I'm just excited for the time when I can purchase a self-driving big rig and stick a living space in the back of it. Work remotely while traveling all over North America.
Wow, never thought about it that way. That would be awesome.
Why limit it to US And Europe. The world might soon be a better place. Imagine Starting out in Berlin Then over a couple of months go to Turkey, then India, Vietnam and beyond and then back without ever driving a single km. Just let it drive while you sleep.
Is anyone even talking about let alone demoing self-driving in a seemingly chaotic urban driving in India and elsewhere? My uneducated guess is we are decades away from being able to navigate anything real world like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLUm3Q-7iZA
If you zoom out, you'll see that there's a method to the madness but a lone driving car that's not a part of a fleet doesn't have such luxuries.
I don't think the problem is solely image processing and machine learning. I just don't get self driving and how we're supposed to wow the logic. You have to be aggressive to drive in a city or people will constantly cut you off for hours. This means you will hold up traffic making the situation worse for everyone. However, you can't be too aggressive. Imagine the damage we will cause to the "optics" of self driving if we run over (at a slow 10 mph) stubborn people who cut us off. That will just look like murder.
The idea that a self-driving car would even make it to Turkey in the first place is laughable. Let's see how it goes in Italy or the Balkans first. But it's ok to dream...
Considering the route takes you through Iran and Pakistan, and a few 100s Km from Afghanistan, Indian trafic is the least of your worries. I'm considering driving the same trip but it seems a detour through Caucasus is a much safer choice.
haphazard traffic flow due to lack of traffic safety awareness and road discipline by pedestrians and drivers alike are not exclusive to just India. we have a large Indian population in Malaysia and Singapore... go to their Little India enclaves and you see the same free for all situation... perhaps just a little better then shown in the video.
Having driven in similar "chaotic" traffic, it's not different that how we move on feet in a crowded area.
This explains it better: https://highwayflocking.github.io/
A self driving car can have much better "perception" of the surrounding area and reaction times under 100ms, making it potentially very good at flocking safely.
there are many examples of countries that have been able to leapfrog certain steps in development. Case in point: most 3rd world countries skipped over desktop computing, straight into mobile. Maybe self driving cars will somehow take over the world exponentially like smartphones have, and developing countries skip over human policing of traffic into a majority self-drive reality.
175 people make six figures in base pay. The total cost of employment is ridiculously high. I don't know anything about BART but they clearly need to lay off a lot of people. This is ridiculous.
It seems that the most "developed" areas in combination with predictable weather gets roll-out first. This means that non-western countries will get them later; or, depending on the situation, maybe never at all at 100% area coverage. I can totally imagine robotic car software parking right after a the highway intersection and subsequentially handing over driving to a human. Traffic in lesser developed countries may be too complex to ever have self driving cars to ride on.
It tells us that Waymo is nowhere close to "Level 5" or even to the levels Google and the latest cherry-picked "tests" (where they don't count "disengagements" as a problem) would like you to believe it is at.
Level 5 is supposed to be virtually perfect self-driving in any environment or on any type of road, for which we haven't even properly tested in simulations yet, let alone in the real-world.
I said it before, because of marketing and an incentive to be misleading about their capabilities, "Level 5" will be the "4G" wireless of 2011 (and by that I mean "3G+", in case it wasn't clear). That's actually held true since "Level 2" self-driving. For every level carmakers have been patting themselves on the back for reaching, they're at least one level behind in the real-world. They quickly discover this, too, after trying out their "Level X" cars in the real-world for a while, but they "forget" to tell us about it, after making the big announcement previously, or it doesn't get as much attention in the media.
So, I guess I'll wait for Level 6 or Level 7, before I get into one of these. Level 7 will probably be Level 6 cars that actually can't get hacked, unlike all the cars progressing through the previous levels. Carmakers won't even care that much about security and will only prioritize getting to adequate self-driving capabilities first and will "deal with security later", because we all know it's so much easier to fix security issues and redesign architectures later.
Meh... Insurance considerations practically guarantee you are statistically safer in one of these vs. a human operated vehicle, and that advantage will only multiply as the ratio of autonomous to human operated vehicles increases.
As a resident of a first-world country, it's not really my problem if India needs to wait a few decades or modernize their urban transport infrastructure to see the benefit of this technology. I haven't seen it in person, but the reputation is that Street-level activity in those environments is deadly and chaotic, regardless of whether you are a pedestrian, cyclist, or motorist.
