In general, I think most agree that autonomous vehicles are going to happen.

They are going to change the world, and there are likely some ways to cash in on this. I saw something recently about thinking deeper than the easiest level. Autonomous vehicles don't just "put taxis and truck drivers out of business." Mechanics are hurt, because people don't do stupid things with cars. Local police budgets are decimated with no more ticket revenue. Everything changes.

What are your ideas for how to cash in on it?

One I've thought of is trying to get ahead of the curve for inner city driving, which could be one of the first places to ban driving by humans. London already charges drivers for driving in the city. There's a viable chance places like New York ban drivers in the city well before it happens in general. In that case, there could be situations where you have to park your car outside of city limits and get a ride in. This would be a huge boom for the cities who adopt this early. A bunch more space, everything is safer, and you can get really creative with congestion. Each car could communicate with each other and the street lights, and all choose optimal routes. Someone could start building the ideas behind how to coordinate this type of city driving environment, and start figuring out the best ways to make this "revolution" as pleasant as possible.

I always thought the large well-run car rental places, such as Avis, are well placed for this, due to a huge number of retail and prime storage locations (i.e. airports), existing systems and customers, etc, and the absolute necessity that they adapt quickly. Low P/E fleet operations are a possible place too. You'll see a large increase in revenue as more and more people use temporary cars.

Just rough ideas, haven't thought about it much.

Amazon since shipping fees will drop

Driverless cars are decades away in NYC. They have to be able to deal with rain, snow, etc., but more importantly they have to be able to deal with pedestrians and other terrible drivers. By design, these things are super defensive drivers. Which in NYC means they can't go anywhere.

why wouldn't a company with the business model of uber immediately crush them? they already have the model and the logistics in place to take advantage of the inevitability of autonomous cars in an optimal way. the same cannot be said for rental car companies. you might still want to rent a vehicle sometimes, but it'd be extremely trivial for uber to expand into that space. it is true that the well-run car rental places have the huge number of retail and prime storage locations, but the beauty of uber is that it doesn't need physical real estate at all. they just buy the cars and a parking lot -- that doesn't even need to be closeby -- to render the prime locations of existing car rental places useless.

what would incentivize a company like avis to buy into automated vehicles? essentially, they would just take their existing system and rent you an autonomous car. this does not impact their profitability. it just adds a huge up-front cost to replace their fleet.

the downside of this is that you cannot buy into uber unless you know people. perhaps a similar service (e.g. lyft) will come along to raise capital through an IPO to attempt to crush uber before it dominates the market. but they are by far more poised to profit from autonomous cars than anything else out there right now.

Uber is working on driverless cars itself.

They actually started in collaboration with Google. Now they have their own project.

Uber is an Internet based ride matching service. They have nothing to do with physical cars. They are an Internet app maker.

They have nothing except an app.

You massively underestimate the kind of infrastructure and expertise needed to actually run a car rental/taxi company. Cleaning, insurance, inspection, safe storage, account handling, prime locations (such as airports) which require paid access, etc. Uber are as likely to succeed in this space as Burger King.

The real world still matters, man, and it's complex and difficult to do the things you just brush off as "buy a parking lot and some cars".
The slow death of hired vehicles and the need for new revenue streams. The large number of unused vehicles, which could be used profitably as autonomous pickups. The existing infrastructure - monitoring, cleaning, servicing, parking garages, access points. Having the first large fleet of autonomous vehicles. Lots of reasons they're very well placed for this.

You order a hire car for three days and it picks you up and drops itself off. That then easily expands.
You wouldn't want to buy a ride sharing service if you want to do well out of autonomous cars. Uber will be gone in ten years; they offer nothing of value that isn't very easily duplicated. They are maybe 95% overvalued.

I don't know guys, I don't think the rental car companies are innovative enough.

I feel like some collab between Tesla+Google that can spend 100bn to get a fleet and infrastructure to be able to let you get an autonomous ride for less than it takes to drive yourself is the real way this happens. Like autonomous vehicles make real money as a rental/taxi service, but they make biggest-company-in-the-world money when they make people think they don't even need to own a car.

this will be first implemented in some regular/daily traffic schedules, not public, for firms looking to cut cost. Example would be freight transports on interstates. Most likely a "dedicated" lane point A to point B usual transports with some sticky blue markers saying AI/autonomous or something (usual marketing for secure and calmness).

The reason is you need to make the general public emotional brain accept this. Until that no AI cabs in cities.

This will be also an excellent branding position for AI as less deaths per accidents and so on will make public start trusting "robots". Not the usual military UAV movie plots...

lol, ok.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-...05-31-14103924

Mobile eye, Google, Apple are the obvious plays that come to mind

They got five billion dollars from a bunch of chumps, and then went out and bought a few dozen researchers for a few tens of millions.

You're a smart guy - tell me you're not that naive that you think this acquisition of researchers actually means anything? If so, lol. This was a headline stunt to drive up valuation and buzz. Uber is not going to solve the driverless car problem.

The driverless car problem will be solved by sufficiently advanced sensors, which will require a bit more chip advancement than we have today. We're reaching the necessary resolutions and data processing abilities in the coming years. It's a simple problem and would have been solved computationally decades ago had we had the hardware. Research isn't going to help it along until the sensors and data processing capabilities are ready (they almost are).

