Hacker News Reader

Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

I know Waymo are the investing a lot into the PR that makes them seem successful, but they are the only company I actually see on track to delivering autonomous cars (on existing infrastructure).

I'm still a bit torn on whether autonomous cars are a good thing once you consider all the second and third order effects (even more cars on the streets, less investment into better modes of transport, and traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic and watching Netflix). But I have to applaud Waymo for their great execution on a very difficult problem.

View on HN

As others have noted, autonomous vehicles may actually lead to less car use. Currently, many people must own cars for certain use cases. Because of this, for any given trip the decision to take car vs. other means is based on the marginal cost of car usage. In contrast, if people no longer need to own cars because of autonomous taxis, the decision of car vs. other reflects the ammortized cost of car use, which will be far higher than the marginal cost. Put another way, there are plenty of trips being taken by car now simply because people have a car for other reasons, but if they didn't own a car they'd far sooner take another option vs. renting/Uber/Waymo.

I do not see how the existence of autonomous taxis is any different than the existence of taxis.

The existence of taxis is (obviously) not enough to curb car usage growth.

EDIT: Some specificity: How would robotaxis replace commuting for millions of people in a way that reduces car rides? The taxi has to move at least from the storage to the rider pickup to the rider dropoff. Without sharing, that's actually more miles and the same number of cars.

Instead, if it picks up two people per day, that's more miles, fewer cars in existence (since both riders dont need a car), but the same number of car trips (plus the to/from storage).

With taxis (robotic or otherwise) the number of miles driven is just going up unless people change their lifestyle. That doesn't do anything to curb care useage.

It's a lot harder to artificially constrain autonomous taxis with taxi medallions.

I think I did the monthly costs to do short commutes with just uber or taxis and it is easily in the high hundreds or low thousands a month (for me, doing a 20ish minute commute each way)

If it ended up being in the low hundreds, well, that's lower than a lot of people's car payments. Couples or roommates could share a car for non commuting purposes or trips.

You factor in intelligent ride sharing and you could halve the number of cars on the road most days.

> If it ended up being in the low hundreds, well, that's lower than a lot of people's car payments. Couples or roommates could share a car for non commuting purposes or trips.

So the leap here is based on "Autonomous taxi companies will charge less per ride than rideshare"?

perhaps.

Is it really the case that those charges are high because the drivers are getting paid so much, or because the vehicles and things like deadheading are expensive? Uber’s been driving driver compensation down for years but there’s only so much room for further reductions and it’s not like the hardware or support for self-driving systems is free.

yeah, I'm not familiar on the economics of it, and I'm not saying you should buy stock in autonomous vehicle companies. This was more of musing that in theory, if the economics of ride sharing are low enough, it could compete with people buying or leasing cars.

Once there is adequate competition, autonomous taxis should be much cheaper.

This can be said for taxis as well, though, right? What's the difference?

Uber tries that, but it turns out in many places you can't offer human-driven taxis much cheaper once you put them on equal footing regarding insurance and other relevant regulations and stop running the service at a loss.

No need to pay a human and fewer total cars because they can operate mostly 24hr/day

Most traffic occurs during the morning and evening commute, you'll need roughly the same number of vehicles for those surges unless those norms change as well.

Can't taxis already operate 24hrs a day? Just rotate out the drivers.

They can, but nobody wants a ride except drunks. Which is one reason why taxis look so bad: when a significant portion of your clients are drunk (throwing up in the back, peeing on the seats and all the other things they do) you don't want a nice car. Nice taxis don't work those shifts. If there is a big shared car market (I doubt it) you will see cars for different times of the day as a profile for potential drunk rider.

Except that our experience shows that over time competition decreases and things like regulatory capture happen so it becomes harder for anyone small to enter into competition and then prices get hiked up.

And the cars and autonomous driving software itself is becoming more expensive and more subscription-based over time so those rents are going to have to be passed on to the consumer. Large autonomous taxi services may be able to strike better deals or even build their own software/vehicles if they're big enough, but you're not going to be able to compete with them effectively by purchasing a Tesla (and presumably consumer prices will rise as there's less individual-owned vehicles and companies go seeking after only the highest margins and abandon the toyota-corolla market to the robotaxi corporations).

Here are a couple of possibilities. Working aged person sends their car to their elderly parent's place so that they can use the vehicle to do their groceries. Families with kids in various activities can get the car to deliver and pickup all the kids at the appropriate times without needing multiple vehicles if the parents need to accompany some of the children. Car pooling becomes more acceptable because you can sleep during the detours to pick people up.

In reality, I don't think it is useful to try to enumerate these small immediate changes that are distinct from the availability of taxis. The long term cultural shift of having autonomous vehicles may lead people to fundamentally share vehicles in a different way. This may lead to a situation where fewer vehicles are driving more miles.

> Car pooling becomes more acceptable because you can sleep during the detours to pick people up.

Only if it is always picking the same people up. Otherwise this is a big negative. People often need to arrive someplace on time. If my car had decided to take a detour to pick someone else up and made me late for my early meeting I'd be mad. Car pools work - to the extent they do - because it is always the same people who need to arrive at the same time.

There seems to be an implicit assumption in a lot of cases that robo-taxis will drastically slash the price of taxis relative to today. Maybe cut the prices by 50% at best? That's about the delta between me driving my own car versus getting an Uber into the city. It's enough to get me to drive but is certainly not in too cheap to meter territory. And being able to have the vehicle I want with various stuff stored in it today is useful as well.

> I do not see how the existence of autonomous taxis is any different than the existence of taxis.

Cost. The cost of an Uber is way too much for daily travel (vs owning your own car or public transport).

A human-driven taxi needs to pay the driver's salary within an 8 hour shift. An autonomous taxi can run (almost) 24/7, 365 days a year. Which do you think will be the cheaper fare?

