Electric cars do require much less maintenance, but 8K a year would barely pay for someone to keep the windshield wiper fluid topped off much less the kind of issues that would pop up in a fleet of 15k vehicles.

I wonder what would happen to traffic with 15,000 extra vehicles within the city limits. Something tells me it won't relieve congestion or make the streets any safer.

But it would make a couple of vulture capitalists a lot of money.

[–] TheEgoBot@lemmygrad.ml 13 points 2 days ago

I mean, even on top of maintenance the entire system is basically just on rails, it has to be mapped out manually, every car has a 'guy in the chair' that can control the car remotely if necessary, they also got guys in unmarked vans that follow the driverless cars in case of emergency, and on top of that every car is constantly collecting data and that storage is insane, all of that falls under operational costs completely independent of maintenance issues