Let&#x27;s assume self-driving cars take off in &lt;5 years. That means that this isn&#x27;t &quot;winner take all&quot;. It means its a commodity that&#x27;s going to be driven down to razor thin margins. In that case, neither Lyft nor Uber have much of a business, and VCs are better off burning their money in a barrel.<p>Tesla&#x27;s Autopilot can already do most of the driving on the highway, and the latest software release has the car driving in our out of your garage with no human intervention (it&#x27;ll even open and close the garage door for you). Google&#x27;s self driving tech has already mastered a majority of city driving. We&#x27;re getting to a fully autonomous self driving future faster than most realize.<p>EDIT: Tesla charges $2500 for the autopilot feature, so far argument&#x27;s sake, I&#x27;m going to say that cost won&#x27;t be a problem. There&#x27;s no way fully autonomous vehicles are going to require an expensive roof-mounted laser scanner; laser scanning gear? qualified maybe, as there are a few components manufacturers making solid scanner laser scanners (no moving parts). Also, some recent tech out of MIT is (supposedly) drastically better at 3D scanning with polarized camera filters than a laser.