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Comment by purpleblue | Hacker News Reader

> 1. Cars will still be searching for parking: many people will prefer to have their car nearby.

You're not thinking with an open mind.

If I own a robot car and I know I'm going to be at dinner for 2 hours, I will send the robot car to do a few Uber rides while I'm eating. Or it will go and charge. It doesn't have to just drive around in circles like a human. It can coordinate will all the other robot cars in the area and pick a place where it won't create traffic, or they can distribute traffic among each other. Maybe it can park-share, where if there are 3 cars and 2 parking spots, the 3 cars can coordinate and rotate who goes driving around.

Maybe robot cars will be fungible, so you don't own a specific robot car, but you own a time share, so all the cars are basically like Ubers, and you can call the one closest to you.

The possibilities are endless, don't think that a robot car will just emulate a human.

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If I own a robot car and I know I am going to be at dinner for two hours, I will send the car someplace where no dirty person whom I have never met can possibly find or enter my car, because I am not a destitute person looking to monetize my own personal property. If you live in this world, bless your heart, but you are absolutely positively not allowed in my car and I suspect a fair number of people agree with me.

If all cars are Ubers I’ll just move to some other place that isn’t the ninth circle of rent seeking, sharing economy, dot com nightmare dystopia.

I mean, for sure there are some cool moonshot ideas. However I think it's pretty important to have some proof of concept or even a technical idea of how that would work before dismissing all of the concerns around congestion. Waving around "tech will save us" is really easy to do. (Especially when the solution to congestion already exists and is criminally underfunded.)

You're right that I did predicate that little rant on the idea that the majority of AVs would be personally owned and not part of a fleet. I'm sure that car share will come into play to some degree, but I do think it's tough to convince people who are used to their car being a personal, (relatively) private space that they can store nearly for free on public roads, to give that up. It's especially hard to convince the automobile industry that the incredibly profitable 1-2 car per household model should be pushed aside in order to manufacture fewer, shared vehicles. Cruise (i.e. GM) will not cannibalize their personal car sale business: they're using this as a way to get test data to build personal AVs. Maybe car share will increase over time, but we're not about to witness some revolution, especially if it reduces consumption or profit.

I’m not sure why the idea that the cars will talk to each other is so “moonshot”. We have much more impressive pieces of infrastructure in place already. What might be moonshot is my proposal that it should be run by the US Postal Service.

I think it's a moonshot because it expects that we will have shared, open standards and protocols for all of this, which will either need to come from industry, or from regulators. Neither feels very likely. But then again, it could happen :)

They can't even get a standard way to cast your phone onto the screen in the car. It's just a fucking touch screen, and we can't figure that out because Apple and Google just can't let some portion of the money go and make their user's lives better. They have to have all the money or none of the money, and if they can't get all of it, then fuck you. Car manufacturers also won't even put in any sort of standards just so that I can upgrade the terrible stereo that comes in even the nicest of cars. God forbid they put a 2 cent RCA jack on the back of the stereo, maybe give you a read-only connection to the CAN-bus to display some data, and a rectangular hole in the dash (where the ugly ass screen is going to go anyways).

> (Especially when the solution to congestion already exists and is criminally underfunded.)

I presume you mean mass transit, but that's disproven by induced demand: cars removed from the roads will be replaced by others, either drivers who were previously taking other forms of transportation or by new trips. Removing cars frees up capacity, which is effectively no different than new capacity from expanded roads.

Then you add mass transit and make driving your own car expensive enough to dissuade this induced demand.

That won't happen. It sounds good, but the details kill it. Someone will trash your car and now it isn't acceptance when dinner is done. Someone will take a longer than expected trip and you won't have a ride when dinner is done.

Having a car come pick me up and take me to/from work would be great, and with no human to pay would be cheaper than owning a car for that purpose. But the family car packed with backpacks, jackets, sports gear, etc is gonna make owning at least one car per family that can afford it a reality for a long time. But self driving taxis will revolutionize how we get places and get stuff delivered, and ultimately for the better.

I think "coordinate with all the other robot cars in the area and pick a place where it won't create traffic" is pretty unlikely to happen. Tesla will do their own version of that which only negotiates with other Teslas, GM will do one that sends all cars to the wrong city, and Waymo will have their cars perform some optimal algorithm that is somehow incompatible with any human drivers they encounter.

Or, your car parks in the spot you yourself would park in, the ones building codes require the restaurant to provide.

No one wants their $60k+ self driving car casually risking accidents. And I certainly don't want to end my date night with drunk/messy Uber patron roulette for like $10 profit. Not hating if you do.. just not for me.

> Or, your car parks in the spot you yourself would park in, the ones building codes require the restaurant to provide.

In that case it sounds like the self-driving doesn't matter and we're no worse off.

agree. there's a lot of neo-luddite FUD on HN about self-driving.

plenty of actual academics project that autonomous vehicles improve occupancy of city streets by 40% and highways by 80%.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8317654

I've seen those, but they make a lot of assumptions that I do not think are reasonable. Only time will tell.

If there was already plentiful parking at your destination then the whole "cruising for parking" discussion is moot anyway, right? The concerns were about congested commutes to denser downtown areas where parking is difficult, or the date night into the city from the suburbs, etc. Difficult/expensive parking disincentivizes car trips there, and shifts them to public transit, ride share, and commuter rail, which are better suited for cities. If you weren't encountering difficulty finding street parking or paying steep garage prices, then of course you wouldn't suddenly be sending your AV on a joyride around town or letting random people use it as car share.

> If I own a robot car and I know I'm going to be at dinner for 2 hours, I will send the robot car to do a few Uber rides while I'm eating.

I mean assuming I don’t want to leave my sunglasses in the car, or anything else.

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