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Comment by batmanturkey | Hacker News Reader

WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and social and environmental problem relative to the benefits provided?

I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill?

I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in suburban US locales coupled with maglev capsules being routed around electronically by magnetic field switching, etc… Or flying jetson mobiles etc…

Why is the current obsession a robotic driver of a boring old car ?

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- 1.3 million deaths worldwide, annually (94% cause by human error)

- existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need to build anything)

- reduced traffic congestion (autonomous vehicles can better react/drive)

- improved supply chains (autonomous trucks) (can work 0-24)

just to name a few off top of my head

> existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need to build anything)

I think that this is a sunk-cost fallacy. Sure, you would need to build infrastructure for trains, but after that trains are now reasonably automated, can carry cargo, and do other things with the exception of stopping at the exact destination you wanted to (in other words, it requires predetermined stops which people outside the US shrugs and just walk or bike the last feet). Also, they're proven to work: even China (which previously didn't have trains to its far-flung places) and they've done what you've expect. I think that the sole reason that anyone wants to invest in automated (non-train) driving is because trains are boring while AI is oh-so-shiny.

Trains won't do last mile delivery.

Current trains? Not directly.

But with the levels of investment in cars and roads, we could have mini trains on reduced tracks (think stuff like mine tracks) going almost anywhere, probably for a fraction of maintaining our road infrastructure and cars.

We're not going to stop maintaining roads. They exist for military defense as much as they do for road trips and trucks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highway_System_(Unite...

Road maintenance isn't a fixed cost; The level of use, particularly by heavy vehicles like trucks, affects the amount of maintenance required.

You’re right. It’d definitely decrease maintenance. I’m not sure how much maintenance is from usage vs wear from the weather (especially in cold areas)

Or have the train get your delivery drones close enough to the last mile for the battery to last :^)

> with the exception of stopping at the exact destination you wanted to

This, and leaving from the exact starting point you want to, at the exact time you want to, without out-of-the-way intermediate stops that you don't want, without switching lines. I can also easily move a table, couch, 2 shopping carts full of groceries, etc.

It's not an insignificant difference in convenience

Little known fact: In Western Europe when they decided to prioritize the passenger train network it forced 80-90% freight onto trucks on roads.

The existing infrastructure is absolutely going somewhere. Maintaining asphalt roads and highways is a constant, expensive, and neverending struggle.

Yes, and that's not going to go away.

- more autonomy for disabled people / elderly

(although the risk is clearly that vehicles will transition into subscription services that cost many thousands of dollars a year and price them all out)

> 1.3 million deaths worldwide, annually (94% cause by human error)

You don't need full autonomy to mostly fix this, but the fixes are politically untenable (currently). The cars should be speed-governed, they should be speed-limit aware -- the car should routinely be overriding the desire of the driver. No, you can't go into the bike lane to get around traffic. No, you can't make the split-second decision to swerve around a car braking in front of you. No, you can't operate the vehicle at 100 mph in a residential zone. No, you can't go that fast right now; it's raining way too hard, doofus. No, you can't operate your vehicle onto a scheduled parade route.

You don't need full autonomy to create cars that prevent a significant percentage of driver -- to put it charitably -- errors. These are fairly straightforward problems. The opposition is political.

In the real world political tenability matters a lot, so I don’t really think ”fixes” that ignore it are very interesting to discuss. But if we’re already assuming politics doesn’t matter there’s a much more effective solution: ban cars entirely.

I'm not so hopeless as this. Seatbelts, speed limits, and drunk driving laws were similarly unpopular. That opposition was overcome primarily, I think, because it's so stupid, in the end, and the argument for those things is so compelling that it can't be ignored forever.

We will find ourselves in the same position with speed regulators, etc. Once some country does it, the reduction in lives lost will be impossible to ignore.

Those are all problems dependent on the existing auto-mobile centric transport landscape, and would be better solved by moving away from that landscape.

People in the US will absolutely die on a hill for their car.

Companies will invest endless amounts of money to convince you cars are the future, their infrastructure isn’t wasteful, and they’re good for the environment.

People buy into this because it fits their existing lifestyle.

