Excellent points
Agreed! Needs change, and those changes are often unanticipated. We were cleaning out very old books from the library of a school, and I found a SciFi book that was written in the fifties. In the book, we had “advanced” enough to start mining the asteroid belt for ore, fossil fuels, and the like. Now, we don’t even want to use that stuff on our own planet. We are looking at clean, renewable energy sources.
No problems at all. The recommendation on the Bolt-owner’s message board was to use A Better Route Planner to plan the route and Plug Share to verify the stations’ reliability.* ABRP suggested a route I wouldn’t have considered, charging in Prescott and taking AZ-89 and I-40 to Williams. This would have me arriving in the village with 10% SOC so out of an abundance of caution I charged fifteen minutes in Tusayan and arrived with 22%, plenty enough roam around the village and get back to Tusayan.
This proved unnecessary as the destination charger equivalents were easy to find, in service, and uncrowded – there was one F-150 being charged at the four-port station I used. There were actually more CCS destination chargers than Tesla at south rim, ten at three locations vs. four (I think) at one.
The more typical route, I-17 to Flagstaff then US-180/AZ-64 to Tusayan, would have required two charging stops, in Deer Valley (despite departing with a 90% SOC) and Flagstaff. I suspect it’s because the climb up to the Colorado Plateau is a lot steeper on I-17 than AZ-89.
Coming back we used the East Entrance, ate lunch in Cameron, then charged in Flagstaff before heading down the hill. ABRP wanted me to charge 20-minutes in Flag then 10 more at Thomas just off of I-17. This would have put me on the wrong side of town at 5pm so I said, ‘Screw that,’ charged 40-minutes in Flag, then got home with plenty to spare.
Having an adapter I could have used Superchargers but did not do so on this trip. I achieved 5.6 mi/kWh due mainly to that long regen coming down the grade. Yeah, north rim, the closest charger I can find is a Supercharger in Page. I too, would take an ICE.
*This advice was posted long before Tesla opened their Supercharger stations to GM vehicles. It’s almost moot now.
Well, I decided to take the bus home from the airport. It’s completely full, the guy next to me is large and has a suitcase between legs, so he’s assumed a “wide stance”, and a woman nearby has phone alerts that sounds like a dog barking for several seconds. Another guy keeps making phone calls. The ride is going to be long because there’s traffic. I’d be happy to be in a waymo right now, and not in this bus.
It takes me an hour to go 12 miles to my office. A flying Ford Anglia would be a godsend, a deathtrap supersized quadcopter is still not the slightest bit interesting.
WFH and better taxis aren’t a replacement for self driving cars. I still want what you wanted 7 years ago, to travel and let someone/something else do the driving.
It’s an interesting and plausible analysis but I see some flaws. Ride-sharing may be a business innovation but from a user standpoint it’s still just a taxi, with all the same issues – you have to wait for it, it gets expensive for long distances, and it’s impractical for carrying any significant cargo. And how do you use it if your shopping trip involves visiting three or four different places at different locations? The only thing taxis/ride-sharing are good for is basically getting a person from point “A” to point “B”, and not much else.
As for Waymo, for any foreseeable future its geographic coverage is going to be extremely limited. If the tech ever advances to the point that Waymo vehicles can go anywhere, then there’s your fully self-driving car.
I’m surely not the only one who greatly values the mobility and flexibility that comes with owning my own car. In fact I feel isolated and vulnerable if I’m at home and my car is in the shop, and if I’m not getting it back the same day I’ll always get a rental. From that standpoint I think an aging population that may no longer feel safe to drive or may indeed not qualify for a license because of health issues will welcome self-driving cars. The younger crowd will welcome it for reasons of convenience, like being able to read, work, or watch movies while stuck in commuter traffic. And impaired driving will be a thing of the past.
What’s the issue? You just reserve the car for several hours. A taxi isn’t going to just wait around for you, but when fleets of robotaxis are always available and you don’t have to pay a driver to sit around, this will be fairly cheap.
And if you really need a ton of cargo, you just send the robocar home when it’s full and summon another. Unload them all when you get home and then dismiss them (or get your partner or kids to do it).
I wasn’t thinking of robotaxis, but of ride-sharing and taxis as they exist today. I have no plans to ever again live in the kind of big-city environment in which Waymo and its ilk will roam.
My bottom line here is that although you might be able to contrive a theoretical solution with these services for any given transportation problem, nothing will ever beat a private automobile – at least, in my circumstances, which are certainly not unique. I’m aware that some people happily live in big cities without owning a car, but that isn’t me.
Robotaxis aren’t going to be limited to big cities. That’s just an artifact of Waymo’s current defective strategy.
