Google Self-Driving Car Project's first vehicle prototype
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Given Google's stake in Uber the car will be part of a fleet that can be summoned by a mobile app, not some product you go out and buy. Because there will be no dealerships and individual owners, they don't care about attracting buyers for the vehicle - it doesn't need a cool factor. What it needs is to be non-threatening and safe so you will feel comfortable getting in one and going for a ride.
Additionally, the first car on the roads will just be making in town trips and will be limited to 25mph - no highways or major arterials. This means it makes more sense for the car to be compact, light, and similar to a Smart Car, than a Camry or SUB.
Perhaps, this will be the case in the long term. However, until then perhaps we could implement some sort of price surging where rental costs of parking space skyrockets when demands get high. Uber is doing the hard work of making price surging palatable. Everyone else just needs to ride on their coat tails.
"Price surging" would become a fancy word for price gouging.
"Uber is surge pricing right now but Lyft is not, so I'll get my ride with Lyft"
Surge pricing is a legitimate function of a properly functioning market. When demand has skyrocketed, or supply is constrained, prices _should_ rise. This is the mechanism by which markets enable resources to be allocated efficiently. Whether someone is poor or rich, if they desire a thing more than other people do (for the sake of argument, other people of similar wealth), then they should have a mechanism by which to express that preference. That preference is the price they're willing to pay.
If the area is congested, and you _really_ want to go somewhere right now, then surge pricing gives you two ways to accomplish this. (1) To the extent that capacity is fixed, the ability to out-bid someone else means that you can take the capacity from someone else who doesn't desire it as much as you do. (2) The higher price incentivizes more supply. Uber drivers who see an exceptional surge price will make themselves available in order to take advantage of higher wages. A higher surge price is pure profit for the driver, if he can make himself available to drive right now versus some other time in the week
Lastly, no supply is fully constrained. If the price of parking in a city skyrockets, then this creates a strong incentive for parking businesses to find a way to make more parking available. This might mean buying existing buildings, demolishing them, and converting them into parking structures; or it might mean that in the routine course of building new structures, the high price of parking will make it economical to dig a few stories deeper and provide a few more levels' worth of parking. Price and incentives always influence the operation of the market.
But in the case of parking spaces, I don't see how me being able to out-bid you for the last space makes me a more qualified candidate for that parking space. I'm paying a higher price for the same good, the number of spaces isn't going up, and the owner got richer without adding any value. Textbook definition of rent-seeking if I've ever seen one.
High parking tension means that people will try to make more parking, but is that the most effecient allocation of resources? What about alternative solutions, like mass transit? This is a digression, but you mentioned it with supply.
On a more pragmatic level I don't really think the ultra-rich have that much more of a right to a parking space downtown on a Saturday any more than I do, and a parking space is more or less a public good (and should be shared as such).
From what I understand, fear and hatred drive public policy more than objective data does. I doubt it is going to change any time soon.
I easily see you scheduling regular events (leave for work at 8, for example) and your car will be out front waiting each day.
Most people will want to be able get in the car without having to request and wait for a ride (most people already have this luxury).
We haven't imagine half of what cars-as-a-service will entail. Some people will always hold onto their vehicles, but in the end I don't think a hunk of plastic and metal will be able to compete with a fleet of special-purpose vehicles supported by a staff of thousands.
Anyways, it makes no sense that everyone on my block owns their own lawnmower, and yet here we are.
Depends how you account for all factors. Owning usually comes with some hassle and risk. Renting means you pay someone else to discharge those duties. Another factor is the cost of capital for you vs the company that would rent to you.
Having your own lawnmower probably has something to do with transaction costs. Ie it's a hassle to coordinate among people.
Renting a property or object that you are one of many users of is typically less expensive than owning. For instance, you don't imagine that renting one of those steam-carpet cleaners from the grocery store once every year or two is more expensive than owning one, right?
(Renting is more expensive than purely your share of the use -- that is, if the steam cleaner gets rented by 100 people in a year, you expect to pay more than 1% of the yearly total cost of ownership of the cleaner).
