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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

"Listen To Elon Musk’s Awkward Silence After A Question About Tesla’s Self-Driving Fleet"

http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/06/listen-to-elon-musks-awkwar...

TL;DR Based on Elon's response, they're considering released an Uber competitor with their own self-driving electric cars.

EDIT: Uber has an app and drivers. Tesla is going to have enough manufacturing capacity to build 100K cars/year. Numbers I've found indicate that 90-95% of the time, cars are in a garage or parked. That's a lot of idle capacity society doesn't need out there.

What does that mean? Tesla doesn't need to churn out enough cars to replace existing cars being sold; they just need enough that can replace current miles traveled by people.

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Demand for cars is still huge during rush hours. Lots of cars sit idle during low demand times, but that capacity is still needed to meet high demand times.

The problem isn't getting people into the same car. The bigger problem is getting people into the same car at the same time. Sure, self-driving cars can work with each other in ways human drivers can't to minimize congestion, but until you start removing cars from the road, it will still be an issue.

Uber Pool and Lyft Line are already paving the way for car sharing along popular commutes. In the future, you will face the option of a ride home in a self-driving car either alone for $15, or with two other passengers for $5. The decision will be pretty easy for most people.

Or Google Now will simply suggest people in your area you could commute with, based on its aggregation of your daily commute data with the data of others, based on the time you leave every day.

Or perhaps Google Maps will do that. It supports Uber internally as a travel option, no? Wouldn't it be interesting if that dropped away and was replaced with Google's self-driving car scheme one night?

Excellent point. The actual service providing this transportation shouldn't matter. Passengers just want to arrive at their destination. Let the system figure out how to get them there.

Is there any indication or evidence that this will be successful at a massive scale?

Quite frankly, at those prices, I'm not sure either has an appeal greater than my own car, sitting in my garage, available whenever I want.

I'm extremely sceptical that all the people I see driving on the freeway every day would rather sit in a Prius with three strangers twice a day on their morning and evening commutes.

I think driverless cars are the future of transportation, I'm just not certain that driverless cars and car sharing will be married at the hip from day one. There is lots to figure out to make car sharing appealing at a larger scale than it already is. Most of the things I see suggested just don't have enough appeal to convince me that people will change their current behaviors for them.

If you're paying to keep a car sitting in your garage, you're already paying more than it would cost to rideshare to and from work. If you value your time at all, not having to drive yourself for 60 minutes each day easily covers the direct cost associated with the ride.

> Demand for cars is still huge during rush hours. Lots of cars sit idle during low demand times, but that capacity is still needed to meet high demand times.

That's a bit easier to solve. Congestion pricing along with economic incentives to employers who employee remote workers. Traffic is an externality; if you absolutely need workers on site somewhere in a dense urban area, you can do so, but you're going to pay for the privilege of all that infrastructure you're tying up.

The reality is that public transport will always be the superior solution. No matter how big you make the highway some trains are always going to beat traffic. Combine that with some Park&Ride places on the outskirts and bus/subway/tram in the city.

Google is still light years ahead, also, self-driving cars are expected to drastically reduce the number of cars being sold as they will be used much more efficiently and now one will own a car, at least when self-driving cars will be a majority which admittedly won't be for another 15 to 20 years.

> Google is still light years ahead

Google also had a gentleman's deal with Elon to buy Tesla and allow him to continue operating it if they were unable to get their financing together. They have shared goals (electric transportation, reduced/eliminated mobility fatalities).

> self-driving cars are expected to drastically reduce the number of cars being sold as they will be used much more efficiently and now one will own a car

Agree completely. Google is excellent at software. Tesla is excellent at hardware.

> at least when self-driving cars will be a majority which admittedly won't be for another 15 to 20 years.

Google's head of their self-driving vehicle team has committed to general availability of their self-driving cars in 4 years

> Google's head of their self-driving vehicle team has committed to general availability of their self-driving cars in 4 years

Yes, but I said "self-driving cars will be a majority" in 15 to 20 years. The internet was invented in 1983, made available to the public in 1990 and took over 10 to 15 years later, even today there's a good proportion of the population that do not use it.

The future is hard to predict. It depends on two things:

* Regulations

* Manufacturing capacity

The world auto fleet is replaced pretty slowly. Perhaps its turned over quicker for every self-driving car released onto the roads. If I recall correctly, for every Zipcar shared car in a neighborhood, ~20 cars are no longer kept by owners in the area. Self-driving vehicles could have the same effect, limited to only how fast they can be built and shipped on rail to their final operational region.

Regulations. These are important. Self-driving cars will kill less people than human drivers. Full stop. If you incentivize people to use self-driving cars (insurance rates skyrocket for human drivers), you'll push people to automated vehicles faster. Less deaths, less capital outlay for humanity as a whole for buying cars, lots of efficiency all around.

