I like the simplifying-the-problem approach a lot! Roads in the US/California are so good that I can see it happen, and with clear labelling this could totally "ship" in a few years (i.e. remove the safety driver).
The next step would be 1h-out-of-town commuters + close-suburbia to specific dropoff points in downtown or wherever jobs tend to be. Again, stay on big roads that have good signalling, and keep the bright colors so other drivers will know to stay out of your way in the carpool lane.
It's basically what the big tech companies in the Valley are doing with their commuting busses, but smaller and for everyone. The min-busses with flexible routes are a common mode of transportation in certain Eastern European countries, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka
They are. But that makes me wonder why we don't already see a lot of this type of thing in the US. My instinct would be the cost of a minimum wage-ish driver isn't the difference between this mode of transportation working and it not. Of course, it does exist in a sense with Lyft Line and Uber Pool although those don't get a lot of attention.
"Vast majority" may have been too strong, but I stand behind "majority". The two programs on that Wiki page that actually have links are for disabled passengers only. Looking at the three systems that have covered areas I have lived, Broward County Transit and New Jersey Transit offer DRT only to those with disabilities, and Dallas Area Rapid Transit has very limited DRT service for non-disabled customers.
> The one here is open to anyone and even sometimes runs a loop for a local taproom.
If it is running a loop it isn't DRT, it's a jitney.
ridewithvia.com is a recent startup, doing "demand responsive transportation", for regular people, very successfully - multiple us cities, and various (new) global partnerships.
IMHO this is how self driving applications should start. Driving on the US freeways (say between LA and SF) isn't about your driving skills. It's mostly just about trying not to fall asleep. And machines are way better than humans at this!
Even outside the US, there are many areas (like UAE), which have amazing highways, sparse traffic and there isn't rail/air connectivity to some places. Self driving "shuttles" seem perfect for those applications.
In general, highways seem like a pretty logical starting point. There are some potential complications like car accidents and debris but they seem far more tractable than random pedestrians, cyclists, and all the complex driving behavior on city streets resulting from traffic lights, trucks stopped to make deliveries, etc. etc.
It doesn't enable end-to-end autonomous taxis, so you need a sober, licensed driver in the driver's seat even if they don't need to be able to take over on a second's notice.
Handling long distance highway driving would actually be a big win. It just doesn't stir imaginations the same way that completely eliminating a driver door-to-door does--especially among people who really want to get out of car ownership and driving entirely.
> especially among people who really want to get out of car ownership
I have brought this up before and I still do not understand how or why this idea is so tightly coupled to fully autonomous vehicles. I don't see how removing a human driver from a car service is going to change the dynamics enough to drive legions of people who own cars to get rid of them if they haven't done so already. The only friction a human driver adds right now is cost, but I don't see the cost savings of removing the driver being high enough to move the needle.
Self-driving people talk about this because, even if the tech worked, the costs of the hardware involved is currently so prohibitively high (~$100,000s per car) that a taxi model is the only one that makes sense.
In which case the capital costs of the vehicle will wipe out a good chunk of the cost savings from removing a human. Therefore, there will be no mass shift away from car ownership.
A $300k robotaxi could still undercut conventional taxi/rideshare, but the costs will have to come down considerably before they challenge the economics of personal vehicle ownership.
The comment beside you says that a car has a useful lifespan of 200,000 miles, or 50¢ per mile for the tech. The internet suggests the average highway speed in the US is 70mph. That suggests that it will cost $35/hr. for the autonomy and probably that much again for the car itself.
At $70/hr., I expect people will still opt to own their own vehicle.
Certainly not, and in many cases it may even cost more than that to drive your own car. But the car comes with a huge advantage that taxis have fallen short on:
The cost is upfront. People sit down and budget $x for transportation and then they know that amount of money will get them anywhere they want to go. People hate having to decide in the moment whether they want to spend the money or not. I notice a similar phenomena when it comes to mobile phone service. People would rather pay extra for a plan that provides more than they could ever need than to have a lesser plan and pay overages when needed because the overages require thinking about it in the moment, rather than pre-planning how much they want to budget. $70/hr. isn't even going to have anyone thinking twice about changing their behaviour completely.
Maybe robs-taxi services will pioneer a pay ahead of time service that captures the necessary mindshare that will make ownership obsolete, but that won't have anything to do with the technology. There is nothing stopping a taxi service from doing that today with human drivers. It's just a tough business model to work with when providing services, so it is uncommon.
There seems to be an implicit assumption that autonomous driving would somehow make the cost of effectively renting cars by the mile (and have them come to your door) almost too cheap to meter. Whereas, especially for transportation options that involve multiple people in a vehicle, the cost of a driver isn't really all that much relative to the overall cost of operating a vehicle.
For any imagined scenario involving autonomous vehicles ushering in new modes of sharing, renting, etc., a useful question to ask is: "Why don't we have this today?" And, if the answer is anything other than "$10/hour for a human driver makes it too costly," then you should probably reconsider.