Not exactly a situation worth preserving from anyone's perspective...
With ride sharing you can create a profitable business with level 4. The key is to get the revenue rolling to support the investment to get to level 5 some day down the road.
Pretty much. I underestimated how quickly we would see robot cars that drive in straight lines on smooth, well-marked, first-world roads, but I suspect it will be awhile before they venture far out of that context. The developing world's city traffic, and rural roads everywhere, are a bit more complicated, and there's less money out there, so I doubt the robots will be there anytime soon.
I have always imagined the reverse. Countries with less enforced regulations (even if they have them) are the perfect environment to test these things.
Would be awesome! I do fear that he political hurdles humanity would have to overcome for that route to be safe are larger than the technical ones, though.
I mean, Tesla has already announced / demoed an electric semi-truck that will probably be able to drive itself pretty soon, so I don't think that's much of a worry.
good luck going through all those places with different legislations on self driving cars without getting arrested a billion times, even twenty years from now, I'm sure
Yeah, if the RV is driving itself, say, 10 hours a day that's 500 miles. Call it $2/mile to operate--cars today are about 50 cents on average--that's $1,000/day. Maybe that's a bit high, call it $500/day.
You can live as a digital nomad today easily for that kind of money and aren't limited to being on the road or parked at RV parks. I'm not sure I see the attraction of being isolated and on the road all the time even if something else is doing the actual driving.
Once those exist why would the transport companies need you? Would probably make more sense for them to buy big fleets of self driving trucks to use at scale.
I think the idea was to not do delivery runs, but just use the cargo capacity to lug around a mobile office. Finish work every day, and go outside to a different city.
Yes and no. I guess I like the idea of the living space being separable from the vehicle. That way I could even try out different spaces by just swapping out the trailer. Could have a new living space built while I'm still using the old one.
Let’s say you’re wealthy enough to do this. Why can’t you do it today?
I imagine self driving trucks will be priced with the cost savings over decades of driverless service in mind. Couldn’t you get a mega-RV and hire a team of human drivers, retrofit the RV with a collision avoidance system like OnGuard, and live in the RV?
I’m sure it’d be expensive, but I imagine the wealth needed to do either in of the same order of magnitude. right?
Sometimes people talk about how worried they are about human consumption and sustainability and sometimes people talk about sticking their office on a truck, taking to congested roads and generating metric tons of CO2 for a daily change of scenery. We sure are a varied crowd.
> I imagine self driving trucks will be priced with the cost savings over decades of driverless service in mind.
That's certainly not what I would expect to happen in the long run in a competitive market.
For example -- in the early days of computing, I would believe you if you told me that computers had a high premium, reflecting the work savings computers offered. But these days computers are certainly not priced to reflect their cost savings. They're priced to reflect supply and demand.
Indeed, computers (or, say, cars) have become so ubiquitous that to talk about their marginal cost savings relative to the alternative is kind of meaningless. Imagine a world where self-driving cars are in the same category. I think it's coming, and soon.
What indication is there that they’re coming soon, or that commercial applications will be commoditized?
Commercial technology generally reflects cost savings to this day. Technology can run your assembly line at X units per day costs more if X is high, and even more if less people are involved in making X. It’s just technology got cheaper as a whole.
But I don’t think self-driving trucks will ever be that much cheaper since the computing power they use is on the same waning cost curve that brought us cheap computing today, and even if it does get exponentially cheap, the duty cycle of commercial applications will prevent savings from trickling down to commercial vehicles quickly (Just compare depreciation on normal cars vs big rigs).
All that being said, it’s intresting how quickly most people I see talk about this have gone from thinking about safety wins of self-driving cars to how much easier it will make driving. I think we’re headed for something ruinous if self-driving cars do come out and instead of solving the problem of excessive vehicles despite them, we all start thinking of fanciful new ways to constantly have more vehicles on the road.
What indication is there that [self-driving cars are] coming soon
Not to be glib, but TFA?
or that commercial applications will be commoditized?
There are many companies working on specifically this. I find it hard to imagine an uncompetitive market, but you're right, that could happen.
Commercial technology generally reflects cost savings to this day.
I guess I sort of agree with you, but the question is "cost savings as compared to what?"
