No. of Recommendations: 6
mungo:
I dunno
How many engineers does it take to realize that a cab needs more than two seats?*
I guess it takes more engineers to realize this than I happen to have sitting in front of my terminal right now :)
It's engineers thinking like that that resulted in the F-35. THe cab/plane must be all things to all people. That drives up its size and its cost and that gets carried with it to every mission it takes, including the ones that could have been done by a cheaper car/plane.
Let me be clearer.
A LOT of cab rides are for only 1 or 2 passengers. Obviously (I hope) these are served more economically by a 2-seater cab than by a larger cab.
Some cab rides are for more than 2 passengers. Possibly these are served more economically by a larger cab, but not if the usage of larger cabs for larger passenger groups is less intense than the average for small cabs. That is, a small cab utilized 90% of the time it is on the road and a larger cab utilized FOR LARGER GROUPS only 50% of the time it is on the road, it may well be that serving larger groups is cheaper with only small cabs deployed.
HOW MUCH cheaper would having equally well utilized larger cabs for larger groups than using multiple smaller cabs? Well, whatever that number is, it becomes less favorable with auto-taxis vs real taxis since the overall cost of operations of cabs has gone down, so the "waste" in using two small cabs for a larger group is reduced over the current case.
SO WHY do the vast majority of companies use larger cabs now? I'm going to guess, tell me if you think I'm nuts, it is because the driver is the most expensive input into the cab ride. SO relative to driverless cabs, the amount you should be willing to spend to minimize the number of drivers is higher now than it will be when cabs are driverless.
If you were going to dip your toe in to this new market what might be a reasonable way? How about: design the minimum cost vehicle that will be successful in that market. If it only takes 2 passengers are we being stupid? Well, if the cab is successful, given the incredibly large number of rides that are 1 or 2 persons only, and the likelihood that those go UP as a proportion of all rides as the cost to provide them goes down, it could be years before Tesla was able to saturate the market with 2 passenger cabs. And what, exactly, stops them from developing additional vehicles to fill in the niches (groups of 3 or 4 for example) more effectively as the market develops?
But surely the fact that Tesla hasn't thought of that is a bad sign? Well actually this was explicitly Tesla's style of thinking in starting with the Roadster, than a large expensive sedan, then a large expensive SUV, then a smaller sedan, then a smaller SUV. And what high price did Tesla pay for this strategy? Considering they sold every car they could make and averaged about 50% a year in production volume increases, I'm going to say they were right.
My apologies if I seem to have taken your post too seriously.
R:)
