Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel

Presumably the cost for a heavily utilized vehicle is going to be lower per mile. OTOH, any commercial fleet service is going to have costs on top of the base mileage cost. (The $0.53 figure also ignores any distance the vehicle might have to travel to pick you up.)

So it's probably reasonable as a back-of-the-envelope swag to assume that, if a fully autonomous vehicle were available today, you could probably undercut a "ridesharing" service by about 50%. It's definitely not suddenly going to be almost too cheap to meter just because you take the driver out of the equation.

If autonomous cars don't crash, the insurance will be super cheap. If they are electric, then maintenance and operating costs should be very inexpensive.

When cars don't crash, they don't need to be designed to crash, so you can start building the cars out of lighter materials. When the car is far lighter, then the drivetrain can be simpler and energy consumption should be less.

I could see taxis serving city centers that are more like a golf cart than a Crown Vic. So the cars should be cheaper to buy or lease as well.

Some of the same technology that's needed for autonomous driving could be applied to the maintenance and repair side as well. So when the cars do break, I think they could be repaired inexpensively by other robots.

I can imagine all the people involved in the taxi industry being replaced by taxi.py.

There will be different flavors of pricing for needs like yours, like 'Keeping CAR With you'. How about this pricing

Option 1: The CAR will be in serving people 10 streets around your Home, will be available whenever you want but costs you $300 /month ( It will have two Locker boxes in the Truck to keep your Items ALL the time, and your LOCKER BOX opens only with your Smart Phone ).

Option 2: you lease Autonomous car, it is all yours to keep, but the price is like $500/month Lease .

Now when some thing is available for $200/month , you won ONE CAR like OLD way ( for Kids etc.. ), and your spouse may use FLEET CAR .

However: unless you are planning a very large family, this is a transitory phase. I noted as my kids matured the amount of crap you have to lug around drops precipitously. I can't see that many people needing to carry the stuff on the bulky end of this for years and years. I carried my kids sequentially in a back-pack (3 years separation, so #1 was walking everywhere when #2 came along) and managed to fit all the above (aside from movies) into the back pocket of the kid backpack (strongly recommended for the transition to walking, incidentally, as a backpack is almost zero hassle when empty, while a stroller is just as hard to push empty as full).

But back on topic: you could lease a car/van for the Peak Kid bit of your life and still save money.

Everything must be a service. Ideally provided by google.

Next thing your going to say is that waiting for 15 minutes in the rain with a crying baby while you get gouged for triple price because of nearby concert is a problem for you. Just suck it up and accept that car ownership is a outdated idea and you need to bow to the will of the tech hipsters and conglomerates.

edit: changed a few words for clarity

I just want to point out that there is a pretty decent sleeper train that departs from the center of London and will have you wave up in the center of Glasgow. You'll have a full-size bed with sink, toilet etc. and a dining car and a bar if you want to avail yourself. Tickets are pretty cheap too.

It is in no way comparable to a sleeper train, which rides on relatively smooth, straight rails and isn't constantly swerving about and dumping everybody on to the ground. You need to "sleep" in this tensed up position where you're wedged in between ends of the bed using your core to keep you in place.

On the sleeper buses in China, you'll often see people standing in the aisle, getting a rest from "sleeping" while building strength for another bout of it.

So yeah, you'll get to Scotland the next morning. But next time you'll take the train and rent your van at the station.

It takes longer than driving, and a sleeper car is more expensive than flying. The cost is similar to driving for a family of 4, once you account for depreciation on your car.

I suppose as long as you get in the hours you need to as a remote worker and the sleeping is comfortable then this would be pretty sweet for even very long journeys.

It would take a complete redesign of car interiors to something far more comfortable/secure for lying down but no reason that problem couldn't be solved.

I assume, you are a technical person. If you look back at year 2000, In a typical IT company there is a server Box for each category. A Database server box , a WebServer Box ( physical machines ) etc.. very few people used viruvalization etc.. Physical Machines capacity utilization is around 15% . Come to 2017, with Amazon AWS cloud is providing on demand servers to thousands of companies, all of them TIME Sharing tens of thousands of Servers.

Same thing applies with self-driving cars. Higher utilization by ride sharing leads to FEWER cars on the Road. Today average occupancy in a car may be 1.3 with Self-driving RIDE sharing, if it goes to 2.6 that is HALF the CARS on the ROAD compared to today.

Doubling the average people in car from today is much EASIER, since that BEHAVIOUR of Sharing is tied to FINANCIAL gains to people. If you ride by yourself , 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION cost is $500 vs. If you Share it is $200/month, that motivate people to SHARE and leads to LESS cars.

Maybe self driving car fleets will be so numerous, they will optimize via carpooling in busy urban pockets. Maybe people will stop driving there own self driving car to work and use these. Maybe people will own/ride in really small self driving car that network to optimize and self park.

> The more comfortable it is to be inside a car and the less people mind long car rides.

