( Working in the field. This is obviously not my employer’s opinion. ) Don’t think about your own personal car. Don’t even think about a taxi fleet. Think about all the large company who has to truck goods to their locations, like all store chains for example. They have to maintain a huge fleet of vehicles and a small army of drivers. They already have a maintenance center where a different small army is fixing and cleaning the trucks. If you have a working self driving system you can replace the army of drivers with it as long as the cost of the self driving system is lower than the wages you pay the drivers. This of course puts a cost limit on the viability of the self driving system. If you need 10 Phds per car to keep them rolling then you lost and nobody is going to use your system. On the other hand self driving companies bet is that through smartness they can make it so that they only have to employ a handfull of people per thousands of trucks driven. If that bet works out then the system is financially viable. If it is viable the self driving company can capture a portion of the difference between the drivers wage and the barebones cost of running the system in perpetuity.