Self-Driving Taxis Will Become the Most Disgusting Spaces on Earth
thetruthaboutcars.com
thetruthaboutcars.com
But I suspect (dedicated) self-driving taxis will become the most intimately surveilled space on earth, and anyone littering etc will be fined for it, certainly to the point of covering cleaning costs, and most likely as an additional revenue stream.
Additonally I suspect, far from ushering in an era of care-free, and almost cost-free travel, the self-driving fleet will be metered like cell-phones (ridiculously complex price plans), and part of the 'price' will be that your travel data is sold on.
True freedom will be a bicycle - assuming viable routes between "bicycle friendly areas" remain open - a danger is that inter-city/town/village roads become robot-only, and you can only actually travel 'manually' within bounded living areas, eg a city precinct, village, etc.
i have a bike. i love my bike. i don't know how long i'd be able to ride it if autonomous cars take over.
Somebody posted this here a few days ago joking about self-crashing cars: http://autoweek.com/article/autonomous-cars/tesla-model-s-au...
Wait, what? The author seems to have problems with more than just self-driving cars...
Anyway, the problem seems pretty trivial to solve: have a button so riders can report disgusting cars, send the bill to the previous occupant. This works pretty well with people who smoke in non-smoking hotel rooms.
The workaround seems to be: do whatever you want to make the cab disgusting, then press the button. (If the button has to be pressed at the beginning of the ride, then press it at the beginning, then do what you want.)
1. culture 2. surveillance and consequence 3. maintenance.
some cultures are cleaner than others (Japan vs US, or India). if you record activities (remotely stored) and you can impose consequences plus you maintain the fleet properly (routinely and specially when people intentionally or accidentally soil interiors, that will go a long way.
I know I'd want vehicles which get routinely cleaned (BART vs JR subways and trains)
If we are comparing clean-clean countries, Japan is probably #1. Let's not bring US into that list.
Just add two buttons to the app "minor cleanliness issue" and "major cleanliness issue". Then someone remotely checks the footage. If it is confirmed then the previous passenger gets charged a cleaning fee. Majors cost more or could result in ban. Cleaning can be done by carwashes.
Eventually you develop some clever covers and devices/stations that enable rapid cleaning.
With all the computing power and vision AI available in such a vehicle, it seems like it would be possible to perform an automated interior scan of the cabin after each ride. Detecting cleanliness issues(and forgotten baggage).
Which of course creates a self-perpetuating problem, because if the behaviour is not punished, it will never be corrected and it will become "ok" to make a mess in an auto taxi(not vomit, but just leaving your rubbish behind).
Fortunately, I can get that done for me at a cost of much, much less than 12 hours of my own time. I can farm it out overseas to somewhere with a large supply of very cheap labour. I wouldn't be surprised if sitting in front of a bank of a half-dozen taxi-interior replays running backwards at triple-speed (with the empty periods already taken out by some relatively simple processing) from a point at which the uncleanliness is visible was seen as a good job, compared to some other options available.
Wouldn't be surprised if I could have that done for me at a cost of a few dollars a time; if I then charge the culprit a hundred bucks on their already registered credit card or taxi account for cleaning (fifty sounds too low), it becomes very economical for me.
I mean, we have to deal with shitty customers all the time. 99% of the time it's just not worth pursing someone who broke something or just left a mess, even if theoretically I could hunt down proof that they did it. It almost always escalates to some multi-month situation that is not worth the effort.
If someone becomes a multiple offender, you ban them.
Simple.
You know exactly what time your customers entered and left the vehicle. All you have to do is pull out a set of freeze frames from before and after each customer and compare the two.
As others have mentioned, the app can have a button to report a cleanliness issue. Working back from the first report means you don't have to review 12 hours of footage. As a side note (since this is HN), you don't have to review 12 hours linearly, you can use a binary search, which means you can probably find the culprit in minutes at most.
The cars are going to have cameras constantly running in them.
If your SDT brand equates to Four Seasons people will pay top dollar, and vice versa.
Unlike hotel rooms you have flexibility to design the cars for easy sterilising and automate some cleaning tasks.
Taxis currently cost orders of magnitude more than owning a car. One of the main goals of a self-driving taxi service would be to radically reduce this cost, but it would probably be too expensive to do a manual clean between trips.
Maybe we just need to design cars that are self-cleaning as well.
What if we replace the dashboard with a selection of recycling bins and expect people to be unpacking their shopping, eating food on the way and creating waste, putting facilities in place?
Perhaps we even expect people to just bring their wastebin contents with them because it is easier than putting it in street collection bins. Time in transit can be spent 'doing the recycling'.
Well filtered fresh waste may even be preferable for recycling and perhaps the autonomous car driving company has a nice sideline in collecting raw materials for recycling.
Tesla are leading the way with a minimal aesthetic, where the fiddly knobs and switches are all gone and there is just one massive touchscreen instead. There is also no central tunnel to disguise or carpet over. Soon all cars will adopt this look and it may even be possible to offer a selection of power-wash friendly trim levels.
Given the choice of a regular car, e.g. my dad's or one of my workmates, or a power-washed autonomous car, I would imagine the latter to be cleaner even if it had seen multiple vomit stains in the last month.
This won't be a problem for self-driving cars because they're purely vaporware.
Except that's not how this works. No driver means many of the costs of operating the vehicle change -- including the cleaning cost. It will become far, far cheaper to clean the vehicles, not less. Fleets will be able to intelligently organize themselves to drive to cleaning stations in the most efficient manner. With dedicated self-driving cars, it will be trivial to install a ceiling mounted camera in the car. You could simply take a picture of the car before the customer enters and after he leaves, and simply diffing it could give you some estimate of how "messy" it is -- and it could even be used to alert customers if they left something in the car. Accountability for what the customer does in in the car will be higher than ever.
Self-driving cars will make taxis cheaper AND cleaner.
In either case, that car still smells like barf until it is really cleaned.
Pretty sure if I got in a car that was full of barf while on my way to the airport I would stay in the car (and probably barf a bit myself, too).
It also has a lot to do with competition and the self driving taxi market. If self driving taxi company A is consistently giving riders bad experience with dirtiness, then there's going to be a company B that will come out with cleaner solution.
If you think about it, there are far more places that's more disgusting than self driving taxis..
In either case, I feel we'll see a return to older type of punishments, like public flogging or being tied down in a post to enforce shame. That's if, companies come to this realisation in order to protect their bottom line.
Even well behaved humans make goo. This is why even the most obsessive person has to take a bath and clean their house.
If a company can't keep their cars clean, the well heeled consumer will change their habits to prefer the company's cars that are cleaned out from time to time.