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Comment by sentdex | Hacker News Reader

People just expect it to happen much too quickly, there's no patience.

The time it takes to get from say a car that just drives about randomly to a car that drives pretty well 75% of the time is about a day's worth of work with today's technology. Going from 75-80% is a week or two. 80-85% is months. Getting to the 90% is years, and who knows what we need for 99+%.

I did a self-driving car in GTA V project that streamed on Twitch 24/7. If the car wasn't improving noticeably day by day, people were getting angry and frustrated, as if the car was meant to be perfectly driving within months, surely!

There's definitely a major disconnect between the hype and reality of what the challenge of self-driving cars is. The bubble is just simply bursting at the moment, but the dream itself is not dying amongst actual engineers. It's just dying for the people who never understood how absolutely challenging the problem actually is.

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I'm not sure why anyone would say the "dream" is dying. If anything is dying, it's unrealistic hopes that fully autonomous vehicles will be widespread and dirt cheap to be driven around in by the end of this decade.

I suspect the hype's been fueled by--in addition to the usual suspects--the growth of young professionals in urban areas who have this vision of never having to own a car and being driven around everywhere. For that to be a reality, self-driving has to happen right now--not incrementally over the coming decades.

> For that to be a reality...

Those on demand trip services (Uber, Lyft, etc) are already cheaper than owning a car. What you describe already exists.

Ride hailing services are only cheaper in a few dense urban areas where most trips are short and parking is very expensive. Everywhere else they're still an expensive luxury.

Yep. I pay an insane amount of money to Lyft for rides to home because I live away from city and we only have one car.

Could have gotten a second car but I hate driving in peak hour traffic so I take the bus. Lyft is definitely convenient after hours since my last bus is at 6pm. The convinience comes at a steep price though.

I don't know man, I would pay $500 a week in Uber if I used it to travel to and from work, let alone anywhere else.

> Those on demand trip services (Uber, Lyft, etc) are already cheaper than owning a car.

Only until the VC dollars dry up.

or the drivers form unions, maybe?

Really? For a family of 4 or 5? Does lift even have car seats for children? We still need a minivan, and we pay 300 a month + gas when our car isn't paid for (which it is). We generally use used cars that are a decade old to save money.

How is uber cheaper?

> For a family of 4 or 5?

Presumably for the "young, urban professionals" the GP referred to, which I'd expect are, at most, a family of 2 (in the GP commenter's eyes).

Even given this assumption, even that may be debatable, since it assumes the Uber/Lyft model is sustainable without self-driving cars.

I've got a wife, kid and one on the way, and even just us 3, I think uber/lyft wouldn't work. Why do a lot of people on HN assume everyone is single(and always will be), or a family <= 2.. That's a huge fallacy of thinking.

I can't wait for self-driving tech, I'll probably buy it when it hits used car lots, though. I'm hoping by 2030 it'll be real. I don't think uber/lyft can sustain more than 4-5 more years on investors alone, without charging a LOT more for rides if they're going to continue using real drivers.

The real disruption will be when car companies instead of selling cars, simply sell memberships to a car sharing plan... pay $200/family member/month to Ford, get unlimited self-driving wherever anyone in the family is going. No need for insurance/etc... gas included.

> Why do a lot of people on HN assume everyone is single

That's an easy one.. for the same reason they assume everyone is a young, urban, technical professional living in a major tech hub.

I recall this being a source of criticism (though admittedly not recently) about the problems startups are solving being skewed toward the problems the above people (the same ones doing the solving) tend to have.

> (and always will be)

I'm not sure that's quite true, at least not in the sense that of individuals.

However, they may assume it of the population within a certain location, such as that urban tech hub in which they live, if the individuals who do form >=3 families move away to the suburbs, and are replaced by single individuals. This seems to happen in US cities.

> when car companies instead of selling cars, simply sell memberships to a car sharing plan

What's their incentive? Car-share already exists for non-self-driving cars, but through third parties. It's quite expensive.

> get unlimited self-driving

That seems a particularly unattractive option for the provide, as well as being political dynamite.

