211–220 of 232 posts
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Which tells me there's something fundamentally wrong with the automotive (for these specific examples, but there are others) industry. Edit: typo.
The profit incentive isn't there. Cars as a Service will drastically reduce overall car sales so why would you expect a car company be at the vanguard of a movement that will gut their industry?
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I'd say it was the Darpa Grand Challenge that kickstarted it, not Google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge I have the feeling Google never had a real plan behind this research project. Tesla's plan is clear. Uber's plan is clear. What is / was Google's plan?
Why can't it be the similar to the Uber or Tesla plan? Just because Alphabet make the bulk of their revenue from sticking ads in front of eyeballs doesn't mean that's how they have to continue making money.
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Your description of how things would work with no traffic lights would scare me to death. One errant car (mechanical failure, software bug or hacked) could cause multiple fatalities. Systems need to be resistant to disaster from perturbations like these.
"One errant car" already kills scores of people today. It really isn't that much different with autonomous vehicles. A stop light isn't going to prevent a distracted driver from entering an intersection. Mechanical or software problems already cause fatalities today. That said I would still prefer to have a hands-on option with my car. Driving around an unfamiliar neighborhood looking for someplace to eat or maybe ho…
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That's why I said "traffic lights to regulate traffic between cars"
Sorry I'm being a bit glib. What I'm poking at here is what I feel to be undue optimism about self driving vehicles. It almost appears as if people are describing the Beetle from Fahrenheit 451, with no irony intended. What I'm getting at is that there seems to be a lack of critical thinking about the potential negatives of self driving cars. We know for example that transit by car is extremely price elastic, and it…
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Which, by those very figures, would be in selling cars to ridesharing services, not competing with them.
Why would Musk and Tesla sell cars to ridesharing services when they can collect a piece of the revenue that they share with Tesla owners who participate on the Tesla Network rideshare service? Why should Tesla allow Uber or Lyft to profit off of its extensive autopilot work? They shouldn't, and they won't.
Which is to say, it doesn't, if you measure it right: they charge as much as they can for a car with features x/y/z; once you impute out who is making how much profit from what, you find that GM is profiting from the Onstar, and Avis is profiting from the rental service (matching cars with temporary-use customers). To the extent that Avis can rent cars at a premium with Onstar, that profit is mostly eaten by the extra price.
At no point does GM think, "Merely sell our cars to rental agencies? There go the Onstar profits!"
In just the same way, if Tesla sold cars to Uber/Lyft, they would still be the ones profiting from the SDC premium.
As for Tesla owners participating in the rideshare network: they can probably get a lot steadier renting of the car's off-hours if they have access to an established platform rather than waiting for riders to add another app that only gets rides from the few spare Teslas in the area.
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You just described a bus.
Something like Uber for buses would be great! Imagine an existing excellent bus network, like London's, but with completely dynamic routes, and a variety of bus sizes suitable for different times of day. Open the app and tell it where you're going, and it tells you which bus stop and bus number you need.
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Why would Musk and Tesla sell cars to ridesharing services when they can collect a piece of the revenue that they share with Tesla owners who participate on the Tesla Network rideshare service? Why should Tesla allow Uber or Lyft to profit off of its extensive autopilot work? They shouldn't, and they won't.
The same reason GM lets car rental agencies "profit off" its development of new features: power seats, Onstar, media center, voice nav, better steering, heated seats, etc. Which is to say, it doesn't, if you measure it right: they charge as much as they can for a car with features x/y/z; once you impute out who is making how much profit from what, you find that GM is profiting from the Onstar, and Avis is profiting f…
I could go out today and borrow ~$100K to purchase vehicles and put them on Uber, but I'm not; I'm waiting for Tesla network to leverage up.
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That's why I said "traffic lights to regulate traffic between cars"
Sorry I'm being a bit glib. What I'm poking at here is what I feel to be undue optimism about self driving vehicles. It almost appears as if people are describing the Beetle from Fahrenheit 451, with no irony intended. What I'm getting at is that there seems to be a lack of critical thinking about the potential negatives of self driving cars. We know for example that transit by car is extremely price elastic, and it…
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Valid point, car pooling would definitely be a good thing. And I think people would be more willing if it was more efficient than it is. Uber Pool does not seem to match people very well. Scheduled rides could probably be very optimized, so its two minutes out of the way, for each person, and no one really minds. Also optimizations like, if the rider isn't there yet, don't even go for them and pass them on to the nex…
You just described a bus.
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At first glance, Google becoming a car industry supplier like Delphi or Bosch seems just as weird. I kind of was expecting them to eventually go for the robocab business, with the steely bits manufactured by some Chinese OEM or underutilized plants in Detroit, Wolfsburg or wherever. It could be nicely phased in in limited access, limited range, low speed settings like e.g. island resorts. But repeating the Android mo…
With Google's shift to provide answers, not just information, Maps seems like a crutch. If I'm in a fully autonomous car, I don't want to look at a map. I want to tell my assistant where I want to go and not worry about the rest. This would be akin to providing the answer (getting you from A to B) without the information (poking at a map).
Except if they somehow achieve a relationship with hardware companies as symbiotic as in Android smartphones. Just being a backend search provider would be a step back for Google, because that is pretty much a commodity transaction where gatekeepers can negotiate for a sizable slice of the pie (see Firefox).