Tractors aren't priced according to cost savings compared to oxen. The most someone can charge is the cost savings of their device compared to the next best alternative. So tractors are priced relative to the value they add as compared to other tractors.
We should expect something similar in a competitive market for self-driving trucks.
But I don’t think self-driving trucks will ever be that much cheaper since the computing power they use is on the same waning cost curve that brought us cheap computing today
If self-driving cars are commercially feasible in this way, surely self-driving trucks are, since one truck carries a lot more stuff (economically speaking) than one car.
Also transistor counts are still going up, see GPUs. And this sort of thing is amenable to ASICs. And we can already pack sufficient compute into a van. And the computers aren't even the most expensive part -- "laser is the sauce".
and even if it does get exponentially cheap, the duty cycle of commercial applications will prevent savings from trickling down to commercial vehicles quickly (Just compare depreciation on normal cars vs big rigs).
I don't understand your point here, but note that one important way that self-driving trucks deliver value is by dramatically increasing the duty cycle of the vehicles.
All that being said, it’s intresting how quickly most people I see talk about this have gone from thinking about safety wins of self-driving cars to how much easier it will make driving. I think we’re headed for something ruinous if self-driving cars do come out and instead of solving the problem of excessive vehicles despite them, we all start thinking of fanciful new ways to constantly have more vehicles on the road.
In the first your mobile home will need to support 1 person in the 2nd it will need to support multiple. Humans are not robots they also need to eat sleep go to the toilet
Again, I don’t think this changes the impracticality or waste by an order of magnitude.
It’s so impractical and so offensively wasteful, my analysis is really meant to be a tongue-in-cheek expression of the fact, but apparently we’re still seriously discusssing this...
Why use a big rig? Why not an RV? Or a van conversion on something like a Sprinter? The entire premise you're proposing seems very wasteful and morally irresponsible if you care about stuff like global warming and believe in physics, but why try to optimize waste? Seems shortsighted.
Big rig for the same reason that I think repurposed cargo containers can be cool. They're not really that practical, but I just like the idea of repurposing things.
Also, you might be interested in electric cars, that might address your concerns about global warming. Don't worry, we'll have electric big rigs before we have fully autonomous ones. Tesla has already unveiled one, in fact. Not sure what a "belief in physics" [sic] has to do with anything either, but live your best life buddy.
Big rigs and repurposed cargo containers don't make sense as a comparison. All production costs of cargo containers are a sunk and they don't generate any waste on their own. Vehicles do. It's not just impractical - it's wasteful. Apples and oranges.
Electric cars are still massively wasteful. You could make ~250 e-bikes batteries with the same amount of lithium it takes to make one Tesla Model S battery. Then there's efficiency. In general - an e-bike goes around 100 miles per kWh where as a Tesla goes around 3-4 miles per kWh. So you're talking about massive waste in terms of material and energy efficiency. An electric bike is around 6300x more efficient than a Model S. Most of the time people are just using their big ass cars/trucks to haul their big asses - it's unnecessary. Telsa's powerwalls also use lithium. Cobalt supplies are heavily bottlenecked now and for the foreseeable future. Just because Musk wants to market his company as a solution to global warming doesn't make it at all true but I guess his advertising was effective on you.
You suggesting that somehow utilizing an entire electric big rig for yourself seems even more preposterous though. Tesla's electric big rig has a battery somewhere around 1200 kWh putting it at ~14 times more wasteful in terms of production resources than a Model S (assuming we're just talking about transporting <5 people). So you're essentially talking about offsetting 13 of your world saving cars or 3600 electric bikes worth of batteries just to haul yourself around at around 0.5 miles per kWh (putting your around 5-6 times less efficient than if you drove a Model X with a trailer).
To the belief in physics point - there is more to pollution than just the gasses created. There is also heat pollution. Most electricity in America still comes from coal. Even though you're not burning anything while you're running the vehicle doesn't mean the energy you're using isn't coming from something being burnt. While Tesla might also be working on stuff like Solar City - it doesn't change the fact that his solution is grid tied - meaning the infrastructure has to be built by existing power companies to deal with the load which they have no inherent incentive to do. Not to mention every ~21 hours or 1260 miles of driving you'd be using enough energy to power my 3 story house for a year.
