-We all know intuitively that UBER wants to replace human drivers for robot autonomous vehicles. Humans are expensive and they take most of the ridesharing profit. UBER has been announcing testing of autonomous vehicles and we all know that they would make more money by having self-driving cars. The question of "how much money" though was in the air. But big corporations and secret societies always want certainty that they can bank on (or bet on more precisely). Well that certainty has just arrived. UBER just limited human drivers/cars to 50% efficiency. How? By limiting Drivers allowed time behind a wheel to 12 hours out of every 24 hours. This means at a maximum, human drivers and cars can be only 50% as efficient as self driving ones. Now that is a variable that has been fixed so their profitability equation can be accurate.
What will this do ultimately? Well obviously it makes human drivers less competitive. Now what happens when uber reduces their prices by 50%? Human drivers would no longer be competitive and would become unprofitable in many cases. Humans will just be used for surge prices when autonomous cars can't keep up with demand. What this will also do is reduce demand for cars in general since ride-sharing will be so cheap. Car makers will then shift to autonomous vehicle production since they will be the only types of cars that make good profit.
Well that's the plan, at least.
Oh and I just did a search after writing this; and it appears my read was 100% accurate:
https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/28/5758734/uber-will-eventually-replace-all-its-drivers-with-self-driving-cars
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