So the concept is that say you effectively use maybe 1/5th to 1/3rd of a car's capacity in a ride-for-hire situation, and so you pay say 25%-40% of the total cost of ownership, allowing a reasonable profit margin for the owner. (Or you use much less, but in that case you probably were never going to own a car).
So the difference between renting and owning must come down to the cost of unused capacity, which means the fixed costs. Where those fixed costs are high, like a parking space in SF, you want to amortize them by maximizing utilization, which means sharing cars. But where those fixed costs are low, like parking in my driveway, unused capacity may be so cheap that owning costs less than renting, even if the car sits idle most of the time.
But your point is taken, a great deal of the equity burn on a car is mileage-related.
(Especially when you consider that if there are three users of a rented driverless car, it drives more than 3x the distance than would three separate owned vehicles for the users -- it must, after all, shuttle itself between users.)
In the long term, your car isn't going to sit outside your office for 8 hours. It's going to pick up the kids, your take-out order from the Chinese place across town, and deliver your laundry to a laundry service. People aren't going to travel around in taxis that don't even have the benefit of a driver who tries to keep it clean. They're going to want their own space.
There are some caveats and exceptions, certainly. And self-driving vehicles and services may prompt more people to eschew car ownership, but the idea that people won't own or lease these things _in general_ is ridiculous.
You're right on the car parking. I think the City of Chicago actually made a very shrewd decision to sell their street parking revenue to a private operator for a 75 year period in return for a fixed amount of cash up front (obviously I'm oversimplifying). It was excoriated as a terrible deal by most people, but none of them seem to have considered the probability that there just won't be the same sort of demand for parking in even 10 or 20 years.
It's cute, and non-threatening looking, and probably the right design for what it is, but people are still going to look at it and think "this is going to get destroyed if a real car hits it."
PS I think you are too American there. They don't drive tanks on the road in every country. But I see your concern.
I can imagine a scenario of 24/7 tech support VC'ing at the push of a help button or if Google notices the car has malfunctioned.
Getting the laws changed will take time. When presented as a n option will it be in demand? You bet!
So legislation will clearly need to change before these are street legal.
That was the death knell of Google Glass (at least in its current incarnation). Seems that Google hasn't learned much.
One makes you look like a hipster. The other is primed to save tens of thousands of lives a year if it gets rapidly adopted.
One weighs grams. The other can run you over and crush your skull.
Perception matters. This initial design is so insanely non-threatening it achieves its appearance goals. It does not need to sell units, it needs to sell the idea.
Seeing someone wearing Google Glasses was meant to put you in mind that they were testing something and you could help them test it, not that they were using a piece of everyday consumer electronics.
And this car is pretty much the same: it's meant to stand out (see my other comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8785463). So I wouldn't say they needed to learn anything.
As the technologies are accepted and commercialized by other parties, then they can make one that looks normal-ish.
Death knell, not death nail. A 'knell' is the slow solemn tolling of a bell at a church funeral. This has been a public service announcement.
Moreover, I think Google wants their car to be recognizable as a driverless car. They don't want it to blend in, because people would (at least for now) think that was "spooky"—that any car anywhere around them could be being secretly driven by a robot.
Instead, the visual distinctness means that it's instantly clear that these are their own thing, in much the same way that golf carts, scooters, and backhoes are—despite all being wheeled vehicles that can be driven in car lanes—their own thing. Because they're recognizable, it makes it possible for you to build a separate autonomous response into your subliminal "driving event loop" for the class of "driverless car", the same way that you will react separately to seeing any of the above in your lane. Which is exactly what people want, in order to feel in control: the ability to notice and compensate for the driverless cars around them if they all encounter some pathological edge-case.
(Just as an example of what I'm talking about—and this is a completely untested hypothesis on my part—I bet that driverless cars come to a complete stop a lot more frequently, in surprising places, because their sensors tell them something is standing in front of the car—e.g. a pigeon. A regular driver knows a pigeon will just sit there minding its own business as the car approaches it, but fly away right before the impact would happen; a driverless car might not know that. Because of this, your driving algorithm for being behind a driverless car will likely have a component similar to driving behind a school bus: "this vehicle makes frequent sudden stops, and I need to be ready to stop too. I should be more car-lengths away from it than are strictly necessary.")
