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Comment by lastofthemojito | Hacker News Reader

Oh man I misunderstood that headline at first. I thought it was along the lines of "Waymo will start offering long-distance autonomous roadtrips across the US" but it's really "Waymo is still geoboxed in a handful of cities but is adding a second model of car to its fleet".

I've taken a handful of sightseeing roadtrips in the US where the pattern tends to be hike/sightsee during the day, then hop in the car in the evening and drive for a few hours to get close to tomorrow's destination. It'd be great to be able to do that, except outsource the driving (and skip the hotel) by sleeping through the drive. Similar to night train travel in Europe.

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Leaving aside the technical problems, there's just not a big market of people willing to pay couple hundred dollars a night to sleep in a car. Buses, planes, and trains work by spreading the fixed costs of the vehicle over all the riders. A car can't really compete with those ticket prices. Plus, there aren't many destination pairs with demand between them willing to pay high prices where competitive transit services don't already exist. LA/SF maybe, but we've already seen a number of luxury sleeper bus operators fail to materialize demand on that route. LA/Vegas formerly, but those days seem numbered with brightline.

If you can get the inside of a van to be basically small hotel room you are competing with the airline and hotel combined on price, so taking a way-motel (I demand royalties for that now Google) can work out much better. Plus a better experience than flying

Vehicle regs require passenger restraints for safety reasons. That's only analogous to a very specific kind of hotel room. The bus exemption kicks in for vehicles designed to carry more than 10 people.

Also, hotel rooms tend to offer privacy. If you do that in a vehicle people get motion sickness.

To be clear, I do think there's interesting stuff in this general area. I'm just not sure it's as a sleeper bus. The big OEMs have loads of interesting concept designs buried in their basements about similar vehicles that I wish could see the light of day.

Why wouldn't a few-occupancy sleeper bus work? I'd agree that this is a bit beyond "normal cars are autonomous". But I don't think the driving part will be particularly special to this application. It's just the form factor that changes.

Whether it will be possible to be cheap enough operationally is an interesting question though. The price of an (autonomous) taxi is (probably?) largely lower bounded by cost to build the system divided by the number of times it's used. And that means the denominator largely scales inversely with trip length. So it might still be too expensive to offer hotel-price level fares for night-long drives

Many people would be tempted to buy a vehicle where this is a possibility though so its not just the economics of waymo

Few hundred dollars? Waymo's are more expensive than taxis. Spending the night in a driving taxis will be over a thousand dollars easily.

I've daydreamed the same thing.

I can picture my family of four getting on our PJs and hopping in a sleeper car on Friday night. We tell the car if we need to stop for a restroom, or anything else...

And we wake up on Saturday morning, up to eight hours away from home (were we allowed to go 90 mph? Or more?) And then we spend all day Saturday, all day Sunday, enjoying some town. Sunday night, we put on our PJs and hop in the sleeper car. We wake up Monday morning back at home, the kids go to school, and the adults go to work.

I could get to Duluth, Charleston WV, Sioux Falls, Toronto, Pittsburgh.

I also understood it the way that you did, and got excited. Womp womp. I'm optimistic that it will be reality in the not too distant future though.

Wen Waymo Campervans?!

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