Comment by 37ef_ced3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 37ef_ced3 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

From a customer's perspective, it isn't clear that a software taxi driver is in any way better than a human taxi driver, particularly with (human) driver assist preventing collisions and all the other warnings provided by a modern car.

In both cases someone else is driving for the customer. With a human driver (plus driver assist braking and collision warnings) you have the most flexible, sophisticated intelligence on Earth driving. With a robotaxi you have something inferior. But maybe it's a lot cheaper, right?

The robotaxi can only compete on price because that's its only advantage.

If you own a car that drives itself, that's a different story. Everybody can see the value proposition.

We would have to look at the cost of the hardware and maintenance and fallback remote operators and the R&D investment to evaluate whether a robotaxi fleet is indeed cheaper. How much cheaper is it, exactly? 5%? 10%? 15%?

Would you pay a little more to have the most flexible, sophisticated intelligence on Earth (human brain + driver assist) or would you want to save a few dollars and risk having some dumb piece of software strand you in the middle of the road somewhere?

We all use Google Maps or Apple Maps when driving and most of us have seen these systems do boneheaded things. Just imagine the dumb things a robotaxi could do.

It's hard for a normal person to be excited about this. I don't know a single person who is excited by robotaxis.

> From a customer's perspective, it isn't clear that a software taxi driver is in any way better than a human taxi driver

The taxi driver having 0% chance of raping or stealing you would be prominent a clear win.

Or really any of many many other issues you could have with an actual human person with a specific world view and social position interacting with you. Not even considering if you yourself have specific shortcommings (fear of social interactions etc.)

It wouldn't be fair to pit a perfect human against the self driving car, there are many other stuff to be consided outside of the sheer driving competence.

> The taxi driver having 0% chance of raping or stealing you would be prominent a clear win.

I find it interesting that this gets mentioned so much - I’ve done some moderate googling for cases of rape by a cab driver in Berlin and the last case that went to court was in 2013 - and even that is not a classic case of premeditated rape (+) There is one case later where a passenger raped a taxi driver and one where two rapists pretended to be Uber drivers - they could not have easily pretended to be taxi drivers in Germany since the cars need to have very specific signage and equipment.

Now, this doesn’t mean that no rape occurred - after all not every rape case gets reported - but it certainly indicates that the risk of being raped in a taxi in Berlin is low.

Things may be different in the US, but even there my initial assumption is that the risk gets overestimated since this is the kind of crime that gets overrepresented in the news.

(+) the passengers didn’t want to pay the fare and threatened the driver who then pulled out a gun and forced them to have sex as payment. Still rape, no question, but not a premeditated rape case.

The robo taxi can't steal FROM you very easily, but it can certainly steal YOU.

Good correction :)

Then, the robot taxi is probably not stealing you on its own, there would need to be other humans involved...

The robot taxi could always stop next to a robotic arm, similar to the one from a car factory. But your point is well made.

> The robotaxi can only compete on price because that's its only advantage.

With robotaxi you get a driver that:

  - never gets tired
  - never gets distracted
  - never gets drunk
  - never gets upset
  - never falls asleep 
  - has reaction time in milliseconds
  - ...

Of course it has tons of problems of its own, but it's not like price is the only advantage over human driver.

Given the article, I'm not sure "never falls asleep" is a good example

Those are also all reasons for competing on price from the perspective of the fleet operator — robos (should) be able to run longer and cheaper than these pesky humans.

I am hopeful we will see improved safety but rather skeptical that will come in urban robo fleets ahead of highway longhaul cargo.

If I can hire a robotaxi, I never need to own a vehicle larger than what I need to commute; I can just fill up a rented vehicle with whatever cargo I'm hauling, let the taxi chauffeur the kids to school, etc.

Today's auto fleets are idle 95% of the time, because everyone overspecs capacity for the worst case. Marginal level 4 self-driving is sufficient to disrupt this. The savings in being able to downsize personal vehicles and hand off logistics to a third party are huge for individuals and also improve land use - hunting for parking space disappears, and every parking lot can subsequently downsize too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com