By finding things that self-driving cars can't do such as load your luggage, open the door for you, make sure your car is absolutely spotless.
There's always a way to compete; it's a matter of finding out what people will pay for and people have a long history of paying premium prices for premium services.
The flip side of that argument is that everybody and his little sister will dogpile onto the 80% part. The 20% is where the real money is likely to be. It will be a much smaller market, but likely more profitable.
I understand that! The point is having a human driver get out and open the door for a passenger, or perform any of these additional services is part of the premium service I alluded to.
Some people will always use the valet even if free parking is available. Those are some of the potential customers I see.
Yeah, but while that might be relevant to the “human involved personal transport industry”, it really doesn't help automotive industry players that aren't competitive in the self-driving space, because once SDCs are good enough, even people providing car-with-included-footman service will use self driving cars to carry the passenger and footman, the latter of whom can then focus on customer service, rather than driving.
The post I was originally responding to was discussing the advantages of SDC over a "real" taxi and asking how it was possible to compete with that, implying that competition was not possible. My response was about ways that a human-driven taxi could compete.
In a general sense, I don't care about the specifics, I just find the thought that you can't compete with something to be intellectually lazy. Discussing the automotive industry at large is diverging from the point I was trying to make.
There's always a way to compete; it's a matter of finding out what people will pay for and people have a long history of paying premium prices for premium services.