See my response above. The buyers of these vehicles are going to be the networks themselves, which will eliminate most if not all car brands.
The car brands know it, which is why they're panicking.
(Why ALL car brands? Because you're going to have companies like Bosch and Foxconn competing. I'd like to see Ford beat Foxconn at a challenge like this.)
2. Vehicle size. Once these systems are up and running, do you think Waymo & Uber, once their systems reach any level of maturity, are going to send you a 4 person vehicle to pick up 1 person? This reduces:
a- the capital cost of the vehicle
b- its cost of maintenance (less parts, etc)
c- the amount of energy required to get from point A to point B
Which brings me to...
3. Price of electricity. Waymo, Uber, et al will get their electricity at wholesale rates.
4. Low cost of capital. The cost to access the capital to buy these vehicles will be lower than anything a peon like you or me could ever access.
5. Bulk-buying 1,000,000 vehicles. No dealers, no dealer commissions, zero customizations, less parts, smaller vehicles, no car manufacturer marketing budget...
6. Maintenance scaling. The need to scale maintenance operations country-wide is going to lead to its own interesting effects. With a hard limit on the types of vehicles in a network, most cleaning and general maintenance will, in time, be doable by human-monitored robots.
7. Ride subsidization will effectively crush any margins any of these companies could ever hope to have.
8. Shared depreciation. Depreciation will be significant per vehicle but overall, cheaper, as each vehicle will have more utilization.
I'd hesitate to guess at the effects of all of the above, but it's not much of a stretch to anticipate an additional 50% reduction here, barring any unforeseen taxes, of course.
You might pay more for the network with great coverage and lux vehicles.
You might pay less for the crappy network with dirty cars and plastic seat buckets.
The car brands know it, which is why they're panicking.
(Why ALL car brands? Because you're going to have companies like Bosch and Foxconn competing. I'd like to see Ford beat Foxconn at a challenge like this.)