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Retired People Could Be Ideal Customers for Self-Driving Cars
- umeshunni 8y agoThe thing I don't get about how most companies are approaching self driving cars is why they are trying to first get them to run on regular roads. It seems like getting them to work well on contained campuses with limited traffic like old age homes, universities, hospitals, corporate campuses etc seem like they'd be ideal places to test and deploy low speed self driving vehicles rather than setting them free on public roads as their first market.
- burlesona 8y agoFrom my limited understanding of the technology involved I would guess there's some risk of overfitting. That is, it requires significant work to train a car to drive period, whether you train it in a relatively "orderly" environment (as we would think of it) or not. However, the training to drive in a chaotic city center should generalize to handle orderly environments, whereas the inverse may not be true. The whole idea of driverless cars is not to be people movers on tracks, but to actually provide the versatility of a human driver in a car, so getting one that can do "everything a human driver can do" seems like the bar everyone needs to hit for it to be commercially viable.
- maxxxxx 8y agoI wonder about that too. Is Tesla's corporate campus fully equipped with autonomous vehicles?
- kccqzy 8y agoThe campus is so full of parked cars that there's no space for cars to move, let alone autonomous cars.
- BurningFrog 8y agoThe easiest case is freeways. City streets are vastly harder.
- panic 8y agoAs far as I can tell, these companies convinced their investors that they're going to be the next Uber, so they need to look like they're making direct progress toward that goal. Driving around a retirement home might seem like a distraction when Tesla claims to be shipping a fully autonomous car by the end of 2019.
- Piskvorrr 8y agoTesla claims things, and this is a perpetually moving goal. IIRC, they first announced it in 2015, to be completed by 2016. Well...I assume it could be a business tactic, to force competitors' energy in this direction, just as you have noted.
- 1ste 8y agoThat is what the article is about
- burlesona 8y agoThis seems like really obvious -- in a good way -- market targeting. For the very old, that ship has already sailed. Thinking of my surviving grandmother, her take on losing access to the car is "it's a bummer but I didn't have one until I was twenty five anyway." And many younger people would prefer not to need a car at all by virtue of living in a human-scale environment. But for my parents (baby boomer) generation, what I hear from them is "I don't know what I'm going to do when I can't drive anymore, that's just terrifying." They love their cars, and feel crippled when they can't drive anymore, as they lose access to the suburban lifestyle they've spent their whole life pursuing. Thus, going after the "active retirement" people who have money and want their "freedom" back is probably the best possible place for a self-driving car business to start. (edited for clarity)
- TaupeRanger 8y agoYou must live in a big city huh? I know zero young people who would give up the convenience of a car, and I suspect this is the case for a majority of the country.
- dahfizz 8y agoPeople on HN tend to have this huge misconception that the entire world is one dense urban core. Many more people live in suburbs than in cities. The suburban population is actually growing faster than the urban population [1]. For this plurality of people, cars aren't only convenient but irreplaceable. [1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-ec...
- leesalminen 8y agoNo, you’ve misunderstood. Young people love cities. They’re full of diversity and energy and startup jobs. Nowhere but a sprawling city has those things. Plus, if you don’t live in the city then you must burn more fossil fuels than I do and are clearly a terrible person. /s
- tzhenghao 8y agoFull disclosure: I work for Drive.ai, and these might not be the views of my employer. But yes, retired people or just sleepier communities with an older population makes sense. It's not just because of an early stage rollout of self driving cars for a good tech shakedown, but also communities like that stand to benefit the most from it. My dad back in the motherland retired recently and have generally poor eyesight in the dark, so he'd rather take a Grab than driving by himself if he needs to go out at night. Self driving cars could fill this need.
- dead_end 8y agoMeanwhile, of course, no one can afford to retire. Many struggle to eek out a meager living, working dead-end jobs.
- judge2020 8y agoSadly not the retired people of today. This is a little pessimistic, but fully self-driving cars where they basically guarantee that you won't have to touch the wheel, or are level 5 autonomous, will likely take another 30+ years to mature. Hopefully we'll see this in the lifetime of boomers, and we'll get to hear tales about how everyone used to text and drive, while now everyone just texts while the car drives itself.
- mav3rick 8y agoWaymo has already launch this in Phoenix for customers.
- LanceH 8y agoThere are intermediate steps. Lots of retired people live in specific communities which could control the layout of their streets and make them very compatible with self driving cars. Just community <-> medical center would be huge. Nearest grocer, bus terminal and that would cover a lot.
- YeahSureWhyNot 8y agofor places with shitshow traffic, very erratic drivers, tons of roadwork and pot holes, such as new york, yeah maybe 30 years, probably never. but the rest 95% of the country can be handled by self driving tech in 3-5 years.
- nightfly 8y ago
- Causality1 8y agoOh really? People with money to buy a car but who can't safely drive are the ideal customers for self-driving cars? Mind-blowing!
