I don’t see how a self-driving car is going to be more available than a Lyft or Uber car service. If there isn’t a car in the vicinity, it won’t matter if a human is driving it or not.
I live in the suburbs and I work in the city. There aren’t enough people who work at my building to dedicate a bus service. And there aren’t enough people who work in my building and live in my suburb to make car-pooling work for me.
Suppose I use a car service, driverless or not. I get done with work, I hit the button on my phone to summon a car. Maybe it’s 4 o’clock in the afternoon, maybe I had to work late and it’s 10 at night. The closest available shared car has to get to me from wherever it is no matter what.
Inspired by this thread, I checked my options for Park and Ride in my area. There are no bus stops within a mile of my building, and no bus service directly to the city I work in. So I would have to drive to the Park and Ride, ride the bus (leaving every half hour until 10pm) to one downtown, change buses, ride to a different downtown, change buses, ride to the city I work in, ride the bus to as close as I could get to me building, and then walk for at least a mile.
Or I could drive.
If you can figure out a way to dedicate or nearly dedicate a driverless car so I don’t have to wait, or change cars, or walk a mile, that would be great. Currently, demand for people in my situation doesn’t seem to be driving a solution in that direction. Because my time is actually worth something, and I am willing to pay a certain amount such that I don’t spend three hours a day on my commute.
I’ve never seen anyone with an infant call a Lyft. I’m not sure any Lyfts have rear-facing infant car seats.
I think it’s possible to look at young people in urban areas not owning cars and draw the wrong conclusions about the future. Those young people aren’t going to grow up with their no-car sensibilities and create a new paradigm, they’re going to turn into normal old people who live in the suburbs and have 2 kids who are going to be in different sized car seats for a total of 16 years. One of those kids is going to play upright bass and the other is going to be a hockey goalie, and their practices are going to be schedule on the same day 15 minutes apart.
The logistics of waiting for a self-driving taxi with the right configuration given the demands of the average parent are going to be a nightmare, and as long as it’s an option most people will still opt to just buy their own self-driving cars. And then when the kids grow up and move out, the parents aren’t going to be stressing too much about the economics of the situation.
The average age of a new car buyer is something like 52 years old and has an income of $85k. New car buyers are the only ones that dictate what gets built, and they’re going to be able to afford the “luxury” of personal vehicle ownership. The demand will be there. Meanwhile young people will be zipping around in the cities in their electro-taxis talking about how they’re never going to get old and move to the suburbs
That’s why I said I’m an outlier. Rare if you will. Though many people I know are just like me. I’m married to one. So, it doesn’t feel that rare.
Program my truck, or any vehicle available in the next 50 years to plow the road I live on and my driveway? Hahahahhahahh. AI is still too far. Way too far away for that. In the 26 years I’ve been plowing just my drive (and sometimes the road) every single time it’s different and presents a different challenge.
Plowing public roads with regular markings? That might be able to happen.
Well, if I was going to design a process for this, I might program my truck to plow as soon as there is a modest plowable amount of snow. With a small amount of snow, it’s likely not an arduous challenge, and not something that requires significant problem solving skills.
That’s the wonder of automated machines, you can just tell them to do a task over and over. You’re not going to go out and plow 5 times in 10 hours, but a robot will.
WRT driving services, theoretically there could be a much larger population of available cars, as all self driving cars are capable of picking up fares. Today the population of car share vehicles is much smaller as the human has to be willing to do the work. It’s a theory, and the reality will shake out one way or the other, one thing the free market is REALLY good at is determining winners and losers from competing service models.
Yes, your situation is unusual, but fifty years is a very long time. I imagine that it would be possible for the self-driving systems to build a map of your road when it’s clear and dry, which will allow it to know where the road is, even when it’s covered in a foot or more of snow.
And remember that, ideally, these systems will share information between cars from the same manufacturer, if not between manufacturers. So your trip down a road may be unfamiliar to you or your car, but presumably someone else has already been down that road and an electronic map built in the system.
Please note the language of the OP was not gendered, nor intended to be. Appreciation for status and power are not uniquely male traits, desires, or selling points.
An Uber or Lyft is only available when there is a human driver nearby, in their car, logged in to their app and ready to pick up passengers. There are very few drivers standing by at 5am. Past 3 times I had to catch a 6am flight, I ended up with the same Lyft driver, she’s apparently the only one who works those hours in our part of town. That won’t happen with self-driving cars. Those cars can just park somewhere in standby mode.
Every mode of transport has a finite capacity. Trying to leave home at 4pm will always have costs associated with it. Even if you are walking, you have to deal with crowded sidewalks (been there, done that in Tokyo). If you drive your own car to work, you spend a long time sitting in traffic - you waste valuable time, as well as using more gas and affecting your health (stress, air pollution).