Another scenario is someone simply renting out their own car as an autonomous taxi whenever they aren't using it themselves (which is most of the time). Then it'll always be cheaper than current-day taxis because it's just a low-effort bonus source of income to the car owner.

I think the difference in cost between a maybe minimum wage driver and a computer is far less than maybe people assume.

And, for a car driven any reasonable amount, most of the cost is in the mileage.

> Which do you think will be the cheaper fare?

Neither, any savings will trickle up to the investors. The price of robotaxis is going to be just below the limit where it would make sense to own a car.

An autonomous taxi isn't going to make many more trips per day. Every hear of "rush hour?" Turns out most people are moving around the city at the same time of the day, then much less trips in the other parts of the day. (except lunch hour when again all the same people are going to lunch). In the middle of the day the trips people make tend to be different (more likely shopping or delivery: different car type than commuting).

I think most people will try the taxi, but if you already own a car (that is transit doesn't make sense for most trips) you will discover it isn't much cheaper than owning your own car, and your own car is waiting outside when you want to go (one big advantage of owning a car over transit is the car is ready when you want to go instead of having to call or hope one is waiting - if cars need to wait outside your office all day in case your kid gets sick that increases costs). Instead you can just buy a self driving car and then leave your things in the car if you go shopping over lunch - something you cannot do with a shared car.

The idea is that the cost of autonomous car use will be much lower than taxis, because there are no labor costs. If you have to get to work every day, taking a taxi (if you can even find one) is much more expensive than buying a car and amortizing the cost across its lifetime. As the price of autonomous taxis fall, that will reverse.

That doesn't mean I agree with the GP's point about it lowering car usage overall. The reduced cost of auto taxies also pushes against your reluctance to take one, though perhaps not all the way to "use my car whenever I leave the house" levels. I also think that once people begin replacing their cars with autonomous taxis, they'll sign up for all kinds of taxi subscriptions that will further reduce that reluctance. After all, driving your car now isn't completely free: it still costs you gas money, plus the hassle of actually driving it. And other forms of transportation aren't free either. So the bar here isn't 0.

This is fair. I was unclear about the distinction between fewer cars (supported perhaps by cheap taxis - robotic or otherwise), and car useage (not supported by cheap taxis of any kind).

Once human-driven alternatives (eg. rideshare, taxis) are out-competed by autonomous taxis, what would be the incentive to keep those prices low? Especially if Waymo is the one service with suitably performant autonomous vehicles

Exactly. People imagine some sort of future SciFi benevolence from PCs that is not going to happen.

> The idea is that the cost of autonomous car use will be much lower than taxis

I see this all the time and I just do not believe it is true. Uber/Lyft/etc undercut taxis for users to take market share, and have drastically raised prices to become marginally profitable.

Autonomous cars are more expensive, and the labor in non-autonomous cars is not the majority of the costs. In NYC, a 1hr Uber could easily cost $100 against a minimum wage of $15.

The idea that a taxi trip becoming cheaper than a car owners marginal car trip would require dramatic dropping of taxi prices. Even halving is not really going to do it, and I don't think removing the driver even halves the costs.

The autonomous taxi boosters also seem to overlook what happens to unattended, unmonitored public infrastructure in urban areas of this country. The reason I stopped using Zipcar in NYC was because they were typically trashed inside by the previous drivers. Now imagine an autonomous taxi that gets turned over 10x as often. Good luck.

People will very likely also be willing to spend much more time in cars if they don't have to actively drive. E.g. you have a 2 hour commute but you can play on your steam deck the whole time, or you can travel by sleeping in your car while it drives 8 hours.

To the extent that self driving taxi services are cheaper than human driven taxi services, they will also increase use of taxi services.

There's no reason to assume that on the balance people will end up driving less as a result of a technology that makes driving significantly more convenient simply because it might make taxi services somewhat cheaper and therefore potentially might make it easier to not own a car and encourage people to use other modes of transportation for some trips.

Well, sleeping is generally done when demand for cars is extremely low. And a lot of people can’t sleep in cars even when they are a passenger. It’s hard to imagine that becoming common enough, even at very low prices, to add to the number of cars on the road.

While I’d certainly prefer to watch Netflix than actively drive, I’ve still got stuff I need/want to do that I can’t in a car even as a passenger. And it’s just not comfortable for long periods of time. A lot of people get motion sickness staring at a screen in a moving car. Etc.

A lot of people own pickups just because they occasionally want to tow something or move something large. A lot of people own second cars for occasional use. These might become rentals instead when it can affordably just show up at my door in a half hour.

There’s no way to tell how this plays out. There will be some amount of induced demand, there will be some amount of reduction in use. One never knows which will be bigger.

What I do know is traffic deaths kill over 40,000 Americans a year, and driverless cars could potentially get that to 0 or near it, whereas human drivers cannot. I do know we can electrify cars and power them all with renewable energy, not immediately of course, and remove many of the environmental concerns. We can enhance mobility for the elderly and children and mentally disabled who can’t drive.

There’s a strange amount of anti-car propaganda that has gotten people worried about this, but I look forward to a driverless future in which cars are cheap, clean, safe, and available to all.

> There’s a strange amount of anti-car propaganda that has gotten people worried about this, but I look forward to a driverless future in which cars are cheap, clean, safe, and available to all.

It’s not propaganda but jumbled concerns which are often poorly expressed. I think the strongest arguments are:

1. Self-driving cars don’t change pollution - even EVs are better for local air quality but still cause massive carbon emissions and unchanged or worse tire particulates, etc. – and may even make it worse locally with the extra mileage from taxi fleets.

2. Self-driving cars only lightly improve congestion, and then only to the extent that they can coordinate and you can ban non-AI drivers from certain chokepoints at certain times. The form factor unavoidably needs far more space per passenger than anything else.

