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> This commentary assumes self-driving cars are here to stay and become the de facto way we drive instead of driving ourselves. This seems like an extremely my

> This commentary assumes self-driving cars are here to stay and become the de facto way we drive instead of driving ourselves. This seems like an extremely myopic "tech bubble" take to me. I'm trying to find a way to put this so that it doesn't sound like an attack, but have you been to suburban or rural areas outside of places like SF, NYC or Phoenix? Being reliant on third party transportation, on roads the are often in disrepair with poor signage, is a nonstarter for probably most of the US population.

hiddencost 2y ago
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru... > urban areas, defined as densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas, now account for 80.0% of the U.S. population
- WrongAssumption 2y ago
  They are including suburbs in that number, so that doesn’t really counter the post you are responding to.
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    As I just replied, counting just the largest 100 cities covers more people than the rural population.
    - WrongAssumption 2y ago
      And as established, not the rural plus suburban population.
grecy 2y ago
> is a nonstarter for probably most of the US population. I disagree. I grew up in Rural Australia, lived in the Yukon and have driven to many of the world's most remote and undeveloped countries. You are saying "Self driving cars will NEVER work in <this specific case>" When what you mean to say is "Self driving cars will first work in the easy cases, and then years later will work in more and more cases until they eventually work everywhere." FWIW, people said exactly the same thing when the automobile came around and horses were the best transport. Of course automobiles didn't work well in places with no gas stations or very nasty horse tracks for many years. But the years will always roll on, and things will change.
- chias 2y ago
  While self driving cars are provided by private companies, self driving cars will first work in the profitable cases, and then years later will still only work in the profitable cases.
  - grecy 2y ago
    The Model 3 and Model Y will eventually be self driving... any anyone that wants to can simply buy one. Obviously many other manufacturers will also sell consumer cars that can completely drive themselves. Even a person who lives in Tok, Alaska will just be able to buy one and then sleep in the car as it drives down the Alaska Highway* * Trust me, once you've driven it a handful of times it's a chore.
    - dageshi 2y ago
      Having given this some thought recently, I don't actually think anyone will sell self driving cars for a long time, if ever. I don't think there will be a big bang moment where self driving is suddenly here and it works everywhere. Instead I think it looks like what waymo is doing now, self driving taxi services that expand to cover specific regions and then expand more as they begin to handle more edge cases and more extreme weather. By the time self driving is actually to the standard needed to sell it with a car a younger generation will probably have grown up using self driving taxi's and wonder what they need to own a car for.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    With scale and time, the tech gets cheaper and the number profitable cases continues to increase. As long as it isn’t human labor intensive (and it’s not), they can expand profitable territory almost indefinitely.
  - berdario 2y ago
    As long as the expensive bits continue to be externalized (i.e. publicly funded), I think that there might not be any cases that aren't profitable. The expensive bits being: - road maintenance - theft and vandalism policing Surely, once Waymo covers most cities, the marginal cost of getting one extra waymo car on the road should be substantially lower than a Bus (and maybe even a Marshrutka?) ...And then, once you have the cars on the road, to avoid increasing waiting times too much (which will lead users to prefer alternative transport methods, walking, cycling, etc.) you need to have slack/extra-capacity in any area that you're serving. This means that I don't see why Waymo might not expand even in remote mountain towns: they are not going to have a massive fleet, but keeping one or two cars there shouldn't have a different overhead than for a Waymo car serving a city. (the only caveat might be in making sure that the overnight depot/parking lot won't be too far from the area served). I think that would be pretty cool, if it means that people won't have to drive themselves anymore... but I'm also quite concerned about the consequences this might have for public transport: if its usage numbers falls, and thus public investments in it stops, entire small town might end up depending on extremely few (one?) self-driving taxi providers.
gcanyon 2y ago
> most of the US population You do realize that "most" of the US population lives in cities, right? The "rural" population has remained almost constant since the 1960s, while the "urban" population has grown to roughly 5x the rural population's size. Even just counting the largest 100 cities is more than the rural population. Setting that aside for a moment, how does poor signage affect self-driving cars? They're not like humans expecting to take the third left but miscounting, or turning right at the Dairy Queen (which has shut down). They have GPS and full maps. Those maps might not be perfect, but they'll only ever be wrong once if they're part of a system, which is what's being proposed here. To be clear, I'm matching your tone here. Normally I'd try to be a little more understanding and tempered.
ghaff 2y ago
