The coming war on car ownership? | Hacker News Reader

The coming war on car ownership?

geohot.github.io

70 pointstea_drinker58 comments

To be fair here (and I say this as someone who's had a spinal fusion as the result of being mowed down by a distracted driver) car ownership is so incredibly subsidized from an insurance perspective that any increase in prices should be described as the removal/reduction of a subsidy.

If the damages/externalities caused by cars were internalized by the system car ownership would already be unaffordable for most. We just choose to sacrifice/maim X-number of humans every year so folks can continue to zoom around and structurally increase sprawl/pollution (which in turn have their own massive un-internalized costs).

All of us pay for these subsidies via significantly higher healthcare prices.

Look up what happened to the Michigan laws/policies that required drivers to actually pay for insurance that would compensate accident victims for their death and suffering. It was lobbied/voted out of existence almost immediately because the costs are simply too high, and we love our cars.

I'm confused by this comment because there is an entire industry (personal injury attorneys) dedicated to extracting every dollar possible from the insurance company when an accident happens.

I've personally known at least five people who have been in a car accident and then received a windfall of cash after paying off their medical bills and having their car repaired/replaced.

I don't know if this is still the case but years ago my friend, who was in a collision with a drunk driver, was told by his attorney that the insurance will just settle for 3x your total expenses (medical, car repairs, etc). He was being encouraged by his attorney to see chiropractors and specialists because of this.

Are you talking about $30k or $10M though?

I think GP was talking about permanent, life altering injuries that require medical care until the (early) end.

The highest minimum injury coverage states in the US are still like $50k per person meaning complying with insurance law still leaves the most seriously injured victims (or their medical insurer) in the hole unless the at fault driver (if applicable) can pay.

Yes, this. I got 50k and will never be made whole for my acute or lifelong pain.

I had an ace attorney who told me there were no assets to recover beyond the insurance settlement at the minimum limit provided.

My health insurer at the time later tried to take the settlement from me via predatory collections tactics, and I was only able to keep it due to California state laws that protected me if I wasn't made whole (I wasn't hit there but am a citizen of the state).

Most accidents are caused by folks on the lower end of the SES spectrum so a very large number of victims end up like me.

You also don't hear that much of our stories because the dead and the maimed often tell no tales / it's unpleasant to hear. Many settlements also require silence.

That is neither true of healthcare or car ownership specifically. It’s the Pareto Rule. 20% of participants drive 80% of the costs. This is expanded across the population via averaging from insurance.

Law describes this as the thin skull problem. If you accidentally tap someone that had a thin skull and their head explodes you are still guilty of manslaughter even though the action is both completely benign and unintentional. The extreme alternative is to eliminate high risk people until no risks remain in the system. Insurance is a nice balance in the middle, but that doesn’t mean ownership is otherwise unaffordable for most people.

Car are anti-subsidized. Tarrifs are the opposite of a subsidy.

Highways are subsidies for car operators

Michigan had unlimited lifetime coverage from 1978 to 2019. That it was no fault doesn't really matter all that much, there's enough people driving and enough collisions that it reflected the cost of doing it, even if there's disagreement about whether the placement of that cost was fair.

Then in 2019 they made unlimited coverage opt in. Now ~Medicaid is gonna cover those injuries. A victory for the supposedly libertarian leaning Michigan House Republicans, moving Michigan from a user-fee type of system to the dole.

I'd bet a lot of money getting hit by an asset of a megacorp that has a legal team which will actually fight for every penny will work out way worse for the average person than getting hit by a private car owned by someone who's just a number to their insurer.

Not to mention all the road infrastructure and free parking car owners expect to have everywhere, preferably in pristine condition.

And if there is an issue with it, there is a huge outcry and push to fix it ASAP with public funds.

Then the same people complain about trains and public transportation being too costly and not frequent enough.

> All of US pay for these subsidies via significantly higher healthcare prices.