In a future where self-driving car is the norm, it may mean you pay extra to have a car reserved to pick you up at 4pm, or it may mean you have to call for a car 30 minutes before you are ready to head home. I don’t see that as a major downside.
I think you just made a case for self-driving cars that can pick you up from home and drop you off at work.
Which is yet another problem solved by self-driving cars. To be clear here, the problem is not that a computer won’t drive in unsafe conditions. The problem is that a human will.
It may be that “My self-driving car refuses to drive down my street in these conditions” will be an acceptable excuse for not making it into work during nasty weather.
Or you having a standing reservation from Monday through Friday to be picked up at home at X time and picked up from work at Y time… which would make a lot of sense since if you did that in advance the car would waiting for you without needing to make a call every day.
If you didn’t need it then you’d cancel. Or log on and change the post-work destination from “home” to “bar” if you and your coworkers decide to go out for drinks after work.
That would be the way to do it. And someday might work for my driveway.
Here’s the thing though. Win I say I plow my road sometimes, it’s because it’s not ‘my’ road. It’s the county’s road and not my job (I want to keep it that way). I will plow it when I have to. That’s usually when I need to get in or out and we have had a big snow. At times like that I can count on the county to plow it, but I can’t count on when. So the little at a time approach doesn’t work for that.
Wrong. I’ve explained the conditions in which I drive, if you choose to ignore that information, there is really no point in addressing you further. I’m only responding here because you quoted me.
Why would you assume this? A true self-driving car has far more information to work with than you do. It knows exactly where it is based on GPS, IMU and gyros. It has access to weather records as well as sensor readings of the current weather conditions. It knows the “obstacle” it detected with LIDAR & camera is most likely just snow. It knows exactly how much traction it’s getting, and will know within a few milliseconds if it starts to slip. And it can draw upon the experience of all self-driving cars that have ever driven this road. (OK, maybe all cars from that company.) If necessary, it could prompt the driver and ask if it’s an emergency (i.e. ask if passenger wants to take the risk of driving into snow rather than turning back).
I have taken an Uber with an infant plenty of times.
Infant car seats these days are made so they can be buckled into a seat or snapped into a stroller frame. So you just pull it out of the stroller, fold the stroller up and put it in the trunk, and buckle the kid into the car.
The real hassle is not infancy, it’s toddlerhood. They have to sit in bigger less portable car seats. But of course if you travel by plane somewhere, you’re gonna end up taking a car one end or the other, so we just haul the damn thing with us. At which point we can take an Uber.
Man, that sounds like the best argument for a self-driving fleet I’ve ever heard of. Why would I want to buy a big mini-van so I could schlep my kids around to practice when the robot cars can take them? A kid old enough to play an upright bass is a kid old enough to sit in a car by themselves to go to practice.
I say all this as the owner of a mini-van that I bought so I could schlep my kids around.
I think people are greatly overestimating how hard the logistics problems are. “Position cars with carseats convenient to neighborhoods where people have kids” is a problem that is eminently solvable by the army of math PhDs we’re going to collectively throw at it.
In fifteen years, the average new car buyer is going to be a corporation that operates a self-driving fleet. And I’m sure that the average individual new car buyer will be even older and richer. But they won’t be dictating the design of the fleet vehicles.
I will also note that people mentioning the hassle of waiting 5 minutes for an Uber/Lyft are not properly imagining the future. We have to wait 5 minutes for a car now because Uber/Lyft drivers are still a very small fraction of total cars. When a self-driving fleet is providing 20% of the transportation in an area, you aren’t going to have to wait 5 minutes under normal circumstances. There are going to be multiple cars on your block! You’re going to have to wait as long as it takes to walk to the closest one and get in.
Why would I assume this? Well, I’ll tell you what I do know, On my 2006 4x4 Pathfinder, and my Wife’s 2019 Subaru AWD Ascent, you have to TURN OFF the VDC TCS(Vehicle Dynamic Control/Traction Control System) when in deep snow to give you the best odds of making it through. I’ve been there, this is a fact. A Subaru mechanic backed me up when I told my Wife about this for her new car.
Does this apply to everyone? Shit no. But it does apply to my Wife and I.
I’ll say again, that my situation is rare compared to the rest of the world, but common for those that I know and live near me. From my perspective, it’s not rare at all.
My point is that, when I own a car, there is always going to be a car in standby mode for me to use. A car service, whether driverless or Uber, does not have this feature. The closer you get to one car per person, so you don’t have to wait and where a car is available 24/7, the less you need a car service.
It depends on the cost, including non-monetary costs like wait time.
My point is that there is not enough demand for people who live where I live, and work where I work, on my schedule, to justify a different mass transit option, like a bus.