For renting cars there is a big advantage. You may notice that different drop offs have different fees associated. This is because people tend to collect around certain areas. This creates the need for company drivers to redistribute the cars. Being able to do that dynamically and automatically has a huge advantage. It also allows you to make the rental locations more sparse and efficiently packed.
So yes, it does lessen the cost of renting cars. But it doesn't make it anywhere near too cheap to meter.
> Whereas, especially for transportation options that involve multiple people in a vehicle, the cost of a driver isn't really all that much relative to the overall cost of operating a vehicle.
Do you have a source on this? It’s my understanding that most mass transit systems in the US spend a huge amount on operator compensation. BART, the one I’m most familiar with, spends $500m of its $691m operating budget on salary and benefits [0] despite the fact that BART trains already drive themselves!
First off, you cannot ignore the $876mm capital portion of the budget; that money needs to come from somewhere.
Second, that $500mm covers every employee of BART. The administrators, maintenance personnel, police, and other non-operator functions do not go away. Without knowing what portion of that line item goes to operators one cannot make a judgement on how much cheaper the system would be without them.
Of course you're right; my comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek. Actual train operator salaries probably cost BART about $50m annually, not $500m. In both the cases of BART and private cars, the money to pay for tracks or roads comes from taxpayers. The trains themselves are now 40+ years old, and are finally being replaced at a cost of ~$300m this year. Grandparent post specifically talked about operating costs though.
All that said, trains are basically the most efficient mode of transport from a (number of drivers) / (number of passengers) perspective.
But speaking seriously for a moment:
- Lyft charges riders about $2/mile in the Bay Area [0] before fees.
- The IRS lets you depreciate your vehicle at a rate of $0.545/mile.
- A reasonably efficient car burns ~40 mpg on freeway, at $3.50/gallon that's ~$0.09/mile.
So, of the $2/mile the riders pay, about 1/3 of that is costs associated with purchasing and operating the vehicle (according to IRS estimates) and fuel.
If we eliminate the rest via autonomous driving, and taxis became 65% cheaper, I suspect many people would make much more use of them.
Utilization rates are 50-58% for Uber or Lyft. When you take it into account that a taxi is not en route 100% of the time, and add the cost (interest, depreciation) of a much more expensive vehicle, I think your 65% savings go up in smoke.
Sorry, I'm not smart enough for this comment to stick with me. Could you walk me through how 50% utilization means the savings go up in smoke?
The most compelling thing I can pull from your comment is "autonomous cars will be 3x as expensive as regular cars (at least), so you won't save anything". That may be short-term true, but is almost certainly long-term false.
A 50% utilization compared with 100% utilization makes almost no difference in vehicle cost structure -- if anything, it actually increases the labor fraction of taxi cost.
If you're driving your car 50% of the time, then wear and milage is the dominant depreciation factor (rather than age). But a human sitting around doing nothing but waiting for that 50% of the time doubles the labor (time) cost of the service, suggesting an even greater savings from eliminating the human driver.
I was assuming humans and self-driving cars both get revenue from riders, but don't get paid in between. And I'm interpreting utilization as the percentage of the time that riders are paying.
If the technology becomes commoditized, the cost reduction would be massive. A $30000 vehicle can drive 200K miles for the price of fuel and occasional cleaning. That's in the 30 - 50 cent/mile area, almost a full order of magnitude. Insurance premiums will depend on how safe they are - so they will be very low if self driving cars are to be allowed in any way on the road.
> A $30000 vehicle can drive 200K miles for the price of fuel and occasional cleaning.
That is significantly underestimating the operating costs of a vehicle, especially a vehicle that is used heavily. There is a lot of periodic maintenance required, and the frequency increases as usage gets more stressful. Then there is non-periodic maintenance, be it from accidents, vandalism, or just flawed parts.
It's true that most of these costs come in even if you own, but putting 200k miles on a car over eight years costs less (both per-mile and per-unit-time) than putting 200k on in two years.
> putting 200k miles on a car over eight years costs less (both per-mile and per-unit-time) than putting 200k on in two years
The per mile part sounds like a personal speculation. (Per unit of time is obvious and irrelevant here)
Quite the contrary, it's most efficient to put the load in a short span to minimize time-limited consumables like belts and seals, fixed costs like insurance and regulatory charges per vehicle, interest, depreciation of things like paint and esthetic appeal etc. The battery has an age induced wear also, the tech is moving fast and more efficient vehicles are always appearing and so on.
The IRS allows a 50 something cents per mile business expense deduction. And if you run some numbers that’s a pretty good ballpark for the cost of operating a car.
Considering that's more than a cab costs in some European countries, driver included, I would say we aren't talking about commodity tech, but a highly profitable initial phase.