FTFY

I think the author is significantly underestimating the technical difficulty of achieving full self-driving cars that are at least as safe and reliable as Waymo. The author claims there will be "26 of the basically identical [self-driving car] companies".

If you recall, there was an explosion of self-driving car efforts from startups and incumbents alike 7ish years ago. Many of them failed to deliver or were shut down. [1][2][3]

Article about the difficulty of self-driving from the perspective of a failed startup[3].

Waymo came out of the Google-self driving car project which came from Sebastian Thrun's entry in 2005 Darpa challenge, so they've been working on this for more than 20 years. [4][5]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/26/business/ford-argo-ai-vw-shut...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

[3] https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-...

[4] https://stanford.edu/~cpiech/cs221/apps/driverlessCar.html

[5] https://semiwiki.com/eda/synopsys/3322-sebastian-thrun-self-...

He funded Comma.ai, so he does understand the problem domain & complexity.

As I understand, Comma.ai is focused on driver-assistance and not fully autonomous self-driving.

The features listed on the wikipedia are lane-centering, cruise-control, driver monitoring, and assisted lane change.[1]

The article I linked to from Starsky addresses how the first 90% is much easier than the last 10% and even cites "The S-Curve here is why Comma.ai, with 5–15 engineers, sees performance not wholly different than Tesla’s 100+ person autonomy team."

To give an example of the difficulty of the last 10%: I saw an engineer from Waymo give a talk about how they had a whole team dedicated to detecting emergency vehicle sirens and acting appropriately. Both false positives and false negatives could be catastrophic so they didn't have a lot of margin for error.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openpilot#Features

Speaking as a user of Openpilot / Comma device, it is exactly what the Wikipedia article described. In other words, it's a level 2 ADAS.

My point was, he had more than naive / "pedestrian level" (pun?) understanding of the problem domain as he worked on Comma.ai project for quite some time; even the device is only capable of solving maybe about 40% of the autonomous driving problem.

But that is the author's point. I don't see many of the same alternatives years later.

They have either shut down, got acquired or were sold off and then shutdown. Even Uber and Lyft had their own self-driving programs and both of them shut theirs down. Cruise was recently taken off the streets and not much has been done with them.

The only ones that have been around from more than 7 years are Comma.ai (which the author geohot still owns), Waymo and Tesla and Zoox, but they ran out of money and is now owned by Amazon.

Generally not a fan of geohot, but this is pretty possible, especially once self driving tech becomes available through suppliers like mobile eye / Bosch/ continental etc. (it’s possible it will stay a Tesla / Waymo duopoly but I doubt it)

> it will stay a Tesla / Waymo duopoly

The chinese already run self driving taxis in ~20 cities, more then Waymo and certainly outpacing Teslas. The Duopoly ship sailed.

Well you should keep in mind that my cat matches Tesla when it comes to self-driving taxis. My cat runs 0 self-driving taxis. Tesla runs 0 self-driving taxis.

The problem with Waymo is simple: at the price they're doing it, it isn't worth doing. Waymo only works with real drivers ready to take over at the first sign of trouble, so it's at best level 3 self driving, definitely not level 4. This may compare favorably with Tesla's taxis who failed level 3 self-driving and proved to be unsafe at level 2, which really is failing level 2 if we're honest.

I mean, Musk SCREAMs in the news they're improving, but let's not forget this is the same Musk that promised level 5 self-driving by 2016 (2014 if you count ...). And if you can tell: yes, I'm still pissed about believing him enough to pay for that.

I beg to differ, waymo doesn't have humans ready to take over at the first sign of trouble, there are no remote-driven Waymos. The operators make remote high level executive decisions by clickin items in a menu, not by driving.

Also Waymo is cash positive per car, and more expensive then human drivers - they accidentally unlocked a premium market where people are happy to pay extra to not deal with other humans. At their price point its certainly worth doing the robotaxi business

> Our robotaxis are all cleaned by Black Women who were diagnosed by Licensed Therapists with PTSD from the ICE raids, so we should be first in line to get a license.

