Aren't they too expensive for commuting? Public drinking has declined despite Uber. Maybe seniors will give up driving sooner, but they're less likely to trust a computer. Many teenagers seem to be delaying driving regardless, which is also good.
Last decade, GM said if all cars were electronically connected, they could reduce traffic delays and improve safety by accelerating/decelerating in concert. I don't see how these will sense sudden braking two or six vehicles ahead--it's hard enough for a human with monster pickups and SUVs.
> "I don't see how these will sense sudden braking two or six vehicles ahead..."
The idea is that if all cars are networked, each car will know what the cars ahead of it are doing "through the cloud" irrespective of whether they have a visual line of sight.
Then they can also pack cars more closely together on the expressways. No more sissy Two-Second Rule: the expressway will be just like a full parking lot, but moving 70 miles per hour. Good times!
And no more costly infrastructure bills: just pack motorists onto our existing infrastructure at 10× the density. Wave in moar immigrants!
I don't see why you'd need 5G. The speed of every car on a stretch of road isn't much data. It's more that you need enough coverage so that you have bandwidth left over from all the radios and FaceTimes and GPS maps. They could easily make traffic control the highest priority for cellular bandwidth on highways.
I don’t think they even need to be networked. If every car goes the same speed and keeps the same distance the benefits would be immense. Most traffic is caused by the variable in driving speeds and aggressiveness. Of course certain interactions or traffic circles will need to be redesigned.
Exactly. The basic rule will probably be on a given stretch of a given highway, once you are on you're locked into exactly 70 mph for example. Tractor trailers might be restricted to the right lane at 65 mph.
They's have to solve a bunch of other problems like how do you merge into traffic when individual cars don't have predictable acceleration capability? What happens when a car fails in traffic? How do people get off the highway? And likely a host of other issues that experts in the field are researching.
In certain neighborhoods they'll be boxed in and stripped down. I don't think they could get away with refusing service to these neighborhoods so no, I don't think they'll be widespread. They'll have their uses in heavily monitored, controlled environments such as airports, parks and such.
Another issue is the liability. Companies with human drivers can blame the human, limiting culpability. Robot car companies will have no such defense.
Waymo isn't venturing very far into South Central LA at present. The blue area on the map ranges from okay to posh (although, weirdly, they don't serve the Flats of Beverly Hills between Santa Monica and Sunset Boulevards).
That seemed to be one of Uber's breakthrough business plans: yeah, we're just not going to worry about anti-discrimination rules. If our drivers don't want to pick up fares in South Central, well, that's not us, that's them. Sue Abdul, not us.
I was discussing a related point with my Uber driver (a guy from Ethiopia). Drivers rate passengers on the same 1-5 scale that passengers use to rate drivers. He said he won't take a fare with a score under 4.2, with a higher cutoff at night. (And, presumably, for pickups in the bad parts of the city.)
For Uber, this system would seem to offer another layer of defense in a Disparate Impact suit. Neither the company nor the drivers know the race or any other protected characteristic of the fare. And the victimized [sic] fare's poor score is an average of ratings bestowed by drivers who are mostly protected-characteristic, themselves (at least around here).
Not available in the Valley last time I checked either. We are still in the phase where they need to train the taxis on the geography of a particular area for a long time before they are confident.
Yes, but it's not just a matter of blaming the drivers. Some investors believe Uber will be able to compete with Waymo for some time because Uber drivers currently pay for two expensive services that Waymo will have to eat on its own - auto insurance & maintenance.
Yes, so if they do work, then there could be a few impacts on real estate. One impact will be that if we have silent electric cars then living near a big road is less of a bad thing. And if robo-taxis are real, then perhaps more and more people will not need their own car, which might favour inner city real estate. It's one thing to rely on some human taxi service to get you around, but in a world of plentiful & reliable robo-taxis, waiting times might be very low, and so then I can imagine it might feel like you have just as much control over your ability to travel as if you had brought your own car. That's an optimistic take.
Is that a synthetic noise added to alert the blind?
I favor being nice to blind and distracted people. I can strolling thru a park lot in the early 2000s and hearing a gentle beep: stuck behind me were two Priuses running silent on their electric motors. Now, I believe, they make that sci-fi whooshing noise to alert people like me.
Readers of "The Marching Morons" (the inspiration for "Idiocracy") may recall that one jarring feature of the idiocratic future was that all the cars emitted driving sounds they weren't actually making.
Really? I live near a busy street and my window is open right now. That loud whooshing sound I assume is from the tires and maybe cutting through the air. Car engines are pretty quiet these days whether electric or not. Sure motorcycle, diesels and ones modified by men with tiny penises are much noisier, but I'm not sure a busy highway gets quiet unless we mandate quiet tires.
