There are enough people in the developed world who are physically unable to drive or use public transportation in their area and who also don't want to be homebound that the economics could still work out even if they were the only market, which they aren't.

> Just keeping sub meter scale 3d street maps up to date has a massive cost.

True, but probably not actually necessary.

You seem to assume there is unmet demand that you can meet cheaper with automation than with human drivers. I agree there may be unmet demand but I don't see you get automation to be cheaper than a $10 an hour cab driver. I mean if automation was cheap and easy then our factories would all be automated before something quixotic like a car. It is frankly absurd.

> a $10 an hour cab driver

Well, for one thing, I don't want anyone in populated parts of the US to live on $10 an hour, not even a cab driver. What happens when we double that? Cost of living goes up over time, but cost of technology goes down. When do we reach the tipping point? Have we already?

No. Look into. Supply and demand.

If wages go up to $20 an hour, then maybe there is general inflation and robotics goes up to $200 an hour. In the world today we have cheap labor and expensive energy. That is why automation is not replacing humans. Look into the history of the British industrial revolution.

>if automation was cheap and easy then our factories would all be automated

Please describe the last factory you were in.

I have probably been in far more American factories than you. Obviously I am not going to answer your question directly because I have an interest in protecting my career or privacy but in my extensive experience in mamufacturing many things that you might think could be automated are not because it is still cheaper or more effective to pay a worker $15-25 an hour than to spend $15,000 on automation that doesn't work right half the time.

Here is the reality that self driving will confront:

cost effective, reliable, competitive automation is hard, even for seemingly closed mundane taskes like palatising products.

I make these kinds of maps for a living.

Yes, it's expensive, however, as we refine algorithms, and the processing systems, it gets cheaper, especially amortized over more cars, where the per-car cost becomes affordable.

ML doesn't work well enough for offline maps generation either, and all the high quality maps require human editors for final touch.

All this work is currently done because realtime perception doesn't work well enough, and you can have a much more reliable system with the aid of the maps. Having a 3D base map of the world makes the realtime perception problem far simpler, and it makes fancy sensors less critical.

In the US, where the cost of labor is very expensive, self driving will make sense, even if it's expensive, but someplace like China or India, where a middle class person can afford a driver, it probably makes less sense, though the push for it in China is probably the strongest that I've seen anywhere in the world.

So you think self driving cars will be able to profitably offer a 10 mile ride for $20 in suburbia of second tier cities like Springfield MA? If your opinion is that cab drivers make much more than $10 an hour today then I suggest you look at things outside the bay area.

Self driving does not scale at all now. Because as you said these special maps need to a lot of human labor to make and the cars need a lot of sensors on top of the auto patform. Labor is not even the main cost driver in person transportation.