Waymo granted a permit to operate as a Transportation Network Company in Arizona

A self driving car can have much better "perception" of the surrounding area and reaction times under 100ms, making it potentially very good at flocking safely.

Consider that in US the cheapest ZipCar is ~$8/hr.

Adding even the cheapest human driver working at minimum wage is ~$15/hr.

Adding a human driver in US makes the trip 3x more expensive.

Or to put it another way: a self-driving trip can be 3x less expensive.

Or to put it another way: a $30 trip from SF downtown to airport becomes $10 trip which is competitive with BART prices.

I don't know what is the minimum wage in India, but per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_India per capita income is $1670 / year which is probably less than $1 per hour.

In other words: self-driving cars only make economic sense in countries where humans are expensive.

It tells us that Waymo is nowhere close to "Level 5" or even to the levels Google and the latest cherry-picked "tests" (where they don't count "disengagements" as a problem) would like you to believe it is at.

Level 5 is supposed to be virtually perfect self-driving in any environment or on any type of road, for which we haven't even properly tested in simulations yet, let alone in the real-world.

I said it before, because of marketing and an incentive to be misleading about their capabilities, "Level 5" will be the "4G" wireless of 2011 (and by that I mean "3G+", in case it wasn't clear). That's actually held true since "Level 2" self-driving. For every level carmakers have been patting themselves on the back for reaching, they're at least one level behind in the real-world. They quickly discover this, too, after trying out their "Level X" cars in the real-world for a while, but they "forget" to tell us about it, after making the big announcement previously, or it doesn't get as much attention in the media.

So, I guess I'll wait for Level 6 or Level 7, before I get into one of these. Level 7 will probably be Level 6 cars that actually can't get hacked, unlike all the cars progressing through the previous levels. Carmakers won't even care that much about security and will only prioritize getting to adequate self-driving capabilities first and will "deal with security later", because we all know it's so much easier to fix security issues and redesign architectures later.

Either way, the self-driving aspect is the most important bit.

I also thought about doing this with a blimp, but the logistics are a lot harder with that route.

Commercial technology generally reflects cost savings to this day. Technology can run your assembly line at X units per day costs more if X is high, and even more if less people are involved in making X. It’s just technology got cheaper as a whole.

But I don’t think self-driving trucks will ever be that much cheaper since the computing power they use is on the same waning cost curve that brought us cheap computing today, and even if it does get exponentially cheap, the duty cycle of commercial applications will prevent savings from trickling down to commercial vehicles quickly (Just compare depreciation on normal cars vs big rigs).

All that being said, it’s intresting how quickly most people I see talk about this have gone from thinking about safety wins of self-driving cars to how much easier it will make driving. I think we’re headed for something ruinous if self-driving cars do come out and instead of solving the problem of excessive vehicles despite them, we all start thinking of fanciful new ways to constantly have more vehicles on the road.

It’s so impractical and so offensively wasteful, my analysis is really meant to be a tongue-in-cheek expression of the fact, but apparently we’re still seriously discusssing this...

Electric cars are still massively wasteful. You could make ~250 e-bikes batteries with the same amount of lithium it takes to make one Tesla Model S battery. Then there's efficiency. In general - an e-bike goes around 100 miles per kWh where as a Tesla goes around 3-4 miles per kWh. So you're talking about massive waste in terms of material and energy efficiency. An electric bike is around 6300x more efficient than a Model S. Most of the time people are just using their big ass cars/trucks to haul their big asses - it's unnecessary. Telsa's powerwalls also use lithium. Cobalt supplies are heavily bottlenecked now and for the foreseeable future. Just because Musk wants to market his company as a solution to global warming doesn't make it at all true but I guess his advertising was effective on you.

You suggesting that somehow utilizing an entire electric big rig for yourself seems even more preposterous though. Tesla's electric big rig has a battery somewhere around 1200 kWh putting it at ~14 times more wasteful in terms of production resources than a Model S (assuming we're just talking about transporting <5 people). So you're essentially talking about offsetting 13 of your world saving cars or 3600 electric bikes worth of batteries just to haul yourself around at around 0.5 miles per kWh (putting your around 5-6 times less efficient than if you drove a Model X with a trailer).

To the belief in physics point - there is more to pollution than just the gasses created. There is also heat pollution. Most electricity in America still comes from coal. Even though you're not burning anything while you're running the vehicle doesn't mean the energy you're using isn't coming from something being burnt. While Tesla might also be working on stuff like Solar City - it doesn't change the fact that his solution is grid tied - meaning the infrastructure has to be built by existing power companies to deal with the load which they have no inherent incentive to do. Not to mention every ~21 hours or 1260 miles of driving you'd be using enough energy to power my 3 story house for a year.

Also - common sense check - what's the point of a road trip if you're going to try to be in the trailer the whole time? If you're going to skip all the scenery and stops anyway, you might as well fly. And have you tried doing a road trip in a big rig? They're not legal on a lot of roads and they're a major pain to find parking for unless you really enjoy camping at rest stops.

To your condescension - don't worry, I am, and have fun playing with your "Big Rig". You're probably right about electric cars magically fixing global warming. Enjoy your magic kingdom, pal.

Remote driver with xbox controller who controls a car every 1,000 miles.... one person per 1,000 cars? Or your idea of 1,000 drivers for 1,000 cars. Hm....