Now, of course, the big thing it doesn't include is a labor cost. Note: I'm assuming self-driving technology gets within the range of the average vehicle cost - which isn't unreasonable given that even Google's fancy set-up only adds an extra $10K today. And it includes both variable costs (fuel, maintenance, and tires) as well as fixed (insurance, registration, taxes, depreciation, and finance charges). This comes straight out of the Department of Transportation's latest average cost per mile for vehicle ownership. OK, all that said, let's plug in some current assumptions for each part of our formula: But at some point even VCs get impatient, so let's focus on a point in time where Uber has to stand on its own as a public company.
How far will uber drive pittsburgh for free#
Of course, this assumption also removes the venture capital subsidies that have allowed them to operate at a loss for all these years (and, in fact, Uber plans to give away the self-driving rides for free at first). Because we don't know how they arrived at those calculations, it makes sense to focus on Uber as a regular business, plain and simple. Note that this strips away the ambiguities of Uber's existing consumer-facing pricing model (Base Price + Time + Distance + Booking Fee). Price = Cost/Mile x Miles/Trip x (1 + Margin) Namely, could we do a little back-of-the-envelope math and predict how much these rides will actually cost at scale? And while the sci-fi fan in me sees this as one more step towards the Robopocalypse (written by a Carnegie Mellon robotics PhD, naturally!), the Excel nerd in me sees this this as an awesome opportunity to bust out a spreadsheet.
So Uber has launched self-driving service in Pittsburgh.