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Comment by a_imho | Hacker News Reader

>The self driving car business isn't close to profitability, but clearly has a successful business model ahead of it.

Won't/can't read the article because Wired adwall, but what is this business model? Whenever self driving cars came up, I see they need a miracle. Solution looking for a problem. Points being: have better or on par alternatives for transportation already, don't have the necessary legal framework to operate in, people actually like to drive, road safety could be improved way better with other improvements (better education, harsher fines, lowering and enforcing speed limits), environmental impact decreased by moving away from motorized transportation etc.

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> people actually like to drive

This does not appear to be true, do you have any research?

> road safety could be improved way better with other improvements (better education, harsher fines, lowering and enforcing speed limits)

This also does not appear to be true. It's like saying humans can get better than computers at Go if you push them hard enough. And we know that's false.

> environmental impact decreased by moving away from motorized transportation etc.

While i agree, i can point out that a self-driving car will mean less cars (as it can be shared), so it will be more environmental efficient than private ownership of cars.

1. Why do you think it is controversial? People like to drive fast cars, people even like to watch others drive fast cars. Some like manual transmissions. I do think recreational driving is thing, not necessarily commuting.

2. I'm not arguing humans are better at following rules, I'm arguing we could have safer roads tomorrow if we were interested and would actually enforcing traffic laws. I think driving is a much harder problem than go, so saying we can solve a simpler problem does not imply we can solve the hard one.

3. Car pooling and shuttle services are nothing new and it is not an alternative to ownership, it is more part of the on demand transportation toolchain. Parallelism still remains a problem with self driving cars.

1- I don't think it is controversial that some people like to drive, but I think this is such a tiny fraction of the market as to not matter. This point - that people like to drive - contradicts your "transportation alternatives" more than self-driving cars, as self-driving cars are closer to "driving a car" than public transportation.

2- Your point was that other improvements were way better. I don't disagree that we can make roads safer without it.

3- Self-driving car will certainly diminish the need for ownership. But I was just arguing on the environmental point of yours, that even if it does not solve, it will help alleviate.

> Won't/can't read the article because Wired adwall, but what is this business model?

1) Replacing taxi drivers.

2) Replacing commuters who don't want to drive.

Both of those problems exist on the scale of hundreds of thousands / millions of people. Solving them with good margins is a business model.

Not to mention shipping/delivery drivers.

I think the delivery drivers will still be needed as they need to physically exit the vehicle and handle the packages.

To me, at least, that seems like a use case where you'd need drones.

3) Drive between owners to reduce the number of cars a family has to have.

This would be huge. Half or less of the cars equal mobility. If a single family car could drive home so my daughter could drive to school and then drive back to work so I could drive home it would be awesome. You still get near full autonomy for a family with a single car. No-human driving is probably a tougher policy hurdle than human-ready-to-take-the-wheel driving, but it would be amazing.

It's not very likely though. If a single car would suffice, then most families would already have just one car. The reason they tend to have two or more is because multiple people need to get to different places, in different directions, at roughly the same time. If my wife and I need to be at work by 9AM and we work in opposite directions, it doesn't matter if the car is self driving or not. Either one of us is going to be late, or we both have to leave exceptionally early. Likewise for going home.

IOW: people tend to acquire multiple vehicles out of necessity, not poor planning.

Fair enough, but I still think the underlying problem of on demand transportation is already solved by friends/taxis/uber/planning, it is merely a different breakdown, you take out the human component and replace it with a machine. As someone who had problem with Google Services and was not able to contact anyone (no, the help pages did not work) it seems as a pipe dream, but maybe I am wrong and people will embrace it. Or you need an actual operator who can be called and you are back to square one. For that money I feel a fundamentally different solution should emerge than a mere augmentation - if at all. For 2, it is the same. Public transportation is a more efficient solution already. I'm from Europe, so I might have a different view on this, but it works really well here.

The million (billion) dollar question is the timeframe. Alphabet/Google has apparently decided to go down the full autonomy or bust route and many researchers in the space think that's decades out for commercial availability.

Good assistive systems (probably leading in the nearish term to a level of full autonomy under some conditions) has already started to arrive from a variety of auto makers--but Google doesn't seem to be interested in participating there. So there's a definite business model for assistive/autopilot systems and there will be, some day, for fully autonomous systems. However, it's unclear whether the latter, taken by itself, will be profitable in any reasonable commercial timeframe.

Offhand, my educated guess based on how much it costs /me/ to drive, is that for any form of transport the order of costs from greatest to least is:

1) The human driver. 2) The fuel. 3) Maintenance.

Even at a minimum wage, what really breaks bus routes is the human driver. You could send a smaller (more fuel efficient for low loads) vehicle on less profitable routes, but that doesn't modulate the biggest cost at all.

Google, Ubur, Lyft, all seem to see a future where (to borrow from the older Total Recall movie) Johnny Cab is able to eliminate a lot of public transit and ride-sharing issues.

I believe that the technical challenge is within our grasp (it'll be difficult but possible).

It might, with sufficient volume, be cost effective and when factoring in the difference in accident rates surely will be.

The hardest sell will be the truly glacial speed of modifying laws to get these vehicles on the road without drivers.

>The hardest sell will be the truly glacial speed of modifying laws to get these vehicles on the road without drivers.

I disagree with this. Yes, autonomous vehicles will be held to a very high standard--both in terms of statistical safety and in not doing "dumb things." A higher standard than humans almost certainly. But that is not an unreasonable bar to set.

When vehicles can indeed go door-to-door reliably across a wide spectrum of roads and road conditions, I don't really expect laws to be the limiting factor. But I expect that to be pretty far out.

> Good assistive systems (probably leading in the nearish term to a level of full autonomy under some conditions) has already started to arrive from a variety of auto makers--but Google doesn't seem to be interested in participating there. So there's a definite business model for assistive/autopilot systems and there will be, some day, for fully autonomous systems. However, it's unclear whether the latter, taken by itself, will be profitable in any reasonable commercial timeframe.

If you can replace a driver you are paying ~$20,800 [$10/hr] every year, that is ~$100k of savings [I'm assuming the more complex car also costs ~$100k to service over 10 years, so it may be more than that if I'm being overly conservative].

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/12/0...

Right now, its ~$100k to produce a self driving car. If they can get it down to $50k and maintenance costs of ~$5k/year ... it is much, much cheaper than any human driver.

My assumption is that the "replace a driver" is multiple decades away--which isn't an interesting commercial timeframe for most companies. It's not a question of competitiveness with human driver costs (in developed economies).

I actually think that your human driver costs are quite conservative. And I expect that the incremental costs associated with autonomy--once the technology exists--will be quite modest.

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