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Comment by bmcusick | Hacker News Reader

I like the discussion at the end about the difficulties on delivering the busses long distance, and the lack of chargers big enough to recharge them. If the Tesla Semi actually launches at some point, perhaps that will change and we will get city-to-city electric busses too. Battery ranges should improve to the point where that becomes practical over the next few years too.

What a great market that would be for Waymo. Predictable routes of mostly highway driving would be right up their alley.

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With electric buses, at least, you can put the chargers at end point stations, which is a cost but one bussing agencies can handle. Also, they cost much less than the overhead wires electric trolley buses currently use.

If you have enough cities with electric buses in their fleets you could probably hop skip from one muni bus yard to the next.

One idea I've read is to use those overhead wires for BEV busses, but only on certain segments. Most bus lines loop through a central area, so could charge along a section of a few blocks that feature the overhead wires.

Wire attachment is a big problem even for bus line me that are fully overhead. Before the buses had batteries, a detachment often required shutting down the road and bringing out a big truck to reattach the bus.

Seattle used to run dual gas/electric (not really hybrids since no battery) in the downtown tunnel by having them attach going in and Unattach going out. Great when it worked, but it often didn’t, so they just use cleaner emission buses now instead.

You can't get people to ride buses now, often for reasons like fear of crime, not wanting to associate with "those people", perceived low status. So somehow a driver less bus is going to be _more_ appealing? A big box full of strangers with no supervision or authority figure? Lord of the Flies on Wheels? I think this is going to be a hard sell.

Presumably "those people" are already riding the bus, so clearly we _can_ get people to ride buses.

To me buses and truck market seems niche as compared to personal cars for companies looking to build electric tech to drive them. Number of state departments and businesses willing to pay for electric vehicle are fewer compared to electric car customers.

Trucks and busses often follow centrally planned routes without much deviation, they're too large to be sent down narrow lanes or poorly maintained roads, and the people who buy them are ready to spend a six-figure sum.

Some companies might have autonomous tech that's a good match for those constraints, despite the much smaller market.

And airlines are niche compared to mass market cars too, but they're still a good business!

One thing I think most people don't appreciate is that the switch to self-driving cars will transform America into a mostly-transit society. Once you don't need a car to live from day to day, you sell it. Then you take a self-driving Lyft from your house to the bus depot, train station, or airport.

The market for self-driving busses between cities will grow alongside the market for self-driving cars within cities.

Considering the substantial amount of of bankruptcies by airlines, I wouldn't call it a good business.

I don't understand your logic. Why does a self driving car free me from having to have a car to live day to day?

The prediction is that ride-hailing taxis will be ubiquitous and cheap once we have self-driving cars. Companies will be able to flood the city streets with them once they are purely a capital expenditure and they don't have to pay human drivers.

If self-driving taxis are ubiquitous enough, there could be very little wait time between hailing a taxi from an app on your smartphone and the taxi arriving at your location.

At some price point, it will stop making sense to spend $20,000-$30,000 to buy a car. And you won't have to pay for insurance or gas or wear-and-tear or parking. The car could be out making money instead of being parked 22 hours a day.

Businesses and apartments and home developers will stop building parking spaces and parking lots once self-driving taxis hit a sufficient threshold.

Finally, cars will solve transit's "last mile" problem. Instead of paying for a taxi from home to work, you can pay for a taxi from home to the Light Rail station.

Exactly right.

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