Of course, I only used minimum wage as a starting point, because people must be paying a human Uber driver at least that amount now (and be satisfied with the service), plus maintenance/depreciation, plus fuel, plus corporate take, or else the human driver would be going to work elsewhere. Once the free market enters the equation with autonomous drivers, prices plummet, since nobody needs to pay the robot driver a living wage any more. Prices fall, demand skyrockets, ridership increases.
So when you said “But in places like where I live” , you meant: “in places like where I don’t live” Gotcha
In any event, since you live in a state capital, I’m going out on a limb and saying you’re looking at thousands of currently idle vehicles available within a 10 minute drive, if even 20% of the total population was magically converted overnight to allow for autonomous hailing.
No, it doesn’t. You have to postprocess the data to get a vector field out of it. And that processing is just as difficult and subject to ambiguity as visual processing.
Suppose you have a depth sample at some distance. On the next sample, it’s much closer. Is that a car headed to you at high speed, or did a piece of paper flutter past?
Standard LIDAR doesn’t even give you velocity information, though that may be changing with Doppler units. Even assuming Doppler, though, you don’t get transverse velocity measurements. If you want a vector field, you have to use sophisticated computer vision.
These really feel like edge cases to me. Yes, even today we have the classic problem of people walking around at night in black clothes. But this doesn’t really dominate the vehicle injury rate statistics.
HDR cameras, and various tricks to mitigate bloom, will more or less solve the bright sunlight problem. That’s one of the easier visual processing pieces to deal with. Even crappy cell phones do a pretty good job these days.
Well, you said it: these systems are still in their infancy. I’m not arguing that LIDAR doesn’t serve some short-term need. I’m arguing that Level 5 autonomy requires a degree of sophistication in computer vision that makes LIDAR redundant. LIDAR only solves a few of the easy problems; the hard problems require the same sophistication in processing that vision does. Maybe there will be systems, like Waymo, that are ostensibly level 5 but are really limited urban taxis, and they’ll find some continued use for LIDAR.
One more comment since I didn’t quite address this:
LIDAR does not enable you do identify hazards without positive identification. The simple reason is that it is that false positives are too frequent to be ignored. You cannot slam on the brakes on the highway every time there seems to be an object just ahead of you. It may be a cardboard box, or a leaf, or a bird, or just a bug splatted on the sensor.
Radar has an even worse problem in this regard, because a soda can may have the same radar cross-section as a car. LIDAR makes it at least possible to discriminate between some of these cases, but not without some sophisticated processing. And there are probably some cases that you’ll still really need cameras for corroboration.
I’m still confused over whether you think that private individuals own these cars, or taxi companies. (It just occurred to me that if it’s private individuals, they often won’t even get to drive their own car! It’ll be an hour and a half away, having just driven three people to successive destinations further in the distance. They’ll be stuck riding in somebody else’s vomit-encrusted jalopy instead of their own vomit-encrusted jalopy.)
And I maintain that it’s impossible that the price will ever drop low enough that I’ll stoop to using one of these cars for my daily commute. That ten minutes you’d have me wait for it to arrive? That cost is higher than the cost of the gas to fill my car, per trip. (My time is worth a lot, by a couple of different measures. )
I didn’t say that in places where I live it wouldn’t be possible to hire a car within ten minutes. I said that in places like where I live lots and lots of people will just own their own car. Which is absolutely true. Besides the fact that there are a lot of people who aren’t desperate enough to hand their cars off to strangers for cash, there’s not enough demand to justify everyone using Ubers.
The kicker, you see, is everybody who needs to go anywhere around here has to drive, because absolutely nothing is in walking distance. Which means that during periods where most people need to get places (like, say, rush hour), you need approximately one car per person - at best one per every two adults. can equivocate and say that people will carpool or change shifts or switch to bicycles, but that’s not going to happen to any significant degree. These many cars need to exist.
Which means somebody needs to own them.
And that a significant percentage of them will be sitting idle all the rest of the time. By definition there isn’t as much load during the non-rush-hour parts of the day.
Which means there’s not enough demand to justify all those cars being Ubers. In fact, after a certain point the more of them that are Ubers the less business there is for all of them.