Most of the US population is urban per the census bureau but a lot of that is spread out suburbs and exurbs. I’m “urban” between many acres of orchards and conservation land. Depending on third party transportation day to day would be utterly impractical.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  In a typical suburb, providing a 2-3 minute wait would require one idling self-driving car per hundreds of houses. I think that sounds practical.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    That will work well when one or two people in most of those houses are commuting, dropping kids at school, and/or running errands at about the same time. /s I fully expect that autonomous vehicles at some point will marginally expand the ranks of people who are marginal car owners and will just effectively taxi. But if you have daily use that Uber/taxis doesn't solve, regularly use a personal car to drive places, have your vehicle configured for things like care seats for kids, etc. you'll do without full autonomy in favor of presumably improved automation in your personal vehicle.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      > That will work well when one or two people in most of those houses are commuting, dropping kids at school, and/or running errands at about the same time. /s I don't really understand what you're arguing here. At most, doing that with self-driving cars would require the same number of cars that already exist. Right? That's good enough for me to put it in the "practical" category. What's your standard for "practical"? But more realistically, even at peak use there's a lot of cars sitting there not moving. Make some do taxi work and you can cut numbers significantly. > I fully expect that autonomous vehicles at some point will marginally expand the ranks of people who are marginal car owners and will just effectively taxi. Not just them, it can displace a lot of second and third cars even when it's barely touching primary cars.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
This is fun because until the last couple of decades, private transportation wasn’t very common in China at all, people simply didn’t own their own cars and taxis were (and still are) ubiquitous even in small rural towns (though they might be breadbox vans to supplement shared minibuses). Almost everyone was relying in third party transportation and even today most still are. And really, this kind of thing was common in most countries and turned out America (along with Canada, Australia) are the odd ones out with almost ubiquitous private car ownership in most of its area. I have no idea how self driving taxis will change the USA, but I rode in my first Waymo last week on a trip to SF and it felt very real. Having lived in a country where I took a taxi to work everyday, I can totally see that life working for me (since I already lived it anyways).
- majormajor 2y ago
  Private car ownership has not been unusual in developed countries. There is a reason so many large car manufactures are not American, after all. It's not just to sell to people in NA and Australia. What's different about the US and those other places is that far more large cities were built after private automobiles were common. There are cars everywhere in both countryside and cities in Italy, say, but there is ALSO more walkability and transit because the cities were there first (and even there, there are cities like Florence that didn't invest in rail for decades before starting to build some more light rail again very recently). China is something of an odd one out for development patterns because of the much higher levels of state control. What I don't really see is places voluntarily giving up point-to-point private transit after having it as an easy option for generations. Places where even the super-wealthy have turned in their private cars and drivers and take the bus with everyone else. I think the market that self-driving cars could potentially capture over mass transit is exactly those people who would rather have a private point-to-point experience. Which can be an overlapping set with the people who would also be willing to use mass transit if it was "good enough", in addition to the people who actively dislike mass transit. The total pool of users is very large.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Nothing really replaces good mass transit. But in a rural town a taxi is often the best you can manage as an alternative. Even in cities, taxis fill in gaps that make it possible to live without cars and use mass transit more. Like a trip can involve a taxi to a station then a train ride then a taxi from destination station to your actual destination.
harmmonica 2y ago
No attack taken. Fair question. I'm in a bubble at the moment because I'm located in one of the few areas where Waymo is available (think that qualifies as a (tech) bubble any way you look at it). But I feel like experiencing this tech answers a lot of questions about what is and isn't possible (or better yet what is and what will be possible with self-driving cars). Also, I work in a very rural environment that couldn't be more hostile to self-driving cars, at least as I thought about them before riding in Waymos (an example: where I stay when I work there I have to give people turn by turn directions because if you rely on Google or Apple Maps your car will get stuck on a road with foot-deep ruts where you'll need to be pulled out; I mean it's not driving on those crazy roads in Pakistan you see videos about (never been) but I would be willing to bet those roads, which I transit regularly, are amongst the poorer-quality roads in the US and I can see self-driving tech working there before long). And I have spent a few evenings trying to understand how the corporate-owned-fleet economics work in rural areas (and in urban). I don't think it works today. But I do think that when costs come down, and they will come down if regulation doesn't kill self-driving cars broadly, or if Elon's right and you can do it with "cameras only," then it will only be a matter of time before the tech is adapted to crappy rural roads.
n0bodyproblm 2y ago
Love of driving may be a generational thing as cars were new and cool for them. Like religion having a license is on the decline: https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/05/17/gen-z-less-likely-get-drivers-license/73678202007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/05/17/gen-z-les... Generational social trends are not immutable physics.