I am unlucky enough to live in Europe where diesel powered passenger vehicles are still very common. The engines are appreciably louder than gasoline ones.
In the early 80s, almost all Mercedes Benz sold in the US were diesels. Imagine paying top dollar and having to put up with sluggish acceleration (better with turbos), the soot, the noise, vibration, and smell.
But you get the three pointed star, and everyone thinks you can afford to buy and maintain it.
I remember. I didn't know much about cars but I didn't understand why all the mercedes were diesels. I'm reminded of Albert Brooks conversation with the Mercedes dealer in "Lost in America"- it's not a car. It's a Mercedes. You want leather, I'll throw some shoes in back. Just a great scene with the guy making him question his worthiness to overpay for a meh car
The ideal first-use case for robot taxis would be at Las Vegas airport. Everyone is going from there to a relatively few well-defined destinations. The weather is generally good. And the customers are ready to gamble. High visibility if they’re problem-free as well.
I've seen a few robot delivery carts on the sidewalk, but they are still pretty rare in the parts of Los Angeles I've been to lately. But the density isn't that high.
Your friend will win. Including testing, data-gathering, and beta they've been operating for a while with hardly any tragedy (certainly nothing compared to that caused by human drivers) in SF, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Austin, and coming to DC later this year. If even not-cool DC has it, then no US city except NYC can be cool if it bans it, and LA cares about cool. Total rides per week up 400% from a year ago. Working seamlessly with Uber now. People I know in Austin, especially women dressed to go out and who don't want to attract interactions with a driver, prefer it to humans. Chris Best joked that the modem horror movie in the Bay Area would be a flash of lightning revealing someone unexpectedly sitting in your cab's drivers seat. The age of the robot taxi is here.
You have an occasional reader who rides these all the time. The lack of a driver you have to interact with was the first or second benefit he stated while trying to sell me on them.
It's a vicious cycle too. People stop going to the movies so they forget how to act proper at the theater. That means there's a bunch of people acting improper at the theater, so people don't want to be around them and they stay home.
Similarly, you talk to AI's and avatars so you lose social skills. Then the people around you all have bad social skills, do you retreat into your AI's and avatars even more.
Social skills require training and maintenance, and bad social skills are painful to be around. So ideally you train kids when they're very small then maintain it through adulthood. But that's not happening anymore.
I was in an Amex lounge at an airport recently. A young couple sat at the table next to me and the young lady promptly placed her sneaker-shod feet up on her chair. Coupled with the braying laughter of an obese blonde behind me, it quite ruined my mood.
At this point, if your friend loses the bet because of that, he'd be entitled to complain. Isn't the bet about the tech being widely available? If it's temporarily shut down in his city he loses? What if there was an earthquake and no one could go to dinner?
I haven't taken one. I live in the San Fernando Valley, and they don't go north of about Hollywood Boulevard.
I am told they are competitive with Uber/Lyft. Of course, at this point Google is just setting the price where ever they feel like, rather like how Uber let the stock market subsidize its riders in the 2010s as it built its brand.
The big question seems to be whether they can get the price of the equipment down considerably.
People tend not to realise that taxi driving is generally poorly remunerated per hour. The upside is being able to work whenever you like and as long as you can stay awake. Very few jobs have this feature.
The intermediation (basically dispatch) is already automated by Lyft, Uber, or whoever.
So I wonder how much saving is left when you eliminate the human driver.
Old fashioned taxis used to be driven at least two shifts per day. Then Uber came up with the business model of having the driver own his car for his personal use. But I presume Waymo can, at least eventually, get up to running their vehicles something like 120 hours per week. On the other hand, I doubt there is 20 hours of demand per day.
If I could remember my microeconomics jargon I could explain what Uber did. Basically, old-fashioned taxi companies had to pay the fully loaded cost of their vehicles, but Uber mobilized guys who really want a nicer car than they can afford, so they'd drive for Uber to own it.
There was also an extra-legal arbitrage on the insurance companies as Uber drivers with non-livery insurance chauffeured paying customers around town all day while the taxi companies had to insure themselves at commercial rates.
Walking through the center of a university town earlier this year I saw an SUV bristling with cameras and LIDAR. It had large signs painted on each side announcing "Driverless Vehicle".
It was akin to watch an attack on a helpless retarded person. The Waymo didn't "understand" enough to leave the area. It was doubly troubling because I personally knew a retarded person who was attacked by a gang and killed. #clockworkorange
Uber has been a Godsend to me out on in the suburbs. Mostly for drives to my country club where I can play golf and get drunk. Thank you Vladimir, Uche, Wang, Lin, Mohammed, Muhammed and “Mo”.
