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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

> Whether they are public transit agencies or the Ubers and Lyfts of the world or logistics companies like Amazon or FedEx or UPS. We think about building a driver that can support all of those opportunities.

Why not just focus on one of these? Or even just highway driving kits first for long hauls and commuters?

This seems to be the approach geohot is trying to take with his company. Narrowing the scope down to the simple stuff and working it into serious commercial operations, then scaling it up to harder stuff.

The main thing is scope creep with the different demands of the different drivers.

But who knows maybe they have a different internal plan for initial roll out. Or a more generic use case is indeed the best approach...

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This is the kind of thing you tell investors to justify a higher valuation because the total addressable market is potentially massive. I wouldn't read it too literally. They're very likely to be focusing on just 1-2 of these to start.

On the other hand...the road is the road. It's not like the logistics companies are trying to automate train traffic, public transit is all about them boats and others are into the road business. They're all on the road and the main thing that might differ is the behaviour of their transport to a certain extent (eg trucks vs cars)

You could focus on highways only for logistics transport but even then you might need to be able to react to a sudden pedestrian...even if it's just to make truckers lives a bit easier because you can always rely on human error.

B2B logisitcs have fixed routes so one can simplify a lot of things. For example, you can map out all traffic lights, stop signs, turns, lanes precisely and without ambiguity. This can reduce reliance on stochastic predictions by an order of magnitude. Also, fixed routes mean continuous recurring paid high value business.

Not really though, right? I theoretically have the same commute every day, but there have been times when a moving truck has been stopped in my lane, or the period when a road was down to one lane as it was repaved, and then re-opened with a new traffic circle, etc. You can't train your truck how to complete a route today and then assume it'll be able to successfully complete that route everyday as detours, new traffic patterns, accidents, etc, happen.

Interstates are more consistent than local roads. I'm surprised long haul trucking isn't the first target for these companies. Driving 20 hours straight and pulling up next to a local driver for the last mile would be faster (human drivers are required to sleep) and save a bunch of money.

Consistency is key in automation. Other than the cost of automation itself consider the big big costs when those irregularities do exist, the big cost of the systems made to account for and handle those potential failures and the fact that as almost always there's more of those failure points than you expect.

The article did address that apparently the necessary sensors for commercial trucking use cases have only recently become available. I'm guessing it's related to how far the systems can look? Due to the involved speeds and stopping distances, truck systems need to be looking very far ahead. Anything nearby and the truck needs to be maneuvering instead of stopping, which is also non-trivial with the trailer dynamics.

All of these things are partnerships (to one degree or another) of which SDCs are a piece of the larger puzzle of operations, logistics, regulations, etc.

I agree with you that scoping down to one scenario makes sense, but they'd need to find a highly motivated partner to do that with.

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