Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_go_brrrrr | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the cars will always have a human chaperone. Not as a safety driver, but to prevent riders from trashing the car.

View on HN

They don't in Phoenix; the article links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdrV9wqXyH0 as an example.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself.)

It's interesting the number of comments I've seen since it launched many months ago that completely ignore that this has been deployed somewhere without safety drivers. However unimpressive you find the geofence/HD maps/lidar etc., you'd think more people would know about it

Yep, there are multiple even on this thread.

Thanks! I'd love to see their data on rider behavior. AIUI, they have hand-selected a group of riders into their pilot program there. I suspect those people probably behave better than your average taxi passengers. Either way, fascinating to see.

I think initially they opened it up to handpicked riders that were willing to sign NDAs, but now anyone can sign up in the Waymo app

This problem has been solved when it comes to hotel rooms, or rental cars. What would be fundamentally different when it comes to autonomous cars?

If a human has to clean the car between rides that seems like a pretty big problem

It’s also been solved (or isn’t a problem) with car share apps like Car2Go or Zipcar. Those cars don’t get cleaned between rides, but system asks how clean the car is when you start a trip.

It's not exactly solved - your examples are close but not equivalent.

Hotels have many people who work there and cleaners who enter the room daily (no Hendrix hotel a la Altered Carbon yet). Rental cars are secured with your credit card so there's a massive disincentive to trash the vehicle.

Perhaps pervasive recording of the vehicle interior would suffice.

I think they should record passengers boarding and unboarding, with motorized camera shutters that close while in transit for privacy.

>Rental cars are secured with your credit card so there's a massive disincentive to trash the vehicle.

Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. Trash the vehicle, get a cleaning fee charged to your card.

There are plenty of rail-based transports that have no driver (Vancouver's SkyTrain is the largest iirc). They seems to get by without being ripped apart by passengers.

The other passengers serve as the social discouragement in that instance. Most human-driven rail transit isn't monitored by rail employees.

What about elevators? Sure it's sometimes shared, but you can also ride alone.

I'm not saying I agree it will be a big problem - but graffiti, littering, urination definitely happen in public lifts.

I imagine though that it'll just be something you can report when it comes along, then it gets sent off for cleaning, they pull up its recent rides, and send you a different car.

I imagine truly autonomous rides without a specialist on board will have plenty of cabin cameras with clear view to identify the passengers. With consequences in mind, does that work in a similar way to the social discouragement of other passengers?

If you can teach a car to drive, you can teach a car to detect when it's being thrashed.

Unless it comes with the ability to eject participants, how would that help?

you automatically charge $500 to the passanger's credit card, and self-drive back to the depot to be cleaned

The cost to clean (and repair damage) and opportunity cost of not earning money in the meantime would be far more than $500, and far more than how much most people could afford to pay.

> Unless it comes with the ability to eject participants, how would that help?

System locks all doors and calls police?

I highly doubt police would care. People trash hotel rooms all the time, and they might escort people out of the hotel, but recouping any costs is a civil matter for the business. And good luck breaking even via that avenue.

And if it turns out the thrashing of said car was an in-cabin fire? You just locked them in.

You wouldn't achieve any scaling benefits there. But also - trashing an autonomous car (aka a car full of cameras and sensors, which you charged to your credit card) seems like one of those self-limiting problems as the people who do it go bankrupt or to jail.

There's a neverending stream of way-too-drunk people who need a taxi (or at least there were, in the beforetimes). I don't see that happening.

Also, I don't particularly want to ride in a car with a bunch of sensors and cameras monitoring my every move.

A self-drive / remote piloted vehicle doesn't need a functional interior. Which means the interior can be basically be made fluid tight, and rapidly replaceable.

The current situation with taxis is that you enter before confirming your identity via payment, and the problem is put onto the taxi driver (an individual) when something happens.

This is distinctly not the self-drive corporation issue: you trash the car, the issue is forwarded to corporate debt recovery, who then work a 9 to 5 slowly pushing the issue though the relevant channels. Meanwhile, the car is returned to base, maintenance rips out the absorbent materials and power washes the interior.

Trashing it becomes a line-item cost to a very large organization, not a problem which "isn't worth it" for an individual operator.

Agreed on both points. However... while I don't want to ride in a car full of sensors, I think the popularity of CCTV and Facebook demonstrates that a lot of other people are much more OK with that. Just look at busses, trains, and even gas stations -- I'd never want to have ads thrown in my face the way all of those systems push them on you, but a lot of people just seem to be... OK with it.

Aside from vandalizing the gas pump TV, what do you suggest doing to say that I'm not okay with that? Whining about it on Twitter seems equally ineffective.

> Also, I don't particularly want to ride in a car with a bunch of sensors and cameras monitoring my every move.

Many (most?) taxis already have both dashcams and cabin cams. This has already been normalized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com