The more "mass" the transit the harder it is for the vehicle to go exactly where all the people on it want to go. Subway, maybe walk a 1/2 mile, bus somewhat less but lots of stops, individual road transport, very close.
An auto-car just sitting costs almost nothing per hour (capital cost, but very little other cost), so you can have lots of them everywhere. Pickup time can be very short. I almost never used taxis in my town because of long and unreliable pickup times. Use uber all the time now. I still own a car, but if I did not have off street parking like many in my neighborhood, getting rid of it would be a no-brainer.
auto-vehicle? I'll try to use that. A much better word especially since car=always bad for some people.
Bicycle parking is also a problem in many areas that have a high density of bicycle users. See Amsterdam train stations or apartment buildings where you have to store your bike in your 600sqft apartment.
Walking is really the best although these new electric skateboards seems to be almost totally portable and storable.
> An auto-car just sitting costs almost nothing per hour (capital cost, but very little other cost)
I'm not sure it's fair to dismiss capital cost parenthetically as part of "almost nothing". Maybe if the auto-cars were retrofitted 10-15 year old vehicles and the retrofitting cost a fraction of the vehicle's value, I'd agree. However, if they're all brand new (and even electric, where the TCO is weighted toward capital and away from operating costs), I say it's far from almost nothing.
Additionally, you go on to point out:
> if I did not have off street parking like many in my neighborhood, getting rid of it would be a no-brainer.
Therein lies a cost of "just sitting" that is routinely brought up in any car vs public transit (or other alternatives like bicycles or walkable designs) conversation.
The denser the area, the higher the cost. I suspect that if you did not have off street parking due to density, the parking portion of the "just sitting there" cost included in the pricing of the auto-car would make it no longer a no-brainer.
Where auto-cars could at least gain some space efficiency is in being able to park bumper-to-bumper and with minimum side clearance, since there would be no need for a human to enter or exit while it's in storage.
Auto cars can also drive away from expensive parking when not in use. Lots of Uber drivers live in Sacramento but work in SF 80 miles away.
Maybe if interest rates go up capital costs will be an issue, but using a 100k car paying 4% interest is $4000 a year or about $0.50 per hour. When not moving there is basically no wear and tear or fuel costs. Almost nothing compared to paying a driver.
> Auto cars can also drive away from expensive parking when not in use.
Driving away is, of course, not standing still. That increases the cost, but, perhaps more importantly, increased latency (or, rather, jitter).
They need not be stored in the most expensive, densest areas, but, for those who want to get rid of car ownership, that non-zero cost (especially if borne by the public with free on-street parking) isn't likely one they're willing to ignore.
> about $0.50 per hour.
A car sitting idle for 9 hours per day and averages 30mph while driving adds 1 cent per mile. A car sitting idle for 18 hours adds 5 cents per mile.
The former may be almost nothing, but the latter isn't.
Depreciation and utilization rates need to be incorporated.
If interest + depreciation is about $9K/yr, that's $25 a day, which means if you drive 8 hrs a day and have a 58% utilization rate, is $5.38/hr which is not all that far from what Uber drivers net. At 30 mph, it's 18 cents added per mile.
A self-driving car could perhaps operate more than 8 hours a day, but that doesn't mean that customers will be equally available at all hours.
I strongly suspect that when you do a proper analysis, self-driving cars are just competitive and not hugely cheaper.
> Depreciation and utilization rates need to be incorporated.
That's tough to do, since we don't know either one. I suspect there's also a (perhaps incorrect) assumption that an unused auto-car will be "just sitting there" rather than moving, in which case utilization is, effectively, 100%.
That's not possible with a human driver in at least the case of a long one-way trip. However, with auto-cars, this could end up merely increasing the capital cost at the expense of unpaid/empty trip cost.
The extra cost is something I mentioned in my latency/jitter comment, wrt cheaper parking.
> $5.38/hr which is not all that far from what Uber drivers net
I didn't check your arithmetic, but, if so, it's is quite far from the fair/livable wage of $15/hr that at least I've been assuming for this conversation.
The fact that rideshare services are currently, effectively, paying much less is certainly an indication that even that may not be enough to lure people away from ownership.
Utilization rate means percentage of time that is billed to a customer, I believe/presume. Whether a car is moving is not the same thing. The issue is whether it is on the clock or not, and given that computers already are used to match passengers and route cars, I'm not clear on why we would expect a drastic increase. Currently, we see 50-60%. Even a perfect routing algorithm can't make it 100%, because there are only so many customers, so things like how many cars there are per customer matter. If you reduce the cars per customer, service suffers. If you increase the number, utilization falls.
> given that computers already are used to match passengers and route cars, I'm not clear on why we would expect a drastic increase
It depends on what the denominator is.
If it's only the time between when a driver/auto-car "accepts" the ride and the end of the ride, there's little reason [1] to expect a drastic increase.