Also - common sense check - what's the point of a road trip if you're going to try to be in the trailer the whole time? If you're going to skip all the scenery and stops anyway, you might as well fly. And have you tried doing a road trip in a big rig? They're not legal on a lot of roads and they're a major pain to find parking for unless you really enjoy camping at rest stops.
To your condescension - don't worry, I am, and have fun playing with your "Big Rig". You're probably right about electric cars magically fixing global warming. Enjoy your magic kingdom, pal.
> Waymo has been running a pilot program that lets people hail rides in its cars, at first with safety engineers riding in the driver’s seat, but fully driverless since November 2017.
Perhaps a stupid question... Does that mean that when the service starts the car will be devoid of any human (except for the paying customer/customers)?
I think so, although apparently it's possible for Waymo to control the car remotely. Not sure if that means fully driving the car remotely, or just giving it higher level instructions.
Remote driver with xbox controller who controls a car every 1,000 miles.... one person per 1,000 cars? Or your idea of 1,000 drivers for 1,000 cars. Hm....
Well, that assumes that solving whatever problem can be handled by a remote driver with no situational awareness of what's going on can plug in 5 minutes later and deal with things.
That's not necessarily unreasonable for handling rare and non-urgent events but it's a lot different from having an alert backup driver. (Of course, if you need an alert backup driver, there's no benefit to autonomous systems once you get past the testing stage.)
How could it be cheaper to have a driver in each car instead someone watching 8 videos at once? They'll probably want cabin cams anyway so you wouldn't even save that expense.
This appears to go against Rodney Brooks' (former director of MIT's CSAIL, member of NAE, and a robotics expert) predictions, which was just published last month: https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/
"NET (No Earlier Than) 2022"
"First driverless "taxi" service in a major US city, with dedicated pick up and drop off points, and restrictions on weather and time of day."
"The pick up and drop off points will not be parking spots, but like bus stops they will be marked and restricted for that purpose only"
A possible resolution is in the case that he meant somewhere more ‘major’ than Phoenix, AZ (1.6 million population; 5th largest city in the US), but that is a bit hand-waving.
I have no expertise with self driving cars. I'm not even an engineer. But this is a case where a lot of experts might be wrong. I think there are many paths to a self-driving car, and an expert might only be familiar with their particular research. That is why there are so many vocal voices saying it can't be done. But these voices only know what doesn't work--they don't know what does work
Oh, Rodney Brooks is hardly "some guy". His wikipedia page is a start, but you can find more information on him in AI - A Modern Approach (the standard AI introductory course textbook).
"My milestone predictions below are not about demonstrations, but about viable sustainable businesses. Without them the deployment of driverless cars will never really take off."
In particular, he's predicting when a company does this profitably, not at a loss as part of research.
(Btw, thanks for linking - that prediction list was a great read.)
That's just a deliberate business model decision though. If all the ridesharing services decided tomorrow to double their prices and downsize in line with reduced ride volume, they could probably turn a profit fairly quickly, albeit on lower revenues and (probably more relevantly) sharply reduced valuations. People will still use them even if they cost as much or more than taxis. They just wouldn't use them as much.
Two years before their first flight, Wilbur Wright confided to Orville that man would not fly for 50 years.
It took until two years before the first atomic bomb for Enrico Fermi to be convinced that one could be built at all.
Even the foremost experts in a field have a terrible prognostication record, because their predictions are necessarily based on what they do and do not know how to do at the moment.
Within a year or two, a breakthrough could be made by someone else—or by they themselves!—that changes everything.
Yep. Was also predicted a computer would not beat top Go player until 2026. Love seeing some of these coming in sooner now. For decades it was the other way.
I live in Phoenix and applied to their beta program. Haven't heard a word since but I've seen a few passengers riding in them. My guess is that they're hand picking people with compelling stories for marketing reasons.
I live in Phoenix and applied to their beta program. Haven't heard a word since but I've seen a few passengers riding in them. My guess is that they're hand picking people with compelling stories for marketing reasons.
Gotta say though...it's quite amazing to see 5-10 SDCs/day.
Yeah in Phoenix/Tempe/Chandler I see them all the time, multiple companies here with Waymo being the most seen and having the actual self-driving ones.
Arizona/Phoenix metro is a great place for self-driving because the relatively flat, square mile based road grid and the fact that we have both lots of college students and older people that live here that need it. Most of the self-driving ones are in and around ASU.
When both college kids and seniors are testing these out, it will also be good for word of mouth, for the older crowd especially which will be a big consumer of self-driving transportation.
