4 ms·

I don't understand the pessimism in this thread. Google owns two of the most important pieces of the puzzle: maps and the mobile OS/app store in 80% of people'

by nugget 11y ago

I don't understand the pessimism in this thread. Google owns two of the most important pieces of the puzzle: maps and the mobile OS/app store in 80% of people's pockets. Not to mention lots of software and hardware IP related to autonomous vehicles. There are plenty of car companies in the world who can provide car frames, windows, leather seats, four wheels, and yes even an electric engine. I see Uber, Google, Apple, and others going head to head in this market, ultimately to the great benefit of consumers as transportation prices plummet. Imagine an airport run from 3rd and Market to SFO costing $15 (technically only $13 after 20% discount for paying with the UberRewards Capital One Visa Card), or a 4 hour trip (time to watch a long movie and send some email) from Santa Monica Pier to the Las Vegas Strip for $50 (or for a limited time, $55 if you stop at the selected partner gas/charging station for pre-paid lunch and bathroom break) - it will happen and sooner than most think.

adventured 11y ago
Or put another way, electric + autonomous = inexpensive, intelligent, on-demand transportation. It'll merely spare consumers from a trillion plus dollars - every decade - in wasted costs on buying cars and then hardly ever utilizing them. While likely saving a quarter of a million lives every decade, and further sparing consumers a large percentage of the vast associated medical, insurance and lost-asset costs that go with those injuries and deaths. The 'dumb pipe' of the Internet is going to eat the dumb car - as it'll try to do with everything it can touch - sucking out the complexity and inefficiencies with smart, hyper-available software. A few decades from now, people will consider buying a 'dumb' $30,000 gasoline engine car to stick in your driveway and rarely use, to be comically absurd.
- ams6110 11y ago
  I disagree, but we'll have to wait and see I guess. I work in software and as a result I don't trust computers. I see every day how rollouts of "minor" changes or small oversights bring major production systems to a screeching halt. Google and Apple do not have a culture of the type of careful software engineering that I would trust my life with. The notion that they would bring cars back nightly for "updates" is positively hair-raising.
  - carbocation 11y ago
    I trust Google's and Apple's software more than I trust the software that we use in many hospitals, to which people do approximately trust their health.
    - stcredzero 11y ago
      I have a friend who did medical equipment software. You should trust Google's and Apple's software more than the software in the typical piece of hospital equipment. Which is to say, hospital equipment software can be really really bad!
  - rezashirazian 11y ago
    Absurd. Codes are as error prone as the humans that write them. You entrust your life with other drivers every time you get on the road. I would take the hacker culture of Google or Apple over drunk brosefs driving from one bar to another on a Saturday night every time. In fact I hope for the day that driving on public roads would become illegal by humans.
    - derefr 11y ago
      Although I'm personally optimistic about driverless cars, traffic is a distributed autonomous-agent system: a failure of one driver is compensated for by other drivers. Someone does a "rude" merge, or an illegal U-turn—and everybody just modifies their own driving to let it happen, even though it's "against the rules." On the road, I'm not really trusting other drivers individually; I'm trusting traffic as a fluid. My big worry is that we'll have autonomous-car-AI monoculture. If that happens, we'd lose the advantage of the "compensation" other drivers in traffic can do. We could end up seeing car-behavioral "prions": glitches in car software that cause a strange behavior, which in turn triggers the same glitch in the cars attempting to compensate for that behavior. You could see, for example, every car getting into a state where it thinks it needs to swerve "more right than other cars" to avoid an emergency, and thus an entire "pack" of cars driving off the road and into a fast clockwise-torquing circle. Or, less eyecatching but more fatal in the near-term, you could see a monoculture-wide decision that works alright for single driverless cars, but actively harms drivered cars (and other driverless cars with other-model AIs) when the majority of a "pack" of cars is from the monoculture. For example, I could see a "pack" of driverless cars all deciding to jam on the brakes at once (because, say, a bunch of spike-strips suddenly popped out of the road in between them or somesuch)—leaving the one drivered car boxed in by them to keep going and crash into the vanguard of the pack.