I had similar bet a my brother back in 1998. He worked for Sun Microsystems at the time and thought technology would make that Leap much sooner. He thought it was five years from then. I figured around 2020 because all the extraneous factors you’d need to consider. I sort of thought humans would all need an indicator to alert them to cars in case a kid jumped out into the street. That turned out to be not the case. He also didn’t have his job for long as Sun Micro came crashing down.
It’s likely kids under 10 will never need to know how to drive. Definitely will be safer on the roads. Will be interesting to see how Waymo handles the ghettoes. Nobody likes to see a robot tortured. Remember when Homer Simpson snapped the legs off the Autodialer 5000? Very unsettling.
Driverless cars were two years away for more than a decade. It's kind of like AIDS. AIDS was almost uniformly fatal and totally insolvable for decades. I stopped paying attention and the next time it came up my friend was like--"oh yeah I think fixed AIDS. You just have to take 50 pills a day for the rest of your life and it's fine"
The technology is coming. All these concerns will work themselves out with few hiccups along the way. I figure Klaus Schwab is right. In thirty years no one will own a car and for one very simple reason. Driving will be illegal! Something you might think impossible if you were born in the 20th century, but the new generation will be nonplussed about it. I’m guessing it will be a boon for living in the suburbs, less traffic and more independence for those who don’t normally drive.
Will people live further out in the 'burbs? Would you be in the office from 9:30 to 4:00 and in your driverless vehicle answering emails from 8:00 to 9:30 and 4:00 to 5:30? That would seem like a pretty reasonable way to put in a 45 hour work week.
The Board of a hospital system around here was chasing one of their top docs to be their new CEO. (He'd proven himself to be a hard-nosed, talented administrator.) He didn't want the job, preferring patient contact and the OR. He ended up taking the position, on the condition that the Board arrange a full-size SUV with a portable office, along with a driver on-call 24/7.
This is the scenario you describe, except ex-robot and 65 hr/week.
$100,000 revenue per year on a $170,000 initial investment is a better return than most investments available on the public markets. Other than tires, electric vehicles are supposedly lower maintenance than the combustion kind. Electricity costs something (especially in California) but if Trump licenses enough nuclear plants, that could become a trivial cost too (except for California who might insist on only "certified organic solar power", lol.)
So, payback in two years, largely free cash flow thereafter, battery lifespan of ... ten? ... years, so ... maybe half a million net present value for every one of these they can get on the streets?
Until the market is saturated and the price curve converges to the cost horizon around ... 2040? Ben Crump Jr. brings class-action lawsuit after AI hesitates to pick up passengers matching certain patterns ...
Only way to prevent commodity pricing and ruinous lawsuits is if Google lobbies City Hall for Neo-Taxi Medallions, maybe pays off corrupt Mayor Brown to maintain Waymo taxi monopsony and make Crump Jr. go away, brings in Sicilian-looking guys from the waterfront district to ensure a few "accidents" befall any competitors ...
Google used to have a corporate motto: "Don't be evil...
[...er than necessary for quarterly earnings]."
Something like that. Presumably they'll rely more on the quiet part in the future.
I presume that at present that Google has a whole bunch of mid-six figures talent working on the self-driving problem. An interesting question is whether what has been learned in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles will generalize to the rest of the world or whether Waymo needs to roll out slowly and expensively in each city with a whole bunch of $500k per year guys fine-tuning the software for each city.
That's a big issue. My impression is that bad weather changes things significantly for self driving (and electric cars generally). Big city layouts and hazards look very different to me. Training in San Francisco is a good head start for self driving in Chicago, but it will require a lot of extra training to make it work well in Chicago. With current tech anyway
Meh. Just wait until one fatal accident happens and our august politicians will either outright ban them or require a human “driver” to be in the vehicle in case something goes wrong.
That's the emotional response but if the companies can show that robots are over all better drivers, it will be very difficult to turn the public on them.
I don't know about that. "Emotional responses" seem to rule.
For example, all databases show female pilots are safer than male pilots. I just did a study of every naval aviation mishap category since 1975 that showed that male pilots are six times more likely to be involved in an accident of any kind than are female pilots. A male pilot recently crashed on approach to Montgomery-Gibbs (a field I've flown into many times under all sorts of weather conditions and not crashed even once, hard as that is to believe) mainly because he was hand-flying hundreds of feet below the glide path. Had that pilot been a female, we'd never hear the end of it. But because the pilot was male, crickets. The public still believes women pilots are less safe than male pilots because that's what they are told. Cherry picking rules.
So if all the "influencers" and click-bait outlets dig up every robocar accident, sneer at statistics and data and all that fake nerd nonsense, the public will believe self-driving cars are unsafe.
Does the public believe that? I've only ever heard it hinted at when female fighter pilots had accidents and only because they counterposed it with the idea of the army deciding to let women fly jets despite possibly not passing the test...or something. It's never been clear.
