Analysis finds ride-hailing costlier than vehicle ownership

[ergophobe]

A nontrivial portion of what the driver is paid goes toward covering gas, maintenance, insurance, the car's cost & financing the purchase.

True, but the future of self-driving EVs change some of that.

First and foremost, a self-driving car doesn't *need* idle time. Obviously, you have demand surges, so to have capacity to meet those, there will be a lot of idle time no matter what, but much less than you have in the current scenario and surge pricing can even some of that out, both by spreading out demand and by bringing part-time drivers/cars into the mix because of higher payouts.

In the current model, you either have a ride hailing service where one person owns one car that spends most of the day idle, or you have a taxi company that has two drivers in 12-hour shifts which has its own big inefficiencies.

So basically, you spread your fixed costs over more miles and rides and that brings costs down.

Then you have the basic maintenance equation on EVs, which have roughly a third as many moving parts as ICE vehicles. In the short-term, EVs are expensive, but as the tech matures, most analysts expect the cost to run a car to drop and the expected lifespan to go up. This is especially true if cheap renewables come online, but even without that, you just have a lot fewer moving parts to change, no oil changes, air filter changes, etc. The transmissions are more robust. Right now, it's mostly the battery that makes the price of EVs so high and raises TCO, but that is on track to keep falling.

All of which could lead to a dystopian future of people logging massive amounts of miles in their self-driving EVs (or someone else's just as likely), but that's another topic.