Some Say Self-Driving Robotaxi Isn’t A Business; Billions Are Being Bet That It Is

Some Say Self-Driving Robotaxi Isn’t A Business; Billions Are Being Bet That It Is

Waymo is now operating a robotaxi pilot in non-downtown San Francisco using Jaguar electric ... [+] vehicles. This is territory where a real robotaxi make sense. Most of the biggest names in self-driving cars are aiming to make money selling Robotaxi service — most quickly described as a self-driving Uber UBER -style service where you can summon a car with an app on your phone and ride elsewhere for a reasonable fee, possibly combined with "sharing" in some form, such as the style of UberPool or forms of on-demand transit. This is the plan of Waymo, Cruise, Amazon AMZN /Zoox, Ford/Argo and many others. It was obviously the plan of Uber ATG before it sold to Aurora, and Lyft LYFT L5 before it sold to Toyota. It's even a big part of the plan of Tesla TSLA . While Tesla intends to sell consumer cars, it promotes that they will become part of the "Tesla Network" where customer cars temporarily hire out to give rides, and also that Tesla will buy 3-year old cars as they come off lease to put into a robotaxi fleet. Indeed, last week, Dan Ammann, CEO of GM/Cruise predicted that they would see $50 billion