- rezashirazian 11y ago
  I'd say the $30,000+ price tag is fairly absurd right now. But let's not forget, an immense portion of US manufacturing revolves around people making this investment.
- JonFish85 11y ago
  Sure cars are mostly idle / under-utilized, but when they are needed, what's the replacement? I don't really understand how a driverless world is going to solve the problem of X million people who have to drive to work every day at roughly the same time, and then get back home at night. For huge swaths of the country public transportation is unfeasible (basically outside of cities), and cars seem to fit the bill there nicely. On top of that: "It'll merely spare consumers from a trillion plus dollars" -- seems a bit of an exaggeration, does it not? Transportation will still be needed, and it's going to have to be paid for somehow or another. If it's not directly towards paying for a car it's in taxes for infrastructure, or it's to companies who have to invest the capital and make a profit on it. It changes how the money is spent, I guess, and the hope is that it's more efficiently spent, but I suspect that the costs will just shift around and not necessarily save "trillions of dollars every decade".
  - lambda 11y ago
    If you need to leave to go to work at 8:00 AM, to get there at 8:30, it's a 5 minute drive from your office to my house, and I need to leave at 9 to get to my job at 9:30, then an on-demand driverless car can take care of both of us. It can also pick up the person who was able to take public transit in but needs to run errands on their lunch break, as well as the second shift worker, and take someone else home for dinner, and get someone else to the airport at 3 AM. Right now, many people have cars sitting idle for a large portion of the day because they need them for an hour a day, or sometimes an hour every couple of days, or a couple of hours a week. While it's true that there are surges in demand in the normal morning and evening commutes, there is still a lot of excess driving capacity that is needed for trips other than those surges, and so you only have to have enough cars to cover those peaks. In addition, there may be other people who could take public transit, walk, or bike to work, but don't because there are other things that they need to do at various points that require a car, and so it's more convenient to just always have it available. So yeah, driverless cars can only get you so far, you're right that the peak demand number is pretty much the minimum number you could have. But if I go an look at my residential street during the day, when commuters are presumably at work, I still see about half of the cars present. Those are all cars that wouldn't be necessary if everyone were riding in self driving cars that could rearrange themselves based on demand. That reduction in number of cars would also reduce the amount of space needed to store all of those cars, which could help bring everything closer together making it more walkable, bikeable, or efficient for public transit, which could further reduce the demand for cars.
- superuser2 11y ago
  I think Mazda made a smart move with its "Driving Matters" campaign. "Point A to Point B" econoboxes may not be long for this world, but there are many who will hold on to their manual steering for decades to come, just as they held on to their manual transmissions. Along with the driverless car revolution, I expect an utter gutting of the segment whose only selling point is being cheap and reliable, and a huge renaissance of the "fun to drive" class.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- estefan 11y ago
  > A few decades from now, people will consider buying a 'dumb' $30,000 gasoline engine car to stick in your driveway and rarely use, to be comically absurd. And because they're fun to drive.
rasz_pl 11y ago
Last time I used google Earth it looked like buildings were added manually by someone modelling them one at a time :( Google owns maps, video/photo database of almost all roads (streetview) and push for autonomous cars, yet they still didnt even start using all this data to build 3d map of the world a la Photosynth.
- foota 11y ago
  When was the last time you used maps?
- jevinskie 11y ago
  That was (still is?) precisely a program that Google Earth ran. Purdue University sponsored some students to map almost the entire campus in 3D many years ago.
  - rasz_pl 11y ago
    entire campus - thats "nice". Im talking all of the roads of the world captured by streetview cars. Depth map of entire city as seen from the road would be of great value to autonomous car software dev team. Its crazy to me that they dont have it, unless they keep it a secret? Last time I checked Warsaw(capital of EU country) in google earth there was maybe 20 biggest buildings, all hand modelled. Actually even calling them modelled is too much, those were pretty much boxes of approximate size.