But let's grant that and follow your logic. The public has not hounded their elected officials to outlaw lady pilots and they certainly have never considered outlawing air travel, even if we keep having to remind people that it's safer than driving.
No one is more accustomed to the emotional innumeracy of the public than I. But that hardly ever leads to action to outlaw some obvious public facing part of a business that people love.
The problem occurs these days because airlines and air forces announce they're upping their female and PoC percentages. People rightly assume some won't be as qualified.
Can I ask where you found the data you used? I’ve never seen anything on actual rates. I have seen some unbelievably knuckleheaded male pilots. As an aside, I find it curious that essentially nothing has come out about the Hudson River helo crash.
NAVSAFECOM, NAVAIR, the GAO, et al, working with others on a research project involving Mishap Categories A through C. So we looked at things like taxiing into hanger doors, runway excursions, tail strikes, as well as failure to remove engine blanks, FOD-caused failures, snapped arresting cables, catapult capacity selector-valve failures, failure to remove the cat seal (no blame to the aviator for things like that) and so forth, not just mishaps involving fatalities or hull loss that were the direct result of pilot actions or inactions. It was clear that most flying accidents due to pilot error were caused either by failure to maintain sufficient airspeed during landing operations, or failure to follow pre-flight procedures.
I don't assert that females are somehow inherently safer pilots than men, even though the data may suggest that they are, but that they are no less safe, and I object to those claiming that they are less safe _because they are female_.
Thanks. I’m a civilian pilot, not military, and I’m constantly surprised at some of the folks who’ve managed to get themselves a certificate. Good luck to you!
In the late 1960’s the NYPD’s “Hack Bureau” lowered the permissible driving age for taxi drivers. Many of the old-timers were quitting; it seems they didn’t enjoy being mugged or murdered by junkies.
I drove an NYC taxi the summer of ‘69; 4pm shift. 49% of the meter plus tips. It was the highest paying summer job around…much higher than my college friends who were working in summer resort areas cooking or serving. The tips were good, especially if you engaged with the passenger. They were surprised to see a 20 year old kid driving a cab. They wanted me to get home safely that night, go back to school in September and not have to be a taxi driver the rest of my life. My mother didn’t sleep much that summer, waiting for me to get home @ 2am.
I’m betting that Waymo could make a very engaging AI personality to chat with their passenger in a nice way. People are lonely. They don’t like admitting it, but they are.
The last Lyft I took, the driver was a charming black Englishman with one of those Don Cheadle in Ocean's 11 accent. He was a big soccer fan, so I bored him with all my anecdotes about World Cups going back to the 1970s (I don't know anything about soccer other than World Cups.)
Whenever I’m in a taxi I bore the driver with stories of my three month long taxi-driving career. I can sense my wife’s eye-roll, even if her “not again” is inaudible.
Aren't they too expensive for commuting? Public drinking has declined despite Uber. Maybe seniors will give up driving sooner, but they're less likely to trust a computer. Many teenagers seem to be delaying driving regardless, which is also good.
Last decade, GM said if all cars were electronically connected, they could reduce traffic delays and improve safety by accelerating/decelerating in concert. I don't see how these will sense sudden braking two or six vehicles ahead--it's hard enough for a human with monster pickups and SUVs.
> "I don't see how these will sense sudden braking two or six vehicles ahead..."
The idea is that if all cars are networked, each car will know what the cars ahead of it are doing "through the cloud" irrespective of whether they have a visual line of sight.
Then they can also pack cars more closely together on the expressways. No more sissy Two-Second Rule: the expressway will be just like a full parking lot, but moving 70 miles per hour. Good times!
And no more costly infrastructure bills: just pack motorists onto our existing infrastructure at 10× the density. Wave in moar immigrants!
Is that the idea behind 5G cell phones? Ultrafast communications make this kind of thing more feasible.
Less the phones than the base stations.
Also creates more bandwidth for your chipped shoes or eyeglasses to spy on you.
I don't see why you'd need 5G. The speed of every car on a stretch of road isn't much data. It's more that you need enough coverage so that you have bandwidth left over from all the radios and FaceTimes and GPS maps. They could easily make traffic control the highest priority for cellular bandwidth on highways.
I wasn't clear--I meant the Waymoes and other self-driving cars. They're not connected to other cars yet.
Remember when they gradually phased out tollbooths as everyone got EZ-Pass?
It'll be like that, but mandatory. And not just for tollroads.
"You vill be netverked, and you vill be hahppy."
—Klaus Schwab, probably
I don’t think they even need to be networked. If every car goes the same speed and keeps the same distance the benefits would be immense. Most traffic is caused by the variable in driving speeds and aggressiveness. Of course certain interactions or traffic circles will need to be redesigned.