Since so much SDC data is being collected in Arizona, it is great for being early as a robust product for Arizona. Colder areas with more complex roads, obstructions and traffic may take much longer.
I think I've read a about a dozen announcements like that stating that they are going to start having the cars drive without safety drivers, but all the videos I saw on Youtube still have safety drivers, that's why I asked.
If Waymo launches the service this year according to plan, how that will affect the upcoming Uber IPO in 2019 will be interesting to see.
It obviously depends on whether Uber has a similar service ready or imminent before their IPO. They have great AI and robotics people recruited from top places. However, such a feat takes time.
80 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadMaybe even all over Europe!
Why limit it to US And Europe. The world might soon be a better place. Imagine Starting out in Berlin Then over a couple of months go to Turkey, then India, Vietnam and beyond and then back without ever driving a single km. Just let it drive while you sleep.
If you zoom out, you'll see that there's a method to the madness but a lone driving car that's not a part of a fleet doesn't have such luxuries.
I don't think the problem is solely image processing and machine learning. I just don't get self driving and how we're supposed to wow the logic. You have to be aggressive to drive in a city or people will constantly cut you off for hours. This means you will hold up traffic making the situation worse for everyone. However, you can't be too aggressive. Imagine the damage we will cause to the "optics" of self driving if we run over (at a slow 10 mph) stubborn people who cut us off. That will just look like murder.
A self driving car can have much better "perception" of the surrounding area and reaction times under 100ms, making it potentially very good at flocking safely.
Consider that in US the cheapest ZipCar is ~$8/hr.
Adding even the cheapest human driver working at minimum wage is ~$15/hr.
Adding a human driver in US makes the trip 3x more expensive.
Or to put it another way: a self-driving trip can be 3x less expensive.
Or to put it another way: a $30 trip from SF downtown to airport becomes $10 trip which is competitive with BART prices.
I don't know what is the minimum wage in India, but per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_India per capita income is $1670 / year which is probably less than $1 per hour.
In other words: self-driving cars only make economic sense in countries where humans are expensive.
I looked up BART because of what you said and it looks pretty bad.
https://github.com/enjalot/bart/blob/master/data/bart-comp-a...
175 people make six figures in base pay. The total cost of employment is ridiculously high. I don't know anything about BART but they clearly need to lay off a lot of people. This is ridiculous.
It tells us that Waymo is nowhere close to "Level 5" or even to the levels Google and the latest cherry-picked "tests" (where they don't count "disengagements" as a problem) would like you to believe it is at.
Level 5 is supposed to be virtually perfect self-driving in any environment or on any type of road, for which we haven't even properly tested in simulations yet, let alone in the real-world.
I said it before, because of marketing and an incentive to be misleading about their capabilities, "Level 5" will be the "4G" wireless of 2011 (and by that I mean "3G+", in case it wasn't clear). That's actually held true since "Level 2" self-driving. For every level carmakers have been patting themselves on the back for reaching, they're at least one level behind in the real-world. They quickly discover this, too, after trying out their "Level X" cars in the real-world for a while, but they "forget" to tell us about it, after making the big announcement previously, or it doesn't get as much attention in the media.
So, I guess I'll wait for Level 6 or Level 7, before I get into one of these. Level 7 will probably be Level 6 cars that actually can't get hacked, unlike all the cars progressing through the previous levels. Carmakers won't even care that much about security and will only prioritize getting to adequate self-driving capabilities first and will "deal with security later", because we all know it's so much easier to fix security issues and redesign architectures later.
As a resident of a first-world country, it's not really my problem if India needs to wait a few decades or modernize their urban transport infrastructure to see the benefit of this technology. I haven't seen it in person, but the reputation is that Street-level activity in those environments is deadly and chaotic, regardless of whether you are a pedestrian, cyclist, or motorist.
Not exactly a situation worth preserving from anyone's perspective...
Larry's goal was to be safer than human on at least a limited number of paths, and was very patient with it.
You can live as a digital nomad today easily for that kind of money and aren't limited to being on the road or parked at RV parks. I'm not sure I see the attraction of being isolated and on the road all the time even if something else is doing the actual driving.
Either way, the self-driving aspect is the most important bit.
I also thought about doing this with a blimp, but the logistics are a lot harder with that route.