- Animats 8y agoIt's workable, but there's a problem. The fake-it-til-you-make-it self-driving car companies have unicorn-sized valuations. One that's actually doing it is measured on cost and return on investment. This competes with taxi and van services. You get rid of the driver cost while taking on lots of new costs. On a small scale, it probably loses money. Navya and Local Motors, with their little slow shuttle vans for airports and such, have this problem.
- ghaff 8y agoIt seems as if there’s a common assumption that taking out the driver opens up fundamentally different use cases. Even if we assume self-driving cuts costs in half (not obvious), that’s a big drop but is it a fundamentally change how people can use cars drop?
- grogenaut 8y agoMy mom is getting up there and when I think about this and Lyft/Uber really the Gap is with Lyft/Uber you don't always know if you'll get a driver that will help you with heavy or bulky objects. With a taxi you wait longer but you can request it. But with Lyft/Uber there is still a good chance there would be help (currently). With self driving there is no one to help. As you get older you would want someone to make sure you got into the place. Someone to help you with groceries or other objects to the door. This would nessiciarily drive you away from local business and to delivery for everything (online likely). And make it less likely you'd take the car if you needed assistance. Eg as you get older where you have trouble driving you're likely going to need additional assistance that just a car can't provide.
- silencio 8y agoHa, if the Lyft/Uber/taxi driver even gets to the address! It's a constant annoyance for many at my dad's dialysis clinic that every car service basically decides to stop in the middle of a lane on a large street and leaves after 30 seconds, rather than pulling into the parking lot with loading zone in front of the waiting room. Even if you put the pin in the right spot. I've been trying to convince my dad to use GoGoGrandparent instead of using the Lyft app so someone else can deal with ensuring the driver isn't an idiot, but he actually WANTS to track the driver himself. Anyway, I'm feeling like by the time level 5 autonomous cars are around, we'll also have worked on improving helper robots for a big chunk of those needs.
- nradov 8y agoIn general there are lots of ideal customers for all sorts of non-existent products.
- 0j 8y agoHere is recent a talk/lecture by Oliver Cameron, CEO of voyage, explaining in detail why they chose retirement communities and how they built their company. https://youtu.be/-j0tc0Y1CIE https://youtu.be/-j0tc0Y1CIE
- LoSboccacc 8y agoAlso insurance payouts will be lower on crashes.
- okonomiyaki3000 8y agoThe remake of Driving Miss Daisy just isn't going to be the same...
- skocznymroczny 8y agoThese cars will have accidents, and they will have victims. Perhaps there is another hidden benefit for offering them to retired people - they have already lived most of their lives, and if an accident happens, it will be less of a loss.
- Piskvorrr 8y agoI don't think EH was in either of those categories.
- pawelmurias 8y agoIt would create a bad image from a marketing point.
- kwhitefoot 8y agoSo long as it is a car that CAN self-drive not one that CAN ONLY self drive then that sounds great. Retired doesn't mean crippled! My mother in law is 84 and is a perfectly competent driver. I suspect that she would find a self driving car more difficult to manage than the Land Rover she currently drives simply because the UI will be unfamiliar. I'm 63, and retired, and while I enjoy the additional features that my Tesla S has I don't want them instead of being able to drive the car myself.
- smegger001 8y agoMy 90 year old grandmother took a drivers test at the instance of he children last year. She passed both written and driving portions. My other grandmother who is about ten years younger on the other hand is a menace that should of had her license taken away years (and multiple accidents) ago.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- amelius 8y ago> So long as it is a car that CAN self-drive not one that CAN ONLY self drive then that sounds great. It's just the natural progression of tech. For example, you don't see the Flintstone style propulsion system on modern cars either, even though users could drive their cars that way and some would even find it more intuitive.
- frosted-flakes 8y agoWhat's a Flintstone-style propulsion system?
- Piskvorrr 8y agoA car without a floor, propelled by passengers' feet; a running joke (sic) in the cartoon Flintstones. Doesn't quite fit into the real-world tech tree though...
- 1ste 8y agoPaywall. How are commenters reading the full article?
- gdy 8y agohttps://outline.com/ https://outline.com/
- ungzd 8y agoThe same way as nuclear fusion will help retired people to spend less on electricity. Both things will likely never happen.
- sitkack 8y agoSo is mass transit. This sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
- cityboy2 8y agoOr we could just build things closer together. Pros: 1. We’ve known how to do it for 5,000+ years and it still works. 2. People can walk or bike so they don’t wind up on My 600-lb Life. 3. Reduced greenhouse gas emissions. 4. Reduced stress from traffic. 5. Reduced traffic deaths. 6. Doesn’t rely on billions of dollars of unproven tech that may net work and we can get started today. 7. Reduces the soul-crushing boredom of suburbia, which has about as much character as a glass of water. Social interaction is important for humans.
- frosted-flakes 8y agoCons: You have to live in a shoebox and experience the soul-crushing boredom of urban cities, which has about as much character as a slab of concrete.