by nugget 11y ago

adventured 11y ago

Or put another way, electric + autonomous = inexpensive, intelligent, on-demand transportation. It'll merely spare consumers from a trillion plus dollars - every decade - in wasted costs on buying cars and then hardly ever utilizing them. While likely saving a quarter of a million lives every decade, and further sparing consumers a large percentage of the vast associated medical, insurance and lost-asset costs that go with those injuries and deaths. The 'dumb pipe' of the Internet is going to eat the dumb car - as it'll try to do with everything it can touch - sucking out the complexity and inefficiencies with smart, hyper-available software. A few decades from now, people will consider buying a 'dumb' $30,000 gasoline engine car to stick in your driveway and rarely use, to be comically absurd.

ams6110 11y ago
I disagree, but we'll have to wait and see I guess. I work in software and as a result I don't trust computers. I see every day how rollouts of "minor" changes or small oversights bring major production systems to a screeching halt. Google and Apple do not have a culture of the type of careful software engineering that I would trust my life with. The notion that they would bring cars back nightly for "updates" is positively hair-raising.
- carbocation 11y ago
  I trust Google's and Apple's software more than I trust the software that we use in many hospitals, to which people do approximately trust their health.
  - stcredzero 11y ago
    I have a friend who did medical equipment software. You should trust Google's and Apple's software more than the software in the typical piece of hospital equipment. Which is to say, hospital equipment software can be really really bad!
- rezashirazian 11y ago
  Absurd. Codes are as error prone as the humans that write them. You entrust your life with other drivers every time you get on the road. I would take the hacker culture of Google or Apple over drunk brosefs driving from one bar to another on a Saturday night every time. In fact I hope for the day that driving on public roads would become illegal by humans.
  - derefr 11y ago
    Although I'm personally optimistic about driverless cars, traffic is a distributed autonomous-agent system: a failure of one driver is compensated for by other drivers. Someone does a "rude" merge, or an illegal U-turn—and everybody just modifies their own driving to let it happen, even though it's "against the rules." On the road, I'm not really trusting other drivers individually; I'm trusting traffic as a fluid. My big worry is that we'll have autonomous-car-AI monoculture. If that happens, we'd lose the advantage of the "compensation" other drivers in traffic can do. We could end up seeing car-behavioral "prions": glitches in car software that cause a strange behavior, which in turn triggers the same glitch in the cars attempting to compensate for that behavior. You could see, for example, every car getting into a state where it thinks it needs to swerve "more right than other cars" to avoid an emergency, and thus an entire "pack" of cars driving off the road and into a fast clockwise-torquing circle. Or, less eyecatching but more fatal in the near-term, you could see a monoculture-wide decision that works alright for single driverless cars, but actively harms drivered cars (and other driverless cars with other-model AIs) when the majority of a "pack" of cars is from the monoculture. For example, I could see a "pack" of driverless cars all deciding to jam on the brakes at once (because, say, a bunch of spike-strips suddenly popped out of the road in between them or somesuch)—leaving the one drivered car boxed in by them to keep going and crash into the vanguard of the pack.
rezashirazian 11y ago
I'd say the $30,000+ price tag is fairly absurd right now. But let's not forget, an immense portion of US manufacturing revolves around people making this investment.
JonFish85 11y ago
Sure cars are mostly idle / under-utilized, but when they are needed, what's the replacement? I don't really understand how a driverless world is going to solve the problem of X million people who have to drive to work every day at roughly the same time, and then get back home at night. For huge swaths of the country public transportation is unfeasible (basically outside of cities), and cars seem to fit the bill there nicely. On top of that: "It'll merely spare consumers from a trillion plus dollars" -- seems a bit of an exaggeration, does it not? Transportation will still be needed, and it's going to have to be paid for somehow or another. If it's not directly towards paying for a car it's in taxes for infrastructure, or it's to companies who have to invest the capital and make a profit on it. It changes how the money is spent, I guess, and the hope is that it's more efficiently spent, but I suspect that the costs will just shift around and not necessarily save "trillions of dollars every decade".
- lambda 11y ago
  If you need to leave to go to work at 8:00 AM, to get there at 8:30, it's a 5 minute drive from your office to my house, and I need to leave at 9 to get to my job at 9:30, then an on-demand driverless car can take care of both of us. It can also pick up the person who was able to take public transit in but needs to run errands on their lunch break, as well as the second shift worker, and take someone else home for dinner, and get someone else to the airport at 3 AM. Right now, many people have cars sitting idle for a large portion of the day because they need them for an hour a day, or sometimes an hour every couple of days, or a couple of hours a week. While it's true that there are surges in demand in the normal morning and evening commutes, there is still a lot of excess driving capacity that is needed for trips other than those surges, and so you only have to have enough cars to cover those peaks. In addition, there may be other people who could take public transit, walk, or bike to work, but don't because there are other things that they need to do at various points that require a car, and so it's more convenient to just always have it available. So yeah, driverless cars can only get you so far, you're right that the peak demand number is pretty much the minimum number you could have. But if I go an look at my residential street during the day, when commuters are presumably at work, I still see about half of the cars present. Those are all cars that wouldn't be necessary if everyone were riding in self driving cars that could rearrange themselves based on demand. That reduction in number of cars would also reduce the amount of space needed to store all of those cars, which could help bring everything closer together making it more walkable, bikeable, or efficient for public transit, which could further reduce the demand for cars.
superuser2 11y ago
I think Mazda made a smart move with its "Driving Matters" campaign. "Point A to Point B" econoboxes may not be long for this world, but there are many who will hold on to their manual steering for decades to come, just as they held on to their manual transmissions. Along with the driverless car revolution, I expect an utter gutting of the segment whose only selling point is being cheap and reliable, and a huge renaissance of the "fun to drive" class.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
estefan 11y ago
> A few decades from now, people will consider buying a 'dumb' $30,000 gasoline engine car to stick in your driveway and rarely use, to be comically absurd. And because they're fun to drive.

rasz_pl 11y ago

Last time I used google Earth it looked like buildings were added manually by someone modelling them one at a time :( Google owns maps, video/photo database of almost all roads (streetview) and push for autonomous cars, yet they still didnt even start using all this data to build 3d map of the world a la Photosynth.

foota 11y ago
When was the last time you used maps?
jevinskie 11y ago
That was (still is?) precisely a program that Google Earth ran. Purdue University sponsored some students to map almost the entire campus in 3D many years ago.
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  entire campus - thats "nice". Im talking all of the roads of the world captured by streetview cars. Depth map of entire city as seen from the road would be of great value to autonomous car software dev team. Its crazy to me that they dont have it, unless they keep it a secret? Last time I checked Warsaw(capital of EU country) in google earth there was maybe 20 biggest buildings, all hand modelled. Actually even calling them modelled is too much, those were pretty much boxes of approximate size.