How does the economics of owning a self-driving car make sense?
This isn't specifically about Lucid, but a lot folks do ask about and/or compare Lucid's DreamDrive to Tesla's FSD. But the more I think about it, the more the economics don't make sense to me. If anyone can point out the flaw in my thinking, please let me know.
tldr; Tesla selling you a vehicle on the premise of self-driving is them screwing you twice.
Musk has said owning a Tesla with FSD will be like owning an Airbnb - free money! However, the reason Airbnb's have margins at all is because housing is supply constrained - building cars is not. As soon as self-driving tech becomes mature-ish enough to go mass market, you (the car owner) are in competion with Tesla, which will pump out hundreds of thousands of cars. Margins will go to zero and costs will be competitive. If you are buying a car to own for the FSD future, you've made a huge capital investment for a service that will be competitive and drive prices down at which point it would make more economic sense to just use the FSD service instead of own the car. Meanwhile, if you're a Tesla owner, you're taking on all the risk (Tesla won't take responsibility for any accidents using FSD) to help Tesla improve its software to the point where they can then undermine the market they promised you would be a beneficiary of.
This is where things do come full circle back to Lucid - if you buy a car because you like to drive it, then you don't have to worry about any of that!