Electric and Autonomous Vehicles: Upshot for Ride-Hailing Companies and Customers?

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As ride-hailing companies like Uber and Waymo shift to EVs, factoring in charging station infrastructure and charge times, which of these EV models would best suit the business?

Tesla Model 3 Standard Range — $40,000 and with a range of about 200 miles (after typical battery degradation over 4 to 5 years).

Nissan Leaf — $30,000 and 130-mile range at that age.

Ford Mustang Mach E — $50,000 and a comparable 260-mile range.

Read on: Surprisingly, researchers settled on the low-range, lower-price Leaf, noting that the best dispatching policy, when a rider orders a car, is to consider a group of nearby cars and then dispatch the one with the highest battery level, even if it’s currently at a charging station.

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Continuing with the fleets of Uber and its competitors, during a shift to autonomous vehicles, in a series of research simulations, how did service — the percentage of ordered cars actually showing up — fare?

Autonomous vehicles did the best. After all, robots never take a coffee break.

An all-human-drive fleet gave the best service. Yay mortals!

A mix of AVs and human drivers was the most efficient.

Read on: In the simulation, created using data from 1.1 million Uber, Lyft or Via trips in New York City midday during January 2020, the introduction of AVs pushed some human drivers out of the market, hurting availability, and the platforms put their AVs in high-demand areas, leaving shortages elsewhere. In separate simulations, an all-driver fleet outperformed, picking up 93% of orders; an all-AV fleet picked up only 84% of orders.

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A 1994 federal rule set a minimum level of protection in side-impact car crashes and fatalities fell 44% overall. The rule’s mandated crash-test dummy was about 5 foot, 8 inches, 170 pounds (similar to a typical man). People of other sizes — shorter, taller, lighter, heavier — weren’t as protected. But some carmakers did protect those other body types, and a researcher set out to determine why some did and some didn’t. Which factor or factors mattered, according to the study?

The car company CEO was the father of daughters.

The company had a history of responding to safety problems before regulators forced it to do so.

The company possessed tools and resources to do detailed testing on multiple body types.

A and B.

B and C.

A and C.

Read on: Companies that didn’t prioritize safety and lacked strong measurement capabilities did the narrowly assigned job of protecting occupants matching the dummy — reducing deaths around 63% for that group — but showed no statistically significant improvement in fatalities for anyone with a different body type.

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Property tax rates vary widely by state, roughly 2% of market value in New Jersey and Illinois, and 0.5% of market value in Colorado. Because they’re levied annually — as opposed to, say, paying sales tax on a car once — they chew up a lot of a home’s value over time. As an exercise, if you bought a $1 million home in Denver and invested the $1,250-a-month savings versus taxes you’d have paid on a $1 million home in Chicago, assuming a conservative 5% return, after 30 years of compounding you’d have:

$400,000

$1,000,000

$1,600,000

Read on: On a median basis, over time researchers calculate 25% of a home’s value is extracted via property taxes. At the 75% percentile of tax rates, 36% is extracted.

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A shaded map of corporate taxes in the United States.

With income disparity rising, one hears calls to tax the rich and to tax corporations. Does taxing corporations at a higher rate affect consumers? A 1 percentage point increase in corporate tax rates:

Leads to a 1% increase in consumer spending

Leads to a 0.5% decline in consumer spending.

Causes no change in consumer spending.

Read on: When tax rates rise, companies often raise prices, cut wages and reduce investment, which can lead to less job growth. When corporate tax rates go down? No benefit to consumer spending. Perhaps companies spend the savings on stock buybacks or dividends.