Which means that all of us who wouldn’t hire an Uber if it was free are fully justified -by market forces- to not come near enough to the market to touch it with a ten foot pole.
Oh, and also it’s not like every Uber sitting in a parking lot would be available for use anyway; if a person is out on a shopping trip with multiple stops they need the car to stick around and not take off with their groceries. It’s not a big thing when Ubers are only use to carry drunks home, but there are times people just need to hold on to the same car.
(With the meter slowly ticking upwards as they try to rush their shopping…)
You wouldn’t have to stand outside waiting for the car. You call for the car, finish your breakfast, get ready, go outside and get in the car that’s waiting for you. Also, the car will drop you off right in front of your office building, rather than a parking lot a block away. So you actually save time.
(And gain weight because you don’t even walk to/from the car anymore, but that’s a different issue.)
Yeah right, like I plan that far ahead. What would actually happen is I would forget to call for the car, forget I hadn’t called for the car, eventually notice the car wasn’t there, call the car, wait for the car, get in the car, and arrive twenty five minutes late to work (rather than the usual ten, which at least gets me there in time for the morning meeting).
And I don’t work downtown. My workplace, like all workplaces in this part of town, has a parking lot. There would be no benefit whatsoever to taking a taxi to work.
I also don’t leave at a constant time and don’t know I’m ready to leave until I’m packing up to go. Another ten minutes burned.
And then I sometimes go shopping. And I don’t have a cell phone. So either the car stays there, waiting for me, calmly racking up the price, or I’m completely boned.
Yeah, this is looking more and more appealing all the time. :smack:
Anyway, begbert2, like I said before, if you want to waste your money by buying your own self-driving car, and never let anyone else use it, I don’t think anyone will stop you. So rest assured. I’m sure lots of wealthy people will do that.
I’m lackadaisical. I’m theoretically supposed to be at work at 9:00, which probably means I should leave by 8:55ish or even as early as 8:50 if I wanted to be really confident of being on time. But I’m often just sitting down to eat then. So I leave when I’m ready - sometimes 8:55, sometimes 9:00, sometimes 9:05… Under the proposed model I’d call the car…sometime, and it’d just sit there until I was ready. (Unless it got bored and took off for another customer; I don’t know how these things would work.)
At 8:40, the proposed time to make the call for the car presuming I was responsible, it’s anybody’s guess if I’m even out of the shower yet or not.
So yeah, while the variance isn’t hours, there’s not part of my schedule that’s stable enough that I want to tack an extra ten minutes delay based on remembering to do something at an earlier point in the schedule.
Just a comment specifically on these somewhat emotion-driven reactions of squeamish visualization. Natch, I’m not saying that nothing messy ever happens in a vehicle; but speaking as a non-car-owning frequent user of car sharing, rental cars, public transportation and taxis, the average filth factor is really nowhere near as high as the above remarks would suggest.
Of course, shared vehicles (autonomous or not) would doubtless have to be cleaned and maintained on a more frequent schedule than privately owned single-user vehicles. But in my experience, car-share vehicles and public-transport vehicles are overwhelmingly not smeared with puke and peanut butter, reeking of farts, or otherwise physically revolting even when they haven’t been freshly cleaned since the last user.
It’s fine if you personally just happen to prefer never to share the use of a vehicle with strangers, but there’s no need to let your fastidious imagination run away with you into realms of highly exaggerated grossness.
I am dead certain I’d be saving money, and that everybody I know would be saving even more money, because they drive even more than I do. This Uber business is for people who don’t have to drive on the regular - basic logic shows that. After all, if it costs X amount to own, fuel, and ride in a car yourself, it costs at least that much to own, fuel, and have other people ride in it. But Uber wants a profit, and the car owners want a profit, so it must cost more to ride in an uber to ride in your own car. It simply has to, for the business model to be viable. Which means the only place you could save money is if you have other reasons that make the ownership - really, just the storage of the car to be more expensive or inconvenient than the Uber markups. Just the storage, because the cost of the car? The Uber providers pay that too. It’s all factored into the price.