(I think I learned that in one of the tech talk videos about it.)
And if we remove humans entirely from the equation what we get is traffic that comes to a stop because none of the vehicles can avoid or get past the plastic bag which floats around more-or-less randomly.
Source: tech talk at my university by a self-driving car engineer.
I think the rest of us are going to start loathing these timidly-driving things: "Oh f%#k! I'm stuck behind a self-driving car again, now I'll be late for my meeting."
In my town, many parents put their newly-licensed teenage children behind the wheels of enormous SUVs in the name of safety, simultaneously reducing the safety of everyone around them. If tanks were street legal, we'd probably have 16 year old kids barreling down the road in them.
Making it illegal to buy SUVs is moronic even if buying them is moronic in itself. Lots of things in life are dangerous, and we're going too damn far with needing to make anything with a potential of danger illegal. I'd much rather own a Range Rover which is far more comfortable, enjoyable to drive, accommodating, while reserving the capacity to take me to Yosemite a few times a year.
Actually, I don't really know: how old are the soldiers in a typical tank crew? I guess they might have a couple of years in the service before they get into a tank, so maybe they're early 20's rather than teens.
Tanks are not usually quiet, whether driving or throwing.
If someone moves the location of a traffic light, can a Google car still find the traffic light? Wbat if a bulb in the traffic light is burned out; is the car smart enough to negotiate the intersection with the failed light? What if a bucket of white paint fell on the road yesterday; is the Google car's image processing good enough to recognize this or to tell the difference between wet paint and dry?
Heck, when I drive, there is a lot for me to watch and analyze. A Google car can do that?
Yes.
I've had a sign disappear on me over night which changed the roads rules at a tricky intersection.
There has been a lot of construction in my area so 2 lane roads had a lane closed off and a traffic controller managed traffic across a single lane.
I've even seen a road that you could drive into and out of, become a road that you can only drive into. There had been traffice controllers during road works managing a single lane all through construction and then the day that it was finished, one direction became a dead end.
The google cars have no memory of what was "yesterday".
When the cars can come to you where ever you may be, broke down on the side of the road for example, and take you anywhere regardless of conditions then it can be heralded.
As it stands now its nothing more than the automated cars shown as high tech in Jurassic Park.
Snow, heavy rain, being able to go everywhere with up-to-date maps -- these are problems which will find solutions in time. I have no doubt that up-to-date maps will be no problem, considering these vehicles constantly collect centimeter-accurate 3D maps of where they drive and upload them to Google.
And being able to pull over to the side of the road to pick someone up? A simple software feature. There's nothing preventing that NOW.
Don't get caught up in thinking that these things have to be perfect upon release to have a huge benefit.
My kids will likely be baffled by the idea that we attached so much of our own identity to our cars. The financial investment in cars to make a statement about ourselves (over and above getting us from A to B) is immensely irrational.
With self driving cars ownership will likely disappear, and be replaced with time sharing. At that point the connection between our view of ourselves, and the car we ride in disappears.
I'm not sure that completely excuses the lack of modern car aesthetic here, but it could go some way to explaining it.
| Google's new fleet was intentionally designed to look adorable... By turning self-driving cars into an adorable Skynet Marshmallow Bumper Bots, Google hopes to spiritually disarm other drivers. I also suspect the cuteness is used to quell some of the road rage that might emerge from being stuck behind one of these things. They're intended as moderate-distance couriers, not open-road warriors, so their max speed is 25 miles per hour.
The 25mph speed is a hack around US auto regulations, which are far less strict if the vehicle's max speed is 25mph or less.
In California, the default speed limit in business or residential districts is 25 mph, this is also the default speed limit for school zones.
I imagine they did 25mph because its slow enough to appease representatives in letting them put the car on the road. Nobody with the ability to actually make this happen is rational or knowledgeable about this, and will behave like psychotic monkeys when confronted with autos, so Google is using every trick in the book to make these look innocent, including Grandma grade speed limits.