If you want to make a gentleman's Long Bet [1] on it, I'd be down for that (token amount donated to the winner's charity of choice).

[1] http://longbets.org/

And what's Googles record on hardware like ?

Apple has hired everyone under the sun to work on their rumoured car project and they already have decades of experience in global supply chain management. That is what I would be expecting from Google today if they were planning on shipping a car in 4 years.

Far more likely they will license their software to Tesla. Which would be one of the only car companies interested since everyone has had autonomous systems project in place for many years.

According to Google's latest monthly report [1]:

Miles driven since start of project in 2009 “Autonomous mode” means the software is driving the vehicle, and test drivers are not touching the manual controls. “Manual mode” means the test drivers are driving the car.

* Autonomous mode: 1,158,818 miles

* Manual mode: 877,477 miles

* We’re currently averaging ~10,000 autonomous miles per week on public streets

(my note: over a million miles without an accident caused by software)

[1] http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...

Don't let their track record on consumer hardware fool you. Apple makes nice phones and laptops, while Google has built an entire simulation of where their vehicles drive, continually updates that data with vehicles in the field, and runs their self driving algorithms against those world simulations. This ain't no Apple Maps.

Software is just one very small part of the work involved in building and selling a car globally. Not sure why you are fixated on it. At this point in time there is no evidence Google has put in the necessary steps to be ready to sell a car in 4 years time. And yes their absymal record on consumer hardware counts.

You're, of course, free to you're opinion.

I'm fixated on reducing traffic deaths to zero and eliminating fossil fuel use by any means necessary. If that means I'm obsessed, so be it.

Google, Tesla, whomever doesn't need to sell the cars. They just need to provide you the option of transportation through your smartphone. You don't own a 777, and yet, you can travel across the country for a few hundred dollars with a purchase on your smartphone.

> At this point in time there is no evidence Google has put in the necessary steps to be ready to sell a car in 4 years time.

Their Robo-taxi patent, their existing services (Street View, Express) that could use them, etc., suggest that when they ship self-driving cars, it may not be as a mass-market, sold-to-consumer product.

Either way, that still doesn't address the complexity of manufacturing cars at scale. How's Google planning to do that? Common sense says they're going to OEM it, but I haven't seen any hints to that.

> Common sense says they're going to OEM it, but I haven't seen any hints to that.

http://www.autonews.com/article/20150114/OEM09/150119815/goo...

Google's openly stated that they would likely be working with existing car companies as OEMs; Tesla would be an unsurprising choice.

Do you have a reference for that commitment?

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...

"Our project lead Chris Urmson’s goal is to make sure his 11 year old son doesn’t need to get a driver’s license."

That's not a commitment, and neither does it imply 4 years, since only 50% of 17 year olds currently have a license and that figure has been dropping anyway.

Remember how computers were supposed to eliminate paper in the office? Now we have more paper than ever thanks to computers.

With self-driving cars people can have their cars out running errands for them during the day. Need to pickup something two hours away? No problem, send your car to get it while you are at work. The car that was sitting idle in the parking lot is now out on the road during the day.

By eliminating the driver the number of cars on the road might increase dramatically.

> By eliminating the driver the number of cars on the road might increase dramatically.

Charge road tax by the mile. Replaces the gas tax, regulates a limited physical resource.

Right. Looked at a different way, self-driving cars increase the utility provided by cars, so -- since people will only buy self-driving cars if the price premium over non-self-driving cars is less than the added utility -- can be expected, all other things being equal, to increase the number of cars sold and in use.

OTOH, because self-driving cars decrease the number of cars needed in society to deliver a given degree of utility, they could facilitate a reduction in the number of cars, but some other changes would need to occur to realize that reduction. Tax, regulatory, and/or urban design policies which disfavor individual ownership of vehicles in favor of centralized on-call services would have to reduce the number of cars on the road.

I have gone over a full year without thouching paper at work before so the 'paperless' office is real.

Based on Elon's response... it's silence, there is nothing here.

I have a hard time believing that, considering Tesla has only existed for 12 years, and is already producing 50K vehicles a year that are rated as the best car ever built.

Not sure who is saying it is the best car ever built.

It's long term reliability has been marked as questionable to say the least and the interior build quality is to put it mildly embarassing. There are budget Hyundais that are more luxurious.

The below are results of a quick google search. I could go get references about the Model S being one of the safest cars ever produced as well, but I don't think that's necessary.

"Tesla’s Model S breaks Consumer Reports rating scale"

http://arstechnica.com/cars/2015/09/teslas-model-s-breaks-co...

2015 Tesla Model S 70D Ranked “Car Of The Century”: Car and Driver

http://www.businessfinancenews.com/22425-2015-tesla-motors-i...

Tesla : Consumer Reports' best car ever tested

http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/09/autos/tesla-model-s-consumer...

> Consumer Reports' best car ever tested

What a surprise when it's also the most expensive one...

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