I imagine self driving trucks will be priced with the cost savings over decades of driverless service in mind. Couldn’t you get a mega-RV and hire a team of human drivers, retrofit the RV with a collision avoidance system like OnGuard, and live in the RV?
I’m sure it’d be expensive, but I imagine the wealth needed to do either in of the same order of magnitude. right?
Sometimes people talk about how worried they are about human consumption and sustainability and sometimes people talk about sticking their office on a truck, taking to congested roads and generating metric tons of CO2 for a daily change of scenery. We sure are a varied crowd.
That's certainly not what I would expect to happen in the long run in a competitive market.
For example -- in the early days of computing, I would believe you if you told me that computers had a high premium, reflecting the work savings computers offered. But these days computers are certainly not priced to reflect their cost savings. They're priced to reflect supply and demand.
Indeed, computers (or, say, cars) have become so ubiquitous that to talk about their marginal cost savings relative to the alternative is kind of meaningless. Imagine a world where self-driving cars are in the same category. I think it's coming, and soon.
Commercial technology generally reflects cost savings to this day. Technology can run your assembly line at X units per day costs more if X is high, and even more if less people are involved in making X. It’s just technology got cheaper as a whole.
But I don’t think self-driving trucks will ever be that much cheaper since the computing power they use is on the same waning cost curve that brought us cheap computing today, and even if it does get exponentially cheap, the duty cycle of commercial applications will prevent savings from trickling down to commercial vehicles quickly (Just compare depreciation on normal cars vs big rigs).
All that being said, it’s intresting how quickly most people I see talk about this have gone from thinking about safety wins of self-driving cars to how much easier it will make driving. I think we’re headed for something ruinous if self-driving cars do come out and instead of solving the problem of excessive vehicles despite them, we all start thinking of fanciful new ways to constantly have more vehicles on the road.
Not to be glib, but TFA?
or that commercial applications will be commoditized?
There are many companies working on specifically this. I find it hard to imagine an uncompetitive market, but you're right, that could happen.
Commercial technology generally reflects cost savings to this day.
I guess I sort of agree with you, but the question is "cost savings as compared to what?"
Tractors aren't priced according to cost savings compared to oxen. The most someone can charge is the cost savings of their device compared to the next best alternative. So tractors are priced relative to the value they add as compared to other tractors.
We should expect something similar in a competitive market for self-driving trucks.
But I don’t think self-driving trucks will ever be that much cheaper since the computing power they use is on the same waning cost curve that brought us cheap computing today
If self-driving cars are commercially feasible in this way, surely self-driving trucks are, since one truck carries a lot more stuff (economically speaking) than one car.
Also transistor counts are still going up, see GPUs. And this sort of thing is amenable to ASICs. And we can already pack sufficient compute into a van. And the computers aren't even the most expensive part -- "laser is the sauce".
and even if it does get exponentially cheap, the duty cycle of commercial applications will prevent savings from trickling down to commercial vehicles quickly (Just compare depreciation on normal cars vs big rigs).
I don't understand your point here, but note that one important way that self-driving trucks deliver value is by dramatically increasing the duty cycle of the vehicles.
All that being said, it’s intresting how quickly most people I see talk about this have gone from thinking about safety wins of self-driving cars to how much easier it will make driving. I think we’re headed for something ruinous if self-driving cars do come out and instead of solving the problem of excessive vehicles despite them, we all start thinking of fanciful new ways to constantly have more vehicles on the road.
Strong agree on this part.
It's priced at under $200k. That's definitely cheaper than paying multiple people to drive me around 24/7.
It’s so impractical and so offensively wasteful, my analysis is really meant to be a tongue-in-cheek expression of the fact, but apparently we’re still seriously discusssing this...
Also how is it impractical?
At this point I’m going to assume you’re either trolling or just severely out of touch with reality.
I'm very confused by your responses.
Also, you might be interested in electric cars, that might address your concerns about global warming. Don't worry, we'll have electric big rigs before we have fully autonomous ones. Tesla has already unveiled one, in fact. Not sure what a "belief in physics" [sic] has to do with anything either, but live your best life buddy.