Exactly. The basic rule will probably be on a given stretch of a given highway, once you are on you're locked into exactly 70 mph for example. Tractor trailers might be restricted to the right lane at 65 mph.
They's have to solve a bunch of other problems like how do you merge into traffic when individual cars don't have predictable acceleration capability? What happens when a car fails in traffic? How do people get off the highway? And likely a host of other issues that experts in the field are researching.
In certain neighborhoods they'll be boxed in and stripped down. I don't think they could get away with refusing service to these neighborhoods so no, I don't think they'll be widespread. They'll have their uses in heavily monitored, controlled environments such as airports, parks and such.
Another issue is the liability. Companies with human drivers can blame the human, limiting culpability. Robot car companies will have no such defense.
Waymo isn't venturing very far into South Central LA at present. The blue area on the map ranges from okay to posh (although, weirdly, they don't serve the Flats of Beverly Hills between Santa Monica and Sunset Boulevards).
That seemed to be one of Uber's breakthrough business plans: yeah, we're just not going to worry about anti-discrimination rules. If our drivers don't want to pick up fares in South Central, well, that's not us, that's them. Sue Abdul, not us.
And it worked.
I was discussing a related point with my Uber driver (a guy from Ethiopia). Drivers rate passengers on the same 1-5 scale that passengers use to rate drivers. He said he won't take a fare with a score under 4.2, with a higher cutoff at night. (And, presumably, for pickups in the bad parts of the city.)
For Uber, this system would seem to offer another layer of defense in a Disparate Impact suit. Neither the company nor the drivers know the race or any other protected characteristic of the fare. And the victimized [sic] fare's poor score is an average of ratings bestowed by drivers who are mostly protected-characteristic, themselves (at least around here).
Not available in the Valley last time I checked either. We are still in the phase where they need to train the taxis on the geography of a particular area for a long time before they are confident.
Yes, but it's not just a matter of blaming the drivers. Some investors believe Uber will be able to compete with Waymo for some time because Uber drivers currently pay for two expensive services that Waymo will have to eat on its own - auto insurance & maintenance.
Yes, so if they do work, then there could be a few impacts on real estate. One impact will be that if we have silent electric cars then living near a big road is less of a bad thing. And if robo-taxis are real, then perhaps more and more people will not need their own car, which might favour inner city real estate. It's one thing to rely on some human taxi service to get you around, but in a world of plentiful & reliable robo-taxis, waiting times might be very low, and so then I can imagine it might feel like you have just as much control over your ability to travel as if you had brought your own car. That's an optimistic take.
“One impact will be that if we have silent electric cars then living near a big road is less of a bad thing. “
I live near a busy road and diesel engines idling and tailpipe noise is a big annoyance (also bad for air pollution).
In 20 years I expect the only diesel vehicles left will be trucks and the like.
EVs on new asphalt make very, very little sound when moving and none at all when stationary.
Whether or not they're moving, many electric cars make a weird high-pitched humming noise, sort of like a flying saucer in a 1950s sci-fi movie.
Still quieter (and less smelly) than a combustion motor though.
Is that a synthetic noise added to alert the blind?
I favor being nice to blind and distracted people. I can strolling thru a park lot in the early 2000s and hearing a gentle beep: stuck behind me were two Priuses running silent on their electric motors. Now, I believe, they make that sci-fi whooshing noise to alert people like me.
According to the internet, it could be the induction motors, but carmakers are adding sound to electrics as you describe.
https://carsbibles.com/why-do-electric-cars-hum/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2024/09/06/electric-car-sound-inspirations/74908203007/
Readers of "The Marching Morons" (the inspiration for "Idiocracy") may recall that one jarring feature of the idiocratic future was that all the cars emitted driving sounds they weren't actually making.
Vroom, vroom!
There's a movie, 'The Dilemma' in which the hollywood cool job of the protagonists is designing muscle car vroom sounds for electric cars.
A better solution for the blind might be a sound that only activates when a pedestrian is nearby
Some luxury sports cars already pipe fake engine noise to their occupants. I'd find it as annoying as a laugh track.
Really? I live near a busy street and my window is open right now. That loud whooshing sound I assume is from the tires and maybe cutting through the air. Car engines are pretty quiet these days whether electric or not. Sure motorcycle, diesels and ones modified by men with tiny penises are much noisier, but I'm not sure a busy highway gets quiet unless we mandate quiet tires.
I am unlucky enough to live in Europe where diesel powered passenger vehicles are still very common. The engines are appreciably louder than gasoline ones.
Yep. I remember when those invaded the US as an interim measure to deal with fleet average mileage requirements. Horrible things.
In the early 80s, almost all Mercedes Benz sold in the US were diesels. Imagine paying top dollar and having to put up with sluggish acceleration (better with turbos), the soot, the noise, vibration, and smell.