This may not be generally correct. People also like to commute quite a bit by rail in certain areas. Living on the east coast I can tell you this because of #of people using NJ Transit and Amtrak is big. Cars take much longer to get to NYC already. Commuting to city via subway trains is so that there is shortage of housing right in manhattan where no one goes by cars.

Instead we could be sleeping, playing video games, working on laptops, etc.

I think that vehicle design will shift a lot once we start optimizing for these new use-cases, and this might make a big difference to how tolerable road journeys are.

This is all very hard to predict though...

Couple that with the ability to reclaim a lot of space designated for parking, and forward thinking cities might make themselves much more walkable as well.

In my home-town of 30k people, nearly 2,000 of those are high school students alone, plus probably another 1,000 elementary school kids, and maybe 800 middle school. No doubt they'd all want to use the cool tech to ride to school instead of taking the school bus. Add 4,000 more cars to the road please. (And as for ride-sharing, that may be fun once in a while, but why do that when I can get an entire entertainment pod all to myself?)

In my experience Public transportation sucks. It's fine for getting around locally, but is terrible for commuting.

For a short 3 month period I found uberpool to be far superior to taking a train. Some days it cost a dollar more. Some days it cost less. The travel time was pretty much equivalent plus it was more comfortable.

I hate driving in rush hour traffic but as a passenger I didn't mind.

I definitely see your logic towards higher density with things like 'office cars' so people do more travel. Or sleeping cars but that would be outside typical peak hours. But would self driving increase volume that much? Possibly if people stopped getting trains/busses but this should be remain cheaper and faster via priority lanes most cities have.

Also in general;

Freeways; most traffic jams are caused from someone breaking and then the next person breaks a bit more and so on creating a jam. With self driving car the computers will be able to talk and do a 'everyone accelerate on this mark' and get the flow happening even on very crowded roads. And ideally accident reduction that often creates traffic jams.

Cities: Algorithms will start making little efficiency improvement to driving. All the little things like removing unnecessary lane changing. People double parking to drop something off. And like those futuristic car intersection scenes where cars dont stop at lights but all go through an intersection from every direction reducing traffic back-ups.

We will need to make rules to adapt and keep the flow, e.g. stop people have cars driving around the block rather than parking. Ensure we have 'road neutrality' so the wealthy dont pay a premium for faster trips where other cars in the fleet move aside and slow everyone else type deal.

Anyway, I dont profess to know the answer. Its all a guess! I do suspect the benefits will outweigh additional trips people might take. Besides, who knows, maybe by then we'll have the 'Boring company' or equivalent making private roads so only the plebs use public roads anyway....

There are places with comfortable public transport today but it seems most prefer would prefer a 40 minute drive than a 1 hour train ride even though it frees up their time.

Yeah, of course self driving cars are going to make traffic way worse! Who even thinks otherwise? Suddenly you are going to have millions of disabled and homebound seniors wanting the cars to take them to do grocery shopping and errands, kids being driven around to and from from school and practice, and low income residents sleeping in their cars commuting to work in higher income areas of the country. Self driving cars will make traffic exponentially worse.

In the long term a critical mass of well-behaving self-driving cars may be able to regulate traffic much more efficiently than humans currently can.

In the medium term we may also see dedicated self-driving car lanes with higher speed limits.

However, flying:

$550 after taxes and fees is the cheapest I've gotten an LAX/IAD roundtrip for in a while, so $3300 minimum for flying.

Parking for 3 weeks is about $200

$3500 is the flying price, and often I can't get tickets for under $600 that match our schedule.

Depending on the 405, it can take 3 hours to reach LAX and park. You really don't want to have to be running through the airport with little ones, so plan to be there 90 minutes before flight. It usually only 4 hours in the air going west-to-east (east-to-west is longer) but figure time sitting at the gate an taxiing means a minimum of 5 hours on the airplane. So nearly 10 hours of travel time.

Issues with flying that were non-issue in car:

We cannot change our schedule even by a few hours without incurring fees with the airline.

LAX/IAD, plus price sensitivity means almost certainly flying United. I'm not paying the economy plus price times six, so my knees are touching the seat in front of me the entire time.

We had a 20 month old, already nervous from flying for the first time fall asleep on the taxi-way with her seatbelt on, resting her head on my wife's lap. The flight attendent insisted she must be sitting up for takeoff. Said child was screaming for the next 90 minutes from being woken up.

kid potty training? Not while flying, since the fasten seatbelt sign always goes on at the most inopportune times.

It's true that none of these were enough to get us to stop flying (having a kid with PTSD was what did that; you don't want to be locked in a box with 200 strangers when he gets triggered), but it was surprising how much less stressful it was even compared to flying before we had him.

Perhaps cross-country will still be niche, but certainly day-long road trips will jump in popularity when nobody has to do the driving.

Fleets will change their tires for the conditions and the automated system will be just as good at driving in adverse conditions as it would be if it drove in them all year. The sensors will see things human eyes can't.

I don't know how long it will take to happen, but it's inevitable.

