5 ms·
That sounds cool, although most cities already have something similar in the form of buses, which are cheaper and more efficient than what you're talking about.
by rquantz 12y ago
That sounds cool, although most cities already have something similar in the form of buses, which are cheaper and more efficient than what you're talking about.
In any case, they will probably not start by having a huge fleet, but by selling them as personal vehicles.
- jackvalentine 12y agoI wouldn't compare it to buses, I'd compare it to taxis combined with zipcar. Buses don't have the destination/pickup resolution that a small 2-4 seat vehicle has.
- Sami_Lehtinen 12y agoBuses don't need to be on fixed route. In Helsinki some buses are using dynamic routing based on demand. So basically those are shared taxis with drivers. When the driver can be dropped out of the equation service can be cheaper and there can be a lot more of these vehicles. https://kutsuplus.fi/home https://kutsuplus.fi/home
- jackvalentine 12y agoYou're going to need to translate some of this for me. How long in advance do I have to signal my intent to get the bus? How frequent are the busses/how long will I wait on average? How close will busses come to me, will they come to my house in a court where it needs to three point turn to get out? Will the bus wait 10 minutes while I load my things in it? I don't think the google car will replace mass transit like busses, trains and trams. They're a far more blunt instrument. I do however see it as a more flexible hybrid of car sharing and taxis. A taxi fleet that doesn't have the overhead of keeping enough drivers active for small demand spikes and can be sent directly to the user. Edit: Weird, was not showing up in English on my phone, does on my laptop.
- Sami_Lehtinen 12y agoI assume they're using accept-language. Because it's in Finnish on my work laptop, but on my home desktop and mobile it's in English. Anyway, here's link that goes always to English version. https://kutsuplus.fi/home?lang=en_GB https://kutsuplus.fi/home?lang=en_GB
- greeneggs 12y agoAll the signs right now point to Google's self-driving cars being a fleet, not personal vehicles. A few points: * Google has expertise in "big data" and algorithms: running a fleet would fit their expertise. * On the other hand, Google has no expertise in designing or marketing pretty cars. They don't have any dealership or repair network. To release a personal vehicle, they'd have to team up with a car company (and that partnership would have to be in place by now given Google's aggressive timeline). * A fleet lets Google control the deployment carefully. Nobody is going to buy a self-driving car that only works in Mountain View. (Or, worse, they would buy the car, and then complain loudly.) But with a fleet, Google can start on a corporate campus, expand to Stanford, say, then Mountain View, etc. No worries about driving in the snow. No worries about self-driving cars getting in well-publicized accidents after an owner ignored the maintenance schedule.
- Mister_Snuggles 12y agoThese would be buses on steroids. Imagine if you could fire up an app on your phone that would make a driverless car magically appear to take you somewhere. Once you get to that somewhere, it would scurry off to take someone else somewhere or recharge or go towards where Google's analytics show that it's likely to be needed next.