I am somewhat anxious to see how this plays out financially and economically otherwise. Will these cars cost the same as a car that every person now buys for themselves with maybe a little higher cost of maintenance and operation (M&O)? Will there essentially be one manufacturer because one vehicle can support 10 people and we don't need millions of these things pumped out? And will the collapse of competition mean that there will be a monopoly (dare I say it, Über) that over-charges all of humanity after they have essentially captured the market in the exact way that an evil empire like Über would?
An even bigger question I have, will this kind of development essentially mean the doom for anonymous movements? We can all imagine that there will essentially be no way that you will be able to ride in one of these without identifying yourself and at some point manual vehicles will be banned; very likely in most of our lifetimes. At which point you, the guy who rides his bike or walks will be highly suspect if you are even able to at all, since you must be hiding something since you don't want to use the government tracker transporter.
It's a status symbol. If you don't understand them or why cars function as such...you probably don't understand people :)
Yes, but if you have to have a car, and some people do (to commute to work, etc) then what a car costs is what you have to pay. It's not squandered money if there aren't any other options.
If you pay too little, chances are you end up with a lemon that will just die on you after a week, and then where are you?
I like cars. I like driving. There are some cars I'd be happy to own, even if they didn't go. I spend money on buying, maintaining and driving cars because it's something I like doing.
This is no more or less irrational than any number of other discretionary spends. So you shouldn't be baffled anymore.
That's a bold statement. It might become more of a luxury, i.e. something you buy when you reach a certain income, rather than something you need to live. But disappear, no, it won't.
As anecdote, I can bring the experience of European life. In a lot of European towns and cities, you can live quite comfortably without a car, today -- after all, they were built for people and horses. Rich people (or people who want to be seen as wealthy) still buy huge SUVs -- and then struggle to park them, because they're not as thin as a horse.
In London, a lot of people simply use cabs to move around most of the time; but sure enough, if they have a decent income, they'll buy a car and park it somewhere, ready to be driven during their countryside weekends.
Already today, car ownership has very little to do with convenience; it's mostly about ownership and individualism, something that is completely opposite to the concept of sharing. My wife is absolutely horrified at the thought of sharing anything ("germs! ruined things!" etc etc), and that will not change because of Google or Uber.
Do Europeans really by SUVs like that? I was under the impression a sports car like a Porsche (or even Ferrari) would be the grander status symbol?
Sports car are really quite gauche, the realm of sheiks, footballers and crass salesmen. Old Money, industrialists, politicians and affluent professionals will buy SUVs for the day-to-day.
These self-driving cars will be cheaper than even UberX/Lyft/whatever, as there is no driver to have to pay. They can be smaller than a cab, taking up much less parking room (they can park too close for their doors to open, and they don't need to including seating for a driver), which can actually be a fairly significant cost in the city, where convenient parking spaces can sell for as much as a house does elsewhere.
- You can buy this car. It costs $100,000. But that's okay.
- When you aren't actively using it, you tell it to go "Uber mode" and pick up and drive people around as part of the "Uber Network of Cars"
- You split the fee with Uber/Lyft/whoever. They get 30%, you get 70%.
If the average ride pays you $7, over 5 years that's like 8 rides your car has to "sell" per day to be effectively "free" to you (except for financing, insurance, etc.).
- At the end of the workday, Google Now summons your car to pick you up in front of your office and whisk you home.
- After dropping you off at home, your car goes back onto Uber mode and does night-time service (if you opt-in).
You could probably pay your car off much earlier than 5 years with more rides/higher average ride fare, after which your car is making you money. Clever people will use this extra to finance more cars to run small fleets and effectively live without working.
You sigh as you clean up the mess, "At least it feels like I'm living in the future now..."
But, most likely, the cars will keep track of who is riding in them and you could hunt down whoever made the mess and make them clean it up. Or maybe it has cameras installed? Talk about an invasion of privacy! Plus it's not like they ever signed a waiver saying they WOULDN'T shit in the car.
