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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

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.

whoisthemachine 3y ago
> 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.
- techterrier 3y ago
  Like crappy little trains with no capacity?
  - xnx 3y ago
    Magic little trains that can take you from and to anywhere.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ortusdux 3y ago
  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.
  - bsder 3y ago
    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.
- ghaff 3y ago
  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.
  - jessriedel 3y ago
    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.
    - whoisthemachine 3y ago
      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.
      - jessriedel 3y ago
        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).
- madars 3y ago
  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.
  - whoisthemachine 3y ago
    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...
- HALtheWise 3y ago
  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.
  - whoisthemachine 3y ago
    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?
    - devilbunny 3y ago
      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.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    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.
supercheetah 3y ago
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.
- allanrbo 3y ago
  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.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    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.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  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.
- makerofthings 3y ago
  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.
rurp 3y ago
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.
- tomComb 3y ago
  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.
  - janice1999 3y ago
    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.
- bavent 3y ago
  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.
  - baseballdork 3y ago
    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.
- mathgradthrow 3y ago
  "adblock detected! It is a violation of our terms of service to wear noise cancelling earphones, pulling over."
- jessriedel 3y ago
  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.
grecy 3y ago
> 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.
- ghaff 3y ago
  >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.
  - xnx 3y ago
    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
- vikramkr 3y ago
  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
jessriedel 3y ago
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.
- flutas 3y ago
  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-rely-on-human-assistance-every-4-to-5-miles.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-robotaxis-re...
  - jessriedel 3y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145997
ericpauley 3y ago
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.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  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.
  - hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
    It's a lot harder to artificially constrain autonomous taxis with taxi medallions.
  - VirusNewbie 3y ago
    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.
baron816 3y ago
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?
- epolanski 3y ago
  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.
- ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
  > 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.
  - 3y ago
londons_explore 3y ago
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.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  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
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  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.
- sagarm 3y ago
  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.
dougmwne 3y ago
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.
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
> 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.
- xnx 3y ago
  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
fnordpiglet 3y ago
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.

whoisthemachine 3y ago

> 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.

techterrier 3y ago
Like crappy little trains with no capacity?
- xnx 3y ago
  Magic little trains that can take you from and to anywhere.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ortusdux 3y ago
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.
- bsder 3y ago
  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.
ghaff 3y ago
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.
- jessriedel 3y ago
  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.
  - whoisthemachine 3y ago
    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.
    - jessriedel 3y ago
      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).
madars 3y ago
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.
- whoisthemachine 3y ago
  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...
HALtheWise 3y ago
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.
- whoisthemachine 3y ago
  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?
  - devilbunny 3y ago
    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.
- bluGill 3y ago
  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.

supercheetah 3y ago

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.

allanrbo 3y ago
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.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  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.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
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.
makerofthings 3y ago
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.

rurp 3y ago

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.

tomComb 3y ago
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.
- janice1999 3y ago
  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.
bavent 3y ago
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.
- baseballdork 3y ago
  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.
mathgradthrow 3y ago
"adblock detected! It is a violation of our terms of service to wear noise cancelling earphones, pulling over."
jessriedel 3y ago
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.

grecy 3y ago

> 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.

ghaff 3y ago
>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.
- xnx 3y ago
  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
vikramkr 3y ago
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

jessriedel 3y ago

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.

flutas 3y ago
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-rely-on-human-assistance-every-4-to-5-miles.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-robotaxis-re...
- jessriedel 3y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145997

ericpauley 3y ago

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.

jvanderbot 3y ago
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.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  It's a lot harder to artificially constrain autonomous taxis with taxi medallions.
- VirusNewbie 3y ago
  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.

baron816 3y ago

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?

epolanski 3y ago
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.
ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
> 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.
- 3y ago

londons_explore 3y ago

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.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
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
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
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.
sagarm 3y ago
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.

dougmwne 3y ago

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.

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago

> 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.

xnx 3y ago
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

fnordpiglet 3y ago

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.