Hacker News Reader

Comment by moistgorilla | Hacker News Reader

I can't wait till the day I can have my self driving car drive me to work while I read a book and when it drops me off it goes to recharge it's battery, pick up my family from work or school and maybe when it's not in use I can rent it out as a cab.

View on HN

I can't wait until the day I don't have to drive into work because they woke up and realized I could telework/teleconference/telelive.

Then the miles I put on my car are from my use for my pleasure.

The economics won't support it being your car for long, at that point.

When you can just ask for a car to pick you up and one will arrive, corporate robo-taxi fleets will have economies of scale over family cars sent off to earn their keep. With ordinary people not needing to buy a car, facilities for maintaining and supplying them will dry up too, as the manufacturing effort shifts to taxi-ready cars for fleets. And the price will shift up out of your range to reflect the earning potential.

The robo-car will end the private car as anything but a hobby comparable to the classic car.

Except no company is going to want to buy enough cars to handle the demand during rush hour.

Given those cars make two reliable paying journeys per day, minimum, why wouldn't they?

Because two is not enough.

3D printers, build and reclaim fleetcars on the fly?

Definitely this. The average car sits in the drive way 22 hours a day. It may not seem like it at first, but an all-taxi economy will be much cheaper for the riders (think about paying for 1 millionth the cost of maintaining 1 million cars at once, as opposed to 100% of the cost of maintaining one car).

Agree with your point. It raises another question for me - if we are talking about shared or non-owned vehicles that people interchangably call and use when they need to go somewhere, aren't we inching closer to the same experience that other means of public transportation provide? And shouldn't we give those equal consideration to a world that is still built for and dominated by cars? For all the benefits we are all citing here, there are still a lot of problems with a world dominated by cars (pollution, the space they take up, the roads they require that cut up communities and are inhospitable to pedestrians / other modes of transportation, etc.)

Space waste happens because(1) ego, which means buying big and snarly cars to look like an action hero, (2) over-provision of car space, because you sit in one seat of a five-seat car on the off chance you might have passengers or cargo (3) cars parked, idle.

Robo-taxis have an economic attractor at the "runs forever, gets good mileage" end of the design scale, because energy and maintenance are the biggest ongoing costs. There would be incentives to make them small and efficient, maybe sized for one occupant. And they would not sit around idle, so they would need a long MTBF, which rules out designing for speed or beefiness and suggests electric (it's got fewer moving parts).

All of which means, fewer, smaller, cleaner, slower, simpler, vehicles. Aesthetes will pine for the days of muscle cars. In terms of green-ness, they may come to eclipse buses etc, while retaining the advantages of cars (goes where you want, when you want, and is not full of strangers).

Doubtful. In Sf, there are several companies running into problems scaling up to this type of model (ZipCar, Uber, Scoot). Often there aren't enough cars/scooters to meet demand, or the wait for one to arrive will be too long. People who value their time will always be willing to buy one of their own so they will be guaranteed a ride where and when they want it. Not to mention the cost of maintaining such a fleet.

It's also worth noting this type of service is only effective in dense urban centers. Enough people live in the country/rural/suburban areas where owning a car is necessary.

Americans spend a ridiculous amount of money on cars as status symbols. It'll be a long, long time before that ceases to be the case.

Maybe you meant the robo-car will end the private car in cities where its citizens focus on different status symbols? I can see that being the case in SF and maybe NY in the near future, but not anywhere else in the US.

"there aren't enough cars/scooters to meet demand" because nowadays, a car needs a driver who isn't busy doing anything else. They will be far less rare when unoccupied cars can go in search of fares.

Zipcar and Scoot aren't cab companies. The cars sit without drivers until somebody reserves one online and picks it up. The only difference here is the car can pick you up and drive you instead of having to drive it yourself. Self driving cars don't magically solve every problem I've listed. All they mean is you don't have to drive yourself and it can park itself far away. More efficient traffic flows? Absolutely! Less traffic congestion? You bet! The end of the personal car? not by a long shot.

My first thought was "man, I could go to all the pubs without a driver"

Yeah, i was thinking this too. While self driving cars will probably be a killer for some industries... its a huge boost to others, such as bars.

So are you the driver of the vehicle or not? Under current law, you're the driver whether your hands are on the steering wheel or not. Indeed, people have been convicted of DUI while sleeping in the back seat of a parked car.

This is sort of the whole point: everyone thinks they can eat their cake and have it too.

DUI? I'm not the driver, the car is! Hic!

Run over a kindergartener? I'm not the driver, blame Google!

Auto insurance rates go through the ceiling because of untested technology? Wait, I'm the same driver I ever was, this is unfair!

