Comment by wiremine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wiremine | Hacker News Reader

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> I think when it really works it will be more like the transition from feature phones to smart phones. very very quick. If they actually work it's just too compelling.

The definition of "very very quick" is important here. The smart phone adoption took over a decade. to get to 80+%. [1]

Cars are much more expensive than phones, and last longer. The average age for a car in the US is 11.5 years [2] and people replace their cars between 5 and 7 years. [3] And my guess is self-driving technology will be used at the top-end of the market, and slowly trickle down. This is similar to pretty much any consumer technology: the technology starts off as a premium and becomes a commodity over a longer period if time.

So, if we use cell phones as a benchmark, it will take 10 years at a minimum. It likely will take 20 years given the duty cycle of vehicles. (Assuming we all still own a vehicle. If we all move to subscriptions, that might be a different story.)

Fleets will be replaced sooner, because the commercial ROI will be compelling. But it still takes a ton of capital to replace a fleet, and they need to get the ROI out of their _existing_ fleet before they invest in new ones. So even that won't be immediate.

But it might be uneven. I 100% agree with your example of sleeping through the night. If I can do that with a rental, and that's cheaper than flying, I might consider it.

[1] https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/US-Smartphone-Penetra...

[2] https://www.carchex.com/research-center/auto-warranties/how-...

[3] https://www.quora.com/How-often-do-people-replace-their-cars

Adoption of smartphones was also learning to adopt to a major technology change.

Adoption was also spread unevenly. Some parts of the country moved past flip phones long before others. There are still holdouts!

Cars will be an entirely different matter. People are trained to accept internet enabled devices and ridesharing already.

Once insurance rates for manual navigation clear those of an autonomous fleet vehicle, people won’t want the oil can Henry’s experience anymore.

You can already tell most people don’t want to drive anyway. They are looking at their smartphones as they idle down the street.

The bureaucracy is probably the larger hurdle. Snartphones don't really risk lives the same way cars do. And there are still a lot of people wary of the safety and capability of self driving cars. It could be hard to convince a city to agree to having them, and convincing every city in the US may take a long while.

When they are proven to be considerably safer (a question of "when" and not "if" IMO), I highly doubt many politicians will want to stand in the way of allowing them on their streets... nevermind if Apple ever comes out with a car, it could quickly become a highly sought after experience.

I thought they have already been proven safer than human drivers. And yet people are still wary.

Not if existing fleets can be retrofitted to be self driving. At $15/hr, if you can keep a car or truck driving 100 hours per week that's $6,000 month of labor costs saved. It's reasonable to expect insurance costs will be lower as well. Fuel economy would be better too, since a self driving car would be happy to drive at 60mph or less to get more MPG.

Even if the system + retrofit costs $50,000 that's an ROI of ~8 months. These numbers are made up but even with the most pessimistic of assumptions I believe widespread adoption will happen much faster than 10 years.

Good point. That extends the ROI of the original investment, so it feels like a no brainer.

The big assumption is the retrofit market. Is that something anyone is talking about? Is that something Waymo and the like will be offering?

My point is: it makes sense, but is it the low hanging fruit someone will be going after right way? Or will this happen down the road?

In a way, Waymo is already in that business - as all the cars they use are retrofitted.

Waymo is solving this for a handful of specific models, they would need to do significant work to adapt their system to say a 2010 Corolla let alone more exotic stuff.

It’s not just physical instillation their models would have to be adapted for different camera placement, vehicle weight, etc.

But not to the point where they are selling kits. They retrofit a specific vehicle for use in their service.

I think CommaAI is the closest to a kit, but it probably will never quite reach "no-human-required" autonomous driving; I don't think they're even aiming for that.

https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/docs/CARS.m...

If the ROI was in 8 months, I’d think the seller of the tech would be charging too little. Why give it away for that price, when an ROI of 24 months would still be compelling, would give far greater margins and a more balanced split between the consumer and producer of the tech?

Even retrofits still run into many issues. Delivering gasoline to gas stations for example requires hooking up hoses etc. Training people on site to do it is possible, but it’s a huge shift for an industry and unlikely to finish very quickly. The same applies to delivering cement or wide loads etc which require different behavior while driving.

On top of this retrofits for every existing model is a non trivial problem on it’s own.

> Delivering gasoline to gas stations for example requires hooking up hoses etc

However delivering electrons to a powerpoint doesn't :)

I get your point though. The last mile stuff is tricky and fiddly, and will be done manually long after the long haul stuff has been automated.

Is there a simpler way to make long-haul more efficient by investing in trains along the major arteries of trucking traffic (which would include ports, big production and consumption cities/regions)? And then more intense and automated load transfer between ports to trains and trains to last-mile-trucking.

This could be developed along-side trucking automation. Thus developing 2 networks meaning more resilience.

