Comment by chillingeffect | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chillingeffect | Hacker News Reader

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Way to only see everything with rose-colored glasses.

Has it even occurred to you there might be any possible cons to your scenario?

First of all, the lot the cars come from is going to require real estate, so subtract that from your windfall. Where will they be at night or other low-use times?

Second, subtract the additional resources in gas/electricity it takes to get to my house from god-knows-where it came from.

Third, subtract the time I'm waiting in my driveway with the kids screaming and my wife in labor for a car to show up from god-knows-where. Or else the premium I'm paying to get ahead of the other guys in the queue. And while we're at it, all of those times that I wanted something from the store 5 minutes before it closes? Guess what, if I can't get a car in time, that's lost productivity. Have to buy lunch from the cafeteria b/c I couldn't get to the supermarket. Unless you're telling me that in order to accept this vision of the future, I have to be perfect and plan everything. Telling me in the future no one will be able to get to the store 5 minutes before it closes is just unrealistic, undesirable and unacceptable.

Fourth, subtract again, the additional energy needed to take the car to its next destination.

Fifth, consider all of the extra cost of adding, servicing, verifying, maintaining LIDAR and servoes to all of these millions of cars. With thousands of dollars of extra parts, they're going to require thousands in extra maintenance, inspection, training and insurance. Yeah, I know that's boring. It's not an interesting technical problem, but that's the reality of motor vehicles. If anyone thinks this won't make the price of vehicles go up significantly, they've never been in charge of anything critical.

I'm not "against the future," it's just that all of these digit-heads are seeing a grandiose signal-processing problem and doing multiplicative math like yours to make it look attractive and not even operating at a practical level whatsoever.

So, choose to have a dedicated vehicle then.

But don't be surprised when the majority of people refuse to pay 100% of the price for a vehicle they only use 3% of the time.

Interestingly, people pay 100% the price of a microwave oven, which is usually used just a few minutes per day.

Going that direction ... Did you know? A typical microwave oven uses massively more electricity simply powering the LED clock compared to the amount it uses actually cooking food.

[citation needed]. I can't find any information to verify this.

Apparently a Microwave typically uses about 1.5W on standby, so that's: 24 * 3600 * 1.5 = 129600 Joules per day

So, if it draws about a kW in use, that means that if you use it for less than 130 seconds per day, or just under 2 minutes, you'll actually use more power on standby than on cooking / heating.

I think I use my microwave more than 2 mins each day, but there are days I don't use it at all, so I'm not sure how it would even out.

1.5W is a crazy amount of standby power. Not that I don't believe older models may use that much, but there are now regulations and standards for that kind of thing which push that to a much lower power.

That's just the figure I found from a quick google. If you have a more up-to-date figure, feel free to share :)

You sound like you live in the suburbs. I suspect car-as-a-service wouldn't be popular there. Honestly, if you live close enough to the store that you can drive there in under 5 minutes, to me that's a sign that you don't need to drive there.

Where I live (Berkeley), and in the Sf Bay Area in general, car as a service would be remarkably effective and popular.

do people realize that all these space savings mean that builders will now make smaller houses and more of them?

That already happens in mega cities where parking spots are around $500k. I take taxis all the time so I'm already living in the future, the western developed world will catch up eventually.

The real estate requirement with autonomous vehicles is only the difference between the off-peak maximum required parks and the peak (no cars will be parked). Currently, the real estate required for non-autonomous vehicles is typically more than two spots for each car. (one at home, one at the office, and a fraction of the public parking)

Of course I'm way late to the game here, but thought I'd add one more voice of dissent:

The real estate costs can be extremely low for self-driving cars. Imagine a tower of, say, 10 cars stacked vertically with an elevator mechanism to bring them to and from ground-level. Since each autonomous car is interchangeable, you can just treat the vertical parking lot as a stack. When demand is high, pop off the stack. When demand is low, push back onto the stack. No need for ramps or anything else that existing parking garages use. And just to be totally clear, humans don't interact with this tower, it's just a storage mechanism for empty cars after they've unloaded passengers.

If demand is low traffic should be low too, why not just use empty lanes of streets for the same purpose? Or at least, some variation on that theme. Maybe things work out so well that streets usually only have 1 lane.

Theres already an abundance of parking real estate, there's no need to make more. Look into the predictive analytics used by Uber or Citibike to see how wait times can be minimized. When freed from the redundancy of having to use an overbuilt one-size-fits all for everything, the energy savings will more than make up for a car having to drive two or three blocks from the parking lot to the pick up zone. Shit, I could go on.

Maybe the store will drive to you ;)

Entrepreneurs see the future by being optimistic idealists.

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