Will autonomous or self-driving rideshares exceed that of human-driven rideshares (like Uber or Lyft) by Jan 1st, 2030 in the United States?
I will evaluate this by examining metrics such as total mileage, total revenue from rides, and number of rides driven. It's possible that due to the changing modality of rideshares, some of these metrics may make more or less sense than others and want to leave this option open to resolve the market in the spirit of the question. I will consult subject matter experts if necessary.
Hopefully this will be fairly easy or obvious to resolve, but if it's actually way too close to call, or due to a number of metrics diverging, I reserve the right to resolve at 50%.
I will not bet in this market due to the somewhat subjective resolution criteria. If autonomous driving passes human-driven rideshares before the close date, and it's obvious that the trend will not reverse, I may resolve early.
EDIT 10/3/23: @Joshua has added a Ṁ1000 subsidy to this market (thank you Joshua!)
EDIT 10/3/23: just realized @PC has ALSO added a Ṁ500 subsidy to this market (thank you PC!)
Related questions
I badly want to be betting YES here, but without a clear example of successful adoption I think it's low-likelihood. I love taking Waymo and Cruise in SF, but it would be easy for even one roadblock to completely stop adoption.
E.g., vandalism, or cyber security, or luddites. Or anything else I can't foresee.
I will be slamming the YES shares as soon as this threshold is passed in even one US city!
@CarsonGale I like your rationale; I hadn't really thought about those kinds of things as deterrents, but now I realize they could heavily reduce the economic incentives (rather than just the technological or regulatory challenge)
@benshindel They were only able to scale that fast because they didn't have to build the cars, they didn't even have to own the cars!
Currently there are 1.7 million rideshare drivers in the US. Autonomous cars might have better utilization, but you still have to handle peak load, so the equivalent might be say... 500k AVs. To be half of everything they'd need 250k AVs. And there's what, fewer than 1k active right now? Seems hard to build 249k AVs in 4 years.
@benshindel Those are 100% human driven. There's no evidence that Tesla could have a taxi fleet program ready in 6 years.
You need to like, buy real estate, hire cleaners and mechanics. And that's all assuming they get L4 autonomy working.
@DavidFWatson Further, I was responding to your comparison of Waymo/Cruise to Lyft/Uber, obviously the explanation for why Tesla may or may not succeed is entirely different.
@DavidFWatson My point is directly responding to yours! Teslas have potential self-driving functionality. So do many other vehicles already being sold and manufactured. That’s not the issue. Also retrofitting a car with sensors is very plausible.
@benshindel Buying real estate, hiring various kinds of staff, these are things that an "autonomous rideshare" organization would need to do. You can see it in the operations teams of Waymo and Cruise, which are extensive.
And sure, maybe there's a chance someone could get hundreds of thousands of rideshare vehicles online without that infrastructure, but I think it's a fair bit less than 30%.
@DavidFWatson like I said... Uber/Lyft went from zero to completely dominant over taxis within 5 years! They needed to do the same things that you're saying!
@benshindel No, they didn’t. They didn’t need to build cars, people brought their own. They didn’t need to maintain the cars, drivers did it themselves.
But for autonomous they wouldn’t have drivers. What happens when someone throws up in the car? When it gets a flat?
A normal market starts with the liquidity of 50 mana that you pay to create it, which is the mana you can get from trading on the question even if no other user is betting against you. Now, there is 1000 more mana in this market that can be won. This makes it cost more to bet the market up or down, but more rewarding to do so.