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Comment by autotune | Hacker News Reader

How is this going to combat people who make a mess inside the vehicle after going 100 percent without human drivers/test engineers? If it picks up a drunk person at 3 AM who then throws up inside the car, is it vomit-aware and knows it needs a cleaning before picking up the next passenger?

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The same way stores keep unattended restrooms clean: periodic inspections throughout the day and a timely response to customer complaints: If cars report to a central facility for a 5-minute inspection after 45 minutes of service, they've already cut labor costs by 90%, but with some increased capital costs due to decreased fleet availability.

I was thinking it would be kind of up to the next passenger. If they are ready to get in the car/Uber, and notice it's extremely dirty, or god-forbid someone puked in their recently, maybe they have something on the app or in the car that says "Report car for service inspection/cleaning" and "request another ride".

Uber already charges a cleaning fee of $40-150 at the driver's discretion. There's margin there for the cleaning cost, opportunity cost of the vehicle time, and a credit to the reporter for the trouble of seeing vomit and waiting for the next car.

I imagine that the next user would just tap a button on their smartphone saying that the car is dirty, upon which the car drives back to a service center and the user receives a new car (not the same car).

The problem with this is, as a rider, I personally would not want to have to be constantly expecting a dirty car. If one out of every 3 cars has vomit or syringes in it or feces, I would personally stick with a service that has human drivers at the wheel.

I really wouldn't worry too much about the trivial issues.

Maybe this would self-regulate. If someone is the kind of person that would make a mess on an autonomous car ride, maybe after calling the service again and having to wait for a replacement due to someone else’s carelessness, their attitude would change.

Sure if one out of every three had vomit, syringes, or feces it would be a huge problem. One out of three seems incredibly unlikely and off by at least a couple of orders of magnitude.

This seems solvable. As a rider, you have the option to select "This car is too dirty to ride" or "This car needs cleaning."

If you indicate it is too dirty to ride, the car reports for cleaning. If the cleaners agree with your assessment then your ride is free, paid for by the person responsible for the mess, who would also pay for the cleaning. If the cleaners don't agree, then you pay for the cleaning and your own ride. If you indicate that the car is dirty but want to ride it regardless, then the car could just check in for cleaning after your ride at no expense to you.

If you don't want to send the car away, perhaps you have an urgent appointment, you could just ride the messy car and have it cleaned after your ride. If adding a few extra minutes to your trip isn't a big deal, then the reward of having it be free may compensate you for the inconvenience.

A system like this would provide an incentive for customers to report dirty cars (saving money on their ride) and to leave cars clean (avoid paying for car cleaning). Those incentives are hopefully at least as strong as the incentives in place now.

Zipcar and Reach Now don't seem to have an issue with this, I would be surprised if it's any different when you don't have to the move the steering wheel yourself. If they can make a car that drives itself they can surely figure out a way to keep it clean.

This is remedied with a service charge for the responsible person.

Unlike a Tenderloin sidewalk, deterrents are easily enforced under a scheme like this.

Uber and Lyft currently charge $100 for a cleaning fee to the driver when their passengers soil a car's interior with vomit, etc. I don't see why Waymo, Tesla, or Uber would be any different.

1 in 3 seems ridiculously high. I'm not sure what the vomit-rate is currently for Ubers and taxis, but I'm pretty confident it's not even remotely close to 33%.

> If one out of every 3 cars has vomit or syringes in it or feces

1 in 3... you must be from San Francisco?

The same way ZipCar, Car2Go and every other car-sharing solution deals with this?

"Not very well."

Well played good sir. I would buy you reddit gold if I could.

"Using superadvanced machine learning techniques we've trained our great Uber Customer Surv^D^D^D^DSatisfaction Improvement Module (TM) to predict customer vomitting with over 90% accuracy and will automatically deploy a <your name here> antiemetic for just $10 (free for Uber Prime customers). Tell us how we can improve Uber even more in the comments!(1)"

(1) Joke's on you. We already know better.