Funny thing is, with self driving cars we can actually own less cars as you can just hail them. More convenient and less waste.

Hyperloop is crap, just go with highspeed trains. They get the job done in city corridors.

But you can't have a train stop in front of your house... Nor can you build massive tubes everywhere in place of cheap roads.

Walking, Bikes, Busses, Metros, Trains, Cars, Planes. They all have a place in how we transport, right now the distribution between them is just out of whack.

Hyperloop is still cool because you could have really fast transit over large areas. Mass transit across cities is still quite slow. High speed trains are fine but just not fast enough. Imagine a large city where you could get from one side to the other in only a few minutes.

Musk coined Hyperloop as a distraction to high speed rail. He wanted people to buy Teslas instead of thinking about high speed rail in California. A lot of people fell for his con.

It is a shame that other partial vacuum systems are not being developed. They seem like a useful concept, fast, less air resistance means less energy use. Surely a technology you'd want to have in a future city.

why does it need to be a vacuum system? Couldn't a similar device be a pod-like maglev device that floats above a magnetic track and maybe can temporarily hover albeit more slowly via some drone-like propeller on the bottom when 'off track', or for final-mile portions, could even turn into a car when not in maglev mode.

On concept level they kinda make sense. But the trade-offs are just too stupid. Basically it is equivalent of building tunnel around all of the roads. The energy investment in that sort of infrastructure is unfeasible. And then partial vacuum, that needs more infra and energy to be spend.

And then the safety, on ground level open air is great, you can exit at any point to any direction. But tunnels especially small ones... That would be nightmare in best case and death trap in the worst.

If you chose to build a train with only two stops, yes you could get from one side to the other in only a few minutes. That would have its downsides, like the station not being near your destination, which is why it's rarely done. You would also need a very straight track, which means lots of space for points (places where trains separate from the route onto platforms). This constraint is also shared by Hyperloop.

I gather that you never used public transport in Tokyo.

For anything except sparsely populated rural areas, a train gets you to the city/town, and a mix of public transport + e-bike/e-scooter gets you to your final destination. This is potentially quicker, and much much more efficient than lugging 2-ton capsules around and needing hundreds of thousands of square km of land to keep the things parked 95% of the time.

Tunnels might now be cheaper to build than roads just because of land rights. It's very difficult/impossible to acquire the property rights to build a new roads/rail lines nowadays.

I think non-human payloads make more sense for virtually every kind of innovation:

-- Radically reduced safety margins, if the vehicle itself contains no humans.

-- You can often move cargo at any time of day or night, and therefore do a much more sophisticated job of collaboratively load-levelling traffic.

-- Doesn't matter how uncomfortable a non-human payload is with in reason. Acceleration, cornering, waiting, daylight, motion sickness are all constraints that are eased for cargo.

-- It would be nice if you can move freight anywhere, but even if you can only serve a very limited network its still useful - say between fixed points in major cities. By contrast, a car that can't go almost everywhere is very severely limited.

Example: in major cities, all the freight moves in lorries, which are extremely dangerous and polluting. Meanwhile, the humans are packed into trains in underground tunnels. Surely freight should be moving in autonomous underground trains and the humans enjoying lorry free surface travel?

Humans are freight units that embark and disembark and change vehicles autonomously with very little instruction. Other freight units aren't. Parcel hubs are a hard problem that's far from solved enough to set them up in masses.

You can have humans 'embark' and 'disembark' the freight, the same way we do now...

I mean, 1.3M people die every year in road accidents. Real number is likely far higher since reporting isn't uniform across the world.

That's at least one reason to warrant the investment.

A hyperloop is a much, much harder problem. Not technically, but practically. Just look at California's high speed rail and how that's gone - with that history, the idea that we could introduce hyperloops in US cities is, to put it only mildly punnily, a pipe dream.

As others have pointed out, millions are dying in car accidents now, so a "more compelling vision for the future" is much less important than something that can get done. While we certainly haven't seen the progress many have hoped for/promised on self-driving cars, I'd wager everything I own that we'll see a significant percent of cars on the road in CA operating autonomously before we see that high speed rail finished.