3. Self-driving cars don’t really help with affordability – even if the current prices come closer to parity, that’s a financial stress for many people (e.g. in the region where I live, the average family spends as much on vehicles as they do food).

4. Self-driving safety needs a different relationship with the manufacturer. There are many areas where they can be safer but failures can also be correlated so we really need companies to share liability and have rigorous safety oversight.

As a pedestrian, I’m fairly bullish on the concept given how dangerous the average driver is now compared to 20 years ago but I worry that a lot of politicians are going to ignore the other issues because those require hard choices whereas it’s so compatible with American culture to say you can solve major problems by making an expensive purchase. These shouldn’t be opposing issues, of course, and I’d really like to combine them because autonomous vehicles should soon, if not already, be much better about following speed limits, staying out of bus lanes, etc. Making advanced automatic braking a requirement to enter a city could save thousands of lives every year.

The EV pollution component of this is 100% propaganda spread by legacy auto makers and fossil fuel companies and is blatantly false. They are substantially better for the environment and the delta is growing too. Even in an area where energy is generated by fossil fuels, EVs emit significantly less CO2 per mile driven. Like 2-4x depending on a wide range of factors. And most new power generation being built in the US is now renewables and if anything, we lag much of the world. It's over 80%. (Luckily it's easy to tell the near future in this regard because utility info is all public and planned out years in advance due to permitting, purchasing, etc. so there are functionally no currently unplanned power plants being built in 2024 or even until 2027 or 2028 or so.) This is because it's just cheaper now, and the economics of wind/solar get better every year as generation costs fall and fossil fuel prices rise. Technology usually gets cheaper, fossil fuels usually get more expensive, and both of these seem to be true in this case. You are correct about particulates, but it's basically insigificant compared to carbon emissions, and probably even offset by lack of motor oil or various other fluids that spill and need produced and then to be disposed of, time the car has to drive in for service, etc. Any sane person would happily trade a 50-80% reduction in lifecycle CO2 emissions per car for a 25% increase in tire particulate matter in the environment. It's only propaganda that makes people mention this, even if it's true, because it's just a non-factor.

I had half a mind to write a long treatise on why I think we'll only see significant EV adoption if/when cars become driverless, but I'll save it and just go with this. Someone I know was killed last week in a hit and run. She got in a minor car accident, got out to check on it, and a third driver hit her and took off.

When it comes to affordability, economists generally set the economic value of an average American life at ~$10 million, and 40,000 people die from traffic deaths every year. Even if we just look at the numbers, Americans buy about 3 million cars a year. So 40,000 * $10 million divided by 3 million is a savings of over $133k per car, which is far in excess of the average car's lifetime cost. Even a 50% reduction in deaths, which for all I know currently existing driverless cars could achieve, would be the same as making all cars free in terms of average cost.

And even if driverless cars are a total push in every other respect (and I think they'll be much better) 40,000 families a year (and I assume globally, at least 5x that) not losing a wife and mother that way is more than worth whatever we have to do to make it happen.

Stay safe.

> The EV pollution component of this is 100% propaganda spread by legacy auto makers and fossil fuel companies and is blatantly false. They are substantially better for the environment and the delta is growing too. Even in an area where energy is generated by fossil fuels, EVs emit significantly less CO2 per mile driven.

That’s not the argument being made. Everyone knows they pollute less per mile – but unfortunately the manufacturing is roughly half of the lifetime pollution from a vehicle.

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/07/27/ucs-study-shows-lifetim...

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...

This matters especially because consumers have been getting heavily marketed into getting massive trucks and SUVs, where the sheer size of the vehicle means the lifetime emissions are greater than a small ICE because the lack of tailpipe emissions can’t make up for that even if it’s powered entirely off of renewables.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be electrifying the vehicle fleet quickly but it’s buying time on the trip to zero emissions, not a solution. Buses and e-bikes get us much further because they don’t suffer from emissions the inherent inefficiency of automobiles.

>Buses and e-bikes get us much further because they don’t suffer from emissions the inherent inefficiency of automobiles.

It's a free country: people are free to choose to use autonomous cars over ebikes and buses and why wouldn't they? The emissions profile of a personal electric car being unaffordable[0] doesn't pass the sniff test.

[0]Fair economic taxation of externalities - considering current status quo.

Those comments always remind me how insular this community is. Go to Cleveland, or Phoenix, or Houston, or literally any city that isn’t in the top five in density, and try getting around by bus or bike and tell me how you like your life.

I don’t particularly love cars or anything, and would be really happy to not have to have one, but there’s no way I’m going to try to rely on buses or bikes. I value my time, too much for buses and my life, and not being either frozen or covered in sweat too much for any sort of bike.

A car gets you from point A to point B quickly, reliably, comfortably, and with cargo. Nothing else does that, and we are willing to spend a significant portion of our income for it.

We’re only talking about pollution here - the problem is that multi-ton heavy machinery has a much bigger footprint than any other common option for moving a person around. It’s not a “free country” debate, just unavoidable physics: using 4-6K lbs of machine to move 200lbs of person is going to require a lot more energy than a 20lbs bicycle or having that person share a bus with 50 other people.

I think taxing carbon would be a great way to encourage people to reconsider how they travel, and would expect many people to pick things like those small EVs for urban usage if that became common.

Both of those links say EVs still have substantially low carbon emissions.

Studies are all over the map but the ones that put it anywhere near 50% are all from China.

Speaking for myself, I would absolutely "drive" more miles if my car were autonomous. I'd take the hour+ trip into the city far more if I didn't have to drive or go on the two hour+ drive to the mountains for a day hike. Even if there are fewer cars (which is mostly about the economics) there will absolutely be more car-miles with autonomous systems.

It would probably be much more expensive

If all you pay is the marginal cost then those that live an hour away will pay six times those that live ten minutes away

I'm assuming I own the vehicle. Whether there's a driver or a computer, I also assume that routine 2-4 hour round trips in a taxi of some form aren't going to be viable for most people.

