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Oh c'mon, let's not be silly. One thing is to say it's unpractical to do now, or maybe ever, but the problem is very real. Having the ability for a vehicle to drive itself reliably on normal roads would have a transformational effect on society, first of all the end of car ownership as we have it today.

But of you tackle the problem first, and not the technology, it makes more sense to just build automated road systems. Dumb pod-like cars which are driven by roadside controllers. If we decide to go down this route it can be achieved with existing technology, today. This is the ultimate scenario most people imagine with self-driving cars anyway, a future where hardly any of the cars on the road are driven by humans. We should just go straight there.

That would be nice, but it would also require infrastructure investment on a massive scale before it could even begin. Self-driving cars as currently conceived function on existing infrastructure with zero changes.

But cars are already broken: see LA, SF, NYC. Why double down rather than invest in infrastructure?

Because being easily deployable is a very important part of a technology.

Only to short term business interests. Long term the costs of cars to society are absolutely abysmal compared to bulk transit.

I personally agree, but most people like cars as they are now, even in SF and LA; only in NYC is public transit really good enough that there is a critical mass of non-car owners voting to keep up the public transit.

I live in silicon valley, and the traffic isn't SF or LA bad yet, but it's pretty bad, and it's also clear that the voters around here aren't prepared to vote in usefu public transit; (one could make the argument that VTA is proof that voters are prepared to pay for public transit but aren't willing to allow useful public transit)

The upshot is that most people outside of NYC don't think automotive transportation is broken. Most people prefer automotive transportation. I personally am with you; driving when you could be on transit is nuts, but I'm clearly in the minority.

It's a real estate issue, not a technology issue. Dumb pod cars would have to travel on separate roads, and there's no space to build a whole second road system.

The idea that I am forced to drive the car myself doesn’t even crack the top 1000 problems worth solving. Transformational is not always good, and is often a terrible argument for prioritizing it.

No, this looks like SV companies drinking their own coolaid and ignoring actual world problems they can’t get rich off of.

The problem isn't so much the act of driving, though society would likely see some benefits from that time being used more productively (even if for leisure).

It's that the car is tied to you.

Everywhere you go, it needs a place to stay while you're doing anything outside your car. Parking spots average $5,000 per surface space, $20,000 per space in an above-ground parking structure, and $32,0000 underground. Every moment your car sits in one, it depreciates without performing useful work.

This is the argument that always gets made, but I just don’t buy it. The fact of the matter is that you will always need a ton more cars during rush hour, and those cars have to be stationed somewhere during non peak hours. So no matter what, you’ve got cars needing to be parked in high density areas.

That's a potentially very interesting perspective to me.

My point of view would be that Americans are spending on average about an hour every day driving. That's an hour that could very well be spent doing any number of more interesting and/or productive tasks. How is that not a high priority problem?

Because it's hard to recover those hours entirely unless you just plain don't get into a car.

Rides are often too short to context switch into doing anything useful.

Even then there are all sorts of situations today where people are being transported in a car not requiring focus -- but aren't effectively recovering this time:

* Riding in a Lyft: I suppose in practice someone could whip out a laptop, but you rarely see it happen. Rides too short, induces carsickness, etc.

* Riding in a vehicle that is L2 autonomous. While not legal or particularly safe, in practice, someone driving an Autopiloting Tesla can read and respond to emails. (i.e. similar situation as being in a Lyft)

> Rides are often too short to context switch into doing anything useful.

People on public transit usually use their newspaper / book / phone. Sometimes they miss their stop because they are too involved doing that. Have you used SF<->Bay transit on Google buses or something like that? From my experience it's pretty comfortable and productive to use laptops during ride to check tons of morning emails and it saves a lot of on-campus time.

> where people are being transported in a car not requiring focus -- but aren't effectively recovering this time:

Your examples require some kind of attention to driver or focus on road situation:

> Riding in a Lyft: I suppose in practice someone could whip out a laptop, but you rarely see it happen.

Riding alone vs riding with human driver differs a lot, especially for introvert people (e.g. talking in company of friends is much more comfortable then talking in company of strangers). It's hard to ignore presence of other human during ride.

> Riding in a vehicle that is L2 autonomous. While not legal or particularly safe, in practice, someone driving an Autopiloting Tesla can read and respond to emails. (i.e. similar situation as being in a Lyft)

You have to use your peripheral vision to control situation on the road. You can't fully concentrate on your work and be productive.

I dunno, I’d say people probably worry more about health care than their optimal productivity.

> first of all the end of car ownership as we have it today.

I see the idea thrown around a lot that self-driving cars will make us all use taxis because, absent human drivers, the taxis will be far cheaper than owning a car -- but I have yet to see strong analysis on this claim. There's lots of issues here:

* inconvenience: Unless the network is extremely dense, this means waiting for a taxi vs. driving myself. Denser networks, however, all things equal, mean lower utilization.

* storage: All sorts of people need to store things in their car. Contractors with tools, parents of toddlers with car seats, etc. Taxis prove to be too inconvenient, leading this population to prefer owning (hurting network density)

* traffic patterns: Commute patterns are heavily one-way, meaning in practice, after dropping someone off, the car will need to return without a person. Say you have a core commute time of 2.5 hours and take people on 30 minute journeys; you've managed to turn 3 cars into 1 [1], but at the cost of increasing miles by 60%. It's somewhat questionable if such a conversion has positive ROI.

* existing contrary evidence: You see plenty of private car ownership in areas with cheap labor (Chinese cities come to mind). Even cheap taxis aren't sufficiently solving transit needs.

[1] Yes, you could also pick up multiple people.. but now you introduce inconvenience again!

Driverless cars are IMHO a classic example of technology looking for a problem to solve.

My car’s utilization rate is about 8%. The remaining 92% of the time it’s sitting idle and since I work in a metropolitan area I even get to pay $190 per month to have it sit idle in a parking garage while I work.

My car is an enormous expense. It’s my second largest expense outside of my house. And it sits idle 92% of the time. I pay $900 per year to insure it, I pay to register it, get it inspected, pay for maintenance, depreciation, etc.

Autonomous cars run by service companies like Lyft and Uber will dramatically reduce costs for anyone driving their own cae today. Eventually overall car utilization will flip from 8% utilization to something like 90% utilization making transportation drastically more affordable.

And like you said, you get to work (or sleep or FaceTime with your kids) on your commute.

I dream of the time when I go on a road trip with a family and don’t have to drive. No, train, etc is not an option for too many reasons to list here

You can effectively do this today with high-end SAE L1.5 systems like Cadillac Super Cruise and Volvo Pilot Assist.

We really are on the cusp of L2 highway autonomy, and will get there in 2020 as originally envisioned. This WSJ article is insufficiently researched.

You can already hire a human driver.

That table stops at 2016 with driver comp at 43%, and the share was still growing at 3%/yr, and 43% savings is already a lot, so I'm not sure why you're writing labor savings off.

There's also efficiency gains to be had since computers don't need sleep, could have reduced insurance premiums, etc.

I also expect that with lighter vehicles, the cost of labor is an even higher percentage of total costs.

"Only" 20-40% of the operating cost saved would be enough to completely obliterate the human trucking industry. Amazon didn't have to beat the prices of other stores by anywhere near that much to become 10x or 100x bigger, they only had to be a little bit (but consistently) cheaper and more convenient.

  Driverless cars are IMHO a classic example of technology looking for a problem to solve

The "problem" they are trying to "solve" is driver wages.