Yes, you’ll want your own car if you live 50 miles from civilization. But any modestly urbanized place will have fleets of robotaxis always available and nearby. You’ll be able to reserve them for exclusive use, have a flock of them follow you around (in case you need to carry a bunch of guests or cargo), be able to dispatch them where needed, and so on. Not to mention all the normal taxi stuff. And they’ll be pretty cheap, not much more than the running costs of the car (which are low since the cars will be simplified and all electric).
People will also own their own small (or large) fleets that they can add or remove from the pool as necessary. They can keep two in their driveway and the rest will pay a fee to park in a dedicated lot for charging and maintenance.
I think that your affinity for technology is making you wildly optimistic about this stuff. I doubt that without major technological advances robotaxis will be able to operate on any route that hasn’t been carefully mapped out in advance and use roadways that meet a very specific set of standards. Outside of high-demand areas (i.e.- big cities) that may be at best uneconomical and in most cases impossible. Purely my own conjecture, of course.
As I said before, if robotaxis were capable enough to go almost anywhere, then instead of anticipating fleets of robotaxis being just around the corner we’d be anticipating being able to own fully self-driving cars any day now. But we’re not, and for good reason.
I agree with that; and beside that, in high-demand cities, I picture all the people who commute into (say) Boston via car getting to work from 8 to 9:30, and all those cars normally in garages doing what…circling? Parking in garages? It would be a complete mess. Hell, half the garages here are manual parking because of the way they stack cars.
I’ve said absolutely nothing about timelines. Whether this arrives in the next two years or 10 years or 30 years, I couldn’t say. But once it does, all this other stuff becomes a brain-dead extension of the idea.
Waymo isn’t scalable even for ordinary taxi service. They need to reduce their dependence on hi-def mapping and $100k sensor suites. They’ll also want to sell the vehicles (or a self-driving kit, or something) to operators (whether individuals or otherwise). The capital costs to owning every vehicle in a multi-million unit fleet is too high.
Either they figure this out or someone else does. But it will happen eventually. Maybe someone will beat Tesla. But given FSD as a solved problem (which again, may be a ways out), all the other stuff follows.
They’re either parking in the same lots that ordinary cars already occupy, or serving local customers autonomously. In the longer term, lots can be built that stack the cars more densely due to there being no need for passengers to enter/exit, but that’s not a prerequisite.
Waymo just raised $6.5 billion from outside investors. In 2020, it raised $2.25 billion and $2.5 billion in 2021.
OK, if you allow an indefinite timeline, then basically almost anything is possible that doesn’t violate the laws of physics. So then we have a thought experiment: if this magical fleet of robotaxis comes into being, will it kill the private automobile?
My answer is “no”. This would require more than just a big technological advance, it would require a big change in the social psychology that especially pervades the North American market. People here want to own their own cars. Always have, probably always will. For much the same reason that they aspire to own their own homes.
One can make the case – and many economists and pundits have – that renting makes better economic sense than owning a home. I don’t actually believe this is even remotely true, but regardless of whether it’s true or not, the general attitude towards rentals of anyone who can actually afford a home is “fuck that noise”.
So why would the equally deeply ingrained affinity for cars, especially in the US and Canada, suddenly become any different? I would simply just delight in the fact that I could now have a car that could drive itself. I’d probably use robotaxis about as often as I use taxis/ride-sharing today – I believe my current usage averages about once every ten years; the last time was to take me from my house to the auto repair shop to pick up my beloved car! 
The problem with “public” transportation is that too many of the public are animals.
The same applies to shared commercial transportation like airport shuttles.
Those are orthogonal concepts. It may well be that the vast majority of robotaxis are privately owned. Just as there are many privately owned homes that are mostly kept for personal use but occasionally put up on AirBnb for some extra income. If I had to guess wildly, I’d say that the split will be something like 50/50, which is very approximately the split between apartment residents and homeowners. Neither one will be at negligible levels.
Cars with steering wheels will probably go down to near-zero, though. Like horses used for transport.
That’s already changing. I know a lot of young urban professionals who don’t own cars. They use zipcars and ride share. And I’ve read that that’s a trend, not a quirk of the circles i travel in.
Fwiw, in my life density suburb, taxis used to be unreliable and rare. I basically never used them. But with rideshare, i can reliably get a ride.
Maybe, but that’s alien to my experience. I don’t know anyone – not one single person – who doesn’t own at least one car. My ex-wife owns three. I only own one, and I get severe anxiety whenever it’s in the shop – hence my rant in another thread about how much I value automotive reliability. Of course, my world is not everyone’s world, and there may indeed be changes happening that I don’t know about. But even so, upthread I listed a bunch of practical problems that one runs into if one doesn’t have a personal vehicle.
If you live where they operate (you don’t) zipcar works fine for “i want a car this afternoon. I’ll drive around and do a bunch of errands.”