Yeah, I was offered tickets to a bowl game that’s about three hours away - but it won’t end until around 11 pm, and I have to be at work at 6:30 am the next day.

No way I can do that and be functional the next day, but if the car could drive itself, I’d probably be going.

This is already a reality with the fully electric self-driving tech we have now: trains. And no, people still dislike long commutes, even if they can play steam deck on the train.

I lived the mechanical turk version of this for years: riding a corporate shuttle to work.

I prefer Caltrain.

The problem is that (in the US) an overwhelming majority of car journeys (and traffic) occur during rush hour. And it's difficult to see how autonomous vehicles could reduce the amount of cars used during rush hour. Rush hour traffic involves a lot of vehicles moving to similar destinations, during the same time window. While some cars could certainly be used for multiple journeys during the same rush hour, most cars would likely sit in parking garages all day, just like today.

This. Uber is very expensive because a human has to get paid. If people could get a car "subscription" for X number of dollars a month and forgo cost of gas, maintenance, insurance, and all the other headaches meanwhile,a company could leverage economies of scale to do all of this I think people would move away from a private car.

This would also reduce the cost on doordash type services so if instead of paying an extra $10 for your food/groceries/everyhing to be delivered you paid orders of magnitude less.

This might reduce the traffic on the road.

The pessimist in me makes me think once they got sufficient market share price would go back up and wed be worse off than before lol.

The only way to reduce traffic without changing your routine is by packing more people in less space, i.e. public transit.

I foresee more people will live in vehicles.

It's far cheaper to live in an autonomous motorhome that drives around all day and happens to arrive at work just as you need to be there each morning than to rent an apartment in San Francisco. Driving about is probably cheaper than paying for parking too, especially if you deliberately head for the busiest traffic.

Especially when you can automate switching rented batteries instead of waiting to charge them. Drive 4 hours out in a random direction, then 4 hours back for work, with nary a minute of downtime

This is already happening if you pay attention to all the vans and even cars with blacked out windows parking in your neighborhood, maybe even in front of your house. Stealth campers are very real, even if they don’t stick out as much as meth RVs.

You could already commute with cheap taxis (eg in the developing world). The more important thing is that people want to live in San Francisco, they wouldn’t be happy commuting from some far off place in the first place. And as stealth campers have already figured out, not a lot of places available to camp in your car even 40-60 miles out, so might as well be where you want.

But the idea that your car could just involve itself in traffic jams all day rather than pay for parking is interesting, it could also look for time limited but free parking and move on to somewhere else when that expired, which is more common outside the city. Heck, it could park at a shopping mall that doesn’t allow walk offs…because no one is walking off.

At $10/hr and 14 hours per day moving, that's $50k/yr just in fuel costs. You'd also want to consider depreciation and maintenance.

Already, though, you've got a budget of >$4000/mo for a more comfortable studio apartment.

The US has so much sunk cost in car centric urban design that all discussion of self driving cars taking investment away from public transit is all wasted words. It’s not just the roads and the number of people absolutely committed to driving on them. It’s urban design that is so sparse that we’ll be locked into personal transit for hundreds of years. Compared to Europe where Romans laid down street plans thousands of years ago, people will still be walking around in another thousand years.

Must as well have the cars in the US drive themselves so we can all get a nap at least.

I would note a lot of research shows coordinated autonomous vehicles using basic control theory can dramatically improve traffic flow with even a small percentage of vehicles coordinating (I think it was around 10%). They found they all but eliminate most human behavior caused traffic jams (I.e., most traffic except caused by emergencies or accidents). In fact if most vehicles are AV then it becomes more of a dynamic convoy model where all vehicles cooperate to maximize flow. This would require a much smaller road infrastructure to achieve the same flow as today. Rather than contributing to the problem autonomous vehicles greatly reduce the impact of transit, while maintaining individual carriage.

> even more cars on the streets, .. , and traffic will get a lot worse

I strongly believe it will go the other way, i.e. the 'robo-taxi' vision. Once cars can pick us up, take us where we want and then disappear, very few people will want to own their own car. I honestly think the vast majority of people already don't want to own one, but we don't have a better option. Why would a sane person want to deal with the maintenance, insurance, repairs, depreciation, etc.

Cars will just show up, take us places then go away to get someone else. We won't need nearly as many of them, and we won't need to dedicate so much of our cities to them, and especially not to parking them. We will be able to reclaim our cities.

NOTE: Old School automakers who can't/won't/don't adapt are going to push back on this HARD. But I still think it will happen.

For the record, I'm a car guy. I love cars. I will likely always have one for the weekends. If I was going into a city or commuting, I would take the robi-taxi every time.

>Why would a sane person want to deal with the maintenance, insurance, repairs, depreciation, etc.

Because it will probably still be cheaper if they use it regularly (as is owning in most cases). Because they want a specifically equipped vehicle for young kids/outdoor activities/etc. Because when they want a car, they want one right now.

I'm also skeptical that, if you own a vehicle, it would make any sense to then also rent robo-taxis locally. Certainly I can reserve a private car for an evening event today but it would be 10x or more the cost of parking/gas.

Hard to know what pricing will be, but consider: - Self-driving vehicle wait times may be reduced to less than a minute as they become more common - Car ownership also requires the expenses of: insurance, maintenance, fuel, registration, and storage space - Self-driving vehicles may come in many shapes and sizes: suited to carrying a single person for a family of 6

We won't need as many of them but the ones we use will be almost constantly on the road, 20 cars on the road all the time is more traffic than 100 cars on the road 10% of the time and in people's garages the rest of the time

Why would 20 cars be constantly on the road? The cars would sit in parking lots, ready for a call. The actual road traffic, will not change. 1000 people going to work is 1000 people going to work irrespective whether they own the car.

