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Comment by nebula8804 | Hacker News Reader

I am not so sure. Think of the potential value to be unlocked: It will radically change the way real estate is planned. If cars drive themselves, you can switch over to a "Car on demand" model for most current vehicle owners. Why would you need to waste space on parking lots, single garages etc. You also unlock the ability for more people to live further away from work.

It has the potential to extract a massive amount of value out of other parts of the chain as well. Aside from software(which in my opinion is just stealing existing value from everyone else) pretty much everything else is minuscule growth. What is the next leap in maintaining growth of the economy? Extract the value out of these blue collar jobs(trucking, taxi driving, other logistics).

Combine this with the rise of simpler designs in EVs + less car ownership you also can bring in mechanics and repair into your value chain and extract that value as well.

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You just outlined the advantages to be had should such come about. But am I missing the part where you explain why you think this has any chance of coming to fruition? Because that's what parent is on about. I mean, if a frog had wings it wouldn't bump its ass when it hops. But no one is explaining how frog wing technology has taken (if you'll pardon the pun) some big leaps the past few years.

The potential returns motivate the investment needed to achieve them.

It would be way cheaper and more practical to just to have everyone work from home that can or live close by to where they work or have cities invest in better public transport and biking infrastructure.

Sure none of those are as cool as the JohnnyCab but they already exist so require no R&D.

Sure. All it would take is razing LA to the ground and rebuilding it from scratch.

I don't think I'm exaggerating, either. In a city plan like that one, any public transit route is going to, even at optimal configuration, have simultaneously too many stops and too little:

* Too many stops, because the train or bus spends more time stopped than it spends moving, so rides across the city take forever.

* Too few stops, because you still have to walk a mile to actually get where you're going.

Fixing this requires a walkable city, which can be summarized as "don't spend half the land area on parking and stroads."

Nobody is unclear on the value.

Lots of people -- including me -- don't believe that it's possible without significant technological advances that look to be extraordinarily expensive. ie open R&D problems.

I will say that if anyone can do this, it will be Waymo/Google. Unlike Tesla, it's not a fraud.

That said, it's notable they're doing this in Arizona. Limited rain, no snow, clear weather all the time.

>> "Car on demand" model for most current vehicle owners

I don't see that. Cars are not just transport. They are fashion statements. They are virtue signaling. They are portable storage lockers. I just don't see everyone who owns a car now giving all that up just because the car can drive itself. The traffic/congestion implications of "car on demand" are also staggering, basically doubling the number of trips made as each car delivers itself empty to the next customer. And further reducing the cost of car ownership will only pull more people away from mass transportation/biking/walking.

> They are fashion statements. They are virtue signaling. They are portable storage lockers.

Flip it around the other way - if you had a L5 car at your fingertips, would you give it up so that you could make a fashion statement, virtue signal, or have a portable storage locker?

There's already apps which give us the equivalent of a L5 car fleet at our fingertips; they just come with low-paid humans attached.

Not all car drivers' total cost of car ownership works out less than the Uber fares for the rides they take either....

Yes. Instantly. I keep all sorts of stuff in my car, from shopping bags to a trauma kit. When i am on alert (military) i keep a duffle bag full of my stuff so i dont have to go home before a snap exercise. And in a town of pickup trucks and suvs i enjoy being the smallest car on the road, especially when i see trucks in the ditch needing help. Ever seen a 2door honda pull an f150 out of the ditch? I have. I got a picture of that one in my office.

There is so much wrong with your statement. First, Gen Z doesn’t care nearly as much as previous generations about driving and what vehicles mean for status. Expect that trend to continue especially when ownership goes away.

And as far as “doubling trips”, the car won’t have to drive far to find its next pickup and it may not have to do empty pickups at all with the equivalent of Lyft Line.

If we don’t need parking lots and spaces we can use that real estate for more mass transit.

I wouldn't underestimate people's vanity so much.

Also there are numerous other complications that get glossed over. How many L5 cars are going to be available in my area on a popular holiday travel weekend that have a roof rack for kayaks and a 7 pin trailer connector and electric brake controller for my camper? Not to mention giving up the other customizations I enjoy with my current vehicle - removed rear seats for more space/less weight, dash cam, winter tires, etc.

