10 ms·

As a blind person I get excited about this until I think of just how much the first models will cost. I guess I should save what would now be a car payment if I

by jareds 13y ago

As a blind person I get excited about this until I think of just how much the first models will cost. I guess I should save what would now be a car payment if I could drive in hopes that it will be enough of a down payment that I can afford one of these when they come out and pass all the regulatory hurdles.

wavefunction 13y ago
I find it far more likely that these cars will mostly operate in fleets, since most people just need auto-travel for short periods each day. So you will probably be able to subscribe to a car service that picks you up when you need it on demand, and moves on to the next subscriber when you're done. He's also working on automated maintenance facilities that would allow a self-driving car to report for maintenance/cleaning. The car drives up, receives service and drives off afterwards to the next pick-up.
- jareds 13y ago
  I had this discussion with my friend. Would automated fleets of cars make sense? If traffic is three times as heavy during rush-hour as it normally is then you would either have to have a lot of cars sitting idle the rest of the day or raise costs for rush-hour so high that it wouldn’t make economic sense to use a self-driving car service to get to and from work. I’d be interested if there’s any statistics on traffic volumes for areas including cities and there outlying suburbs in the United States to see what the economics of a service would have to look like taking into account daily variations in traffic patterns.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > I had this discussion with my friend. Would automated fleets of cars make sense? The "automated fleet" idea is not how people are planning to see this idea play out. Automated, self-driving cars are one thing, but an automated fleet makes it sound like a train rather than many vehicles operating very efficiently (meaning without human drivers) but each with a separate destination. To an alien watching from orbit, a country of automated cars would appear different from the present only in that the cars would be much closer together than they are now, with no increased danger of collision -- indeed, less danger. Cars would still leave the freeway and go to their intended destination just as they do now, just more efficiently. > it wouldn’t make economic sense to use a self-driving car service to get to and from work. It would if everyone still owned a car as they do now, the only difference being that the car drives itself. If the idea of a "fleet" were taken seriously, why not switch to trains or buses instead of cars? The only reason to have a car is to be able to go directly to your destination.
    - jareds 13y ago
      I am assuming that services which rented out automated cars would have large numbers of them. I’m referring to them as a fleet in the same way logistics companies refer to a fleet of trucks even if there not all driving the same rout. If only ¼ of car owners are on the road at peak traffic times then it could make sense to have automated car rental for a specific trip instead of car ownership. Assume drives to work take 30 minutes and that most people go to work from 6:00 AM to 9:00 AM. Also assume that we have inefficient routs requiring the car to drive the same distance for all pickups and drop-offs. Between 5:30 AM and 8:30 AM you could get three people to work with one automated car. Assuming this would it be cost efficient for companies to charge a low enough trip cost to make it more economical for people with fairly predictable driving requirements to rent a car as needed instead of buying one.
      - wavefunction 13y ago
        I'm using "fleet" in the same way as you, jareds. A single company owns a large number of vehicles rather than a large group of individuals each owning one vehicle. We wouldn't need to dedicate such a high level of inefficient resources to parking vehicles that sit mostly unused and it could offer us the opportunity to remake our cities to be more pedestrian and bike friendly.
    - Stratoscope 13y ago
      > an automated fleet makes it sound like a train rather than many vehicles...each with a separate destination When I hear the word "fleet" it usually just means a number of vehicles bought by one company: A car rental company has a fleet of cars. A trucking company has a fleet of trucks. A car dealer has a fleet manager. (Forgive me for pointing this out, I'm sure you know it already, just trying to clarify the terminology.) Enterprise Rent-a-Car will already send any of the cars in their fleet to your door. Of course they send a human along to drive the car to you. If they got an automated fleet they could offer the same service they do now, but they would just send the car over by itself. At least that's what "automated fleet" sounds like to me. :-)
    - CamperBob2 13y ago
  - pogden 13y ago