The biggest change would be the lack of a need for parking. This will allow us to build more densely.

You'd have more cars constantly on the road because the smaller pool of cars has to also travel to where the people are. If I go from A to B and later from B to A, a robotaxi would also need to get to A and B when I need them. It really won't matter if they're in use or drove off to a parking lot somewhere else, that is extra traffic.

Wait, are there 1000 people going to work, and then the car parking outside of work? Or are those cars leaving where the people work to go elsewhere? the later creates more cars on the road. Sure those 1000 cars can go somewhere to park - but now we can't build much denser as we still need parking for the cars. Maybe we can move the cars out a bit for more density where people work, but then we need roads to get those cars back out.

The amount of traffic will increase because people who couldn’t drive before and would ride with other people or use public transit (eg. children and the elderly) can now hail cheap autonomous cars, inefficiently using an entire car for their trip.

Induced demand economics. Make something cheaper and people use more of it.

If Autonomous cars make ride hailing cheaper we’ll see an explosion in its use, and traffic will increase as cars are space inefficient and road size fixed.

Traffic and travel time is a much smaller concern when you can be watching Netflix instead of making sure you don't hit, or get hit by anyone.

Traffic and travel time are still a concern: Will I get to work in time for my shift? When I get home how much time will I have for dinner before [whatever you have planned that night]. When do I need to get into this car to make it to [whatever event]

If you are a single person working a flexible schedule (no mandatory meetings), with no other activities planned traffic and travel time are not a big deal. However if you have any life at all you will care about traffic and travel time because you have places to be. Watching netflix is not your goal it is how you kill time that you would prefer to do something else.

Likewise. I would really love it if robotaxis worked out and - crucially - were cheap, because I think it could feasibly increase transit usage, not decrease it. It solves the last mile problem in an elegant way. Nobody said you needed to take the taxi all the way to your destination. You could hop on a regional train or light rail, have a robotaxi near-perfectly timed (if we assume the train runs on time...) to pick you up at your destination stop, and ride it to your final destination. Same in reverse. No waiting for a bus to transfer to, no riding the bus slowly stop by stop, no walking from the bus stop to your final destination, etc.

I'm as much of a transit advocate as the next guy, but I think a lot of people blind themselves to how annoying the last mile problem is for a lot of destinations anywhere outside of urban cores. There aren't going to be train stations built at every possible origin point and destination point, and even if there's a robust bus network, transfers, slow speed/frequent stopping, and the walk to/from your destination/origin are pretty damn annoying. They're not the end of the world by any means, to be clear, (I use buses too!) but it's just, if I have a car, why wouldn't I just drive?

Taxis have the potential to solve that in a great way. But I (...and probably most people?) don't currently use them for that purpose since they're way too expensive. As they should be, it's a whole human being tending to your transport personally for twenty minutes or more. If robotaxis can lower the price, it'd be great, but I don't know how confident I am on that happening. The equipment is presumably expensive, the car itself is expensive (though EVs do have much lower maintenance costs), the R&D is expensive. We'll see. Exciting times!

Everything will be the exact same if not worse.

People will continue to all commute at similar times, resulting in the same traffic as before. That it is automated makes no difference.

And supposing a car can go off after and do some taxi work instead of being parked, well it still has to commute from here to there which is adding even more cars constantly onto the roads driving to where they’re needed whereas before they’d be parked.

The likely outcome is permanent rush hour as cars are constantly going back and forth on the highway.

I can see a possible future where the are less cars because people don't feel the need to own one, and are just fine with calling an autonomous cab.

But just because fewer people own one personally, will that necessarily mean fewer cars on the road? Might still be an increase in cars, but with a different ownership model. It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

There are two questions that may have different answers:

1. Will it mean fewer total cars? Probably. If I have to drive to work and then back home, and you do to, and we each own cars to do it, that's at least two cars. If I can take a Waymo to work, and then it can take you to work, that's only one car.

2. Will it mean fewer cars on the road? (Or, perhaps, let's say fewer car-miles driven.) Plausibly not. If I drive from home (A) to work (B), and you drive from home (C) to work (D), then if we own cars, we drive A-B and C-D. If we use Waymo, it may drive A-B-C-D, which is longer by the B-C leg. That takes up space on the road.

So we may have fewer total cars, but more car-miles driven, and therefore more traffic and congestion.

The most relevant stat though is the number of miles of car usage. If there are ~20% the number of cars, but each car is used 10x as much, we're worse off. If nobody owns a car but always calls a cab, the cab might do twice as many miles deadheading to the pickup. And instead of lasting 15 years, a typical car might only last 2 years because it's getting 10x the milage per day. So fewer cars might result in more gridlock, noise and tire particulate pollution. Fewer cars might mean just as many cars built per year.

Where I live, I can get a cheap taxi, any time, to anywhere I might want to go, through an app. The only difference between that and Waymo seems to be that it is controlled by a meat sack rather than a computer. I don't see autonomous cars as all that different to what I have now.

Where I live is similar, it’s just the prices are prohibitive. Round trips just to locations within five or 10 miles of my house cost upwards of $50-$60. I would end up paying 2-3k a month for Uber/Lyft.

Owning a car is simply more economical. Now if I could buy into fractional ownership of a fleet of vehicles, that may make financial sense for me.

That's less cars in garages, not on the roads.

I agree that the autonomous cars are likely to cause a shift away from car ownership, reducing the total number of cars (which reduces the impact of making all these cars). It might also drastically cut down the required size of parking lots, which especially in America might be a big improvement.

But if you own the car, it's just waiting wherever you left it. If you have an autonomous cab, it has to make an extra trip from wherever it dropped off the last driver to wherever it's picking you up. That alone increases the number of cars on the road. And that's before you consider the cab potentially driving a holding pattern when nobody is actively using or calling it.

