Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

The only way this has an impact on road accident/injury/fatality rates at any meaningful scale is if millions of people switch from routine personal-car based transportation to shared transportation, even single-occupancy shared transportation like Waymo.

I don't see millions running out and buying a real self-driving car kitted with a spinning lidar "hat" and visible radar transmitters sticking out everywhere, even if doing so meant safer roads for everyone.

What people in the market actually want is what Tesla has been selling (however fraudulently): a car that looks/performs very nice and claims full-self-driving capability, not a goofy looking car that self-drives very well in particular locations and use cases. Cars are about personal identity and power at least as much as they are about functional transportation.

I'd like to be wrong about all that, and would like a future where swarms of electric self-driving buses that route-optimize based on demand pick up people very close to where they are. But I also realize that the reptilian brains of consumers tend to decide how these things eventually pan out, and not the solutions that are optimized for efficiency and safety.

It will start in cities with people declining to purchase new cars since they can just take a cheap self-driving car everywhere. It's true that at sufficiently low population density it would not makes sense to rely on a taxi service even if most people were using it, but I think that is only in very rural areas. 90% of the Americans live in an region where, if they all used a self-driving taxi service, the experience would be better than everyone owning a car. The hard economic benefits of not having to worry about maintenance, parking, or the up-front capital costs at purchase (huge!) will steam roll the romantic aspects of owning a personal car.

> It will start in cities with people declining to purchase new cars since they can just take a cheap self-driving car everywhere

Wouldn't Uber/Lyft have already sopped up whatever demand exists for that? If anything Waymo is going to take that business away.

I'm including Uber and Lyft in "taxi", i.e., driving service on demand. Replacing a personal car with Uber and Lyft is too expensive for most people, and the basic economic reason is that a human driver must be paid. But in a few years self-driving taxis will be cheaper than taxis with human drivers. At that point, a larger and larger share of the population will stop buying cars and will just take self-driving taxis.

Designing a prototype car for trials vs mass production are two different things entirely. Those lidar sensors will become far less intrusive once a car is designed for mass production.

Most likely, the existing Waymo cars have their LiDAR sensors equipped like that because they need to be maintained and swapped at a regular basis.

I think the value proposition is more than enough for mass adoption, once people realize they can work and commute at the same time.

Why don't you see millions buying a real self-driving car? You can work (or read or watch movies or whatever) during a commute and buy a bigger house where land is cheap. I doubt there are fundamental reasons why sensors couldn't be made more appealing for people who value aesthetics above saving a literal hour+ every day.

> You can work (or read or watch movies or whatever) during a commute and buy a bigger house where land is cheap > saving a literal hour+ every day.

Hyper-commuting isn't really an aspiration for most people. The aspiration is usually either having the big house where land is expensive, or having the even bigger house where land is cheap plus not having to commute. More abstractly, there are 2 location luxuries: 1) proximity to opportunity, and 2) not needing the proximity to opportunity because you are wealthy enough not to care.

Furthermore, time spent in a car isn't time spent with family - which is presumably most peoples' reason for wanting a big house. Being stuck in a self-driving car for hours commuting doesn't give you that kind of time back.

> I doubt there are fundamental reasons why sensors couldn't be made more appealing for people who value aesthetics

My take is that making them more appealing means making them nearly invisible. To the best of my knowledge, in the case of lasers and other visible-light spectrum sensors, making them more invisible inhibits their function. That's probably a big reason Tesla dismissed lidar.

Also, if there's one thing Elon has taught us, it's that you sell more people on new car ideas by appealing to their base instincts, not their higher selves.

> Being stuck in a self-driving car for hours commuting doesn't give you that kind of time back.

It can. Most would probably prefer a 1 hour self-driving commute to a 30 minute manually-driven commute. That hour of self-driving time can be used for chores (paying taxes, calling the plumber, etc.) that might otherwise have to be done during family time.

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