However, if the denominator is the total time the driver is "on duty", which is, I believe, what is generally used to calculate rideshare drivers' effective hourly compensation, then my original point stands. That is, an auto-car can be "on duty" even while just sitting in storage.
The current algorithm also doesn't tell rideshare drivers where to be while on duty, only routing them once a ride is requested. In the auto-car scenario, the computer has complete control, so a predictive algorithm could increase utilization, even if the denominator is time-in-motion.
Whether any increase would be drastic is debatable, but there's opportunity for something.
[1] Currently, the computer routing algorithm has an incentive to optimize for time at the expense of distance (since it's the driver who bears the expense of the unbilled distance, AFAIK). In the case of an auto-car, that perverse incentive would be absent, but I don't expect the difference to be huge.
"That is, an auto-car can be "on duty" even while just sitting in storage."
If you consider the robot to "work" for more hours than a human, that's great, but due to the lower average revenue, it needs to be cheaper in order to be competitive with humans. There's no way to move your self-driving car to the opposite side of the world for the night.
"Whether any increase would be drastic is debatable, but there's opportunity for something."
If self-driving cars are cheaper, it seems like that would lead to more of them driving longer hours than humans, which would lower the utilization rather than increase it.
> due to the lower average revenue, it needs to be cheaper
It's unclear to me, but this may be tautological, or at least reversible (by being cheaper to be competitive, it reduces revenue). Perhaps I'm missing your point?
> There's no way to move your self-driving car to the opposite side of the world for the night.
Ah, but that's moot. Unlike with a human driver, an auto-car doesn't need to be moved to the opposite side of the world (or an approximation, like Sacramento from SF) for the night.
> If self-driving cars are cheaper, it seems like that would lead to more of them driving longer hours than humans, which would lower the utilization rather than increase it.
You're still confusing "driving" (in motion) with "on duty".
Also, even if an auto-car is cheaper while driving, that doesn't matter if the different parties are bearing the cost of off-meter driving. In the auto-car case, it's the vendor (e.g. Uber), so there's a strong incentive to maximize utilization. In the human case, it's the driver, so the vendor has no such incentive (nor even the ability during "on duty" but not driving-for-that-vendor times).
This is certainly more cautious, but it's not clear that this is any more realistic than Waymo's plan which involves limiting vehicles to a predefine area, mapping in great detail, etc.
It's clearly more realistic. They don't have to deal with roadworks, they have preset pickup points (no need to figure out finding a safe space to stop), they are relying on other drivers being cautious around a bright orange vehicle rather than trying to act like a real car, they have explicit screens for communication with pedestrians rather than trying to do it implicitly like we would (I.e. slow down to let a car out vs having a screen say "after you" or whatever).
Have they significantly reduced the challenge though? I don't think the core task of driving is significantly easier than these problems that they have elided.
I know it is a bit of a fallacy to say "we can fly to the moon, so we should be able to have a self-driving car", but it's also not clear that the tools we have (ML, simulators, planning algorithms, etc) are not up to the tasks that have Drive.ai have engineered around.
It's a reasonable strategy to elide things you can and focus on the "core" hard task, but if solving these other difficult problems is also meaningful product-wise (and it clearly is meaningful), there's no reason you can't have people working on both. And given Waymo seems to be gearing up for a large launch, I have a hard time believing that these additional tasks are as hard as Drive.ai want to make out.
Going a bit controversial here but will self-driving cars be disrupted before they even take off. The big factor that I feel will impact how autonomous travel will evolve in the future is drone taxies/cars. Providing there is a change in the regulation to support self-driving flying cars/drones, the big advantage is that there would be no existing rules created for human driving (road signs, traffic lights...) to adhere to. A centralized system could calculate the best route to fly someone from A to B without the complexities that self-driving cars have to solve. And flying would clearly be much faster as well. Dubai, for example, is already testing, what comes after will be interesting.
agree but it would have to be regulated with virtual/dedicated road lines relatively high up to prevent noise/light blocking issues. if centrally managed, the issues you describe could be minimized.
Given that we are probably heading into an economy where energy will get more and more expensive (at least temporarily, due to a potential oil crunch coming), not sure how flying will be an economical way of transport.
They've been talking about peak oil since the late 1950s, and just about every single prediction about it has been wrong. I got caught up in the hype about it 5-10 years ago, and it took a while before I realized it was mostly a garden variety doomsday cult. [Yes there is such a thing as peak oil, and we may have even already hit it, but it's not going to destroy civilization as some have loudly declared.]
Gasoline consumption is not going up the way it used to, and there apparently is a whole lot more oil than a lot of people thought-- I'm guessing due to a combination of countries not providing correct numbers (it's a national security issue after all), new oilfield discoveries and new extraction techniques. Add in more efficient vehicles and alternative energy sources, and you quickly realize the worst that's going to happen is some gradually increased prices for products & services most closely tied to the current cost of fuel.
electric would be the way it goes and you could argue that flying drones flying at a constant speed could be more economical than a self-driving car limited by the current road infrastructure.