But most of all roads are governed by induced demand. People would take a lot more and longer trips if there was the option to just teleport to the destination. The main downwards pressure on the number of trips is the time investment. That's why adding more lanes to roads often doesn't reduce traffic (outside of a short adjustment period): faster trips means more people willing to take it, which fills up that lane. But a trip people weren't willing to do for 40 minutes behind the wheel they might take if it's instead 60 minutes watching Netflix in a driverless car. Which makes the roads fuller and thus slower for everyone.

This means there will be more cars on the road and more traffic. Whether or not people individually own the cars is irrelevant.

If autonomous cars drive down the costs of taking a taxi it’ll mean more people will do that versus public transit.

Anything that reduces public transit use or increases individual car use will be disasterous for traffic and transportation in our cities.

> the second and third order effects...

You're being overly pessimistic. I can see the opposite occuring on each of your points.

- less traffic due to more efficient driving: once automated driving is pervasive it's natural that cars and traffic as a whole will coordinate and optimise use of the road. You should be able to predict traffic accurately and choose the optimal time to travel. Car speeds will coordinate to maximise flow through roads. Improved public transport will increase the number of passengers per vehicle and reduce personal vehicles.

- more investment into better modes of transport due to lowered costs: the cost structure of buses (and trains) lends itself to larger vehicles with less stops. Without having to pay someone to drive you can remake public transport into something that takes less people at a time to more places, without requiring expensive infrastructure. Think small automated busses that serve a web of points instead of routes, so people can request to get from A to B and the system delivers from as close to A and to as close to B as possible as soon as possible at the lowest cost.

- less car ownership: most people don't want to own cars, so it's very likely that car ownership will drop significantly. With new privately and publicly owned forms of public transport, the need to own a car will disappear in many cases.

I feel that almost all technology is positive (not sure about social media), since it generally gives people more choices and abilities. Automated cars have very few downsides.

More benefits:

- Increase cycling and walking because the roads are much safer

- Less noise from cars revving their engines, or being poorly maintained (holes in mufflers, underinflated tires, etc.)

- No carjacking

> and traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic and watching Netflix

This one could go either way I think, traffic might actually improve once autonomous driving is the standard.

I also kinda-sorta hope that if autonomous driving takes over, that cars end up gaining the ability to switch onto and off of rails, I think this would be the ideal end-state... people still maintain the ability to move independently of each other but we have the improved safety of transport on rails.

Like crappy little trains with no capacity?

Magic little trains that can take you from and to anywhere.

The thing is the average car lifetime in the US is about 12 years so, so even if you assume autonomous driving "everywhere" is available in 10-20 years, that means you probably don't have a vast majority autonomous fleet for maybe 50 years. It certainly would be politically infeasible for the government to tell people they have to buy new cars.

I agree that the existing car stock will take a decade or two to age out, but I can't see any reason it takes 50 years to get to a majority autonomous fleet. Maintenance costs for cars in autonomous fleet will be significantly lower due to standardization and economies of scale, so non-autonomous cars will look relatively expensive in comparison (beyond being less convenient), causing them to be scrapped sooner than you'd otherwise expect.

I agree, my original post did not imply this transition would happen quickly, I think transitioning to automated vehicles will rely more on society changing, so at least one generation from the youngest today... and as far as requiring people to get automated cars, if they're safe enough, it will be like outlawing drunk driving, ie you're infringing on others right to live if you don't use an autonomous vehicle. The corollary is that right now there should be laws strictly controlling the use of autonomous vehicles.

OK. I read your comment as saying that it would happen slowly, not quickly, which is what I was disagreeing with. Personally I think the economic advantages of routinely using a self-driving taxi service will drive most people to simply not buy a new car when their old one wears out, and that this will happen many years before human-driven cars are outlawed (or, more likely for a while, regulated/taxed very heavily without being completely illegal).

You don't even need rails for traffic to improve. Just think at what happens when a traffic light goes green: human drivers slowly, one-by-one, cross the intersection. Whereas a platoon of self-driving cars can, in principle, just accelerate (or brake) simultaneously. On highways this also improves drag/energy efficiency and has already been tested in Europe as part of EU Truck Platooning Challenge.

My only thought was rails truly require little intelligence for autonomy, and require less maintenance (or at least less involved maintenance), but just doing some armchair engineering...

I can't find the report, but IIRC there was a study that calculated that autonomous driving could triple the carrying capacity of highways because they could safely reduce following distance. They also estimated fuel/energy savings due to them being able to collectively draft of each other.

Yeah, right, ever seen "following distance" at rush hour in a US city? I've got a higher chance of seeing a unicorn.

In reality, self-driving cars would help by increasing following distance and leaving a genuine gap so people don't crash every goddamn day on the same arterial roads.

I'm not sure why you think rails are safer than rubber tires. Metal-on-metal contact has way less friction, which makes for much worse stopping distance and worse safety especially at crossings. Having grade-separated dedicated infrastructure _does_ improve safety, especially if there's no human drivers involved, but we can do that just fine with pavement in tunnels or elevated roadways.

Very good points... intuitively, rail seems safer (and simpler to automate?), but your points have changed my mind... Now I wonder though, how do modern roller-coasters stop so suddenly? Magnetic breaks?

Electromagnetic brakes are used, but the biggest difference is that the weight of passengers is a much bigger portion of total weight (you don’t have a locomotive and the cars are not nearly as heavy per passenger) a decelerating quickly is part of the appeal. If passengers on trains were unencumbered with stuff and strapped in as on roller coasters, they could be built to do it too.

Rails are safer because vehciles are more predictable - they are always on the track, with only limited places where they can switch tracks, and you can control that externally ensuring there are no conflicts. Rails can handle more people because in the form of a train they can pack in a lot more people. Cars use a lot of space for engine and luggage compartments.

