Amazingly, people still trot out the "ride hailing is disrupting private car ownership" narrative.
It's also amazing that private car ownership causes so much pollution, congestion and death/dismemberment and yet remains profoundly resistant to "disruption." If I'm a mobility tech VC, I'm asking a lot of questions of anyone claiming their startup will succeed where TNCs failed
This is central to Tesla's success: it provides the aesthetics and rhetoric of "disruption" packaged in the comfortingly-familiar privately-owned premium car format. We love the idea of disruption, but much prefer the reality of sustaining innovations. Tesla threads that needle.
By the way, the "deadheading" issue that contributes so much to Uber/Lyft's environmental impact is also at the heart of this paper about robotaxi economics. Mobility demand is peaky and hard to efficiently match with supply.
Look for an upcoming episode of @TheAutonocast with the lead author of that robotaxi economics analysis for more on this fascinating and important topic.
@TheAutonocast In the meantime, that uptime/utilization factor is why Argo's CEO Bryan Salesky doesn't think AVs will be pure electric (at least initially). He's said this before, but apparently he gets into the topic in a recent podcast theverge.com/2020/2/25/2114…