At least with current technology, electric makes the energy consumption problem worse rather than better, on account of the poor energy density compared to combustible fuel. The difference is manageable with cars, but with aircraft, where you have to take all that extra weight and pull it up in addition to moving it around, things get to be pretty stark.
Disrupted yes but by tunnels. Tunnels will be vastly better than flying cars. Much faster, electric powered, and safer. City centers will be more more pleasant and quiet when surface traffic is all pedestrian.
The manufacturing learning curve has been the path to lower costs through mass production and tunnels will be no exception.
“Without tunnels we’ll be in traffic hell forever” -Elon Musk
I was thinking of a system where you drive your car into/onto a single-vehicle pod/cart which you then drive off at the station near your destination. I thought that was the boring company's design; perhaps it was another company I was thinking of...
Tunnels will initially be shared pods[1]. Much better than existing subways because of higher speed, door to door travel[2], and closer stations (they'll be much cheaper). You could pay extra for a private pod to minimize transit time.
You'd only want to bring a surface car for trips with rural or suburban legs on BOTH ends. Which seems relatively rare.
Building a vehicle that can handle a busy street, with cyclists, pedestrians, roadworks and emergency vehicles, is a tall order.
You can try to simplify the problem by limiting your routes to major highways and making the vehicle ultra-visible so other drivers give you a wide berth.
But at some point there will be construction, or a car wreck, or debris in the roadway. Eventually you'll need to exit the highway and drive on city streets.
Even if you manage to reduce the hard stuff to 1 mile out of 200, you still need to deal with it.
If you can't handle everything, you're not safe to be on the road.
I agree with you that even limiting the operational environment that these things work in doesn't reduce the number of situations it needs to be able to handle by that much.
But I wouldn't be too quick to interpret a single sentence from a piece of short-form popular journalism as a precise specification of what their cars are and are not designed to handle.
>Even if you manage to reduce the hard stuff to 1 mile out of 200, you still need to deal with it.
I think the minimum required to deal with it is to have the car pull over when it identifies a situation it can't handle. Even an onramp to exit car that pulls over if it sees construction will be extremely valuable to anyone routinely doing highway driving.
What I want is a self-driving golf cart that can take my mother to the doctor and back. It doesn't have to go fast.
I make this point every time I can: kinetic energy is the killer and it goes up with the square of velocity. Half-speed is quarter-deadly.
A golf cart-like machine, limited to a maximum speed not much faster than walking, light-weight, and festooned inside and out with airbags (and other anti-collision/-injury stuff), could be built today, I think it would work just fine, and I bet you could sell a lot of them. ("Baby Boomers" he says under his breath...)
Trying to go straight to robot cars is hubris, it's biting off more than you can chew and then trying to talk past the food in your mouth.
I have had the same thought, and I have sometimes wondered if this approach has not been widely pursued because it is potentially too disruptive a technology - disruptive of the current patterns of vehicle ownership and use, that is.
I’d say it’s not profitable enough to justify the R&D costs. You can’t sell a $50,000 golf cart and expect the government to give additional incentives.
The last mile if far more interesting at the moment, with shuttles, Ofo bikes, e-bikes and scooters and "baby boomers" on their mobility devices. What it really needs though is more infrastructure to support it, ideally dedicated lanes.
> In March a pedestrian was killed in Tempe, Arizona when a self-driving Uber vehicle failed to spot her as she wheeled her bicycle across an empty road at night
Wrong, the car did spot her, but the emergency braking systems were turned off.
Everyone is talking about autonomous cars but what about autonomous trains?
The problematics of autonomous trains are vastly simpler than autonomous cars.
Trains move in restricted paths (tracks), trains should stop only at specific places, trains meet other trains in such a few possible places, and so on.
Honestly those ‘features’ of trains have all been achieveable on pneumatic tires for decades. The advantages of trains are all limitations actually. On the other hand, limitations are good from a design perspective, improves focus and prevents feature bloat.
Also, I seem to remember that trains tend to be vastly more energy-efficient than cars, even if you factor in the occasional cost of a nearly-empty train.
This could have been built in the 70s, and I think actually was by Disney in the 80s for park transportation (somewhere I recall had me at a very early age on an autonomous vehicle that ran a planned route and would stop for anything out of the ordinary and announce things.)
However, it is exactly as it should be. I applaud them for daring to be dumb and focusing on the easy parts of the problem first. I think this will catch on and get better slowly.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadThe next step would be 1h-out-of-town commuters + close-suburbia to specific dropoff points in downtown or wherever jobs tend to be. Again, stay on big roads that have good signalling, and keep the bright colors so other drivers will know to stay out of your way in the carpool lane.