A friend emailed me earlier this year asking my opinion on Mobileye. Here was my response:

"While Mobileye is probably going to completely change the way we drive, their stock is very expensive. It's difficult to value very high growth tech companies that haven't even reached consistent profitability yet so I decided to look at what the potential market size for their product is to see how much room for growth they may or may not have.

In 2013 there were 82.84 million cars sold in the world (couldn't find the 2014 number). In 2014 Mobileye's average selling price for their chip was $53.33. So if Mobileye's technology was in every single new car in the world they'd have revenues of 82.84 million x $53.33 = $4.42 billion. That means their current market cap ($9.3B) is more than double the entire market. If they were able to achieve a 30% net profit margin on that $4.42 billion revenue that'd equate to $6.21 earnings per share. A 30% net profit margin is very generous by the way--only one auto parts manufacturer has a net profit margin over 20% and that's GNTX at 21% (they make auto dimming rear and side view mirrors). So at a current price of $43.46 MBLY is selling for a P/E ratio of 7 assuming they capture 100% of their entire market which is of course unrealistic. Now they could (and probably will) expand into other product lines so it's possible they grow into their valuation, but in my eyes that's a risky bet on an uncertain future."

Note: I only spent an hour or two looking at the company so I don't know a ton. Cool technology though!

this is what i meant when in the next sentence i said that they have the right model and logistics in place to take advantage of autonomous cars. right now they are an internet based ride matching service. but all they have to do to enter the space is replace humans with autonomous cars. that’s it. transform marginal cost to capital cost and take all of the profits. as a result, the costs for consumers will come down enormously - expanding the market itself. it’s a winner-take-all game and there is no reason why uber isn’t going to crush avis and the like.


i’m not sure how this contradicts what i said with regards to their business model and understanding of logistics of on-demand transportation. what are you trying to say here? are you saying that their software is useless? software all the way down and capital assets is the most optimal way for providing autonomous on-demand transportation to consumers. another reason these companies will not succeed is that they are not tech companies. and they are not structured like tech companies. when you have autonomous vehicles, you want on-demand transportation.

i don’t underestimate the infrastructure. there is no doubt that the level of infrastructure and expertise is required to run these companies in present day is very high. what i’m saying, however, is that uber or a service like it is going to change all that and make most of the existing infrastructure used by car rental/taxi companies obsolete. there is only one thing that you mentioned that actually makes the car rental companies special and that is the prime locations. literally everything else you listed can be done better and cheaper by uber (yes, simply by having a parking lot somewhere where uber will take care of cleaning, insurance, inspection, etc.). but when you realize that if you can just book an a car through uber 3 hours in advance and have it come pick you up at the airport by the time you land at your destination for cheaper than the existing car rental companies could, it becomes evident how small the worth of prime locations actually is.

…really? you want to compare a car sharing service that virtually has the same functionality as a car rental company or a taxi company to a company that makes fast food?

okay, but on the one hand there is uber that doesn’t have to do anything but buy autonomous cars and integrate their software and innovate, and then there’s the stale car rental companies who will be faced with the choice of investing huge up-front costs to replace their existing fleets just to maintain the same profitability or going bankrupt. it is absurd to think that car rental companies will come out victorious. and even if they do, it won’t be for a very long time before the autonomous car sharing services in the likes of uber come along and destroy them completely.

uber will be able to do this better and cheaper.

that may be true. i’m not saying that uber is the company that will be victorious. i’m just saying that car sharing services like it are better positioned for the autonomous car revolution that will happen within the next 10 years.

this is pretty much what i'm describing. a car sharing service like uber that offers autonomous cars.

They're here now as I posted in an earlier thread racking up miles on some of the busiest roads in the U.S. Our rapidly aging baby boomers will likely be the initial mass market.

I agree with all that. What do you think about trains and public transit? Perhaps buses are a long shot since I've never seen a bus with a dedicated lane before. But trains and light rail trains make sense as an early adopter.

The present and near future autonomous vehicles

http://www.technologyreview.com/news...nother-on-you/

Who and where?

Among other places Northern VA with its extremely congested road system.
Google

Quit hypothesizing and trying to get rich quick and just build that damn collateral model so I have a job six months from now.

You can get on this autonomous vehicle rocket ship with me!

just to highlight how wrong ToothSoother is:
Uber CEO To Tesla: Sell Me Half A Million Autonomous Electric Cars In 2020

I started toying around with "motif investing" 1-2 months ago and dropped 1k on this little gem Connected Car. I also bought 1k worth of China Internet. Both are down significantly, since I bought in . You all are well aware of the China fiasco at the moment. I think I'm going to triple down on both soon, because I'm a degen and all. Whatcha think of the connected car/ autonomous vehicles stocks they picked?

I don't see people giving up driving unless autonomous cars are about 80-90% cheaper and even then I don't think it has mass market appeal.

Where you should see the most growth is in taxis, any type of shuttle service, buses, etc

Between going electric to reduce fuel and going autonomous you could cut the transportation costs significantly. Outright consumer adoption I'm not sure about but even like 15-20% share of car market would be a huge disruption.

Also no real need to go with a high-performance/high priced tesla for an autonomous taxi, something far less sporty will suffice.

I think it has been underestimated how you could just use renewables to power the cars at a centralized fleet. Could really curb oil consumption.

While this may be inevitable, all the industries it disrupts are probably going to do their share of lobbying to stifle as much as they can.