I think what looks interesting on the surface for self-driving cars is that "it is just a software problem". The other projects you describe require actual "stuff".

Still, that argument doesn't count if the software problem is "impossible" to implement, or if it turns out that you also need "stuff" for it.

Edit: typo

Not to mention that the upside of self-driving cars is capped at the cost of an uber driver, and even in a world with ubiquitous fully autonomous cars you still want public transportation.

Driver assistance on highways is probably the right 80/20 solution, at least for the foreseeable future.

> Not to mention that the upside of self-driving cars is capped at the cost of an uber driver

An uber driver that can drive 24/7. Also there are a lot of cars that sit in parking lots 95% of the day that can be used.

The parking lot problem is way far off though, and efforts like Zipcar attacked the utilization problem but have not seen wide adoption

Parking lot problem is also demand problem. Demand is not sufficiently elastic. How many people would be happy have their commute car available on one day maybe at 6 and then next on 10 or 11 or 12...

Those infrastructure requirements are already satisfied - and ~3000 people died on US roads last year.

This sounded off to me, and according to Google it is. You are too low by an order of magnitude.

Cars and trucks continuously degrade the roads beneath them. The infrastructure requirement is never satisfied -- it requires constant, very expensive upkeep.

What if cars were mini maglev trains (or pods), hovering above buried tracks on the road and can 'convert' into a car for last-mile delivery, and parking.

Then you'd still have the asphalt etc, but hovering over it - you degrade it less than actually driving on it. In this situation you could order up any size vehicle you need from 2 seater to 20 seater.

30,000+ fatal vehicle accidents annually, not 3000

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its early estimate of traffic fatalities for 2021. NHTSA projects that an estimated 42,915 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes last year, a 10.5% increase from the 38,824 fatalities in 2020. The projection is the highest number of fatalities since 2005 and the largest annual percentage increase in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System’s history. Behind each of these numbers is a life tragically lost, and a family left behind.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...

Shouldn’t these numbers _always_ get reported in relation to how many people are driving (and for how long)? This increase in deaths would actually be step forward in death rates if for example people drove twice as much this year compared to last year.

A) people want transportation as a service without the human of a taxi or driver, not just for cost but comfort and not having to associate with people (of a lower class)

B) creating a scalable transportation as a service business for profit and power (data)

Regarding A): Exactly! I don’t really mind traveling together with people from my own class (I might even prefer it), but I don’t really want to travel with lower class people. That just makes me feel like I’m one of them.

I think this attitude is quite common, but people won’t admit it. I would never admit it like I just did if I didn’t have an anonymous account. And I don’t see how technology will change this basic preference.

I dunno, being able to easily get places (to visit or work or have fun) is pretty important. Time is finite and valuable, so things that less us spend time in more satisfying ways are valuable.

Denser cities and electric bikes would go a long way. But somehow in the US people only want to go places in a deadly metal box, even to fetch bread.

Some people also want to go to places outside cities! ^_^

Not everybody likes living in dense cities.

Dense cities mean no gardens and no house renovations, both have value too, even if they arent as important.

Cars are also nice for shopping and taking things to the dump.

Hyperloop has long since been proven to be infeasible to the point of being practically impossible. Please stop drinking the Musk koolaid. It was never going to happen and it never will.

Didn’t musk literally out himself (boastfully) as having pursued hyperloop as a way to stifle funding for some other related but competing ventures? I can’t recall, but he literally never believed in it.

I never understood how people have so little understanding of basic physics and practicalities of engineering that it even got cursory pass. Like pointing it out to be stupid only takes handful of questions.

Could is the question, but should is never asked or answered, same goes to other projects like solar roofs with the shingles.

Because the current generation of VCs watched Knight Rider as a child?

There’s nothing boring about a car. It’s private, facilitates living outside of cities so it’s not dense and gross and offers the freedom to go anywhere with roads.

Automatic public transportation will solve a lot of issues.

Luckily, that already exists in driverless trains.

Hyperloop is a long range solution. Most of the commute today are within 20km. These are two completely different problems.

I am excited because then you can have far cheaper taxis -> less people need to own a car.

how about robotic driving of an electric bus? I feel like that would be much more useful for cities + no driver cost.

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