But you get the three pointed star, and everyone thinks you can afford to buy and maintain it.
I remember. I didn't know much about cars but I didn't understand why all the mercedes were diesels. I'm reminded of Albert Brooks conversation with the Mercedes dealer in "Lost in America"- it's not a car. It's a Mercedes. You want leather, I'll throw some shoes in back. Just a great scene with the guy making him question his worthiness to overpay for a meh car
The ideal first-use case for robot taxis would be at Las Vegas airport. Everyone is going from there to a relatively few well-defined destinations. The weather is generally good. And the customers are ready to gamble. High visibility if they’re problem-free as well.
That would seem like good advertising to get the rest of the country acclimated to driverless cars.
How about driverless food delivery? It would have a strong impact on immigration in many places.
I've seen a few robot delivery carts on the sidewalk, but they are still pretty rare in the parts of Los Angeles I've been to lately. But the density isn't that high.
Still have to get the food off the passenger seat and through the customer's door...
Sounds like a job for ... an immigrant!
I saw a Chick Fil A one on X yesterday. You have to go out and fetch the goods from the compartment after IDing yourself.
Driverless taxis are being tested/already running in many cities in mainland China.
They're definitely available in Shenzhen. I'm looking forward to trying one.
Another way my friend could still lose his 25-year-long bet is if there's some horrible tragedy involving a Waymo and the city council bans them.
Your friend will win. Including testing, data-gathering, and beta they've been operating for a while with hardly any tragedy (certainly nothing compared to that caused by human drivers) in SF, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Austin, and coming to DC later this year. If even not-cool DC has it, then no US city except NYC can be cool if it bans it, and LA cares about cool. Total rides per week up 400% from a year ago. Working seamlessly with Uber now. People I know in Austin, especially women dressed to go out and who don't want to attract interactions with a driver, prefer it to humans. Chris Best joked that the modem horror movie in the Bay Area would be a flash of lightning revealing someone unexpectedly sitting in your cab's drivers seat. The age of the robot taxi is here.
People don't like interacting with other people in person all that much these days.
You have an occasional reader who rides these all the time. The lack of a driver you have to interact with was the first or second benefit he stated while trying to sell me on them.
It's a vicious cycle too. People stop going to the movies so they forget how to act proper at the theater. That means there's a bunch of people acting improper at the theater, so people don't want to be around them and they stay home.
Similarly, you talk to AI's and avatars so you lose social skills. Then the people around you all have bad social skills, do you retreat into your AI's and avatars even more.
Social skills require training and maintenance, and bad social skills are painful to be around. So ideally you train kids when they're very small then maintain it through adulthood. But that's not happening anymore.
I was in an Amex lounge at an airport recently. A young couple sat at the table next to me and the young lady promptly placed her sneaker-shod feet up on her chair. Coupled with the braying laughter of an obese blonde behind me, it quite ruined my mood.
Handle, DC is the perfect city for driverless cars.
At this point, if your friend loses the bet because of that, he'd be entitled to complain. Isn't the bet about the tech being widely available? If it's temporarily shut down in his city he loses? What if there was an earthquake and no one could go to dinner?
Steve - roughly how much is the Waymo $ fare per km (or whatever imperial unit you’re comfortable with)?
I haven't taken one. I live in the San Fernando Valley, and they don't go north of about Hollywood Boulevard.
I am told they are competitive with Uber/Lyft. Of course, at this point Google is just setting the price where ever they feel like, rather like how Uber let the stock market subsidize its riders in the 2010s as it built its brand.
The big question seems to be whether they can get the price of the equipment down considerably.
People tend not to realise that taxi driving is generally poorly remunerated per hour. The upside is being able to work whenever you like and as long as you can stay awake. Very few jobs have this feature.
The intermediation (basically dispatch) is already automated by Lyft, Uber, or whoever.
So I wonder how much saving is left when you eliminate the human driver.
Old fashioned taxis used to be driven at least two shifts per day. Then Uber came up with the business model of having the driver own his car for his personal use. But I presume Waymo can, at least eventually, get up to running their vehicles something like 120 hours per week. On the other hand, I doubt there is 20 hours of demand per day.
If I could remember my microeconomics jargon I could explain what Uber did. Basically, old-fashioned taxi companies had to pay the fully loaded cost of their vehicles, but Uber mobilized guys who really want a nicer car than they can afford, so they'd drive for Uber to own it.
There was also an extra-legal arbitrage on the insurance companies as Uber drivers with non-livery insurance chauffeured paying customers around town all day while the taxi companies had to insure themselves at commercial rates.
They were also preying on people unsophisticated enough to understand depreciation.
In large parts of Europe it’s illegal to carry passengers for hire without licensing of driver and vehicle.