hiddencost 2y ago

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru... > urban areas, defined as densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas, now account for 80.0% of the U.S. population

WrongAssumption 2y ago
They are including suburbs in that number, so that doesn’t really counter the post you are responding to.
- gcanyon 2y ago
  As I just replied, counting just the largest 100 cities covers more people than the rural population.
  - WrongAssumption 2y ago
    And as established, not the rural plus suburban population.

grecy 2y ago

> is a nonstarter for probably most of the US population. I disagree. I grew up in Rural Australia, lived in the Yukon and have driven to many of the world's most remote and undeveloped countries. You are saying "Self driving cars will NEVER work in <this specific case>" When what you mean to say is "Self driving cars will first work in the easy cases, and then years later will work in more and more cases until they eventually work everywhere." FWIW, people said exactly the same thing when the automobile came around and horses were the best transport. Of course automobiles didn't work well in places with no gas stations or very nasty horse tracks for many years. But the years will always roll on, and things will change.

chias 2y ago
While self driving cars are provided by private companies, self driving cars will first work in the profitable cases, and then years later will still only work in the profitable cases.
- grecy 2y ago
  The Model 3 and Model Y will eventually be self driving... any anyone that wants to can simply buy one. Obviously many other manufacturers will also sell consumer cars that can completely drive themselves. Even a person who lives in Tok, Alaska will just be able to buy one and then sleep in the car as it drives down the Alaska Highway* * Trust me, once you've driven it a handful of times it's a chore.
  - dageshi 2y ago
    Having given this some thought recently, I don't actually think anyone will sell self driving cars for a long time, if ever. I don't think there will be a big bang moment where self driving is suddenly here and it works everywhere. Instead I think it looks like what waymo is doing now, self driving taxi services that expand to cover specific regions and then expand more as they begin to handle more edge cases and more extreme weather. By the time self driving is actually to the standard needed to sell it with a car a younger generation will probably have grown up using self driving taxi's and wonder what they need to own a car for.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  With scale and time, the tech gets cheaper and the number profitable cases continues to increase. As long as it isn’t human labor intensive (and it’s not), they can expand profitable territory almost indefinitely.
- berdario 2y ago
  As long as the expensive bits continue to be externalized (i.e. publicly funded), I think that there might not be any cases that aren't profitable. The expensive bits being: - road maintenance - theft and vandalism policing Surely, once Waymo covers most cities, the marginal cost of getting one extra waymo car on the road should be substantially lower than a Bus (and maybe even a Marshrutka?) ...And then, once you have the cars on the road, to avoid increasing waiting times too much (which will lead users to prefer alternative transport methods, walking, cycling, etc.) you need to have slack/extra-capacity in any area that you're serving. This means that I don't see why Waymo might not expand even in remote mountain towns: they are not going to have a massive fleet, but keeping one or two cars there shouldn't have a different overhead than for a Waymo car serving a city. (the only caveat might be in making sure that the overnight depot/parking lot won't be too far from the area served). I think that would be pretty cool, if it means that people won't have to drive themselves anymore... but I'm also quite concerned about the consequences this might have for public transport: if its usage numbers falls, and thus public investments in it stops, entire small town might end up depending on extremely few (one?) self-driving taxi providers.

gcanyon 2y ago

> most of the US population You do realize that "most" of the US population lives in cities, right? The "rural" population has remained almost constant since the 1960s, while the "urban" population has grown to roughly 5x the rural population's size. Even just counting the largest 100 cities is more than the rural population. Setting that aside for a moment, how does poor signage affect self-driving cars? They're not like humans expecting to take the third left but miscounting, or turning right at the Dairy Queen (which has shut down). They have GPS and full maps. Those maps might not be perfect, but they'll only ever be wrong once if they're part of a system, which is what's being proposed here. To be clear, I'm matching your tone here. Normally I'd try to be a little more understanding and tempered.

ghaff 2y ago

Most of the US population is urban per the census bureau but a lot of that is spread out suburbs and exurbs. I’m “urban” between many acres of orchards and conservation land. Depending on third party transportation day to day would be utterly impractical.