    Even assuming everyone commutes at the same time, the status quo cars sitting idle the rest of the day, the only difference is that they need two or three spaces to park each, and typically in high value locations. Your car sits at home at night and at work during the day. With the car service there could be half as many parking spaces or less, and they can drive themselves to a garage in some remote area, rather than within walking distance of a place you want to be. The car service makes car pooling and mass transit more practical as well. Maybe you could hitch a ride with someone to work, but then you might have to stay late. With personal car ownership, you need to drive alone both ways, but with the car service, you can share the morning trip and if you need to take separate transportation in the evening. If buses in your area can't reliably get to work on time, you could have the car service pick you up to go to work, the the bus take you home.
  - baddox 13y ago
    Well sure, if you're sticking with the one car per person model, you still need enough cars for the peak concurrent usage. The difference with automated cars is that you theoretically only need exactly enough cars for the peak concurrent usage, whereas we currently (presumably) have many more cars than that.
  - notatoad 13y ago
    It would be an interesting experiment to have a mass-market transit system priced based on demand. If a ride at 9am cost twice as much as a ride at 10am or 8am, would we start seeing a more companies offering flexible hours or varying their hours to take advantage of cheaper commutes?
    - jzwinck 13y ago
      This is being done on Singapore's "subway" (MRT) system now: if you exit by 7:45 AM, your ride is free. http://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltaweb/en/public-transport/mrt-and-lrt-trains/travel-smart.html http://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltaweb/en/public-transport/mrt... And something similar on Singapore's roads too: tolls vary by time of day. http://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltaweb/en/roads-and-motoring/managing-traffic-and-congestion/electronic-road-pricing-erp.html http://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltaweb/en/roads-and-motoring/m... Finally, taxis have a pricing feature common in many places: a surcharge for certain times of day (can be peak times, can be nighttime...).
      - eru 13y ago
        If you ask me, they should raise prices on the MRT during rush hour, instead of just lowering prices in early the morning. But that's just me. The normal price to get to work on the MRT is less than 1 USD. So the difference between that and free isn't worth it for me to alter my schedule. Less well off people might be more influenced, and raising prices might be politically infeasible. (And I usually ride my bicycle to work anyway.)
    - tesseractive 13y ago
      King County Metro definitely has peak and non-peak fares. I don't think that's all that unusual. Also, it's not a mass transit system, but the 520 Toll Bridge in Seattle uses this to price tolls. It was the first time I'd seen this, but perhaps there are other places where tolls operate similarly?
  - Flenser 13y ago
    If most people don't own their car and use a fleet service, then it would be easy for the fleets to offer discounts to people who were willing to share a ride for part of the journey. Being able to automate car-pooling could drastically increase the passengers-per-car during rush hour so rush hour traffic might decrease.
  - RogerL 13y ago
    I haven't thought about this deeply, I'm thinking out loud... What are the energy cost implications of this? Okay, I drive my car to work, and it sits there until I go home. If it was part of a fleet, it would leave my work parking lot, go to some other part of town (empty, using energy), and so on. Okay, we can also save energy by ride sharing, but I speculate that it wouldn't take much to make that really unappealing. In reality, we don't just go from home to work and back; we stop at the grocery, drop the kids off at school, and so on. We already have fleets of automatic cars - they are called taxis. Their neural net is wet, is all. So as a first approximation I'd say taxi fleets are a pretty good proxy for energy use and cost. Sure, the driver needs to be paid, but we can model that.
auctiontheory 13y ago
It is conceivable (even probable?) that self-driving cars would be subsidized for the visually handicapped.
- jareds 13y ago
  They may be subsidized but I could see myself making enough money where I wouldn’t qualify for the subsidy if it was income based but not making enough money to be able to easily afford one if they were six figures.
- eru 13y ago
  Why not just give the blind (or anybody deserving) money, and leave them free to decide how they want to spend it?
saturdayplace 13y ago
> I guess I should save what would now be a car payment In your case I know it's not as applicable, but I often recommend to people that pay off their car loans that they should continue making that payment, just into a savings account. In less time than it took to pay off the loan (remember, you were paying interest too), you'll have saved enough to pay cash for your next auto. If you've been able to live with that money dedicated towards a loan payment, hopefully your budget can continue not to depend on the "extra" resulting from not having the obligation.
revelation 13y ago
So you will then have a car of your own, and then what? Lots of young people are opting not to buy a car; they are a huge black hole for money and can be extremely inconvenient to operate in modern cities. It might turn out that by the point the technology exists for self-driving cars, private car ownership will be extinct and driving a car within city limits a felony.
- tootie 13y ago
  Personal car ownership is a pain in cities, but livery fleets are huge. Hello and welcome to Johnny Cab.