I was wondering why the author was writing like a giant piece of shit, and then I googled him, and turns out that the author is that guy who begged Elon Musk for a chance to work fore free to fix everything and failed, and it really explains a lot.

> In 2022, shortly after the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, Hotz announced that he had joined the company for a 12-week internship, with the task of fixing Twitter search as well as removing the pop up log-in screen displayed to users scrolling without being logged in to an account. On December 20, after less than 5 weeks at the role, he resigned, stating “appreciate the opportunity, but didn’t think there was any real impact I could make there”.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the article. The entire point was the political rat race to obtain the first mover advantage to eventually monopolize local markets, backed by government hindrance to competition.

We've seen this happen time and time again. Just look at what OpenAI tried to do with their AI safety bullshit. They're the "only ones" that can distribute AI safely lest it destroy us all. No ulterior motives there whatsoever.

Information about an author can be evidence in support of or against the credibility of their claims.

Maybe he shouldn't have included it in his article then, because I promptly disengaged with the article immediately after that.

I simply don’t see the problem. What’s bad about a future with fast, door to door, automatic, public transit? That’s how every scifi movie showed the future to me and this guy is against it for… for what actually? A car maintenance hobby? Comma.ai stock value? I’m not sure.

It all smells very “they’re coming to take away our guns” to me. A rambly incoherent argument in favour of worse times.

IF it were a public service run at a fair cost. And IF the ones running it did not have an interest in oligopolistic rent extraction... Then yes that might be true... But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.....

It's not the technology that's the problem, it's the consolidation of entities that control the technology. Low-cost mobility is vital to a healthy economy. Anything that could potentially monopolize transportation should be heavily scrutinized, or else we end up repeating the history of the railroad monopoly era, but with cars.

I don’t see how “robotaxi” implies “monopoly” at all. The road network is already there. There’s lots of money to be made. The idea that only Waymo will ever be able to figure this out seems rather far-fetched to me.

I believe this is somewhat the point of the article. For example, consider the VC subsidizing of Uber in the early days. That was used as a means of fighting competition because Uber could price more competitively than other potential market entrants. I think the same idea applies with Waymo and Tesla. They’re incumbents in the market with significant war chests to have preferential pricing power, which could allow them to push out competition. From here, even if there’s lots of money to be made, people are generally fickle with these types of apps, and it’s not a huge leap to think they’d take the best deal, even if it means that the competition slowly drains out of the market.

Non self-driving car ownership in the future will be like horse ownership is today.

The automotive industry is huge. It seems unlikely that they would lose lobbying efforts to startup tech companies - so it seems far more likely that cars get more expensive due to government mandated self-diving "safety" features, but just enough that Americans still buy them.

Automotive industry is being driven into the ground by chinese manufacturers now. They would probably be OK with "if we can't sell cars, nobody can" and keep just the (certified) robotaxi factories.

Supposing full self driving becomes available, surely this will become available in the cars consumers purchase.

Furthermore, I don't agree with this articles assertion that the existence of robotaxis would lead to an increase on insurance premiums.

It's not that robotaxis will logically lead to higher premiums. It's that lobbying for higher insurance premiums will be a primary way for robotaxi companies to increase market share.

Not just car, ownership of homes might go even earlier. Just pay rent as long as you are earning, have easier mobility, and then when you are not working, move to a state-provided accommodation.

> move to a state-provided accommodation

aka Forced Labor Facility.

Sounds a bit grim, if you get laid off you lose your house?

When you have a 25 year mortgage on a $750K home, it isn’t unheard of to lose the home either.

I don't think it's coming, it's already here and has been for a while. (The war on car ownership, not robotaxis.) Many towns restrict or even ban cars from their centres. This os all fine and well when there is a decent public transport system but that does not apply in all cases. It's also difficult if you live in the countryside (the rewilding rhetoric has a subtext relevant to that).

