But assuming no brekathrough happens: one company that has tons of experience in that field is UPS, they are just finishing building a new system for running their vehicle-routing for 50K routes in the US daily, ~120 points per route, i.e. 600K customers daily. They invested ~$300 million in that system(and they employe hundreds of phd's) and they say it will give them a savings of less than 1% of revenue - just to get a sense how mature those systems are.
On the other hand, it seems that have larger access to customers could enable much more ideal routes, both in cost, customer time and maybe social factor(if social matches will be part of ride sharing). So i believe that to be key to winning.
And i don't think anybody can beat Google in marketing to android users, and even in the US, with iPhone's 40% share(but more wealthy users) - that's avery big advantage for Google.
On the other hand, i think Google prefer not to start a huge service that employs many people, and than have self-driving cars make them unemployed and suffer the huge reputational damage. So they won't go into true shared taxis like ridewithvia.com seems to be doing very sucsessfuly, and instead stick with wazer-rider , enabling drivers to give a lift to poeple for some very modest fee.
So to a certain extent, the winner in that battle would be determined by which approach of those two will win.
As for routes only having 4 stops - sure, but that's after you chosen which users will drive in the same car/trip, which is hard in itself.
BTW the dial-a-ride problem is quite similar to the ridesharing problem, and the complexity there is O(number_of_pickup_and_drop_points^2 ) [1]
[1]https://www.itu.dk/people/pagh/CAOS/DARP.pdf - altough it's a bit old, so maybe results have improved since.
Ford actually builds cars.
Google... likes letting smart people do smart things.
While Ford may be the underdog in the race, I like its chances. It has the operational experience to take a "works-in-concept" to "works-in-reality". The software part, while difficult, is not the hardest part of "TaaS". The systems part is.
Ford has a large learning curve in order to figure out how to do that. It will take a very different workforce to build and manage a software system of that scale.
Google and Uber have been managing a system like that from the beginning, it is in their DNA.
I could see Ford providing the hardware, while a different company deploys and manages the customer facing operation. Demoting Ford to a vendor doesn't sound like such a good thing for Ford though.
While we'll see autonomous taxis operating in some capacity soon, they have to work extremely well and be profitable to justify an aggressive rollout, and that's likely more than a decade out. It's anybody's guess as to what the playing field will look like then.
Many analysts and speculators are getting ahead of themselves by conveniently ignoring just how much of the technical problems of autonomous vehicles need to be solved before these vehicles are ready to venture beyond very carefully managed services operating only in optimal conditions.
I am skeptical. As the article points out, it will take a considerable amount of time to deploy any service, once the automated driving is good enough. If Google gets to commercially viable automated driving sooner, it will have plenty of time to refine their own routing algorithms during the rollout.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12400611
My sense is that this problem is solved to a much greater extent than automated driving is.
AI is just not advanced enough to cope with leaves on the road, a pedestrian who wants to cross or not, a broken traffic light, a criminal who want to steal your car, etc.
And everything as a service... Really, if we would have something that awesome as an autonomous car, wouldn't we want to own it!?
I would! I want to talk to it. And I would like to have a bed and a bath in it and have it go on a road trip with awesome beaches, castles, and sunsets.
Because money. Let's say the first autonomous car is a Ford Fusion or similar, normal cost $30k, autonomous cost $130k (for the sake of argument; we know autonomous tech will be very expensive at least at first.)
Would a normal person buy the autonomous one? Not by a long shot.
But for a taxi company, saving as much as $100k/year on payroll expenses per car (assuming shared between drivers), the $130k car is very attractive.
I don't know why AI should stay expensive.
You what else is cool ? an RV. everybody dreams of owning an RV. almost nobody does.
