11 ms·

As an HNer, I find what Waymo (and other autonomous vehicle companies) are doing is simply fabulous. Technology improvement is a big impetus for human progress.

• mrlatinos 8y ago
  This isn't Reddit, no need to prefix an otherwise normal comment with internet credentials.
  • IshKebab 8y ago
    "As a mother..."
    • ct520 8y ago
      AA {Role} IW2...
• YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  Cars destroy the environment (with the infrastructure needed to accommodate them) and are one of the primary drivers of climate change. We need technology to make them obsolete, not to make more of them that can drive themselves (or not).
  • eboyjr 8y ago
    Thanks for playing Devil's Advocate. This technology applies to mobile transportation in general and it doesn't necessarily have to effect greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, I believe the infrastructure for producing cars applies to such a broad category in regards to driving climate change. The manufacturing industry needs to independently solve this problem.
    • YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
      For the record, I'm not playing Devil's Advocate. I believe self-driving cars are a terrible idea that is only piling more environmental damage on top of what ordinary cards already do. >> This technology applies to mobile transportation in general and it doesn't necessarily have to effect greenhouse gas emissions. Well, I don't know that there is any way to drive a fleet of some millions or billions of cars (once self-driving cars have been adopted widely, that is) that doesn't rely on burning fossil fuels, either directly or indirectly (to charge batteries etc). So how are they not going to affect greenhouse gas emmissions?
      • darawk 8y ago
        So, you would like to just get rid of cars? Do you have any idea the level of human suffering that would cause? If you're not proposing something as silly as eliminating them entirely, then you should want to make them more efficient.
        • eanzenberg 8y ago
          The pinnacle of thinking: let’s allow worldwide suffering so sea levels dont rise 3m in 100 years.
          • bumholio 8y ago
            The pinnacle of spin: paying 50c more for a gallon of gas in US will bring untold suffering to those desperate people in Africa who have no cars, no electricity and are generally carbon neutral by virtue of using dried dung as their only energy source.
            • perl4ever 8y ago
              African countries both utilize and export a certain amount of petroleum, FWIW. Not that it's an unmixed blessing.
  • nugget 8y ago
    Won't autonomous driving eliminate something like 80 to 90 percent of private vehicle ownership, which is well on the way to obsolete? Once people are less tied to private vehicle ownership and open to any effective form of transportation, then adoption of new technology could become easier.
    • simion314 8y ago
      >Won't autonomous driving eliminate something like 80 to 90 percent of private vehicle ownership, which is well on the way to obsolete? We do not know that this will happen, people won't like using public cars. Also the number of cars is not important as the number of kilometers those car run, the companies will try the best to maximize the number of kilometers the cars will run to maximize the profits so we may have people using cars even more instead of walking or public transport
      • jogjayr 8y ago
        > we may have people using cars even more instead of walking or public transport You're aware buses are large automobiles right? Lyft Line with self-driving cars is effectively a more nimble, efficient, usable, and cheap bus network.
        • simion314 8y ago
          Yes, can you assume so good faith from my part and let me know what part of my argument is not clear or what you disagree with. My point is that if we get cheap or convenient cars to drive us around then this would increase number of kilometers done by cars. About buses you have say 30 people using a bus and the bus is driving 10 km, if people would use cars and say they will be 3 people in a car you get 10 cars x 10 km = 100km, so you get 9 more vehicles on the road , you get the more energy consumed since a bus is not consuming 10 times more then a car.
          • jogjayr 8y ago
            My apologies, I'm a bit annoyed by comments everywhere on this discussion that don't count shared taxis as public transport. I wrote in another comment that without congestion pricing or aggressive expansion of HOV lanes, the efficiency gains of self-driving cars would not be realized. Even without that we'd still have the increased road safety gains. > About buses you have say 30 people using a bus The problem is that it's difficult to match transport demand and supply perfectly because the bus is such a large unit of transport. The more common scenario is a close-to-empty (off-peak times, unpopular routes) or bursting-at-the-seams (peak times, popular routes) vehicle. Because the self-driving car is a smaller, more granular unit of transportation, you can deliver more targeted supply to the places where there's demand, at the exact times when there's demand.
  • jliptzin 8y ago
    Humans destroy the environment, maybe we should get rid of them. I don't see how greenhouse emissions is relevant to this conversation. Obviously, we'd prefer to all be driving around (human operated or otherwise) in vehicles powered 100% by clean energy, and certainly people are working on that, but that's independent of whether or not those vehicles are operated by humans.
    • YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
      >> Humans destroy the environment, maybe we should get rid of them. I belive genocide is against the law in most civilised societies, but, be my guest.
      • gpm 8y ago
        <Not that it matters> Genocide isn't the right term here. Genocide is to wipe out a national group [0]. Rather we are looking for a word that means "to extinct a species" or alternatively "to extinct our own species". It looks like "extinguish" or "eradicate" is the closest word we have to the former [1]. I'm not aware of any word for the latter. <It matters even less, but> You could argue that to eradicate humans you would have to commit genocide several times. [0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/genocide https://www.etymonline.com/word/genocide [1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/253505/is-there-a-verb-form-of-extinct#253513 https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/253505/is-there-...
    • YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
      >> I don't see how greenhouse emissions is relevant to this conversation. More cars means more emissions, the industry wants to sell more cars by loading them with self-driving features, therefore the issue of emmissions is relevants. I mean, that's kind of like saying "I don't see how coronary heart disease is relevant to this conversation that's about selling more hamburgers", or "I don't see how diabetes is relevant to this conversation that's abot selling more sugary drinks".
      • bumholio 8y ago
  • nostrademons 8y ago
    If you want to make them obsolete you need a rival technology that possesses all of the attributes that make people choose cars over mass transit, notably convenience, scheduling & destination flexibility, privacy, and cargo capacity. Failing that, self-driving cars as a service preserve all of these while also being significantly better for the environment. You don't need parking lots, because utilization is close to 100% and they go back to a depot when not required. It's easier to electrify the fleet, because the service knows exactly how far the trip will be and can bring the car back to a charging station while it has no passenger. You can share rides when multiple passengers have destinations that are close without them needing to go to the exact same place. You can have pods that dock with each other in motion (benefitting from better aerodynamics) but preserve privacy and split off to different destinations when needed.
    • YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
      >> If you want to make them obsolete you need a rival technology that possesses all of the attributes that make people choose cars over mass transit, notably convenience, scheduling & destination flexibility, privacy, and cargo capacity. Actually, since the goal should be the preservation of the environment that is supporting our continued existence, what is needed is mass transit, which is the least damaging form of (mechanised) transport we know of; not a technology to replace it with privately-owned and operated vehicles. I mean, I understand that's never going to happen, but that's only because we are collectively incapable of making the right decision on this one.
      • bumholio 8y ago
        > what is needed is mass transit, Why mass transit and not walking more or personal blimps shaped like giant Trump babies? To make them more than your opinion, you need to put some numbers on those statements. And the numbers work much worse than you think: between the low energy efficiency and low occupancy at non-rush hours, the massive infrastructure and the longer routes due to non-optimal layout, mass transit is better than American gas guzzlers but nothing to write home about. Here's some numbers put up by people who share your opinion - and that do not even take all these effects into account: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/11/can-we-please-stop-pretending-cars-are-greener-transit/3960/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/11/can-we-please... So for in-city transport, mass transit is a hard sell on environment alone. (Intercity transport like trains are great though, and there is a strong convergence there, self driving cars pair well with fast trains, giving the best of both worlds: flexibility, speed and low footprint)
  • boulos 8y ago
    Fwiw, the Jaguar i-Pace that Waymo will be using in addition to the minivan is all electric. Getting people into electric vehicles gives us the option to recharge them via power generated by renewables. That's a great way to reduce the rate of climate change, even if it's a small step. (The minivan helps if it really gets people to drive with more people per ride)
  • tuxdev 8y ago
    Autonomous cars could allow space currently devoted to idle car storage to be reused for denser development patterns, which would reduce the need for car-based transport in the first place.
• njoro 8y ago
  While I hope the technology succeeds I don't think it is going to be as big of a change as people think. If you are upper middle class in a large city where labour is cheap, like in some Asian countries, driving is already close to free. And while that is somewhat nice from a quality of life perspective, it also means that rush hour traffic is horrible and sitting in a car isn't much more fun just because it is cheap. Basically a car is still a car.
  • clomond 8y ago
    However, I think you should consider how autonomous vehicles enable better utilization of existing cars on the road. If you own a car, what % of the time is it sitting in your driveway idle? Rather consider how with autonomous driving, when paired with services like Uber/Lyft enable a car to be active 80-95% of the time - driving folks around. This means that your cost “of the trip” can be significantly less once you factor how his affects vehicular depreciation.