by jareds 13y ago

wavefunction 13y ago

I find it far more likely that these cars will mostly operate in fleets, since most people just need auto-travel for short periods each day. So you will probably be able to subscribe to a car service that picks you up when you need it on demand, and moves on to the next subscriber when you're done. He's also working on automated maintenance facilities that would allow a self-driving car to report for maintenance/cleaning. The car drives up, receives service and drives off afterwards to the next pick-up.

jareds 13y ago
I had this discussion with my friend. Would automated fleets of cars make sense? If traffic is three times as heavy during rush-hour as it normally is then you would either have to have a lot of cars sitting idle the rest of the day or raise costs for rush-hour so high that it wouldn’t make economic sense to use a self-driving car service to get to and from work. I’d be interested if there’s any statistics on traffic volumes for areas including cities and there outlying suburbs in the United States to see what the economics of a service would have to look like taking into account daily variations in traffic patterns.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > I had this discussion with my friend. Would automated fleets of cars make sense? The "automated fleet" idea is not how people are planning to see this idea play out. Automated, self-driving cars are one thing, but an automated fleet makes it sound like a train rather than many vehicles operating very efficiently (meaning without human drivers) but each with a separate destination. To an alien watching from orbit, a country of automated cars would appear different from the present only in that the cars would be much closer together than they are now, with no increased danger of collision -- indeed, less danger. Cars would still leave the freeway and go to their intended destination just as they do now, just more efficiently. > it wouldn’t make economic sense to use a self-driving car service to get to and from work. It would if everyone still owned a car as they do now, the only difference being that the car drives itself. If the idea of a "fleet" were taken seriously, why not switch to trains or buses instead of cars? The only reason to have a car is to be able to go directly to your destination.
  - jareds 13y ago
    I am assuming that services which rented out automated cars would have large numbers of them. I’m referring to them as a fleet in the same way logistics companies refer to a fleet of trucks even if there not all driving the same rout. If only ¼ of car owners are on the road at peak traffic times then it could make sense to have automated car rental for a specific trip instead of car ownership. Assume drives to work take 30 minutes and that most people go to work from 6:00 AM to 9:00 AM. Also assume that we have inefficient routs requiring the car to drive the same distance for all pickups and drop-offs. Between 5:30 AM and 8:30 AM you could get three people to work with one automated car. Assuming this would it be cost efficient for companies to charge a low enough trip cost to make it more economical for people with fairly predictable driving requirements to rent a car as needed instead of buying one.
    - wavefunction 13y ago
      I'm using "fleet" in the same way as you, jareds. A single company owns a large number of vehicles rather than a large group of individuals each owning one vehicle. We wouldn't need to dedicate such a high level of inefficient resources to parking vehicles that sit mostly unused and it could offer us the opportunity to remake our cities to be more pedestrian and bike friendly.
  - Stratoscope 13y ago
    > an automated fleet makes it sound like a train rather than many vehicles...each with a separate destination When I hear the word "fleet" it usually just means a number of vehicles bought by one company: A car rental company has a fleet of cars. A trucking company has a fleet of trucks. A car dealer has a fleet manager. (Forgive me for pointing this out, I'm sure you know it already, just trying to clarify the terminology.) Enterprise Rent-a-Car will already send any of the cars in their fleet to your door. Of course they send a human along to drive the car to you. If they got an automated fleet they could offer the same service they do now, but they would just send the car over by itself. At least that's what "automated fleet" sounds like to me. :-)
  - CamperBob2 13y ago
- pogden 13y ago
  Even assuming everyone commutes at the same time, the status quo cars sitting idle the rest of the day, the only difference is that they need two or three spaces to park each, and typically in high value locations. Your car sits at home at night and at work during the day. With the car service there could be half as many parking spaces or less, and they can drive themselves to a garage in some remote area, rather than within walking distance of a place you want to be. The car service makes car pooling and mass transit more practical as well. Maybe you could hitch a ride with someone to work, but then you might have to stay late. With personal car ownership, you need to drive alone both ways, but with the car service, you can share the morning trip and if you need to take separate transportation in the evening. If buses in your area can't reliably get to work on time, you could have the car service pick you up to go to work, the the bus take you home.