I suspect if self driving comes to fruition it will be a mixture for many people. I can definitely see our 2 car household just owning one car that fits our niche use cases, and then one on-demand cars for daily work trips and filling in the gaps.

You are in a privileged position. Regulations will follow the introduction of self driving cars to make owning a car a much more expensive proposition. With wages stagnant for decades, the mass market will be forced into the rental model. That will be able to cover their use case as well as your use case because there won't be as many of you.

> How many L5 cars are going to be available in my area on a popular holiday travel weekend that have a roof rack for kayaks and a 7 pin trailer connector and electric brake controller for my camper?

Weekend reservations. Just like people do with kayaks today.

> Not to mention giving up the other customizations I enjoy with my current vehicle - removed rear seats for more space/less weight, dash cam, winter tires, etc.

None of this is necessary with robotaxis. You have way more flexibility in terms of space. You won’t need a dashcam. Weight and tires won’t make a difference to the rider.

Anyone who kayaks frequently is much more likely to own than to rent.

And you are far too dismissive of the customization/equipment/storage aspect. For just one example, there are vast numbers of parents who have child seats, strollers, diapers, wipes, etc stored in their cars. You can be sure they have no interest in hauling all that stuff around during their shopping or whatever because the robotaxi is off getting another customer.

Excessive consumption as fashion has gone the other way for young kids.

Environmentalism seems to be "cool af",to the point where not owning a car is virtue signalling.

I think part of it has to do with the possibility that they are just poorer on average compared to their parents. Circumstances help define the culture so rallying against excessive consumption is more in vogue when you cannot consume in the first place.

Think about the possibility of changing cars on demand. In the morning you can rent a mobile bed like car to get to work(take a nap while it takes you to work or get some tasks done), when coming home you can rent an suv to pick up groceries/pick up your kids and on the weekends if you need a pickup truck/van, you can request one of those for the occasion.

Yes there will be massive traffic implications. This is probably something that will have to be addressed when it happens. If there are dedicated self driving car lanes, can the cars communicate with each other to help reduce traffic? At the very least pollution will be significantly reduced from today's smog filled cities like LA thanks to the transition to EVs(I don't expect this revolution to occur before the transition to EVs).

Finally, in regards to public transportation: it is already a failure in the US outside a few cities. It is a lost cause in a society that focuses on individualism vs collectivism. In terms of walking/biking, I can see improved access to these services. Can you imagine how a car that never gets tired/drunk will reduce accident and subsequently insurance rates? If the cards are played right, there is an opportunity for a massive transformation of how bicyclists and public walkers are treated in relation to cars.

I see lots of self-driving car advocates talk about this "on-demand car" model, but I don't see any way it works in practice.

No actual sharing: At rush hour, I and most of the people around me will need a car to get to/from work. Therefore the rental fleet will have to be large enough to meet this peak demand, and effectively there will have to be a car in the fleet allocated to me (to get me to and from work). So (amortized over time) I will have to compensate the company for the cost of the car, plus the cost of bringing it to me every day, plus overhead, plus profit.

Reduced convenience: A car may not be available immediately when I need/want it. I have to either risk not having a car for some important event or plan in advance and book what I need. The car I'm allocated on any given day may be too small to meet my needs. I have to wait for the car to arrive, can't store my stuff in it, have to take time to install/uninstall car seats, get charged a fee if I leave my empty soda can in it.

IMO, for a regular car user (i.e. someone who currently uses a car for multiple trips per day) moving to an on-demand model will be at least as expensive as and less convenient than owning a car. There might be exceptions in very dense urban environments where parking is very expensive, but those places usually have a good public transit alternative.

> effectively there will have to be a car in the fleet allocated to me

I think most people will carpool to work in self driving vans. It'll be so much cheaper than having your own car.

They could carpool to work now in their non-self driving cars. So why don't they do it? What does self-driving change?

It's hard to coordinate and doesn't save money since you still need your own car to do errands. Pre covid many people absolutely were using uber pool to carpool to work.

> I am not so sure. Think of the potential value to be unlocked: It will radically change the way real estate is planned. If cars drive themselves, you can switch over to a "Car on demand" model for most current vehicle owners. Why would you need to waste space on parking lots, single garages etc. You also unlock the ability for more people to live further away from work.

none of that value accrues to the people who make self-driving cars though (or their investors). It's not like if waymo gets rid of your car for you, they get your parking spot or garage.

