Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

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10 years is a pipe dream. It will be much slower. And you seem focused only on the easy cases, when it's the hard ones that will make it such a slow transition.

Long haul drives are the edge case, last-mile trucking won't be anywhere near the first thing to get automated, people aren't suddenly going to want to sleep in their car to do overnight trips, etc. The biggest future change to fuel stops is electrification, not automated cars.

Consider for a moment that Waymo is very early into the "hey, we are allowing driverless rides on very well mapped roads!" situation. How many years have they been almost at that point already? Now put that together with the typical R&D timeline for a new car (perhaps 6 years plus or minus), and the average lifespan of a car (11 years and climbing, last I checked). No manufacturer has legitimate driverless cars in the production pipeline. We're quite a lot farther than 10 years from seeing any consumer driverless cars on the road, much less a significant enough number of them to worry about 'two-tier' driving experiences. The EV transition is going lightning fast by comparison.

If you are saying that people will still be driving cars in 10 years, then yes you are right. I wouldn't be surprised if 100 years from now there were still roads where it was legal for humans to drive cars.

But we should expect that this transition will be very similar to the transition from horses to cars. The first cars were unreliable and unsafe and didn't work well on roads designed for horses. But as cars improved the advantages quickly became huge and demand for horses dropped quickly.

The same situation is happening with Tesla. FSD is unreliable and unsafe today but once it hits an inflection point the advantages are so big more and more people become willing to accept the downsides.

I remain skeptical. The differences between horse and car were dramatic. An automated car is still a car. I suspect it may have as many downsides as upsides, to be honest (similar to things like Uber making traffic worse, not better, counterintuitively).

>An automated car is still a car

Early cars were designed as [carriages with the horses removed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseless_carriage). It would not be until many years later until we saw car designs that leveraged the unique technological advantages of horseless cars to deliver designs that looked and functioned nothing like horse-drawn carriages. We're still at this stage with automated driving.

As automated vehicles become more commonplace, we'll see designs that leverage the inherent benefits of automaton. For example, we might see designs that essentially function as moving living rooms, bedrooms or meeting rooms on wheels. We might see other designs that resemble small busses, where groups of people travelling to geographically proximate locations can carpool into a single automated vehicle. Heck, we might even see something like moving diners on wheels (potentially serving several clients at once), because why wouldn't you want to eat a hot breakfast in the "car" while on the way to the airport or work.

Once these new designs and use cases become commonplace, people in the future will view our car designs as increasingly archaic and restrictive (just like how we view horse-drawn carriages today).

None of the things you're describing actually require automation. If people actually wanted "diners on wheels" then we'd all be taking diner buses to the airport. A driverless car just frees up a bit of space; it doesn't fundamentally change the physics of how vehicles work (like cars did for horses)

Autonomous cars are going to reshape the motel market and commuting.

If you can sleep comfortably as your car drives you from SF to LA, it is a game-changer. If you can WFH from your car as you commute to the office for mid-morning meetings, you can live farther from town.

Removing the labor costs of having a driver allows everyone to experience the transformative benefits of having a chauffeur. Rich people like chauffeurs because they buy time, the most-precious commodity.

If this were true, rich people would already have cars with chaffers and beds in them. They don't because the form factor isn't practical without compromising all the other things that you'd want to use your car for. The second scenario basically already exists in the form of bay area tech shuttlesbuses; most people who use them find them a (barely) tolerable tradeoff for living in San Francisco rather than something to be relished.

No, a horse and car were like night and day. You have to feed a horse, a lot. Horses poop, a lot. And horses get stressed, they die in intensive use fairly regularly. The poop and the dying were the public health crises of their day.

It’s annoying to drive a car, but a self driving car isn’t going to massively change things. The bottleneck in most road systems are where they interface with pedestrians and cyclists (one can only cross the street so fast); self driving cars might improve highway capacities but the bottleneck is usually a backup from too many people coming or going on the same ramp into a traffic light.

True, the first order effects can be worse in some ways. Horses can easily go off road and step over obstructions and cars cannot.

The big deal is the second order effects. Cars can driver 50 MPH so we build highways and now we can have suburbs.

For autonomy it means that logistics systems can be centrally planned and programmed like never before with no need to factor in the human costs or restraints around sleeping, stopping for food, etc. Then the third order effects of that are very hard to predict

Minor point:"If you are saying that people will still be driving cars in 10 years"

Motorbikes are a thing. Apart from weight/balance relationships to control, many riders are "take control from my dead hands" types so I don't think the market will easily convert to self-driving.

It'll be interesting to see what happens. Maybe motorcycles will fade out or be banned. I will enjoy mine while I can.

seems like waymo is ahead of tesla now, just gleaning from the articles I read on HN. and because tesla only uses cameras and not lidar I don't know if this is a temporary situation or something more fundamental

They’ve always been ahead of Tesla.

Hopefully cars are banned soon.

So we can put an end to all the death they cause, and the pollution they create.

That’s ignoring all the convenience cars provide. Not to mention the utility, freedom and independence they represent to many handicapped people.

Also, cars allow cities to scale further than was possible without them. If cars are banned, inner cities will start hollowing out due to labor / supply shortages, etc.

Surely you just mean the USA right? Because that statement is not true in almost any other country that I can think of.

I don't share your pessimism, I think having a geofenced self-driving experience, on select roads, with the option of occasional manual override by a remote operator, is definitely feasible in 10 years.

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