Dylan16807 2y ago
In a typical suburb, providing a 2-3 minute wait would require one idling self-driving car per hundreds of houses. I think that sounds practical.
- ghaff 2y ago
  That will work well when one or two people in most of those houses are commuting, dropping kids at school, and/or running errands at about the same time. /s I fully expect that autonomous vehicles at some point will marginally expand the ranks of people who are marginal car owners and will just effectively taxi. But if you have daily use that Uber/taxis doesn't solve, regularly use a personal car to drive places, have your vehicle configured for things like care seats for kids, etc. you'll do without full autonomy in favor of presumably improved automation in your personal vehicle.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    > That will work well when one or two people in most of those houses are commuting, dropping kids at school, and/or running errands at about the same time. /s I don't really understand what you're arguing here. At most, doing that with self-driving cars would require the same number of cars that already exist. Right? That's good enough for me to put it in the "practical" category. What's your standard for "practical"? But more realistically, even at peak use there's a lot of cars sitting there not moving. Make some do taxi work and you can cut numbers significantly. > I fully expect that autonomous vehicles at some point will marginally expand the ranks of people who are marginal car owners and will just effectively taxi. Not just them, it can displace a lot of second and third cars even when it's barely touching primary cars.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago

This is fun because until the last couple of decades, private transportation wasn’t very common in China at all, people simply didn’t own their own cars and taxis were (and still are) ubiquitous even in small rural towns (though they might be breadbox vans to supplement shared minibuses). Almost everyone was relying in third party transportation and even today most still are. And really, this kind of thing was common in most countries and turned out America (along with Canada, Australia) are the odd ones out with almost ubiquitous private car ownership in most of its area. I have no idea how self driving taxis will change the USA, but I rode in my first Waymo last week on a trip to SF and it felt very real. Having lived in a country where I took a taxi to work everyday, I can totally see that life working for me (since I already lived it anyways).

majormajor 2y ago
Private car ownership has not been unusual in developed countries. There is a reason so many large car manufactures are not American, after all. It's not just to sell to people in NA and Australia. What's different about the US and those other places is that far more large cities were built after private automobiles were common. There are cars everywhere in both countryside and cities in Italy, say, but there is ALSO more walkability and transit because the cities were there first (and even there, there are cities like Florence that didn't invest in rail for decades before starting to build some more light rail again very recently). China is something of an odd one out for development patterns because of the much higher levels of state control. What I don't really see is places voluntarily giving up point-to-point private transit after having it as an easy option for generations. Places where even the super-wealthy have turned in their private cars and drivers and take the bus with everyone else. I think the market that self-driving cars could potentially capture over mass transit is exactly those people who would rather have a private point-to-point experience. Which can be an overlapping set with the people who would also be willing to use mass transit if it was "good enough", in addition to the people who actively dislike mass transit. The total pool of users is very large.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Nothing really replaces good mass transit. But in a rural town a taxi is often the best you can manage as an alternative. Even in cities, taxis fill in gaps that make it possible to live without cars and use mass transit more. Like a trip can involve a taxi to a station then a train ride then a taxi from destination station to your actual destination.

harmmonica 2y ago

No attack taken. Fair question. I'm in a bubble at the moment because I'm located in one of the few areas where Waymo is available (think that qualifies as a (tech) bubble any way you look at it). But I feel like experiencing this tech answers a lot of questions about what is and isn't possible (or better yet what is and what will be possible with self-driving cars). Also, I work in a very rural environment that couldn't be more hostile to self-driving cars, at least as I thought about them before riding in Waymos (an example: where I stay when I work there I have to give people turn by turn directions because if you rely on Google or Apple Maps your car will get stuck on a road with foot-deep ruts where you'll need to be pulled out; I mean it's not driving on those crazy roads in Pakistan you see videos about (never been) but I would be willing to bet those roads, which I transit regularly, are amongst the poorer-quality roads in the US and I can see self-driving tech working there before long). And I have spent a few evenings trying to understand how the corporate-owned-fleet economics work in rural areas (and in urban). I don't think it works today. But I do think that when costs come down, and they will come down if regulation doesn't kill self-driving cars broadly, or if Elon's right and you can do it with "cameras only," then it will only be a matter of time before the tech is adapted to crappy rural roads.

n0bodyproblm 2y ago

Love of driving may be a generational thing as cars were new and cool for them. Like religion having a license is on the decline: https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/05/17/gen-z-less-likely-get-drivers-license/73678202007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/05/17/gen-z-les... Generational social trends are not immutable physics.