The airline industry is much harder to differentiate because it is so capital intensive. Airplanes are super expensive because failure is so catastrophic -- thus they are built with multiple levels of redundancy (and production / maintenance costs increase exponentially with the complexity). Elon Musk has spoken about this exact situation in relation to SpaceX: basically NASA builds $5 billion rockets with a 1% failure rate, and SpaceX builds $30 million rockets with a 5% failure rate -- but the idea is that because SpaceX's solution is so much cheaper, they will have more launches and thus will have more failures.
Cars are much less dangerous. In a failure scenario, a car can easily be designed with a simple mechanical failsafe to disable the vehicle and wait for help. The lower cost of failure in an automobile entirely changes the business model: it allows you to apply modern product design processes (agile design, rapid feedback, tight integration of R&D and operations, etc.) because any individual failure of the product isn't going to cause headlines.
Anyway, that's the difference: a catastrophic failure in an airplane is $200-500 million in financial losses ($150-300 million for the airframe, and the bad press/settlement from killing ~200 people). A catastrophic failure in a car is the loss of a $60,000 vehicle and maybe death payouts of under $1 million. The only way we'll be able to ethically apply these design principles to flight is drones / UAVs -- which is exactly why they will quickly come to dominate air freight once someone figures out a viable model.
Anyway, due to all of this, automated taxi companies won't be taking on nearly the level of risk that an airline does. IMO there's also more room for differentiation for "specialty" taxis: let's say you and a group of coworkers need to go to another office an hour and a half away. Why not rent a "meeting" car with Internet access, whiteboards and tables so you can knock out a meeting or two on the way? Or are you hungry on the way somewhere? Order a food car and have your meal waiting for you when it picks you up. Are you tight on cash? Order a 10-passenger bus that will pick you up on the way. Because the risk and cost are lower, there will be a lot more variability in cost and thus in business model.
IMO Uber's brand value is in owning the customer billing relationship -- that is ENORMOUS in the consumer product world. They've reduced transactional friction to almost nothing (THAT is Uber's true brand value -- even if consumers don't consciously realize it), so it's going to be very hard to displace them.
Cars are much less dangerous. In a failure scenario, a car can easily be designed with a simple mechanical failsafe to disable the vehicle and wait for help. The lower cost of failure in an automobile entirely changes the business model: it allows you to apply modern product design processes (agile design, rapid feedback, tight integration of R&D and operations, etc.) because any individual failure of the product isn't going to cause headlines.
Anyway, that's the difference: a catastrophic failure in an airplane is $200-500 million in financial losses ($150-300 million for the airframe, and the bad press/settlement from killing ~200 people). A catastrophic failure in a car is the loss of a $60,000 vehicle and maybe death payouts of under $1 million. The only way we'll be able to ethically apply these design principles to flight is drones / UAVs -- which is exactly why they will quickly come to dominate air freight once someone figures out a viable model.
Anyway, due to all of this, automated taxi companies won't be taking on nearly the level of risk that an airline does. IMO there's also more room for differentiation for "specialty" taxis: let's say you and a group of coworkers need to go to another office an hour and a half away. Why not rent a "meeting" car with Internet access, whiteboards and tables so you can knock out a meeting or two on the way? Or are you hungry on the way somewhere? Order a food car and have your meal waiting for you when it picks you up. Are you tight on cash? Order a 10-passenger bus that will pick you up on the way. Because the risk and cost are lower, there will be a lot more variability in cost and thus in business model.
IMO Uber's brand value is in owning the customer billing relationship -- that is ENORMOUS in the consumer product world. They've reduced transactional friction to almost nothing (THAT is Uber's true brand value -- even if consumers don't consciously realize it), so it's going to be very hard to displace them.