Comment by BorgHunter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BorgHunter | Hacker News Reader

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There will be two big, competing points regarding automated vehicles in the public eye:

* Automated vehicles can save a lot of people a lot of money, save lives, and completely transform the way transportation operates (and perhaps even how cities and suburbs look. See, for example, the vast swaths of parking lots in much of the United States, and think how utterly unnecessary they'll be in a world of fully autonomous vehicles.). The NHTSA policy document says this in the first paragraph, in fact.

* Automated vehicles are untested and scary; would you trust your children's safety to a computer?

The entrenched interests like taxi drivers, truckers, etc. will push the second quite a bit, I imagine. As with a lot of new technology being introduced to the public, that argument will initially have a lot of traction (especially if there are big, public incidents when it starts being rolled out) regardless of what the statistics say regarding safety, but it will gradually be marginalized as people get used to it, based on the strength of the first argument. But it'll be an arduous journey there. People don't like change.

NHTSA press release, with link to the actual policy document (at the bottom): http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/U.S.+Departm...

It's possible that the destruction of all driving-based livelihoods will take on symbolic importance in the public eye, too. It could come to represent the loss of blue collar and white collar jobs to everyone who doesn't have a career anymore, and that would really complicate the rollout.

> See, for example, the vast swaths of parking lots in much of the United States, and think how utterly unnecessary they'll be in a world of fully autonomous vehicles.

I don't know that it would make that much difference. Most people want to drive at the same time to get to work and few people seem likely to want to have their car do an extra commute so that it can park up at home. Couple that with the fact that a car tends to be a personal space - and you'd be giving that up if you started having to share (even if you were the only person re-using a hired vehicle)....

I just picture people using self-driving cars in more or less the way they use their normal car.

Presumably self driving cars would lead to dirt cheap taxi and car sharing services, reducing the need for everyone to own a car. Yould even have things like letting your car be a taxi during the day while you work

There's essentially no need to own a fully autonomous car for solely personal use. Big fleets of dispatched vehicles that you can order to show up at your door (with, this is key, low response times for on-demand service plus reliable scheduled service for your daily commute) would be a much better value proposition for most people, with superior economies of scale that you don't get with a dismal ~5% utilization that most private vehicles operate at. If such a dispatch service were done right and had a big enough variety of vehicle types and prompt enough service, it could easily supplant private car ownership for all but a relatively small group of individuals, because owning a car just wouldn't provide enough advantages to be worth the added cost and hassle.

This is basically the way it works in cities anyways. No one really cares in NY that taxis aren't their 'personal' space. In my eyes, autonomous cars would just allow a city-style car culture in suburbia, since it will finally be practical to not own (several) cars. You should really think of self-driving cars as providing scale to a lot of existing car-share economies.

For example, consider how many families today have 2 cars. Right now if the husband drives to work at 7AM and the wife at 9AM, this necessarily requires two cars. In an autonomous car world, the car would just drive back home to pick up the wife, instead of sitting in a parking lot for 9 hours. Now, extrapolate this to an apartment complex: What if part of the renters agreement is access to one of their 20 autonomous cars. Its very rare that at any given moment every single occupant of an apartment complex is using the car, so this would be totally feasible. In fact, it would be feasible today with normal cars except that when one person takes the car, they block access to that car for more time than they are actually using it. A 15 minute drive to the grocery store blocks usage of the car for up to 2 hours since it can't go back and service other members.

Unless the husband commutes 61 minutes away.

What if part of the renters agreement was for access to one of the cars? You have 20 journeys at can be going on at any one time. If more than 20 people go to work, or wherever, in the me period of time then the system stops working. Granted the maths isn't always going to be quite that simple since you're really looking at something being out of service for twice the outgoing journey time, but the limiting factor is going to be peak availability and that is going to stack up around rush hour.

I'm not sure NYC is a good example for the personal space one - do the people there really have the practical option of doing otherwise?

Yes, that is how all things work. If everyone wants to use the swimming pool or gym in an apartment complex at once, then there isn't enough room. Yet you rarely hear about this because the planners make pretty good calculations about peak use of the pool. Similarly, I just snatched the number 20 out of thin air. If you are putting together an apartment complex you would calculate how many you would need such that there are plenty of cars for almost all occasions. You would also probably have a more orderly system of filling out everyone's work time so they can be sure to have enough for that (especially because these time slots would be ideal for self-driving car pooling). May there be some time when someone wants a car but doesn't have one? Of course! But this is not unique to the apartment complex, this happens in families as well. There are plenty of times when a 2 car family needs to go three places at once. And they end up figuring it out, because its not like there's no recourse in that situation. The reality is that this is in not that hard of a problem.

Regarding NYC - I'm not sure what the point is. Most people don't have personal space on an airplane because there is no practical alternative there either (most people can't afford a private jet). So what? Would it be nice if everyone could? I don't know? Maybe. I honestly don't think about it. I value not paying millions of dollars over personal space on an airplane. Similarly, if you really care about personal space, then by all means buy your own car (autonomous or otherwise). I bet a lot of people would value not paying thousands of dollars (often going into debt and paying for gas etc etc) over personal space as well. In suburbia today, that option very much does not exist. For example, in Orange County where I used to live, you need a car to get around. And paying for a taxi to go to work every day is absurd there.

NYC doesn't count as evidence for people wanting a car sharing culture/disregarding the car as a personal space if they lack the ability to do otherwise. The world would look the same whatever people wanted in that instance so it's no evidence either way.

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If 90% of the car owners need a cars in overlapping time slots then carpooling isn't going to make a lot of sense - it's only going to benefit 10% of the people. It'd be like installing an apartment pool that everyone has to pay for for the woman in 3B. This is a case where the numbers matter. If people all tend to commute about the same time, then things aren't going to look much different - you might have people playing on their tablets before they get in to work, or a more efficient taxi service, but most people will still own cars.

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As for getting your boss to stager your time so that you can car pool more effectively. Well, maybe. But at the moment that seems like grasping at straws to me. These are the same people who can't even manage telecommuting successfully and haven't caught up with management books from 40 years ago. Trying to get people to do things together is difficult and companies are by and large incompetent.

And that's before you start introducing all the cultural things like wanting lots of people in the office at the same time. I don't think most people's bosses are likely to put themselves out for this. You need to assume that this is already in wide circulation before any real advantage for them in terms of not having to have a carpark comes into play.

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