Uber/Lyft are still popular for licensed drivers and vehicles as they do dispatch, payments, and trust/security well.
Walking through the center of a university town earlier this year I saw an SUV bristling with cameras and LIDAR. It had large signs painted on each side announcing "Driverless Vehicle".
It had a driver. She was a young woman.
I thought, "Whoa, that's kinda sexist."
Was sickened to see video of idle Utes attack a Waymo. https://rb.gy/xyg6mt
It was akin to watch an attack on a helpless retarded person. The Waymo didn't "understand" enough to leave the area. It was doubly troubling because I personally knew a retarded person who was attacked by a gang and killed. #clockworkorange
Waymo needs to make cars more racist.
Uber has been a Godsend to me out on in the suburbs. Mostly for drives to my country club where I can play golf and get drunk. Thank you Vladimir, Uche, Wang, Lin, Mohammed, Muhammed and “Mo”.
I had similar bet a my brother back in 1998. He worked for Sun Microsystems at the time and thought technology would make that Leap much sooner. He thought it was five years from then. I figured around 2020 because all the extraneous factors you’d need to consider. I sort of thought humans would all need an indicator to alert them to cars in case a kid jumped out into the street. That turned out to be not the case. He also didn’t have his job for long as Sun Micro came crashing down.
It’s likely kids under 10 will never need to know how to drive. Definitely will be safer on the roads. Will be interesting to see how Waymo handles the ghettoes. Nobody likes to see a robot tortured. Remember when Homer Simpson snapped the legs off the Autodialer 5000? Very unsettling.
That's what sux about uber. Having to deal with the 3rd world brownoids. Bring on robotaxis
Driverless cars were two years away for more than a decade. It's kind of like AIDS. AIDS was almost uniformly fatal and totally insolvable for decades. I stopped paying attention and the next time it came up my friend was like--"oh yeah I think fixed AIDS. You just have to take 50 pills a day for the rest of your life and it's fine"
The technology is coming. All these concerns will work themselves out with few hiccups along the way. I figure Klaus Schwab is right. In thirty years no one will own a car and for one very simple reason. Driving will be illegal! Something you might think impossible if you were born in the 20th century, but the new generation will be nonplussed about it. I’m guessing it will be a boon for living in the suburbs, less traffic and more independence for those who don’t normally drive.
Will people live further out in the 'burbs? Would you be in the office from 9:30 to 4:00 and in your driverless vehicle answering emails from 8:00 to 9:30 and 4:00 to 5:30? That would seem like a pretty reasonable way to put in a 45 hour work week.
Or binge watching the latest HBO hit.
The Board of a hospital system around here was chasing one of their top docs to be their new CEO. (He'd proven himself to be a hard-nosed, talented administrator.) He didn't want the job, preferring patient contact and the OR. He ended up taking the position, on the condition that the Board arrange a full-size SUV with a portable office, along with a driver on-call 24/7.
This is the scenario you describe, except ex-robot and 65 hr/week.
Hawaii, Massachusetts and Rhode Island might outlaw private automobiles someday but that's never going to wash in Wyoming or West Virginia.
Federal grant money might make those other states change their minds.
$100,000 revenue per year on a $170,000 initial investment is a better return than most investments available on the public markets. Other than tires, electric vehicles are supposedly lower maintenance than the combustion kind. Electricity costs something (especially in California) but if Trump licenses enough nuclear plants, that could become a trivial cost too (except for California who might insist on only "certified organic solar power", lol.)
So, payback in two years, largely free cash flow thereafter, battery lifespan of ... ten? ... years, so ... maybe half a million net present value for every one of these they can get on the streets?
Until the market is saturated and the price curve converges to the cost horizon around ... 2040? Ben Crump Jr. brings class-action lawsuit after AI hesitates to pick up passengers matching certain patterns ...
Only way to prevent commodity pricing and ruinous lawsuits is if Google lobbies City Hall for Neo-Taxi Medallions, maybe pays off corrupt Mayor Brown to maintain Waymo taxi monopsony and make Crump Jr. go away, brings in Sicilian-looking guys from the waterfront district to ensure a few "accidents" befall any competitors ...
Google used to have a corporate motto: "Don't be evil...
[...er than necessary for quarterly earnings]."
Something like that. Presumably they'll rely more on the quiet part in the future.
I presume that at present that Google has a whole bunch of mid-six figures talent working on the self-driving problem. An interesting question is whether what has been learned in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles will generalize to the rest of the world or whether Waymo needs to roll out slowly and expensively in each city with a whole bunch of $500k per year guys fine-tuning the software for each city.
Beats me.
> "a whole bunch of $500k per year guys fine-tuning the software for each city."