Well, self-cleaning cars don't take a whole lot of new technology. But, sure, that's one of the reasons that I think that self-driving taxis, while clearly one of the long-term applications, probably aren't the first use of self-driving cars. And, particularly, the personally-owned self-driving vehicle whose owner is the primary user but rents it out on the off hours use is, while it might be something people try early on in the self-driving vehicle era, likely to not be a big thing even after self-driving taxis are.
> Or maybe it has cameras installed?
Conveyances used by the public often do, yes. I would rather expect this.
If it's such a great money spinner, why won't companies do that? Why do you _want_ people to own cars?
I feel that the other car companies working on self-driving car technology for consumers are wasting their time. The main reason I enjoy owning a nice car is that I like driving it. If I wasn't in control of driving my car, what would be the point? Vanity of course has to be considered but in the future, I see self-driving cars which we don't own will the the status quo in cities, and owning a manual operating a car will be either a novelty or something for people outside of major city hubs.
- Don't have to worry about availability. Turns out there are a lot of people in my region who go to work in the morning and go home in the evening.
- When you spend that much time in your vehicle, it becomes and extension of your personal/living space. I don't want to spend 10 hours a week in a public box that may have a mess or an odor from the person before me.
Some might also prefer ownership so that their car is always available with no delay, or so that they know their car will be perfectly clean and odorless.
I think you're right that on-demand will eventually make sense for a majority of people, though.
In the near term, I'm looking forwards to hybrid assistive technologies. We took a vacation that required seven hours of highway driving. Toyota's freeway mode ("Automated Highway Driving Assist"), which controls speed and steering, would have made a big difference.
The value of car ownership as a way to have large amounts of your property available at whatever location you are presently at without you constantly engaging in a bunch of loading and unloading work is not to be underestimated.
(There are plenty of other ways that long-term rental or ownership of driverless cars makes sense, too. How prevalent a ride-for-hire model will be is going to depend on lots of details about the technology; it's not a given.)
As a young person living in a city, I'm looking forward to getting rid of my car, and not having to worry about maintenance, etc. I expect it to be competitive with the cost of owning your own car.
Car ownership is very prevalent right now. A driverless car that you can own is higher value than a traditional car you can own. Particularly, the owned driverless car:
1. Can be operated by a passenger who is not legal or safe to drive a traditional car, for reasons including but not limited to: sleepy, under the influence of alcohol, disabled, or (importantly) TOO YOUNG.
2. Can be used as a mobile depot for goods even in situations where a traditional car is impractical for such purposes (such as when parking is too much of a pain in the ass).
3. Can be more efficiently shared among a family, doing things like dropping a working family-member off at their job and then coming back home to serve the non-working family-member.
So while there may be young urban people who choose not to buy a car and instead rent it per-ride, they will be more than counterbalanced by the following rises in car ownership:
* Wealthy families who had one or two traditional cars and choose to buy two or three driverless cars, with the extra car devoted to driving the kids around when the parents don't want to.
* Cost-constrained couples who have the need for effectively two cars but only the money for one who previously chose to apply that money to public transit, but now buy a driverless car and share it.
* Wealthy urban dwellers who previously don't really like public transit/don't find it that convenient but previously coped with it because cars were so inconvenient now buy a driverless car that has increased utility in their city (because they don't need to park it/can use it when going out drinking/don't need to pay attention while in-transit). They don't go with the Uber option because they aren't cost-constrained and they like the privacy, reliability, and prestige of owning.
Why? Can't be less convenient than trains or planes. People take those all the time with kids. (My parents used to.)
Depending on what you mean by "train" travel, that is perhaps more comparable (ie, local subway is in some ways a substitutable good for local car travel). In short, though: families are considerably less likely to find local rail travel useful than are single people. Yes, of course you can find people who use it by choice or necessity. But when you have to tote a baby carrier and diaper bag, or your kid's soccer gear, or just keep track of a gaggle of children in a crowded train, it's just much less convenient.
I suppose that you could try to have the cars come with baby seats (though there are like a million variations of baby seats depending on the age of your child, so that's going to be a headache) and things like kleenex/wipes/snacks/drinks (though replenishing those is going to be a huge logistical issue and there are some legit sanitary concerns). But lots of the stuff people tote around is individual, valuable property.