Restricting cars from town centres isn’t about a war on cars, it’s about making the centre usable for pedestrians

Some studies show that pedestrian friendly centres actually lift economic activity

Much of it is tax farming, e.g. parking permits and entry fees. In other places, councils pedestrianise space so that they can set up their own funfairs and Christmas bars etc in competition with local businesses.

I do not own a car right now, but I don't see much evidence of areas becoming more economically active, except in tourist traps. A lot of businesses and even retail has moved online or out of town to deal with rates. Most of the town centres round here I have seen are deserts filled with vape shops, tanning salons and hairdressers/barbers.

As I say elsewhere this is not just a city problem but a rural one. At my old home I would have to walk several miles to catch a bus which would appear several times a day. The majority of country areas here are not well served by buses.

> A lot of businesses and even retail has moved online or out of town to deal with rates. Most of the town centres round here I have seen are deserts filled with vape shops, tanning salons and hairdressers/barbers.

I think there is a mix of factors. Boomers started the giant supermarket trend, and there has been a giant megastore for everything that followed them. In my relatively small town, many things have moved to the city periphery because people like having a lot of choices and cheap stuff. Most of the offering is low-quality crap, but they don't mind; they actually like to buy more and more. The less it lasts, the better. Then you have the increased taxation by cities, of course, but this also applies to the megastore. It's just that they deal with much bigger volumes and exploit cheap labor, so it's easier to cover them. Finally, many things have moved online indeed, and very often it's not worth physically going to a store if you need a specific item because there is a 50/50 chance a store will have it or it's going to be the same cheap Chinese crap, just marked up.

There are still some decent stores in the cities; the problem is that their volumes are so low that the pricing is very high, and funnily enough, the people most likely to afford them (rich boomers) don't go there and instead flock to the megastore. You can't fix a problem with the "intelligence" that created it.

In the big EU cities it's a bit different; since most people will be on foot, it's very impractical to drive around even if you have a car.

from a pedestrian's point of view. as soon as the self driving car is like safer than the most dangerous bottom 20% of drivers..i want those drivers off the road. and i believe, from google's numbers, we might be there already, if not better.

This blog post is going to age like an 18th century chinese vase in perfect condition decades later.

Not sure I get the analogy…

Was thinking it’s more likely to age like cream cheese left in the sun

God what a garbage human being. Starts off with the stupid racism in the first two paragraphs.

He is the one needing to be diagnosed by a licensed therapist

I see it more like calling out passive racism by these companies.

Wtf is with the random racist diatribe in this?

To quote myself:

> I googled him, and turns out that the author is that guy who begged Elon Musk for a chance to work fore free to fix everything and failed, and it really explains a lot.

The generous take is that's a bit of clumsy inept layout and framing of what is meant to be a throw away parody example of cynical company leveraging "some stupid political agenda item".

Comedically, it landed much like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eVVaDxaOJ4

Classic enshittification loop

This is such a dumb idea. I thought this would be about subscription-based options in cars, of course this was about something much dumber.

Hey: if you never lived outside your city, let's avoid talking about car ownership? Robotaxi make no sense in 80-90% of all locations.

> Robotaxi make no sense in 80-90% of all locations.

Sure, not much call for an AutoÜber in the Tanami[Ψ].

They do, however, make sense in the vicinity of at least 70% of people in G20 countries.

Those with the money to afford RoboTaxi's are highly urbanised populations[δ].

[Ψ] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNJIUZcal0M

[δ] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Level-of-Urbanisation-in...

I want car ownership to end. I want the road network to eventually become a giant, fully automated public transport system. I don't want it to be owned by silicon valley, though.

Fun read, shame it's flagged. The midwits in this joint don't appreciate transgression.

When you have federal agents going around murdering people* in the US, the biggest problem you feel to write about is some kind of fear that private car insurance will be more expensive in the future. Good prioritization!

* I know you can have two thoughts at once, but the timing says a lot IMO.

I mean, his agenda is pretty obvious from the very first paragraph.

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