Electric cars are still massively wasteful. You could make ~250 e-bikes batteries with the same amount of lithium it takes to make one Tesla Model S battery. Then there's efficiency. In general - an e-bike goes around 100 miles per kWh where as a Tesla goes around 3-4 miles per kWh. So you're talking about massive waste in terms of material and energy efficiency. An electric bike is around 6300x more efficient than a Model S. Most of the time people are just using their big ass cars/trucks to haul their big asses - it's unnecessary. Telsa's powerwalls also use lithium. Cobalt supplies are heavily bottlenecked now and for the foreseeable future. Just because Musk wants to market his company as a solution to global warming doesn't make it at all true but I guess his advertising was effective on you.
You suggesting that somehow utilizing an entire electric big rig for yourself seems even more preposterous though. Tesla's electric big rig has a battery somewhere around 1200 kWh putting it at ~14 times more wasteful in terms of production resources than a Model S (assuming we're just talking about transporting <5 people). So you're essentially talking about offsetting 13 of your world saving cars or 3600 electric bikes worth of batteries just to haul yourself around at around 0.5 miles per kWh (putting your around 5-6 times less efficient than if you drove a Model X with a trailer).
To the belief in physics point - there is more to pollution than just the gasses created. There is also heat pollution. Most electricity in America still comes from coal. Even though you're not burning anything while you're running the vehicle doesn't mean the energy you're using isn't coming from something being burnt. While Tesla might also be working on stuff like Solar City - it doesn't change the fact that his solution is grid tied - meaning the infrastructure has to be built by existing power companies to deal with the load which they have no inherent incentive to do. Not to mention every ~21 hours or 1260 miles of driving you'd be using enough energy to power my 3 story house for a year.
Also - common sense check - what's the point of a road trip if you're going to try to be in the trailer the whole time? If you're going to skip all the scenery and stops anyway, you might as well fly. And have you tried doing a road trip in a big rig? They're not legal on a lot of roads and they're a major pain to find parking for unless you really enjoy camping at rest stops.
To your condescension - don't worry, I am, and have fun playing with your "Big Rig". You're probably right about electric cars magically fixing global warming. Enjoy your magic kingdom, pal.
Perhaps a stupid question... Does that mean that when the service starts the car will be devoid of any human (except for the paying customer/customers)?
Remote driver with xbox controller who controls a car every 1,000 miles.... one person per 1,000 cars? Or your idea of 1,000 drivers for 1,000 cars. Hm....
That's not necessarily unreasonable for handling rare and non-urgent events but it's a lot different from having an alert backup driver. (Of course, if you need an alert backup driver, there's no benefit to autonomous systems once you get past the testing stage.)
"NET (No Earlier Than) 2022"
"First driverless "taxi" service in a major US city, with dedicated pick up and drop off points, and restrictions on weather and time of day."
"The pick up and drop off points will not be parking spots, but like bus stops they will be marked and restricted for that purpose only"
A possible resolution is in the case that he meant somewhere more ‘major’ than Phoenix, AZ (1.6 million population; 5th largest city in the US), but that is a bit hand-waving.
Any insight or comment for this?
"My milestone predictions below are not about demonstrations, but about viable sustainable businesses. Without them the deployment of driverless cars will never really take off."
In particular, he's predicting when a company does this profitably, not at a loss as part of research.
(Btw, thanks for linking - that prediction list was a great read.)
It took until two years before the first atomic bomb for Enrico Fermi to be convinced that one could be built at all.
Even the foremost experts in a field have a terrible prognostication record, because their predictions are necessarily based on what they do and do not know how to do at the moment.
Within a year or two, a breakthrough could be made by someone else—or by they themselves!—that changes everything.
Gotta say though...it's quite amazing to see 5-10 SDCs/day.
Arizona/Phoenix metro is a great place for self-driving because the relatively flat, square mile based road grid and the fact that we have both lots of college students and older people that live here that need it. Most of the self-driving ones are in and around ASU.
When both college kids and seniors are testing these out, it will also be good for word of mouth, for the older crowd especially which will be a big consumer of self-driving transportation.
Since so much SDC data is being collected in Arizona, it is great for being early as a robust product for Arizona. Colder areas with more complex roads, obstructions and traffic may take much longer.
https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-google-arizona-phoenix-dri... Waymo Finally Takes the Driver Out of Its Self-Driving Cars | WIRED
It obviously depends on whether Uber has a similar service ready or imminent before their IPO. They have great AI and robotics people recruited from top places. However, such a feat takes time.
They basically hired away Carnegie Mellon's entire SDC research team.