Rocks thrown, sensors spray-painted over, side panels (and sensors) graffitied, interiors damaged, forced into stopping and their chassis stripped (or their occupants held up).

And while the police may be quickly notified, they will not be so quick to respond. Ask someone in a big city about the police's response time to their car being vandalized or stolen... Not to mention, all those fancy cameras? Ask a small business owner with CCTV how useful it is to catch robbers.

Those same concepts won't necessarily be applicable to self-driving car tech.. unless Google is able to establish auxiliary services required to support the self-driving network (public monitoring stations, deep mapping, etc) that can further solidify their position while continuing to distribute just the software. This would further raise the bar for competitors to enter the market.

I suspect it will be the opposite. Who-ever releases driveless taxi's first, people will clamour for the experience. People will be ordering rides for the sake of it for initial weeks/months. Then assuming the experience is safe etc, people will go by price and ride availability which driveless is sure to win.

I also guess there will be some big drama about the danger, then find out it wasn't the cars fault. E.g Massive headline about someone dying in a Waymo car and then we find out they decided to climb out the window while moving or something like that.

If flaky products are released that end up killing drivers (or worse, pedestrians), it'll set the entire self-driving tech sector back 5 years or longer.

How does a circa 2010 human driven car in this scenario complicate or invalidate your routing algorithm proposal?

Would human driven cars need to be outlawed in order to get the efficiency gains you mention?

... and the roadway is not used/intersected by cyclists, pedestrians, or anything that isn't an autonomous vehicle...

I think this stuff is super promising, but it alarms me how often we forget that streets are used by more than motor vehicles. The fact that roads are used by a mixture of users is a feature, not a bug.

in ATLanta

I'm thinking on mini buses, 10 to 20 pax, with flexible dispatching. A service where you tell where you live, where you want to get to every workday at what time. Algorithms pool people and make sure you don't have to walk more than a few minutes. Nor wait for long before journey or arrive too early.

It does? Why? What if the person passed out in their own, manually driven car? Would you expect that car to automatically call an ambulance?

Just because you theoretically could have some kind of elaborate system that detects when the user falls unconscious and carries them to the hospital, doesn't mean that's _required_.

> Are they monitoring if people get into a fight in the car?

No. Why would they be? What makes you think that's necessary?

Non responsive passenger->follow protocol that emergency services prefers (or even legally requires).

Fist fight->stop car, inform passengers that car won't transport them further.

Rape->turn over recordings of vehicle interior to police.

I suppose for the last one you have to take it as a given that they are making such recordings (probably on a rolling basis), but there you go.

It's not like these situations are any thornier because an automated system is involved. Passed out person is better off with monitoring (at least in health terms), fist fight without car, same difference, rape without monitoring, no video evidence.

How to monitor a potential rape? That thing probably has 15 cameras on the outside and might already be saving the footage for law enforcement review. And you actually removed one potential rapist from the scene by not having a driver - sadly this is a real (though thankfully infrequent) issue.

> So now we have driverless cars effectively classified as emergency ambulances - so assuming the CARNOC is paying attention, they then drive the car to the hospital - and have to have a mechanism to contact said hospital

> Imagine the healthcare implications where if someone hasa seizure, ODs, cardiac, etc... what is the response time from the CARNOC, and getting them to a hospital ==> then what types of lawsuits will these companies see? what type of insurance will they require?

The comparison is useful because all of the above scenarios are possible in the Danish rail system.

Still, there have been confirmed accidents involving Auto Pilot. That's not to say it hasn't been acting as designed. It is currently a system to help drivers when they make a mistake, not a way to prevent drivers from needing to drive. They've said it will do more eventually, but that's not what they're selling.

It's entirely possible that Waymo's system is completely incapable of dealing with street sweepers stopped the middle of a passing lane of a highway. If that's the case, there's no way the professional test drivers would be taking the car into that kind of situation. The public isn't given that degree of insight into their testing methodologies. This contrasts with shipping systems, where the public is implicitly given a users (potentially mis)using the system. It also means that Tesla has orders of magnitude more distance of real-world test data than non-shipping systems.

"Do whatever the human would do, but more efficient" isn't an answer. These cars can't get on WTOP the day before and listen to the warning that the Pope is visiting and X, Y, Z streets will be blocked off. One can imagine various contingency scenarios, but the devil is in actually handling all the edge cases.

*at stop lights.

my points are 1) running the roads scouring for GSM and wifi networks is nothing out of the ordinary 2) they would probably not even have to create a mission for that, and use or piggyback something else.

While not legally mandated, most airlines encourage people to keep their seat-belts on during cruise - this is good advice that I take to heart because turbulence is unpredictable; sudden loss of elevation are known to happen.

The top-level comment was just asking if we could work out how this might look beforehand.

Especially if there's a sneaking suspicion that the reason these trials are able to take place in this manner is that for any given driving error, officers and employees of corporations who have chosen to unleash experimental technology on public roads are less likely to be held liable for the consequences of their actions than a regular driver due to the dilution of responsibility.