Just need Samsung to put alcohol meters in its next phone.

A few years time to market. Damn. We may get accurate sickness data worldwide before we get driving cars.

What keeps people from doing that on subways now? Nothing but the social contract, and so subways are generally somewhat dirtier than cabs, but still get you from point A to point B.

There are lots of other people on the subway who can alert staff that cleaning needs doing.

The difference is you have much more privacy in an Uber vehicle. Someone about to make a mess in the subway might be more inclined to wait until they get off vs a private vehicle with just them in there.

Privacy? Everything you say & do in the cars will be recorded, and Uber isn't the kind of company that would treat that data well.

The illusion of privacy. Barrier to entry for using Uber is not exactly high and when you're intoxicated you may forget or simply not care.

How do you have more privacy in an Uber vehicle that knows your identity, everything about your trip and can bill you for any damage? You're anonymous on most transit.

Go with the flow: Institute a highly profitable vomit fee, and offer a VR headset for the passengers to wear during the ride, to increase the chances that they'll throw up.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2009/10/what_price_v...

"I'm a vomit-bucket-half-full sort of guy. I don't think these cabbies are trying to charge you for puking, I think they are offering you the premium service of vomiting in their taxi."

"America was built on the idea of premium services. This is how the wealthy are able to have so much more fun than everyone else. They can behave however they want as long as they have the money to cover the premiums! The $70 currently in my wallet entitles me to a good three blocks on Michigan Avenue and a nice half-digested deep dish pizza projectile vomited all over the headrest."

http://uberpeople.net/threads/throw-up.630/

"Yep Uber is pretty good here in Sydney as well. I had the outside of my car given the Jackson Pollock chunky rainbow look by a passenger. His friends thought it was a real laugh and afterwards I found they had also taken my giveaway chocolates as well. Sent the report in with photos and $95 receipt for the cleanup, and got $250 credited to my account the very next payment.

I have to say, in all my years of driving public vehicles Uber (with its hold on the rider's credit card detail) , have the best and quickest method to compensate drivers for these horrible incidents when they occur."

Once you solve self-driving, I imagine mess detection is rather trivial :).

Probably a lidar on the inside to detect mess? :)

They can certainly have a video/image feed of the inside, to remote check if it is messy once the ride is over(can be automated to a good extent with image recognition), and retire it from service until its cleaned up.

Self-checking a car interior between rides should be one of the easiest computer vision tasks imaginable: fixed camera angles, fixed scene and any differences in outside lighting could be drowned with a strong internal flash (which could even double as a minor privacy improvement if the cameras were tailored to match the light intensity of that flash to be practically blind without).

Have cameras take pictures of the interior before and after each ride. You then have a verifiable record of what state the car is in, and you don't have a bunch of data-privacy issues around recording activities while someone is inside the car.

You could just have the next person report it, which fines the previous person.

Does mean I can fine a person I don't know with the click of a button.

The only way I think this can work is if the customer who reports the incident describes exactly what they see in the report. Then the human who receives the dirty car and cleans it verifies that the car is not only dirty but meets the description of the reporter. How else could "dirty car" reports be audited?

In another case, a customer could actually throw garbage in the car and then report the car dirty - causing the previous customer to be fined. The only safety net against this I know is to record video inside the car while a customer is present.

You could just have the camera rolling the last X minutes of footage like a dashcam, and auto upload it when the next user reports an issue.

Probably. Even if it can't be automated (which doesn't sound too complicated), it wouldn't take many people to evaluate a photo of every cab interior once after every ride.

You've already got someone to evaluate it for free: the next person to get in it. Then you only need people to evaluate the reports, and you offer the person reporting it either a free ride in the dirty car or a fresh car in a few minutes at a discounted price.

just have a hose-friendly interior for those late nights, and more upmarket cars for other times.

you could have before and after photos taken for each trip.

if(weightOfCarpet > averageWeight && noPersonDetected) { //person left something, send sms to previousPassenger ( could be their bag, puke, ...) }

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