Another big negative I think is underconsidered is that a Google owned self driving car fleet will be absolutely plastered with video ads and physical user tracking if they dominate the market enough to get away with it.

Imagine those unmutable video ads that are increasingly common at gas stations, but running constantly inside the car.

Gmail is not like this, and Gmail is free. Waymo will not want to degrade a paid experience with intrusive ads anymore than Uber or Lyft do.

Gmail isn’t like this because they read all of your emails

Google stopped using information from emails as part of ad selection years ago, the ads shown in Gmail are based entirely on the other ad personalization data they have from other Google properties. They obviously still parse email contents for spam blocking and such, but that seems like a necessary part of running any webmail service, and not a profit center for them.

I guess it's always possible that they're lying about it, but given the depth of the regulatory and public relations fiasco that would cause I'd be very surprised.

This is not true: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10434152?hl=en#:~:tex....

As an aside, usually those gas station ads are mutable. There are unlabeled buttons on the sides of the monitor - press them. One of them mutes it. I have yet to find a gas station at which this won’t work.

It's feels like it's about 50/50 on whether or not that button is broken when I pull up to one of those pumps.

"adblock detected! It is a violation of our terms of service to wear noise cancelling earphones, pulling over."

They already have those video ads in a lot of taxis. And of course public transit has been plastered with paper ads for decades now. So what you're describing isn't much of a change from the status quo. Unless you believe the advent of self-driving cars will lead to people being okay with ads in the vehicles they own or lease themselves, which I think is highly unlikely.

You mean like the (sometimes unmutable) video ads I've seen in practically every traditional taxi for years now?

That ship sailed a while ago and didn't need Google to push it.

Windows has ads (and you pay for it), Chrome OS and android have never had ads, so it doesn’t follow that Waymo will have ads due to Google.

Chrome OS and Android are surveillance/data capture platforms designed to funnel data to an advertising giant, including being caught secretly sending location data against users wishes more than once.

Such a bad take

> even more cars on the streets

You don’t know that. I could make a prediction that it would lead to fewer cars on the street. Fewer parked cars especially.

> less investment into better modes of transport

I assume you mean subways, buses, and trams here. But I don’t think it’s fair to call them “better”. They’re hugely expensive and can be disruptive in many ways, are much less accessible.

> traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic

You also don’t know that traffic will get worse. Traffic could potentially get much better with better drivers. But also, if people are ok with it, then who cares?

I think it's absolutely fair to call public transport "better" for society.

Every single time scientists and city planners are called to answer "how we make the city more livable and reduce traffic" the answer is always better public transport (more trains especially).

The only part I could resonate with you is that we don't know whether SDC could lead to less cars. That's true if people will use more self driving taxis over personal cars.

> I assume you mean subways, buses, and trams here. But I don’t think it’s fair to call them “better”. They’re hugely expensive and can be disruptive in many ways, are much less accessible.

Now this is a bad take. Public transit is _always_ better than individual vehicles when we are talking about a metropolitan area. The amount of resources, land, and pedestrian freedom that is eaten up for roads is insane. Imagine how many people can fit in a subway, and then expand that to each of them individually being in a car on the road.

Public transit is expensive, but so are new highways, highway maintenance, road accidents, speed enforcement... Etc. The worst thing is that many times people who don't own cars pay for those services they won't use. All the while public transit is getting it's funding cut.

I think the original comment is a little off in that more autonomous drivers does not directly lead to less public transit. But it is a concern that these profit/investor driven companies will be competing with public transportation and this has a lot of implications.

I will definitely agree that a transportation system based off public transit is much better than what we have now. The advantage you get with a 100% AV based system is that you can get coverage that you’ll never get with public transit. NYC, which has a great system, still has lots of parts of the city which you can’t really get to without calling a car or walking a long way. The point-to-point routing should not be discounted either. Getting in a car and going directly to your destination rather than trying to make a bunch of connection (and dealing with kids or purchased items or a wheelchair) makes a big difference for a lot of people.

I don't know why you think Cruise isn't on track. Their numbers are also good, although probably not as good as Waymo, but they are also much younger than Waymo. Cruise is being punished by the state of California right now because they tried to cover up their vehicle's worsening of a particular human-caused accident, not because of some problem with their overall numbers.

EDIT: If you disagree, please link to the quantitative data that suggests Cruise isn't on track.

Another aspect to Cruise (and potentially waymo, but it hasn't been publicly stated) is that they claim thousands of miles per disengagement...when on average their cars needed remote assistance every 4-5 miles[0]. Waymo does the same thing, but the numbers just aren't publicly known.

IMO stuff like this is going to lead the public to trust it less, since they're gaming numbers as hard as possible.

[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-robotaxis-re...

You're comparing apples to oranges. Disengagements means there is a safety driver present that takes over to prevent a dangerous situation. The car requesting remote assistance, which occurs when there is not a safety driver, is an inconvenience and expense but does not mean there is a dangerous situation. (Of the 22 Cruise rides I took, it happened 3 times, and at no point was there danger.) It just means the car is confused. Conflating these things and accusing Cruise of deception is itself being dishonest (even though Cruise has actually been dishonest on many occasions!).

The whole game plan is have a bank of human operators who prove remote assistance at initially high rates which is then driven lower over time as the edge cases are ironed out iteratively. The fact that Cruise is only using one human remote assistant to manage ~15 rides, as mentioned in the article you link, tells us that the rate of remote assistance is already so low that it will be a very modest expense. For more, see the comment from Cruise's CEO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145997

> Disengagements means there is a safety driver present that takes over to prevent a dangerous situation.

California, at least, cites a disengagement as "whether because of technology failure or situations requiring the test driver/operator to take manual control of the vehicle to operate safely."[0]

Would a car being confused and not being able to proceed without input be a disengagement by that definition? I think so, based off of "technology failure", but it's not reported as that.