This is what I'm saying about the blind spot of the tech commentariat. Next time you walk past a family unloading their car, glance at their trunk. It's twice the size of your car's trunk, and it's filled with stuff all the time.
The reason that kids aren't discussed in this scenario is that they don't present any complications, technically or business-wise. If you've got that much stuff to carry with them, then swap the cache you're using the car for with a big bag. Then move the big bag in and out of the car as needed. If that's too much hassle, then you're out of luck. You've got too much value in the vehicle when it's not operating (for storage).
Robo-Uber requires to solve technical problems (and some regulation). Designated lanes are more of a social problem. (We could have had automatic driving on designated roads for decades; just make the cars run on rails, too.)
I can't react to debris in the road, a pothole, or a deer crossing the road in 1 ms like an automated driver can and at 80 MPH that's where it really matters. A 25 MPH collision is basically just a matter of money, as with today's cars there's almost no mortal danger. Hitting a deer at highway speeds is a life-threatening problem.
You can make a flatbed-type powered sled that people drive their cars onto and it drives you from exit A to exit B. It can enclose and lock the wheels of your car for safety. This can even be electric or hybrid to reduce costs with a long, flat Tesla-like battery under the flatbed. If I could drive my car onto a system like this and take a nap for 5 hours on the highway I would do this in a heartbeat because I have confidence that today's technology can drive a restricted access road better than I can in good conditions.
>I can't react to debris in the road, a pothole, or a deer crossing the road in 1 ms like an automated driver can and at 80 MPH that's where it really matters.
The laws of physics still apply but, yes, in general a computer could do a better job--at least on average--than a person. (Although I suspect there will be some things a computer is very good at and a few where it tends to make errors that a human might avoid.)
I agree with your basic point though that autonomous driving on significant sections of highway is by itself a big win even though it doesn't fundamentally change how most people own and drive cars.
But it's much closer to being technically feasible than the general case.
That said, I don't really disagree with your point which is one reason why it's further out than a lot of enthusiasts would like to think. The likely scenario is that (initially) high-end luxury cars will get features that could allow them to operate autonomously on designated sections of highway. The problem, as you point out, is that it would take concerted public action to change laws and designate those sections (perhaps requiring some sort of radio beacons to enforce the designation). That's a fair bit of public action, and probably at least some money, to let "rich" people fiddle with their phones while tooling down 280 or wherever. I'm not sure it's something I, as a politician, would be anxious to champion.
I suppose there could be commercial benefits as well--trucking and so forth--but given that you still need to pay a human to sit in the vehicle, it's unclear that highway-only self-driving would given businesses much of an economic win.
Nonsense. That's just like saying taxis/cabs will negate the need for your own car.
Sometimes you need a car now to goto the shops, drop your kids at doctor etc. without having to wait 10-30 minutes for a car to arrive from the other side of town.
Cheap enough cabs with a minimum of latency, do.
It's true that if you carry a cell phone you already carry a personal tracking device and offer this information up freely to your cellular provider, but I'm interested in reducing instead of increasing the amount of information I'm leaking in that way.
What kind of information will these cars track? They'll have to track who rides in them for accountability purposes, which I already find troubling. Your average cabby isn't going to be compiling a profile about you based on where you catch rides to. Who has access to the information such as who rides in which cars? Is this available via an open API? I'm already peeved at companies like FitBit which hold my data ransom, is this going to be another of those situations?
There's a lot of privacy questions that I feel aren't being adequately addressed, but I still look forward to the possibilities this will bring. The privacy questions are answerable and any problems should be correctable.
Which might explain exactly why it looks very similar to many NEVs [0] or Motorized Quadricycles [1], which tend to have similar constraints.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhood_Electric_Vehicle
[1]: http://www.littletikes.com/content/ebiz/shop/invt/612060/612...
CMU/Cadillac have a self-driving car. They have a number of long videos taken with a back-seat camera.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXhvQeArwWM
It's good enough that it's been driven around downtown Washington. It doesn't seem to sense turn signals or infer much intent from other-driver behavior. The driver has his hand on the auto/manual switch at all times; clearly there's not much confidence in this thing yet.