It's basically what the big tech companies in the Valley are doing with their commuting busses, but smaller and for everyone. The min-busses with flexible routes are a common mode of transportation in certain Eastern European countries, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka
They are. But that makes me wonder why we don't already see a lot of this type of thing in the US. My instinct would be the cost of a minimum wage-ish driver isn't the difference between this mode of transportation working and it not. Of course, it does exist in a sense with Lyft Line and Uber Pool although those don't get a lot of attention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_responsive_transport#Un...
Lower costs there can perhaps lead to a virtuous cycle of increased service and use.
The one here is open to anyone and even sometimes runs a loop for a local taproom.
I guess you could sample 10 or 100 of them and see how many impose restrictions on rider eligibility.
> The one here is open to anyone and even sometimes runs a loop for a local taproom.
If it is running a loop it isn't DRT, it's a jitney.
Even outside the US, there are many areas (like UAE), which have amazing highways, sparse traffic and there isn't rail/air connectivity to some places. Self driving "shuttles" seem perfect for those applications.
It doesn't enable end-to-end autonomous taxis, so you need a sober, licensed driver in the driver's seat even if they don't need to be able to take over on a second's notice.
Handling long distance highway driving would actually be a big win. It just doesn't stir imaginations the same way that completely eliminating a driver door-to-door does--especially among people who really want to get out of car ownership and driving entirely.
I have brought this up before and I still do not understand how or why this idea is so tightly coupled to fully autonomous vehicles. I don't see how removing a human driver from a car service is going to change the dynamics enough to drive legions of people who own cars to get rid of them if they haven't done so already. The only friction a human driver adds right now is cost, but I don't see the cost savings of removing the driver being high enough to move the needle.
At $70/hr., I expect people will still opt to own their own vehicle.
The cost is upfront. People sit down and budget $x for transportation and then they know that amount of money will get them anywhere they want to go. People hate having to decide in the moment whether they want to spend the money or not. I notice a similar phenomena when it comes to mobile phone service. People would rather pay extra for a plan that provides more than they could ever need than to have a lesser plan and pay overages when needed because the overages require thinking about it in the moment, rather than pre-planning how much they want to budget. $70/hr. isn't even going to have anyone thinking twice about changing their behaviour completely.
Maybe robs-taxi services will pioneer a pay ahead of time service that captures the necessary mindshare that will make ownership obsolete, but that won't have anything to do with the technology. There is nothing stopping a taxi service from doing that today with human drivers. It's just a tough business model to work with when providing services, so it is uncommon.
For any imagined scenario involving autonomous vehicles ushering in new modes of sharing, renting, etc., a useful question to ask is: "Why don't we have this today?" And, if the answer is anything other than "$10/hour for a human driver makes it too costly," then you should probably reconsider.
So yes, it does lessen the cost of renting cars. But it doesn't make it anywhere near too cheap to meter.
Do you have a source on this? It’s my understanding that most mass transit systems in the US spend a huge amount on operator compensation. BART, the one I’m most familiar with, spends $500m of its $691m operating budget on salary and benefits [0] despite the fact that BART trains already drive themselves!
[0]: https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/FY18_Budget_Su...
Second, that $500mm covers every employee of BART. The administrators, maintenance personnel, police, and other non-operator functions do not go away. Without knowing what portion of that line item goes to operators one cannot make a judgement on how much cheaper the system would be without them.
All that said, trains are basically the most efficient mode of transport from a (number of drivers) / (number of passengers) perspective.
But speaking seriously for a moment:
- Lyft charges riders about $2/mile in the Bay Area [0] before fees.
- The IRS lets you depreciate your vehicle at a rate of $0.545/mile.
- A reasonably efficient car burns ~40 mpg on freeway, at $3.50/gallon that's ~$0.09/mile.
So, of the $2/mile the riders pay, about 1/3 of that is costs associated with purchasing and operating the vehicle (according to IRS estimates) and fuel.
If we eliminate the rest via autonomous driving, and taxis became 65% cheaper, I suspect many people would make much more use of them.
[0]: https://www.lyft.com/pricing/SFO
The most compelling thing I can pull from your comment is "autonomous cars will be 3x as expensive as regular cars (at least), so you won't save anything". That may be short-term true, but is almost certainly long-term false.
A 50% utilization compared with 100% utilization makes almost no difference in vehicle cost structure -- if anything, it actually increases the labor fraction of taxi cost.
If you're driving your car 50% of the time, then wear and milage is the dominant depreciation factor (rather than age). But a human sitting around doing nothing but waiting for that 50% of the time doubles the labor (time) cost of the service, suggesting an even greater savings from eliminating the human driver.
What am I missing?
The machine's time cost is time-based depreciation, which is pretty low.
I couldn't find a breakdown in the paper.
Modern vehicles are incredibly more reliable than they used to be, but this seems to be overstating the case.
That is significantly underestimating the operating costs of a vehicle, especially a vehicle that is used heavily. There is a lot of periodic maintenance required, and the frequency increases as usage gets more stressful. Then there is non-periodic maintenance, be it from accidents, vandalism, or just flawed parts.