> It just means the car is confused. Conflating these things and accusing Cruise of deception is itself being dishonest.

When a car is confused what happens? It stops. That is a safety issue by itself, as it can lead to emergency services not being able to properly respond and killing someone[1].

The fact people are trying to downplay this as "nothing" is shocking imo. What happens when a fleet of vehicles get confused, they all stall and it results in gridlock and frustration.[2]

[0]: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

[1]: https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/01/person-dies-cruise-robotax...

[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/07/08/cruise...

> California, at least, cites a disengagement as "whether because of technology failure or situations requiring the test driver/operator to take manual control of the vehicle to operate safely.

At your Ref. [0], I just opened up the CSV titled "2022 Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement Reports (CSV)" under the header "2022 Disengagement reports". Under the column "Driver present (yes or no)", every single entry said "yes".

> When a car is confused what happens? It stops. That is a safety issue by itself

No, the car pulls over, just as it and every other taxi does when picking people up or dropping them off. It does not just stop in the middle of an intersection. I had 3 of these events in 22 trips, which means the number of times the car pulled over was overwhelmingly dominated by normal pick-up and drop-off, not confusion.

> as it can lead to emergency services not being able to properly respond and killing someone[1]

This article is deceptive, and you're either being deceived or are furthering it. An ambulance being delayed for seconds or minutes by human-driven cars in the road happens all the time. It is a constant occurrence. "90 seconds elapsed between the patient being put on the stretcher and the ambulance leaving the scene" means that at worst the ambulance was delayed by 60 seconds because stretchers don't teleport instantly into ambulances. The article does not causally attribute the death to the delay because that is extremely unlikely. It's not how emergency medicine works. This is just a classic case of fear mongering. ("Ambulance has to take detour around construction. Patient died. Therefore, construction caused death." No.)

This of course doesn't mean that delaying ambulances unnecessarily by even a second should go without punishment/fine. It's avoidable and should be fixed. But it's wrong to think this doesn't happen with humans, and its slander to suggest the delay probably caused a death in this instance.

> The fact people are trying to downplay this as "nothing" is shocking imo. What happens when a fleet of vehicles get confused, they all stall and it results in gridlock and frustration.[2]

Be more quantitative.

> At your Ref. [0], I just opened up the CSV titled "2022 Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement Reports (CSV)" under the header "2022 Disengagement reports". Under the column "Driver present (yes or no)", every single entry said "yes".

Uh, that's kinda exactly my point? Any time a vehicle stalls, even when it has to be recovered by a person physically, somehow isn't a "disengagement."

> No, the car pulls over, just as it and every other taxi does when picking people up or dropping them off. It does not just stop in the middle of an intersection. I had 3 of these events in 22 trips, which means the number of times the car pulled over was overwhelmingly dominated by normal pick-up and drop-off, not confusion.

Easily refuted. [0], [1], [2], [3] should I continue?

> This article is deceptive, and you're either being deceived or are furthering it. An ambulance being delayed for seconds or minutes by human-driven cars in the road happens all the time. It is a constant occurrence.

"It already happens, so who cares if people die." Not even going to bother with the rest since it's clear you're pushing an angle from these two points alone.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWZGZWuUx-Y&t=59s

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1k8raq83T4

[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/14/business/driverless-cars-san-...

[3]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/san-francisco-po...

Your first and your third point are not responding to what I actually said.

Your second point is replying to a general quantitative statement with anecdotes. Of course there will be unusual situations. This does not support your original wrong claim that Cruise was being disingenuous.

> Your first and your third point are not responding to what I actually said.

TBH, I didn't even fully read your third point because it's clear you're pushing a certain perspective. I've provided evidence for all my claims, yet a single link hasn't shown up in yours.

10+ vehicles stall and require people to go out and retrieve the vehicles[0]...

Nope, not a disengagement. Clearly the cars didn't have "a technology failure" they just needed to be towed back...for reasons. I guess they all ran out of gas, right?

> Your second point is replying to a general quantitative statement with anecdotes. Of course there will be unusual situations. This does not support your original wrong claim that Cruise was being disingenuous.

He says, while doing the exact same thing.

The vast majority of recorded cases involve the cars "stalling out" in the middle of intersections, roads, or driveways. I have literally never seen evidence of a vehicle "pulling over" when confused.

Please present evidence for your anecdotes.

[0]: https://www.ktvu.com/news/driverless-cruise-cars-cause-traff...

For one, Cruise has essentially disintegrated over the past few months? All key execs left https://fortune.com/2023/12/13/general-motors-cruise-executi..., massive layoffs, founders left.

Cruise is done.

Happy to bet on this (and indeed I have, by buying GM stock). Cruise is definitely dealing with a huge, self-inflected PR disaster here. But all signs I have seen is that their tech is very advanced (although, as previously noted, probably a bit behind Waymo). Cruise and Waymo are heads and shoulders above their competitors, and there won't be only one winner (if for no other reason than the threat of anti-trust), so Cruise is likely to succeed.

Again, if you have data that shows Cruise is behind Waymo by a lot, or is behind any other company, please link it.

Could be a good bet, very asymmetric. The question to me is if the execs are leaving because they know Cruise doesn't have it technically and the jig is up, or if it's really more temporary. Hard to know from the outside. It's also hard to translate Cruise's much worse human-intervention numbers (vs Waymo) into a quantative measure of 'behindness' in terms of how difficult it is to catch up.

That's why it could be a good bet. Or not.

The event precipitating executives leaving related to the single accident and the deceptive behavior by Cruise surrounding it. To my knowledge, the data shows the tech is good (at least as safe as human drivers) and rapidly improving. But I agree it's hard to know from the outside, and that the sensibleness of the bet definitely depends on the fact that the potential upside is so massive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com