Ubers are great if you don’t drive often and don’t want to keep a car around, or if you want to go places where it’s inconvenient or expensive to park there (parking garages; airports) or if you simply can’t drive at all, like if you’re drunk or underage. But if you actually drive a lot and don’t park anywhere weird, it’s logically impossible for them to be a cost savings over having your own car.
And as for anybody stopping me from having my own car, check the OP. The topic of this thread is whether I will be stopped from having my own car (presumably due to me being unable to buy it for some reason).
Since you value your time so much, you should just make a recurring reservation for a car at 8:50, and pay a little bit extra for up to 15 minutes of standby time.
Though, your commute, including the time to walk from the parking space to your office, is nominally 5 minutes? Why do you need any kind of car?
Most of your ride-sharing vehicles presumably come equipped with a human who will do something if conditions in the passenger area get bad (at the least, rolling down a window). The vehicles under discussion are by definition unattended, and also they’re by definition not coming home between trips - the glorious magic of these autonomous taxis is that they only move while they’re carrying a passenger or picking up a passenger. thus maximizing fuel efficiency. They’re not coming home between rides - and if they’re not being remotely monitored by somebody who considers it their day job, they won’t know to come home for cleaning after a particularly nasty passenger.
Yet you insist on owning your own car. You are already paying a lot of money for that convenience. And it sounds like you’ll continue to do so even when there are options that are cheaper and potentially/marginally less convenient. Which is fine, nothing wrong with that.
As I’ve just said, it’s logically impossible for me owning my car to be more expensive than taking Ubers everywhere - assuming the Uber business model is financially viable. This includes both at current Uber pricing and any future (profitable) autonomous Uber pricing.
Admittedly, it helps that nowhere I go asks me to pay for parking.
Note - the logical impossibility of car ownership being more expensive than taking taxis everywhere is predicated on the assumption that my car is not significantly more expensive to fuel and maintain than the taxis in question. I consider this to be a fairly reasonable assumption, but I feel I should acknowledge it as a legitimate point of attack against my position here. If the autonomous cars are spectacularly cheap to maintain -solar powered, no moving parts, that kind of thing- then it might be possible to operate them and make a profit and still be cheaper than my car’s operating costs. Until I buy one of those vehicles for myself, anyway.
No, car-sharing vehicles such as Zipcars (I’m not talking about ride-sharing services such as Uber or Lyft) don’t come equipped with human attendants and don’t get cleaned or serviced after every use. They’re left by one user in a designated parking space to be picked up by the next user. And their condition is usually not objectionable in any way. Same goes for, say, bus seats which are not cleaned afresh for every new occupant.
(Sure, both Zipcars and buses get cleaned more often than your average private car, as I said; but the vast majority of the time their condition doesn’t significantly deteriorate from one user to the next, even without an intervening cleaning.)
I’m not arguing that anybody who’s exceptionally squeamish about shared vehicles needs to suck it up and use them anyway: private individual cars are definitely a preferable solution in that case. I’m just saying that the picture of shared vehicles painted by the exceptionally squeamish is not a very accurate representation of their typical reality.
With regards to my comment, I was really just going for some sensory imagination as a proxy for an entire category of “stuff inherent to shared property”. “Fart” is an inherently funny word, so I used it.
Even in well-maintained and clean vehicles, it’s just not as nice being in someone else’s car. I’ve been in lots of Ubers and in fact none have smelled of farts. The nice ones have an array of water bottles, snacks, phone charging cables, etc. But at the same time that’s a bunch of cluttery crap that I’d never have in my own car. Or considering public transportation–I’ve been in some that are very nice, both clean and with entirely well-behaved people. And yet there’s no way around the fact that I’m stuck in a room with a bunch of strangers that are constantly milling around.
Maybe I’m still being excessively picky; certainly, there are plenty of people that use public transportation on a daily basis and don’t seem to have a problem with it. But personally, I’ll pay quite a lot to maintain personal transport. And I’m not super-convinced of the cost argument, either. A car lasts maybe 200k miles whether it’s over 15 years at 10% utilization or 2 years at 80% utilization. The only thing I’m losing when my car is idle in my garage is some interest. Maybe electrics will change the picture somewhat, but there’s still a ton of stuff that can go wrong.
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