It's a huge social benefit but investors are looking for return-on-investment, not making a multibillion loss to improve society.

Like any service that provides value to individuals, people will pay the makers of self driving cars for the convenience.

Maybe I didn't word it properly. I discussed the value gained as well as how the advent of self driving will transform existing stores of value like parking spaces.

In this case: the value is captured by the car rental company (which will likely be the car manufacturers themselves). Part of the value comes from the rent that the parking space would have extracted.

>It's a huge social benefit but investors are looking for return-on-investment, not making a multibillion loss to improve society.

Its hard to predict how much value they can gain unless we have more information but I'd imagine if the majority of cars become on demand, then there has to be at least a few billions of dollars in potential value.

In regards to if people will actually take up rental: Since everyone else is moving to a rental model today(streaming services vs owning, cell phone "refresh" contracts, potential apple offering a monthly subscription that always gets you a new phone, car companies offering all included monthly car subscription) by the time this thing rolls out it is plausible that there will be high uptake on a rental model.

If software is "stealing existing value from everyone", then what does that make self-driving software?

That was the whole point of my response. I am not saying every piece of software steals value from everyone, I am saying software in general steals value from everyone else. So in your example, self driving software steals value from real estate, taxi drivers, truckers, other logistics services. By making them redundant their margin is now owned by the software makers that made them redundant in the first place.

This is what is driving the valuation of all these FAANG companies. They are just vacuuming up all the existing value from the rest of the country/world.

Sure, but that is more of "reassignment of ownership of capital" and that makes it less likely and not more likely that such an endeavor will be funded (for political reasons). Unlike say nuclear fusion (safe and practically unlimited energy at an order of magnitude previously unseen is worth the spend and most countries would bite I think), is self-driving worth hundreds of billions in expenditure?

I don't know.

>Sure, but that is more of "reassignment of ownership of capital"

ha ha your phrasing is funny. It is more like "sudden unexpected reassignment of ownership of capital".

>and that makes it less likely and not more likely that such an endeavor will be funded (for political reasons).

Yes the powers that be are finally starting to slowly turn against the software people. You see Europe getting tired of them losing every last bit of the little value chain they have left. Meanwhile in the US, elites are getting tired of software empowering people other than themselves and are starting to make moves to try and put the genie back in the bottle. We saw all these tech CEOs being brought up in congress but all that it showed is that they still don't fully get how they have been robbed yet, just that they know that they have been robbed. If they manage to stop the software industry (a big doubt) yes I can see them putting a stop to self driving tech(although China seems determined to steam ahead no matter what). If they do manage to stop self driving that means they have also managed to kill a lot of the software industry as well and with that one of the last few paths to a solid comfortable middle/upper middle class life in this world.

>Unlike say nuclear fusion (safe and practically unlimited energy at an order of magnitude previously unseen is worth the spend and most countries would bite I think), is self-driving worth hundreds of billions in expenditure?

Now you are pulling an exact number out of thin air. Will it really be hundreds of billions in cost? When you talk about "hundreds of billions" you are talking about a noticeable chunk of the US's GDP and the complete GDP of most countries.

Since when has software or even advanced AI research ever cost that much to develop? Don't get me wrong: I believe it will be in the billions or even tens of billions over many years, but this is a cost that that can be absorbed by the companies/government entities that are pursuing this and even tens of billions can be justified by the potential gains.

Maybe hundreds is too much but 100 billion spent over years is not necessarily an exaggeration. Google and Cruise together have spent like 20B to get to where we are right now (easily googled) which IMHO is not the 95% mark where the returns get much harder. The cars are heavily geofenced and need help from service personnel regularly.

Correct me If I am wrong but getting to the point where humans are completely unnecessary is still a research problem. We need more research and more breakthroughs which costs a lot of money and is non-linear (you are not guaranteed results). It could very easily take 100B to get to a point where a car can ferry people anywhere they want with zero human assistance (no service personnel to guide out of traps etc).

>Since when has software or even advanced AI research ever cost that much to develop?

Since now? If software is eating the world, you should expect software research to also eat up a lot of money. As the low hanging fruit is picked, further gains are going to cost a lot more.

These upsides wouldn’t benefit car manufacturers though, since they won’t profit from zoning policy changes.

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