Or you could just pay fifty bucks to a grizzled old guy on a barstool while you take notes:
"Yeah, don't go past 103rd street after dark. Single fare with luggage is going to the airport. [Certain ethnic group] doesn't tip. ..." Etc.
That's a big issue. My impression is that bad weather changes things significantly for self driving (and electric cars generally). Big city layouts and hazards look very different to me. Training in San Francisco is a good head start for self driving in Chicago, but it will require a lot of extra training to make it work well in Chicago. With current tech anyway
Meh. Just wait until one fatal accident happens and our august politicians will either outright ban them or require a human “driver” to be in the vehicle in case something goes wrong.
I could see that happening.
That's the emotional response but if the companies can show that robots are over all better drivers, it will be very difficult to turn the public on them.
I don't know about that. "Emotional responses" seem to rule.
For example, all databases show female pilots are safer than male pilots. I just did a study of every naval aviation mishap category since 1975 that showed that male pilots are six times more likely to be involved in an accident of any kind than are female pilots. A male pilot recently crashed on approach to Montgomery-Gibbs (a field I've flown into many times under all sorts of weather conditions and not crashed even once, hard as that is to believe) mainly because he was hand-flying hundreds of feet below the glide path. Had that pilot been a female, we'd never hear the end of it. But because the pilot was male, crickets. The public still believes women pilots are less safe than male pilots because that's what they are told. Cherry picking rules.
So if all the "influencers" and click-bait outlets dig up every robocar accident, sneer at statistics and data and all that fake nerd nonsense, the public will believe self-driving cars are unsafe.
Does the public believe that? I've only ever heard it hinted at when female fighter pilots had accidents and only because they counterposed it with the idea of the army deciding to let women fly jets despite possibly not passing the test...or something. It's never been clear.
But let's grant that and follow your logic. The public has not hounded their elected officials to outlaw lady pilots and they certainly have never considered outlawing air travel, even if we keep having to remind people that it's safer than driving.
No one is more accustomed to the emotional innumeracy of the public than I. But that hardly ever leads to action to outlaw some obvious public facing part of a business that people love.
The problem occurs these days because airlines and air forces announce they're upping their female and PoC percentages. People rightly assume some won't be as qualified.
Can I ask where you found the data you used? I’ve never seen anything on actual rates. I have seen some unbelievably knuckleheaded male pilots. As an aside, I find it curious that essentially nothing has come out about the Hudson River helo crash.
NAVSAFECOM, NAVAIR, the GAO, et al, working with others on a research project involving Mishap Categories A through C. So we looked at things like taxiing into hanger doors, runway excursions, tail strikes, as well as failure to remove engine blanks, FOD-caused failures, snapped arresting cables, catapult capacity selector-valve failures, failure to remove the cat seal (no blame to the aviator for things like that) and so forth, not just mishaps involving fatalities or hull loss that were the direct result of pilot actions or inactions. It was clear that most flying accidents due to pilot error were caused either by failure to maintain sufficient airspeed during landing operations, or failure to follow pre-flight procedures.
I don't assert that females are somehow inherently safer pilots than men, even though the data may suggest that they are, but that they are no less safe, and I object to those claiming that they are less safe _because they are female_.
Thanks. I’m a civilian pilot, not military, and I’m constantly surprised at some of the folks who’ve managed to get themselves a certificate. Good luck to you!
Scottsdale, AZ, has tons of them. They only work in hot, dry places. Good luck having them drive through snow. I'm sure that will come eventually.
In the late 1960’s the NYPD’s “Hack Bureau” lowered the permissible driving age for taxi drivers. Many of the old-timers were quitting; it seems they didn’t enjoy being mugged or murdered by junkies.
I drove an NYC taxi the summer of ‘69; 4pm shift. 49% of the meter plus tips. It was the highest paying summer job around…much higher than my college friends who were working in summer resort areas cooking or serving. The tips were good, especially if you engaged with the passenger. They were surprised to see a 20 year old kid driving a cab. They wanted me to get home safely that night, go back to school in September and not have to be a taxi driver the rest of my life. My mother didn’t sleep much that summer, waiting for me to get home @ 2am.
I’m betting that Waymo could make a very engaging AI personality to chat with their passenger in a nice way. People are lonely. They don’t like admitting it, but they are.
The last Lyft I took, the driver was a charming black Englishman with one of those Don Cheadle in Ocean's 11 accent. He was a big soccer fan, so I bored him with all my anecdotes about World Cups going back to the 1970s (I don't know anything about soccer other than World Cups.)
Whenever I’m in a taxi I bore the driver with stories of my three month long taxi-driving career. I can sense my wife’s eye-roll, even if her “not again” is inaudible.
On one Uber ride a lady in her sixties spent a lot of time trying to suss out if I hated Donald Trump enough. Who needs that?