Infrastructure for trains is unfortunately very expensive. It's easier to spread the costs over thousands of trucks than to muster the political will to spend a couple of billions for a rail track.

And road infrastructure isn’t? It takes up more land and needs more maintenance than rail

Roads are usually a bit cheaper, yes. And we also have them already.

what? They definitely are not cheaper, they are just subsidized.

Roads are just asphalt. Train tracks need all kinds of supporting equipment installed for safety. If you want to electrify the track I'd guess that just installing that is more expensive than building a road. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though, do you have any sources about the average cost per kilometer of roads vs tracks?

No they are not, there’s all the signage, barriers, and drainage. Roads wear out very quickly, they are the fastest degrading forum of infrastructure.

Technically, yeah. In Europe we finally started to test fully-automatic couplings[0] for freight trains last year (as in, run a production train on the system, making sure to collaborate with freight customers that won't complain).

These couplings are a massive upgrade over the common hook&chain freight coupling, which requires substantial manual labor for (un-)hooking. The new ones theoretically allow for fully automatic freight shunting/train re-assembly.

Now we "just" need to up the speed limit for freight trains to at least the 140/160 km/h most commuter rail uses for max cruise speed, and retrofit the digital part as needed to the already-used mechanical coupling to some electric multiple units that operate on congested links with demand for intra-day freight. A few (1-4) box/container/"swap body (truck/rail only deriviates of ISO 20ft containers)" cars should typically be no problem for these EMUs (especially the longer ones), and would allow to realistically compete with trucks on interstates (Autobahn). Just needs some very small shunting engines, probably ideally remote-controlled (from the rail yard's tower), to add/remove freight cars from the tail while the passenger doors are open. Timings is tight, but some automation for fairly aggressive acceleration/deceleration profiles during that shunting should suffice. Maybe later even add a low tier electric car's drive train hardware-wise to some such container carrier wagons, to let them do the shunting and possibly last-mile trip simply on battery power, as that'd greatly speed up the shunting (low speed acceleration is friction limited, and a separate locomotive can't use the freight weight on the freight axles for traction. They're only outfitted with brakes on typical freight cars.)

For example, these "swap bodies" which are like ISO containers with fold-out legs, should IIUC be able to get put on their legs coming from a freight car (just by folding them out and maybe using some small lifting jack style hydraulics to get an inch or two clearance), followed by that freight car (if it has a battery pack and some small motors) driving away under remote control, and the truck trailer driving under it. This would only need a switch and non-electrified streetcar-style concrete pavement integrated track long enough for one or multiple of these, on the side of an existing railway station. Some $50-100k plus whatever the concrete truck yard pavement itself costs. Adding the battery drive system thing should probably be around $20-30k on top of what the freight car (with the digital automatic coupling) would cost normally, at least if it's only manually operated with sight contact. (It'd recharge via the train's electric heating bus that was originally designed to replace the steam heating for passenger carriages. The coupling that was/is used with hook&chain is 600A@1000V 16.7 Hz AC (in Germany), with one coupling either side of the coupling. This should leave ample recharging power for a small battery pack on the attached freight.)

This obviously only works where trains and existing road infrastructure are level, but on cursory inspection, many train stations here in Germany already have that. On many commuter links there's hourly or even twice-hourly service here, so even fairly short trips could realistically make use of this shifting of traffic from street to rail.

[0]: https://www.dac4.eu/en/

> Training people on site to do it is possible, but it’s a huge shift for an industry and unlikely to finish very quickly.

Training people to pump gas is possible but slow and a huge shift? Are you from Oregon or New Jersey, by any chance?

I believe they are referring delivering the gas to the station via tanker truck, not filling a passenger vehicle with gas.

Ah, I see.

Doesn’t seem much more complicated to pump gas from the tanker truck into the gas station tanks. Just bigger hoses and a bit longer.

What do you suppose all those officers will do when cars no longer break the rules?

They'll claim to smell drugs.

https://abovethelaw.com/2021/07/court-calls-bullst-on-cop-wh...

> The Court agrees with Gray that it is incredible that Officer Hiser—who self-admittedly does not have a heightened olfactory system—could smell the scent of two resealable sandwich sized plastic baggies of unburnt marijuana coming from a moving vehicle when patrolling in his cruiser. This occurrence is not only contrary to any common experiences, but is “implausible” and seemingly “contrary to the laws of nature.“

I don’t think retrofit will work at scale, as maintaining a retrofit for so many models for software as well as hardware will work, building a new model in keeping self driving in mind will be much more cheaper in long run.

The replacement cycle for taxi ie commercial vehicles is lot shorter. Taxi fleets will move to self driving cars a lot faster. 2 biggest running costs for commercial vehicle are driver and fuel. So driver being replaced by ai and ice cars being replaced by electric happening almost at the same time means the transitions will be a lot faster.

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