- baddox 13y ago
  Well sure, if you're sticking with the one car per person model, you still need enough cars for the peak concurrent usage. The difference with automated cars is that you theoretically only need exactly enough cars for the peak concurrent usage, whereas we currently (presumably) have many more cars than that.
- notatoad 13y ago
  It would be an interesting experiment to have a mass-market transit system priced based on demand. If a ride at 9am cost twice as much as a ride at 10am or 8am, would we start seeing a more companies offering flexible hours or varying their hours to take advantage of cheaper commutes?
  - jzwinck 13y ago
    This is being done on Singapore's "subway" (MRT) system now: if you exit by 7:45 AM, your ride is free. http://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltaweb/en/public-transport/mrt-and-lrt-trains/travel-smart.html http://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltaweb/en/public-transport/mrt... And something similar on Singapore's roads too: tolls vary by time of day. http://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltaweb/en/roads-and-motoring/managing-traffic-and-congestion/electronic-road-pricing-erp.html http://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltaweb/en/roads-and-motoring/m... Finally, taxis have a pricing feature common in many places: a surcharge for certain times of day (can be peak times, can be nighttime...).
    - eru 13y ago
      If you ask me, they should raise prices on the MRT during rush hour, instead of just lowering prices in early the morning. But that's just me. The normal price to get to work on the MRT is less than 1 USD. So the difference between that and free isn't worth it for me to alter my schedule. Less well off people might be more influenced, and raising prices might be politically infeasible. (And I usually ride my bicycle to work anyway.)
  - tesseractive 13y ago
    King County Metro definitely has peak and non-peak fares. I don't think that's all that unusual. Also, it's not a mass transit system, but the 520 Toll Bridge in Seattle uses this to price tolls. It was the first time I'd seen this, but perhaps there are other places where tolls operate similarly?
- Flenser 13y ago
  If most people don't own their car and use a fleet service, then it would be easy for the fleets to offer discounts to people who were willing to share a ride for part of the journey. Being able to automate car-pooling could drastically increase the passengers-per-car during rush hour so rush hour traffic might decrease.
- RogerL 13y ago
  I haven't thought about this deeply, I'm thinking out loud... What are the energy cost implications of this? Okay, I drive my car to work, and it sits there until I go home. If it was part of a fleet, it would leave my work parking lot, go to some other part of town (empty, using energy), and so on. Okay, we can also save energy by ride sharing, but I speculate that it wouldn't take much to make that really unappealing. In reality, we don't just go from home to work and back; we stop at the grocery, drop the kids off at school, and so on. We already have fleets of automatic cars - they are called taxis. Their neural net is wet, is all. So as a first approximation I'd say taxi fleets are a pretty good proxy for energy use and cost. Sure, the driver needs to be paid, but we can model that.

auctiontheory 13y ago

It is conceivable (even probable?) that self-driving cars would be subsidized for the visually handicapped.

jareds 13y ago
They may be subsidized but I could see myself making enough money where I wouldn’t qualify for the subsidy if it was income based but not making enough money to be able to easily afford one if they were six figures.
eru 13y ago
Why not just give the blind (or anybody deserving) money, and leave them free to decide how they want to spend it?

saturdayplace 13y ago

> I guess I should save what would now be a car payment In your case I know it's not as applicable, but I often recommend to people that pay off their car loans that they should continue making that payment, just into a savings account. In less time than it took to pay off the loan (remember, you were paying interest too), you'll have saved enough to pay cash for your next auto. If you've been able to live with that money dedicated towards a loan payment, hopefully your budget can continue not to depend on the "extra" resulting from not having the obligation.

revelation 13y ago

So you will then have a car of your own, and then what? Lots of young people are opting not to buy a car; they are a huge black hole for money and can be extremely inconvenient to operate in modern cities. It might turn out that by the point the technology exists for self-driving cars, private car ownership will be extinct and driving a car within city limits a felony.

tootie 13y ago
Personal car ownership is a pain in cities, but livery fleets are huge. Hello and welcome to Johnny Cab.