3 ms·
Your "basic math" fails on many levels. 1) "an average speed of 35mph in the city" is not going to happen. In Manhattan that's 15 MPH. In midtown Manhattan it'
by rorrr 14y ago
Your "basic math" fails on many levels.
1) "an average speed of 35mph in the city" is not going to happen. In Manhattan that's 15 MPH. In midtown Manhattan it's 1.7 MPH. So 10 MPH on average would be more realistic.
2) You forgot gas
3) You forgot tickets
4) You forgot car insurance
5) You forgot car maintenance
6) You forgot car accidents and the cost of replacement
7) You forgot tolls
8) You forgot lawsuit costs
9) You forgot parking costs (and time to drive from and to parking)
10) You forgot the costs of the hiring process (try hiring 10 drivers in 10 days)
11) You forgot the cost of routing of all these cars (you have to organize 10,000 cars somehow)
12) Your guess of $40,000/car for design, approval, production of a specialized car is way off.
13) You forgot server costs (stitching the images)
14) You forgot storage costs (storing, transferring) millions of photos.
15) You forgot IT and management costs to support all this shit. $8M will buy you a few executives in charge of this project.
16) Your estimate of $10/hr for the driver salary is way off (assuming it's just a driver, and not a trained technician). Average salary of a cab drive in NYC is $25/hr. Chicago - $17/hr. Los Angeles - $17.5/hr. That's not counting the benefits - health insurance, social security, etc.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoHeh, part of the goal of 'simplfying' is so that you can reason about things. Most people don't really conceptualize what it means to have 100 billion dollars of 'cash on hand'. We can make the numbers more accurate. Hell if Tim Cook hired me and gave me the budget for it we could knock this out in a couple of years. I'm sure there are at least half a dozen folks out there who could. The simple point remains though which is that you can solve this problem with money, and you can make the solution time arbitrarily short by scaling the money.
- spaghetti 14y agoApple could solve this problem with money by licensing Google's existing service. Actually building a competing service can't be solved with money alone. Just think of the number of people involved.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoFWIW a street view 'type' car (differential GPS, 360 view camera, drive train encoding, wide band celluar/wifi scanner, and 100 TB of on board storage is significantly less than $40,000 these days. It is easier if you're just pulling ground data (no need to optically stabilize the cameras).
- rorrr 14y agoYes, you listed (some of) the components. Building a working scalable system is something else though.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoOooh, wanna test me? Went through a pretty deep dive on the streetview stuff when I was working where you are but I'd be willing to bet you I could build you a 3rd gen car that would out perform the current ones for a lot less than $40K. I'd get dibs on Rod though, that man is hecka talented with a CNC mill.
- rorrr 14y agoSure, Google, couldn't figure out how to make it cheaper than $100K per vehicle, but ChuckMcM on the internets sure can do it for "a lot less than $40K".