    • brudgers 8y ago
      Peak demand at rush hour determines the number of vehicles necessary to achieve a given level of service. Self driving vehicles don't change the underlying mathematics of the job scheduling problem.
      • rbranson 8y ago
        This would only be true if everyone commuted at exactly the same time or along the same route.
        • axaxs 8y ago
          You basically just described 'traffic.'
          • mcny 8y ago
            The goal I think is a complete ban on human driving on public roads. With that in place, maybe we can make significant improvements in traffic. I agree that the last mile will always be a problem though. While self-driving cars are cool, I’d imagine self-driving subways would be easier. In New York, the f train in Queens hits a standstill because of problems in the d line. The air train at JFK has no driver. Why can’t we do this for MTA? While we are at it, transit in the city should be entirely tax funded. N We also need self-driving buses. The buses in Queens sometimes don’t show up for over half an hour and three show up at the same time. Why?
• tbrock 8y ago
  Do they really belong to the same league? I’m sure this will be downvoted into oblivion because everyone on here is working on these projects but I don’t think self driving cars should be uttered in the same breath as any of the aforementioned technologies. It just doesn’t matter all that much. Maybe I’m being dense but can soemone spell out the glorious moment we are all waiting for here after spending all this money? - Trucking is cheaper because we fire the drivers? - There are cheap Ubers taking people from ramen to sushi in SF but clogging the streets? - There safer roads because there are no bad drivers? Ugh, this is not a transportation revolution folks. Where are the personal transportation devices? The hypersonic planes? The hyper loops?
  • newfocogi 8y ago
    Well optimized, high volume autonomous taxi services could be revolutionary: imagine if cars being parked went from being the norm to being an rarity. Instead of 90% of cars in cities being parked, there could be drastically higher usage rates. The average apartment complex wouldn’t need to be 50% parking lot; cities wouldn’t be rows of parallel parking. I can’t find the reference, but a surprisingly high amount of useable space in densely populated areas in the US is parking lots. It wouldn’t happen overnight, but if cars were optimizing for time spent moving people, a city could be much more space efficient.
    • tbrock 8y ago
      Wouldn’t it use more gas to park further away?
      • sand500 8y ago
        They won't park at all. They will drop you off and then go onto the next person.
      • IshKebab 8y ago
        Autonomous cars could be electric more easily - they could charge themselves.
  • 8y ago
• brudgers 8y ago
  With the possible exception of MAD geopolitics, I can't point to instances where nuclear power has significantly shapes my day to day experience in the US. Certainly much less than hydropower. Sure Voyager and other nuclear powered space craft have provided infotainment for many years, but terrestrial electricity is fungible for the end user and nuclear power plants have always correlated with more expensive watts when I've had utility service that owned them.
  • iknowstuff 8y ago
    I feel like MAD is pretty significant by itself. Might not have been as peaceful otherwise.
• cosmon0t 8y ago
  A serious question here, and not trying to ruffle any SV'ers feathers, but why do you see autonomous vehicles to be as valuable as...say transistors, or satellites? In terms of long term usefulness for the 99% who care much more about turning up at work on time and/or transporting things efficiently from one place to another.
  • hgdsraj 8y ago
    Autonomous vehicles could optimize routes and driving to get things to places faster, reduce stress while driving, and create safer roads. If the tech was widespread enough, there could be autonomous lanes that can drive at very fast speeds too.
  • jballanc 8y ago
    My favorite explanation of why autonomous vehicles will be so game changing is this imagined future conversation: [30 years in the future...] My son: Wait...you mean to tell me that people used to operate multi-ton machines, with a minimum of training, in a range of different conditions, and relied solely on human reflexes and human attention span to avoid collisions? Me: Yes My son: And nobody was killed?!? Me: Oh no! People died ALL THE TIME! --- Look at any source you like, and it's as clear as day: the LEADING cause of death for individuals in their prime productive years (late teens through late 30s) is the automobile! If autonomous cars are even a fraction safer than human drivers, the impact it will have on demographics and population productivity will be MASSIVE.
    • perl4ever 8y ago
      "the LEADING cause of death for individuals in their prime productive years" No matter how unlikely it is to die in your prime, something will be the leading cause. Since it is very unlikely to die in your prime in modern first world countries, why focus on that? Are we going to go on a crusade to eliminate bathtubs next? I may be biased, because I'm now too old to die young...
      • icebraining 8y ago