of that with a human driver too, if you're rich.

Waymo is not cheaper than Uber. I don't buy the cost argument tbh.

Explain how a car with a human driver will be cheaper or have price parity with a car that requires no paid human driver. The driver is the most expensive part of every ride. And that's before tip.

Uber outsourced they capital intensive fleet of cars to the drivers. Waymo has no such luxury.

But the main point is: if there is no need to compete in price, companies won't do it. There is no other company offering driverless rides and even if Google were to have huge margins on every ride, they wouldn't lower prices.

Happens all the time that companies literally just choose to not compete in price because people don't have options or just have accepted a specific price level.

A Waymo has something like $100k of sensors and other hardware on top of the cost of the vehicle.

That cost will almost certainly come down, but at the moment it is cheaper to just pay a human to drive a car with $0 of AV hardware.

Yeah, manufactured goods aren't exactly known to increase in price as production scales. This is a very temporary anomaly. Cars with drivers are on the precipice of becoming extinct, save for specialty needs and the wealthy.

I have to pay to store my manually-driven car 90% of the day, because there's nothing else it could be doing while it waits for me.

A driverless car can very easily do things and make money while I'm waiting for it.

In some scenarios, people rent out their owned cars during the day to avoid this massive opportunity cost, but I doubt that will be the most efficient model.

In what other asset class ever has it made sense for the capital owners to be an extremely long tail of people, rather than a large corporate owner? Especially something as high velocity and fungible as cars.

In a few ways, no.

Taxis/uber etc. are all built as "regular cards". It requires at least 2 people in there. How often is actually more than 1 person in a car? Wasn't that like 2/3 of all drives?

Now let's assume we have specialized cars for just a single person - that saves a lot of material, fuel, and also (parking) space.

But that only works if you don't OWN the car, because if you own it, you might sometimes have to have passengers right? So you always get a big car that is not needed in 2/3 or so of the drives.

That aside, having another driver is annoying for various reasons (e.g. privacy).