It's true that most of these costs come in even if you own, but putting 200k miles on a car over eight years costs less (both per-mile and per-unit-time) than putting 200k on in two years.
The per mile part sounds like a personal speculation. (Per unit of time is obvious and irrelevant here)
Quite the contrary, it's most efficient to put the load in a short span to minimize time-limited consumables like belts and seals, fixed costs like insurance and regulatory charges per vehicle, interest, depreciation of things like paint and esthetic appeal etc. The battery has an age induced wear also, the tech is moving fast and more efficient vehicles are always appearing and so on.
An auto-car just sitting costs almost nothing per hour (capital cost, but very little other cost), so you can have lots of them everywhere. Pickup time can be very short. I almost never used taxis in my town because of long and unreliable pickup times. Use uber all the time now. I still own a car, but if I did not have off street parking like many in my neighborhood, getting rid of it would be a no-brainer.
Bicycle parking is also a problem in many areas that have a high density of bicycle users. See Amsterdam train stations or apartment buildings where you have to store your bike in your 600sqft apartment.
Walking is really the best although these new electric skateboards seems to be almost totally portable and storable.
I'm not sure it's fair to dismiss capital cost parenthetically as part of "almost nothing". Maybe if the auto-cars were retrofitted 10-15 year old vehicles and the retrofitting cost a fraction of the vehicle's value, I'd agree. However, if they're all brand new (and even electric, where the TCO is weighted toward capital and away from operating costs), I say it's far from almost nothing.
Additionally, you go on to point out:
> if I did not have off street parking like many in my neighborhood, getting rid of it would be a no-brainer.
Therein lies a cost of "just sitting" that is routinely brought up in any car vs public transit (or other alternatives like bicycles or walkable designs) conversation.
The denser the area, the higher the cost. I suspect that if you did not have off street parking due to density, the parking portion of the "just sitting there" cost included in the pricing of the auto-car would make it no longer a no-brainer.
Where auto-cars could at least gain some space efficiency is in being able to park bumper-to-bumper and with minimum side clearance, since there would be no need for a human to enter or exit while it's in storage.
Maybe if interest rates go up capital costs will be an issue, but using a 100k car paying 4% interest is $4000 a year or about $0.50 per hour. When not moving there is basically no wear and tear or fuel costs. Almost nothing compared to paying a driver.
Driving away is, of course, not standing still. That increases the cost, but, perhaps more importantly, increased latency (or, rather, jitter).
They need not be stored in the most expensive, densest areas, but, for those who want to get rid of car ownership, that non-zero cost (especially if borne by the public with free on-street parking) isn't likely one they're willing to ignore.
> about $0.50 per hour.
A car sitting idle for 9 hours per day and averages 30mph while driving adds 1 cent per mile. A car sitting idle for 18 hours adds 5 cents per mile.
The former may be almost nothing, but the latter isn't.
> Almost nothing compared to paying a driver.
I still disagree, but that's just semantics.
If interest + depreciation is about $9K/yr, that's $25 a day, which means if you drive 8 hrs a day and have a 58% utilization rate, is $5.38/hr which is not all that far from what Uber drivers net. At 30 mph, it's 18 cents added per mile.
A self-driving car could perhaps operate more than 8 hours a day, but that doesn't mean that customers will be equally available at all hours.
I strongly suspect that when you do a proper analysis, self-driving cars are just competitive and not hugely cheaper.
That's tough to do, since we don't know either one. I suspect there's also a (perhaps incorrect) assumption that an unused auto-car will be "just sitting there" rather than moving, in which case utilization is, effectively, 100%.
That's not possible with a human driver in at least the case of a long one-way trip. However, with auto-cars, this could end up merely increasing the capital cost at the expense of unpaid/empty trip cost.
The extra cost is something I mentioned in my latency/jitter comment, wrt cheaper parking.
> $5.38/hr which is not all that far from what Uber drivers net
I didn't check your arithmetic, but, if so, it's is quite far from the fair/livable wage of $15/hr that at least I've been assuming for this conversation.
The fact that rideshare services are currently, effectively, paying much less is certainly an indication that even that may not be enough to lure people away from ownership.
It depends on what the denominator is.
If it's only the time between when a driver/auto-car "accepts" the ride and the end of the ride, there's little reason [1] to expect a drastic increase.
However, if the denominator is the total time the driver is "on duty", which is, I believe, what is generally used to calculate rideshare drivers' effective hourly compensation, then my original point stands. That is, an auto-car can be "on duty" even while just sitting in storage.
The current algorithm also doesn't tell rideshare drivers where to be while on duty, only routing them once a ride is requested. In the auto-car scenario, the computer has complete control, so a predictive algorithm could increase utilization, even if the denominator is time-in-motion.
Whether any increase would be drastic is debatable, but there's opportunity for something.
