I definitely get the appeal and the value of that kind of future. It just feels like "driverless cars + simple Google-made reservation app" would send Uber's value down to zero. So if driverless fleets of cars are the future that Google is aiming for, then why invest in Uber? What does Uber currently have that would still be valuable in that future?
If you add the exclusive technology and you cut out the people, profits go through the roof. Do you think Uber wants to keep paying out 70% of each ride to a driver? They'd rather buy more expensive cars (servers) and have less humans in the mix over time. Humans take things like vacations and make the wrong decisions at a non-miniscule rate.
Probably the operational expertise in efficiently getting cars to pick up and drop off people at arbitrary points throughout a city. They're building that expertise right now with human drivers.
I'm referring to logistics. I have 3 cars available and a set of 5 passengers, their coordinates, and their destination coordinates. How do I efficiently deliver these 5 passengers that minimizes their wait time and travel distance?
Please explain how it makes a difference whether humans are operating the vehicles or whether they are self driving. In either case a larger network is making the pickup, dropoff and navigation decisions, not the driver.
I humbly propose that if you have perfect agents, picking up 5 people with 3 cars is an incredibly simple problem.
It's only difficult because Uber has to deal with humans - will their cell phone be charged? Will they hear the notification on their phones? What if they forgot to indicate that they've taken the rest of the day off? What if they claim to be available but are actually in the restroom at a fast food restaurant? It's supposed to be a 6 minute drive but what if they make a wrong turn? What if they glance quickly at the map of where they're supposed to go but saw it wrong, then muted the turn-by-turn so they could blast some daft punk? Working with human agents is hard.
If you have always-online self-driving cars, then you've already done the hard part. Directing them where to go is trivial.
I'm only using 5 people with 3 cars as an example. In reality it's hundreds upon hundreds of people and proportionally fewer cars. I understand there are challenges with dealing with humans that will disappear when we switch to robots, but I can't see the API changing very much. The concept of a vehicle network, customers, app, doing clever things to anticipate traffic and customer desires on certain days, all of these things take (I would imagine) years to understand and optimize.
Your claim that operating such a network with humans versus robots, on a logistical (API) level, have "almost zero in common" is rather brash.
