Hacker News Reader

Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

Call me a technology optimist. I'd bet 10 years.

I'd agree. I think in 10 years we're starting to have the conversation about when human driving should be banned in metro areas. At that point it'll be obvious that the technology has arrived, and the safety record will be there, but not everyone will have the technology. There will be the problem of telling someone with a jalopy that they need to park that outside of the metro and pay for an Uber to their destination which will probably snarl that up for at least a decade or more... At some point, though, as rich people are zipping along in cars that never get pulled over for speeding or having taillights out, the "Uber tax" is going to be calculated to be less expensive than the "PoPo tax" on the working poor.

I'm rather skeptical on that happening anywhere near 10 years. Even if the tech was ready to go full-scale tomorrow, just the process of tooling up to make tens of millions of these cars and actually selling them to people, letting them trickle down to lower-income used car buyers and letting the oldest manual cars trickle out of the market could take decades.

Once the first ones are available on the open market, I'd expect at least 10 years of them being very expensive rich peoples' toys while the remaining edge cases and kinks in the tech are worked out, manufacturing scales up, insurance and legal issues get sorted out, various road maintenance departments learn to deal with their needs, etc.

One reasonable scenario for rapid deployment of self-driving cars - is shared vehicles, driving a few people at a time over a shared but optimal route.

It's possible that such vehicles will have 5x-10x total occupancy per day of regular vehicles(which sit idle at most times). And it could imagine how the right financial incentives would shift a large share of the manufacturing capacity towards such cars. And considering the car replacement rate at probably something like 20 years - maybe 10 years is a possibility of starting to have that conversation.

That's an good possibility for getting self-driving cars to market sooner and getting more people in them all right, but I'm thinking we have to get a lot of manual cars out of the market before anyone starts taking the idea of restricting them seriously.

Rush hour patterns imply that a lot of that idle time would likely remain idle. EDIT: Fixed typo

I think 10 years is just a bit optimistic. I think it'll take about 10 years from the time we have the software/hardware at a point where it is ready. I think that could be 5 years. I think it'll be another 15-20 years after that where the majority of cars on the road are self driving. Baring any crazy legislation, which I don't think would happen, in the US anyway.

I argued that it'd be 10 years when we'd start the discussion, and that it'd be 20 years from now before metros start to go driverless.

Yeah, I apologize, I meant to respond to the GP and accidentally responded to you. I don't want to clutter the thread with duplicate posts though, so I'll just leave it as is.

Even if it were possible to go buy a fully automated car today, there's no way enough of the fleet would have changed over in as short a time as ten years to make such a ban practical. And it's not possible to buy an automated car today; nor are the research prototypes Google and others have been working with up to a level of sophistication where simply productizing them would yield a fully automated car which could be used as a generic replacement for current automobiles.

I could believe that the first generation of fully automated cars might be available for purchase in ten years.

> there's no way enough of the fleet would have changed over in as short a time as ten years to make such a ban practical.

Cars sit idle 95% of the time. That means you only need to flip 5-10% of the total fleet. Tesla could do it by themselves building 2-4 million cars/year, with the amount of cars needed per year declining the higher the utilization level you can achieve.

Yes, but they all sit idle the same 95% of the time. Everyone needs a ride at rush hour.

> Yes, but they all sit idle the same 95% of the time. Everyone needs a ride at rush hour.

Disincentivize rush hour using congestion pricing.

You could divide rush hours maybe to 2 shifts of an SDC. And there's always the possibility of shared rides.

I don't understand how replacing a small minority of the fleet with automated cars leads to a situation where it is reasonable to talk about banning human drivers.

You would always consider banning humans from an activity if it was overly dangerous compared to having a machine perform the operation.

40K people a year die in the US from vehicle accidents. Why would you not ban humans from driving if machines were objectively superior? Where do you find the "right" to drive to be? Driving is a privilege granted by the government, not a right.

The comment I replied to was suggesting that vehicle automation would progress so rapidly that it would be practical to start working on such a ban as soon as ten years from now. I'm not disputing that such a ban might eventually become a good idea, but for it to become practical so soon, we'd have to be much, much further down the road to full automation than we are now.

If fully-automated vehicles become commercially available (which seems likely at some point, though not in the immediate future), we will likely see rapid adoption in the applications where they are very well suited, followed by a long, slow, gradual trend toward broader usage. The hardest cases will be the ones sticking around longest, and one can't simply legislate them out of existence. Just replacing a small percentage of the fleet won't come anywhere close! It's only when automated cars have become so dominant that only a small percentage of the fleet still depends on manual drivers that it will become practical to start talking about a ban on manual operation.

So I argued we'd start the conversation in 10 years and that it'd take at least another decade. I that is 20 years until we'd see the first ban against human drivers in metro areas.

To be there I do think we need the first generation of fully automated cars available to the general public in 5 years or less, which I think we're actually close to or we wouldn't be having this very discussion...

Ah, I didn't notice the second ten-year span in your prediction. I still think your perspective is wildly optimistic, but it makes more sense now.

You want to get in on this bet? We could open up a pool on the prediction markets.

Probably not. I don't think it's sufficiently well-defined for me to trust an arbiter to resolve the bet satisfactorily. Also, time value of money.

http://longbets.org/ would help facilitate this, though the minimum is 200 dollars.

I think you or the colleague are more likely to be correct than 40+ years. There are hugely capable companies driving this and more understanding than ever on what will be achievable and how much money will be on the line.

Self-driving, electric cars will make future taxi-equivalents affordable enough that it's considered for many instances. That makes for a massive market.

It's not as though current taxis have a sparkling reputation as drivers either. Not many will be sad to see the end of them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com