The economics of a ~$500k car supported by $2.5 million per year of personnel, all to undercut an immigrant working as a 1099 contractor for… a few bucks an hour saved? The math never worked and it still doesn’t work.
Once upon a time there was probably someone who said it was silly to spend a couple million dollars to do the job of a secretary making 50 cents per hour, but now here we are, typing these comments with computers.
Self driving is not even claiming it would have much of an effect of the world. A few points more efficient, cutting a bit of costs - not changing the human experience at it's core.
Right now the best way to reduce car fatalities is reducing the number of cars by eliminating single family zoning mandates, building safe cycling infrastructure, improving public transit frequency, allowing mixed-use buildings and walkable neighborhoods.
Boring stuff, yes, but unlike self-driving cars, it is something we already know how to do.
Instead we get companies doing R&D of unproven technologies on public roads because no one wants to build more rail.
For some eye-popping numbers, check out the automotive deaths/100,000 people for the US (12.9) vs. Denmark (3.4)[1]. Denmark doesn't have some magical AI that makes all their cars safe, just better infrastructure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
For example, Seattle area just spent tens of billions on light rail expansion, then built the outlying stations next to the freeway. Half the walkable distance is wasted. Then they build parking garages and zero amenities. They're surrounded by dangerous parking lot and multi-lane roads. It's not designed to actually be used by enough volume to matter! And even if people did come (which they won't) it can't handle more than a small portion of the existing traffic because it's too slow and can't be expanded and can't have express routes.
This is the best we get, for tens of billions!
If US drivers had to meet the same standards as Danish drivers in order to get a license, our roads would be a lot safer.
It's frustrating to see traffic fatalities trotted out as a "the ends justify the means" justification for self-driving R&D budgets and practices as if there are no other solutions to the problem.
It probably wouldn't. A VERY high proportion of the most risky drivers on US roads are already driving illegally. For example, nearly 1/3 of drivers in Mississippi are driving around without insurance.
https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-uninsure...
If people are given a choice between driving illegally and going without basic necessities, they choose the former.
A lot of people end up in this situation because they are bad drivers with bad records, and can't afford the insurance, so they drive illegally. Functionally this is no different than if they weren't able to get a drivers license. They are still on the road.
Lax licensing is not the cause of bad drivers in the US. Both the bad drivers and the lax licensing is caused by a lack of transportation availability.
Self driving vehicles could be the innovation that makes public transit usable in non-dense areas. We could do dynamic routing based on the demand of the riders.
There are other solutions to the problem - I'm sure you can come up with a few that are more satisfactory than changing all cars to being computer controlled.
It would also massively increase traffic compared to taking the school bus or walking, and compared to parking at work.
- Car ownership could end up eliminated except for those who really need dedicated work vehicles. - Goods and delivery costs plummet. - Cross-state/country trips eliminate short/medium haul flights (wake up at your destination). - People get thousands of hours back from commuting (in theory).
So many other knock-on effects similar to how smart phones changed every aspect of our lives.
Also, highways with human drivers are highly wasteful of material and space. A smoothly flowing highway requires 80%+ of the space to be empty in order to account for the high latency in human decision making. This is expensive.
This thread, and this entire topic, is a discussion about things that currently don't exist and aren't currently possible. We are all aware that self driving vehicles are future technology, not an existing one.
If you think that this upside potential is not very well defined, entirely hypothetical, and isn't even clear that it will even happen, you're entirely right. Investors call this "risk".
Either way, it was envisioned from the beginning that digital computers could replace human computers along with a lot of other office disciplines. There once was a big "computers are going to make office jobs disappear" scare.
Sure, in the sense that's the idea behind lots of things. But there is an awful lot of handwaving about how to concretely get there.
The overall goal of using self-driving technology to reduce human deaths and injuries is clearly admirable. What's less clear is a) if it is technologically achievable and b) if any of the current efforts are scaled appropriately to get there over a decade or two.
The early self-driving hype was pretty depressing to behold. It was obviously an Apollo sized or bigger effort, and people were actually getting traction with the laughable idea that we'd "get there" in 2-3 years with a few 10k of engineers (or less, I'm estimating conservatively).
Of the current efforts, the only that I have heard very positive things about is Waymo.
Cars are safer than they've ever been; looking at some statistics, we have halved the fatality rates since 1980. So I'm not exactly sure claiming "it's safer" is really much of a selling point.
GP is correct that the money has never really made sense, other than in the context of logistics (automating semi trucks maybe?). Given that even the safest of transport modes (say, the metro in London or Paris) still needs to have a conductor (for potential emergencies), it's hard to see the fully driverless dream ever materializing.
Not if you are outside the car. Pedestrian and cyclist fatalities have increased steadily in the US over the past ten years [0] due to ever increasing car sizes and speeds [1].
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/fatal/trends.html
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...
Cars are inherently unsafe but we refuse to disengage from this failed model despite the solutions (ie. public transit) being right there for decades and decades.
Self driving public transport in contrast is a solved problem. Vancouver's driverless Skytrain has been serving customers since the early 1980s (as you say, requiring a driver only in the rare exception of some emergency or technical malfunction).
London's system is particularly old and deep, and lacks space for emergency walkways.
There are certainly exceptions, often well publicized by the companies, of drivers who figure out how to exploit the algorithms to make decent money. But when too many figure this out, the companies adjust the algorithms to contain costs, leading right back to the above.
That's a lot of ifs, so I'm not at all saying its right around the corner, but it's within the set of possible outcomes. V12 is looking quite promising, but then again so was V11 and V10
Isn't this true of all the other players as well.