It doesn’t matter if it is self-driving or not. Either the car service allocates enough cars to every case of someone like me who wants to get from point A to point B, or some lesser number. If it is the same as one car per owner/driver, it isn’t a car service - it’s ownership. If it is less, then I will have to wait while the car gets from wherever it is to point A, to pick me up - presumably including the time to drop off whoever is using the car before me. Also, if the car service wants to be efficient, it will also pick up someone else in the general vicinity of point A who wants to get somewhere else in the general vicinity of point B, where I live. So I then have to wait while we go and pick up the someone else, and then wait while we drop off the someone else at his house and then drive to my house at point B. Or just have one car dedicated to me, and another to someone else. In which case, again, you don’t need a car service - just own a driverless car.
Car services seem to me to be a more specialized market. Possibly valid for people who live where a lot of other people live, and who want to get where a lot of other people want to get. But that is not significantly different from any other form of mass transit. For efficiency, you want to concentrate on the most heavily traveled routes. Which is fine - except if you don’t use those routes. That’s why the buses don’t take me where I want to go, when I want to go - and also why it is likely a car service, driverless or not, will be able to do it either.
Don’t get me wrong - I would like a driverless car. Not least because of the ferschlugginer semi that side-swiped me this morning as I was driving to work. And when I worked downtown, I used to take the bus, and it was fine. But it is going to depend on cost and convenience and several other factors (not snobbery - I could not care less what my car looks like or what the neighbors think about what car it is).
A one-size-fits-all-commuters approach where you just hit an app on your smart phone and a robot whisks you home in a jiffy is probably not going to come about just by wishing.
Yes, the traction control system should be turned off under certain circumstances. That’s why they provide an OFF switch for it. Right now, it’s the driver’s responsibility to decide when to turn it off. On a self-driving car, it will be the computer’s responsibility.
The reason the traction control system doesn’t just work in deep snow because it only relies on wheel rotation sensors. They let a human driver disable it because a human driver can rely on other senses - mostly vision - and handle a car with wheels spinning. A self driving car will have the same senses as a human driver, plus much more.
I’ll remain skeptical until I see it actually work better than a good experienced human under any conditions, on any roads. It will also have to be able to be directed to maneuver to wherever I want it (go behind the shed, drive through that creek).
Yes, but at some point there will be enough cars that a car is always available within a few minutes wait. And that point will be reached well before you get up to 1 car per person. Uber/Lyft is already there in major cities, and that’s with fewer than 1% of the city’s population working part-time as drivers.
I still don’t see why. Even if you live in the middle of nowhere, there is probably a nearby village or town where it would make sense for self-driving car operators to have a few cars standing by. If it’s 10 minutes away, you probably do need to call for a car 10 minutes before you leave home. Even in this situation, you are benefiting by sharing the cost of ownership of the car with other people.
Of course not. It will take billions of dollars of research & development. Maybe even trillions. Waymo alone had spent $1.1 billion as of last year. (Which was a good investment, considering Waymo is now worth $175 billion.)
I think it depends on the dynamic in your area, and your personal usage needs.
Outside of rush hour, a large percentage of cars are idle, perfect for a car service or car sharing service to handle most people’s needs as swiftly as car ownership, and at a lower cost per mile.
During rush hours, a higher percentage of cars are in use, which would likely strain the capacity of car services, and introduce delays. With intelligent maximizing of resources, it’s possible that automated car pooling can be accomplished, reducing the number of cars required to get people where they’re going, at the expense of diverting to multiple origins/destinations.
This is true. It’s certainly more convenient to have your own car. The question is whether that convenience will still be worth the extra costs when the convenience of all the other options increases. For many people it will not be.
You’re also discounting the times that it is not convenient to own a car. When your car doesn’t start in the morning and you have to deal with a tow truck and a mechanic instead of just having the next car in the queue pick you up. When you want to make a one-way trip somewhere and then have to figure out how to get the car back where it needs to go. When you have to choose a single model car to handle all your occasional needs instead of using the mini van when family is in town, and the jeep when you go camping, and the hatchback when you’re headed to the grocery store. When you have to spend an extra $100 in rent for the extra parking space…
There are lots of costs (monetary and otherwise) that come with owning a car, but people mostly ignore them because we’re good at ignoring things that are normal and focusing on things that are new and different. The downsides of not owning a car are new and different for most people, so we focus on them more than they are probably worth.
It does matter, although it still might not matter enough.
The number of people on a route required to have a self-driving shuttle be economically feasible is way lower than the number required for a human-driven bus. So self-driving cars will greatly expand the number of people who can reasonably not own cars by making other transportation options feasible and more flexible. Obviously, that doesn’t mean that everyone will give up their car, but it means a lot of people will.