I know for one, Tesla has made it so you can't use tesla for rideshare, because you have to use their (forthcoming) service, IIRC, I remember reading that somewhere, I also believe some of the manufacturers of self-driving tech have partnered with lyft or uber to possibly be the software behind their own rideshare.

The future of cars, makes sense not to own... A car just dropped johnny (a kid I have no relation to) off at school a mile from my house 5 minutes before I need to be to work, this car then becomes mine till I get to work, from there it takes someone else to a brunch meeting... and so forth.

Using logistics it can free up roads by sending the closest available car to pick people up, and possibly re-arranging traffic patterns via networking to make roads clearer...etc.

Edit: one more attractive thing for car companies: Subscriptions. Someone paying 800 for life, is MUCH better than someone paying 20k once. They can know with better certainty their monthly recurring revenue when charting growth/etc..

Seems more likely to be a membership in the 50 cents to $1 per mile range which is what it currently costs to operate a car (including for any deadheading). Not sure why anyone would offer for a fixed fee unless it was for a very high number.

I suspect the assumption is that this cost will go down if insurance/liability (i.e. injury and property damage) costs are drastically reduced by self-driving cars and fuel and maintenance costs are also reduced by all-electric drivetrains.

Still, $200 seems far-fetched in light of the average American 1200 miles monthly. At under $.17/mi (not counting deadheading), that might not even cover depreciation/capital cost.

It'd be 400 for a family of 2, 1000 for a family of 5. Could be 300, or 400 per person I just pulled an arbitrary # out of my arse. It does assume more electric use, maybe not 100% electric, but maybe 100 mpg with electric assist.

People are more apt to buy into an 'unlimited' plan. Road trips would cost extra (because you're gaining unlimited full-multi-day access to a vehicle), maybe something like $30/day + gas.

> Could be 300, or 400 per person I just pulled an arbitrary # out of my arse.

That's part of my point, though, that what the number is (or at least its order of magnitude), actually does matter.

For something like a per-person charge, if that number is high enough, for large enough families, people are going to start looking at whether they could be saving by using the per-vehicle pricing of buying versus renting. I'm also saying that this number must be high enough to be attractive for the car company.

> maybe not 100% electric, but maybe 100 mpg with electric assist.

I'd say that's misguided, then, because fuel cost alone is too low a fraction of total operating cost.

> Road trips would cost extra

So like today's cellphone "unlimited" data? In that case, sure, an actually-limited subscription plan would easily be attractive to a car company, since they could write in any limits they want and change them any time, as well as vary the pricing at any time.

How many consumers would opt for that instead of outright buying is another matter.

It depends on where you live and your lifestyle. They certainly wouldn't be for me. And there are many situations where I have to drive myself, even if it's a rental car.

I don't know if it's cheaper in urban USA than here in Western Australia... But I find taking Uber every morning and afternoon works out to be substantially (i.e. prohibitively) more expensive for me than driving the car in to the office.

> People just expect it to happen much too quickly, there's no patience.

> It's just dying for the people who never understood how absolutely challenging the problem actually is.

You're laying a lot of blame at the feet of the excited people, but in their defense, much of their excitement is thanks to hucksters (cough Elon cough) who've been insisting that fully autonomous cars are just a year or two away. It's not like these people can be reasonably expected to understand how difficult the problem domain is, especially when they've seen recent AI successes at other problems that were popularly considered impossible (e.g. AlphaGo).

Hucksters in combination with a massive game of Topper. The company that's honest and says they're 20 years away from door-to-door autonomy gets their stock downgraded and negative press because they're so far behind.

And, as you say, a lot of people assume the mostly unanticipated advances in deep learning in a short period of time carry over to everything even vaguely related to AI and cognitive science more broadly.

I watched some of the progress updates that you posted on youtube for that project and I was amazed by what you could acheive at home with a powerful GPU and publicly available software.

Here's the playlist with all of those videos if anyone else is interested: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQVvvaa0QuDeETZEOy4Vd...

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