Can't get insurance at all? Help, the Man is a luddite! I'm being repressed!

The computer is a better driver than humans are.

So, "The Man" in this case is a luddite, and making laws that require humans to be in control of the vehicle actually decrease public safety.

I don't think the car is a better driver than people are, but I think it will be soon. And once it is we should let people sleep, be drunk, or do whatever while their car drives them.

Move to city with public transit and live your dream.

There's a big difference between being driven around in a cab and walking to a bus/subway station, waiting for the service and sharing a commute with strangers.

I don't mind public transit but I'd much rather be driven around by a cab.

I agree it would be nicer than mass transit, but its not sustainable at all to go without public transit and having people be physically closer to their needs.

I'm not completely sure, the costs structure would likely be very different but imagine fleets of small (1-seater and 2-seater) automatic electric cars, call one on your smartphone specifying the route (for your job it'd probably be a recurring route), it arrives in front of your door, climb in, it leaves you at your job and goes back to hibernation mode (or picks up somebody else in the area)

One of the great things about a fleet like this would be that you could change your car depending on where you were going and what you were doing. For example you take a 1-seater to get around a city but if you go a longer drive you take a larger, more powerful car. This is one of the things I enjoy about using zipcar, you get to drive fancy cars some days but only pay for the cheaper ones most of the time.

The great thing about an automated fleet is that you could actually switch cars during the journey. Take a small car to leave the busy urban areas and than switch to a larger car when you get to the motorway.

Absolutely. An alternative for longer journeys would be multiple small "pods" docking together as a bigger unit for increased efficiency, or boarding some sort of platform for long-range travel.

I love the idea of smaller, more efficient vehicles, but I think we hold too much hope in the fact that they could be "self driving". Why would a smaller self-driving car be more likely to gain in popularity over what most people choose to drive today? Why is it more likely to be electric? Those are two independent characteristics that haven't taken off on their own; I don't see how the self-driving aspect is going to change many of the existing problems we have with car-based transportation.

It's pretty easy to do the math and see that once population exceeds a certain density, the idea that all humans can move around on the surface of the ground in 9' x 14' vehicles is no longer feasible. They simply don't fit. We are past that density in all major cities.

That point often seems to be left completely out of the discussion about self-driving cars. Is making a 9x14' box an easier and more appealing mode of transportation really the best move for society? It's at least worth considering.

Robo-cars in taxi mode won't stop, they'll go from one job to the next, and they won't park except at times of low demand. Unlike drive-it-yourself cars, they won't eat up urban space for parking lots, and the total car fleet will be much smaller because the allocation only has to be "one per currently travelling commuter", more or less, rather than "one per human".

So just like taxis, then?

With no driver and a quarter the size or less for smaller (1-seat) units.

And instead of underground trains, there could be underground highways that automatic vehicles use.

This is the harm-reduction debate. For example, Swedish snus and electronic cigarettes are much less harmful than smoking, but the argument goes that quitting nicotine altogether is less harmful than anything. Yet people still smoke and use nicotine, so switching the stalwarts over to less-harmful methods of nicotine consumption would save lots of lives and money.

Likewise, it may not be possible in the short term to convince everyone to stop driving cars. Self-driving cars won't fix the long-term problem of efficient transportation, urban sprawl, or emissions, but they can reduce its harm by efficiently providing car-like service to the public.

Yes, nothing quite as rewarding as waiting for a bus in the cold only to have it drive straight on by because it was full.

It's only a dream when you don't have more than 1 connection, and even then you do have off-peak issues. Mass transit needs a lot more work even in the NYC metro area, for example.

> maybe when it's not in use I can rent it out as a cab

Hey, there's a start-up idea: Buy a fleet of these and deploy them around the Bay as the Robot Cab Company. Have them queue at designated points or hailed via smartphone. I expect to see this at Y-combinator in 3-5 years.

Now, if we could only wedge a social networking component into it...

"Speed"-dating ?

Why bother with all that trouble of renting it out as a cab? Instead, be the person who rents the cab.

If I had kids I would like to know where they are. Maybe be able to do voice chat with the while they are in the car. Also, I imagine that cars will become media and productivity hubs like our smart phones or tablets. Cleanliness is also a factor.

This is the right answer. Requiring most American adults to own cars that spend 90% of their time parked is enormously wasteful, both directly (expenditures on cars, maintenance, etc.) and indirectly (that we, societally, have to provide three times as much street space as each car will occupy at any one time: home parking space, rush-hour road space, and workplace parking space). The era of everyone having their own car should end.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com