[1] Currently, the computer routing algorithm has an incentive to optimize for time at the expense of distance (since it's the driver who bears the expense of the unbilled distance, AFAIK). In the case of an auto-car, that perverse incentive would be absent, but I don't expect the difference to be huge.
If you consider the robot to "work" for more hours than a human, that's great, but due to the lower average revenue, it needs to be cheaper in order to be competitive with humans. There's no way to move your self-driving car to the opposite side of the world for the night.
"Whether any increase would be drastic is debatable, but there's opportunity for something."
If self-driving cars are cheaper, it seems like that would lead to more of them driving longer hours than humans, which would lower the utilization rather than increase it.
It's unclear to me, but this may be tautological, or at least reversible (by being cheaper to be competitive, it reduces revenue). Perhaps I'm missing your point?
> There's no way to move your self-driving car to the opposite side of the world for the night.
Ah, but that's moot. Unlike with a human driver, an auto-car doesn't need to be moved to the opposite side of the world (or an approximation, like Sacramento from SF) for the night.
> If self-driving cars are cheaper, it seems like that would lead to more of them driving longer hours than humans, which would lower the utilization rather than increase it.
You're still confusing "driving" (in motion) with "on duty".
Also, even if an auto-car is cheaper while driving, that doesn't matter if the different parties are bearing the cost of off-meter driving. In the auto-car case, it's the vendor (e.g. Uber), so there's a strong incentive to maximize utilization. In the human case, it's the driver, so the vendor has no such incentive (nor even the ability during "on duty" but not driving-for-that-vendor times).
Much easier (though still very hard).
I know it is a bit of a fallacy to say "we can fly to the moon, so we should be able to have a self-driving car", but it's also not clear that the tools we have (ML, simulators, planning algorithms, etc) are not up to the tasks that have Drive.ai have engineered around.
It's a reasonable strategy to elide things you can and focus on the "core" hard task, but if solving these other difficult problems is also meaningful product-wise (and it clearly is meaningful), there's no reason you can't have people working on both. And given Waymo seems to be gearing up for a large launch, I have a hard time believing that these additional tasks are as hard as Drive.ai want to make out.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41399406
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
Gasoline consumption is not going up the way it used to, and there apparently is a whole lot more oil than a lot of people thought-- I'm guessing due to a combination of countries not providing correct numbers (it's a national security issue after all), new oilfield discoveries and new extraction techniques. Add in more efficient vehicles and alternative energy sources, and you quickly realize the worst that's going to happen is some gradually increased prices for products & services most closely tied to the current cost of fuel.
The manufacturing learning curve has been the path to lower costs through mass production and tunnels will be no exception.
“Without tunnels we’ll be in traffic hell forever” -Elon Musk
I've seen that Dr Who episode.
You'd only want to bring a surface car for trips with rural or suburban legs on BOTH ends. Which seems relatively rare.
[1] https://www.boringcompany.com/
[2] dynamic routing means no waiting around to change trains
There are plenty of air traffic regulations to deal with
You can try to simplify the problem by limiting your routes to major highways and making the vehicle ultra-visible so other drivers give you a wide berth.
But at some point there will be construction, or a car wreck, or debris in the roadway. Eventually you'll need to exit the highway and drive on city streets.
Even if you manage to reduce the hard stuff to 1 mile out of 200, you still need to deal with it.
If you can't handle everything, you're not safe to be on the road.
But I wouldn't be too quick to interpret a single sentence from a piece of short-form popular journalism as a precise specification of what their cars are and are not designed to handle.
I think the minimum required to deal with it is to have the car pull over when it identifies a situation it can't handle. Even an onramp to exit car that pulls over if it sees construction will be extremely valuable to anyone routinely doing highway driving.
I make this point every time I can: kinetic energy is the killer and it goes up with the square of velocity. Half-speed is quarter-deadly.
A golf cart-like machine, limited to a maximum speed not much faster than walking, light-weight, and festooned inside and out with airbags (and other anti-collision/-injury stuff), could be built today, I think it would work just fine, and I bet you could sell a lot of them. ("Baby Boomers" he says under his breath...)
Trying to go straight to robot cars is hubris, it's biting off more than you can chew and then trying to talk past the food in your mouth.
Also, can we please call them "auto-autos"?
https://trl.co.uk/news/prev/35671
The last mile if far more interesting at the moment, with shuttles, Ofo bikes, e-bikes and scooters and "baby boomers" on their mobility devices. What it really needs though is more infrastructure to support it, ideally dedicated lanes.
Wrong, the car did spot her, but the emergency braking systems were turned off.
The problematics of autonomous trains are vastly simpler than autonomous cars.
Trains move in restricted paths (tracks), trains should stop only at specific places, trains meet other trains in such a few possible places, and so on.
However, it is exactly as it should be. I applaud them for daring to be dumb and focusing on the easy parts of the problem first. I think this will catch on and get better slowly.