And far from "dominating," Google is a small player in any market for physical goods in which it competes. They're much more likely to license their technology to other manufacturers than sell it directly to consumers.
Ads are not the only form of PR. (They are actually some of the weakest.)
Where can I take you sir?
Naturally, I don't know anything about trucking, and you'd want to be really sure something so big and bulky is safe, but the idea would be, rather than "do everything a car does all at once" to do something relatively simple.
On a highway, you can't safely just stop. And there are still difficult driving situations. For example, construction zones often have poorly marked lanes (or multiple, contradictory lane markings), construction workers to watch out for, and nowhere to pull over. Exit and entry ramps may be clear, but merging at speed and in traffic is a difficult and unsafe problem. And any failure at highway speeds is far more dangerous than at 25mph.
Moreover if there is say some uncertainty in the sensor readings at 25mph, that is multiplied by many factors at higher speeds and becomes very significant. Control at higher speeds has more stability issues and can deal with less uncertainty and than at lower speeds.
But if someone can manipulate a LIDAR signal to confuse the car into thinking the road ahead is clear when it is not, well then the attack becomes much different.
And, different group.
I see their modified self-driving Lexus SUVs driving around Mountain View all the time.
personnally i just hope roads stay open for motorcycles in the future. self-driven transportation can be massive fun.
So, they need all the driver-used mirrors, etc., that any manually-operated vehicle has (plus, the applicable safety regulations probably still require them, since, while provisions allowing self-driving cars to operate exist in some jurisdictions, I don't think that exceptions to the usual equipment requirements, particularly the federal ones, for them actually exist yet.)
I tried to use Google's driverless car, but everytime I asked it to search for rival services, it kept driving me to their search and adsales offices. Was a bit weird. Like they told the car to prefer their services first! My eurotrash friends promised to investigate though, so that's nice.
It's something Google probably just doesn't "get" - but a lot of people's identities are tied to their cars. It's why we have colors, shapes, brands, options.
This car may be "perfect" algorithmically, but it doesn't mean it stirs the soul.
Either way, the point of Google's self-driving clown car isn't to look cool, it's to get people used to the idea of robotic cars driving around on the streets, successfully not killing people. It's largely PR. They're really doing everyone a favor.
What Google wants to do is create a car that is not aggressive in it's design because they want other road users to feel comfortable around a self driving car.
I think they learnt from their mistake with Glass, where it was far too alien/futuristic and hence a lot of people rejected it. Whilst this car isn't futuristic at all but rather cute.
More over, I quite enjoy driving so I'm not interesting in relinquishing control of the vehicle.
So Google doesn't have cool, and Tesla doesn't have technology. Could be some synergy maybe.
It is a tremendous, insane, unacceptable waste to have autos parked all day. The only way these things make sense is through subscription services where you can summon a car from a fleet whenever you want, so that you can maximize utilization.
Eg I'd be happy to send a car on an autonomous grocery run during the day.
And the majority is just maximal utilization. Even then, it is drastically less than the total number of vehicles in the system, and the reuse of those vehicles every other hour of the day besides peak hour is only a utilization gain.
It will be much cheaper to subscribe to an auto service than own one. In the best case one auto could possibly represent the vehicle usage of a dozen or more people if their driving times align properly. And the worst case is that it is still two or three times the utilization.
Do you complain about the fashion sense of the BART?
I too don't care about what the car looks like, but then again I don't own one, partly because I don't care about them as much
I don't really see Google looking to sell these to consumers. What I see Google doing is some combination of:
1) Selling services to consumers which self-driving cars help deliver (Google Now cards currently give you approximate time to likely destinations -- maybe in the future they also include the time including how long it will take a Google Car to get to you to pick you up and take you.)
2) Using them for Google's own use -- driverless Street View cars, for instance.
3) Demonstrating a technology platform that car companies that do want to sell to consumers can purchase -- and put underneath their own styling.
The first driverless cars need to appear as least threatening as possible.
Google, please don't release that.
(OR: Google, I will pay more not to ride in that.)