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Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

ben-evans.com

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Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#41

Post by Animats »

There's considerable wishful thinking about autonomous cars. Not about the technology; that's coming along fine. (I used to work on that stuff.) About the business possibilities. There's a fantasy that there's a high-margin business opportunity in there somewhere.

The most likely outcome in the near term is that self-driving is an auto accessory you can order for a car. That's what the car-makers have in mind, and most of them are talking about shipping it for the 2020-2021 model year. In that business model, it's not a big money-maker for whoever sells the self-driving technology. They get to be a Tier I auto parts supplier, squeezed hard on price.

There's a lot of noise about "transportation as a service". Remember that Uber loses money, even after squeezing its drivers really hard and making them buy and maintain the cars. Actual "transportation as a service" is going to look more like car rental and Zipcar, and will probably come from companies that already operate fleets of cars. They already have "rent by the hour, day, week, or month". They're just adding "rent by the trip". Also, bear in mind that "transportation as a service" requires level 5 autonomy - no driver required - so the vehicles can move around empty to pick up a passenger. That's going to come a few years after Level 4.

Autonomous cars don't require car to car communications. They don't need to be "connected" at all. Chris Urmson pointed that out when he was heading Google's self-driving effort. From a safety perspective, it might be better if they're not connected. The enthusiasm for car to car communications is coming from the infotainment and advertising people.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#42

Post by sien »

Animats wrote: post #41

There's considerable wishful thinking about autonomous cars. Not about the technology; that's coming along fine. (I used to work on that stuff.) About the business possibilities. There's a fantasy that there's a high-margin business opportunity in there somewhere. The most likely outcome in the near term is that self-driving is an auto accessory you can order for a car. That's what the car-makers have in mind, and mo…

What do you think about these slow electric busses that are all over the world on serious trials with real passengers.

For examples: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/18/self-driv....

They have also been used in DC, Vegas, Perth, the Netherlands and other places.

It might not be a total replacement for cars but they are self-driving vehicles that are moving passengers now.

If I had access to these running at 30km/h only on major streets in my city I'd probably get rid of my car.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#43

Post by Judgmentality »

Animats wrote: post #41

There's considerable wishful thinking about autonomous cars. Not about the technology; that's coming along fine. (I used to work on that stuff.) About the business possibilities. There's a fantasy that there's a high-margin business opportunity in there somewhere. The most likely outcome in the near term is that self-driving is an auto accessory you can order for a car. That's what the car-makers have in mind, and mo…

> There's a lot of noise about "transportation as a service". Remember that Uber loses money, even after squeezing its drivers really hard and making them buy and maintain the cars.

Uber loses money because it pays the drivers - if you eliminate the driver you eliminate most of the cost. And if you can use simpler electric vehicles which are cheaper to drive and maintain, then you have yet another significant advantage.

I don't think anybody knows what exactly will happen, but there is clearly an enormous opportunity. The trucking industry alone in the United States is nearly a trillion dollar market. Of course when you add in all the complexities of actually scaling the business it doesn't become pure profit, but I'd be amazed if you couldn't print money if the technology worked.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#44

Post by lern_too_spel »

mabbo wrote: post #29

One way to help prevent a winner-take-all situation is to have more open protocols for some of the hard problems. An example that I feel needs to be done right now: an open protocol for signaling intent. Today we have left and right blinkers, brake lights, the horn, and some 'body' language when you use the whole vehicle to show your intent. But with fully autonomous cars, we could be giving out signals that are rich…

This is much less useful data than the map data and fleet positioning data mentioned in the article, for which the advantage due to network effects is very large.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#45

Post by colejohnson66 »

tomsthumb wrote: post #14
stephengillie wrote: post #11

Given the lack of network effect in cars already, it's not likely we'll see a huge explosion of inter-car connectivity anytime soon. Even Tesla see their cars largely as individual machines, and not nodes on a highway network. Example: Driving with cruise control on at 60 mph. The car in front is going ~59.5 mph, so you slowly gain on them. Why do the cars not communicate their speed, so your car can adjust speed to…

> Why do the cars not communicate their speed, so your car can adjust speed to maintain a safe distance? How do you deal with spoofing info for/from another vehicle? What happens when someone decides to see what happens when they `inter_car_radio.broadcast(myspeed=0)` or `inter_car_radio.broadcast(myspeed=120)` when the speed limit is 80?

The naive solution would be to make it illegal to modify the communication system of your car, but wouldn't just making it illegal to broadcast false data be enough? And then if an accident is caused because of that, you can tack on some other charge like an autonomous version of reckless driving.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#46

Post by idorosen »

normalfaults wrote: post #36
ruytlm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly agree. While reading this article, I had a paranoid convergence of ideas. I was reading another article the other day about stock trading strategies, and how some particular strategies only work if a small number of people are using them; once they go mainstream, they lose their advantage. The example used was a whole lot of funds jumping into a particular strategy, which then effectively killed the strategy's…

I wonder if there is an economic/academic term for this? Vicious Cycle?

Tragedy of the commons?

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#47

Post by Animats »

sien wrote: post #42
Animats wrote: post #41

There's considerable wishful thinking about autonomous cars. Not about the technology; that's coming along fine. (I used to work on that stuff.) About the business possibilities. There's a fantasy that there's a high-margin business opportunity in there somewhere. The most likely outcome in the near term is that self-driving is an auto accessory you can order for a car. That's what the car-makers have in mind, and mo…

What do you think about these slow electric busses that are all over the world on serious trials with real passengers. For examples: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/18/self-driv... . They have also been used in DC, Vegas, Perth, the Netherlands and other places. It might not be a total replacement for cars but they are self-driving vehicles that are moving passengers now. If I had access to these runn…

There are several of those, none of which seem to be beyond the demo level. Navya is really slow, about walking speed. EasyMile is so slow they have to show sped-up videos. Proterra, which makes electric buses, is just talking about self-driving. Olli, from Local Motors, is starting out at 5MPH and doesn't seem to have any units installed.

None of these systems seem capable of an ordinary airport parking shuttle route. That's embarrassing. Those things should be performing better.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#48

Post by jcranmer »

6d6b73 wrote: post #13
djyaz1200 wrote: post #7

Autonomous cars are going to kill people, lots of people. They are going to kill passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians etc. It has already happened and will continue. Even though autonomous cars will be (and Tesla argues already are) safer than human drivers the fact that these deaths will be at the hands of machines rather than people will outrage the public. The industry will become even more heavily regulated, and t…

>Good drivers really distinguish themselves in the moments where the inputs and behaviors that are expected do not occur (ex: tire blow out). Autonomous cars will be much better at handling these types of situations - in your example, the machine will know what's going on few milliseconds after it happens and will be able to adjust speed and direction almost instantaneously. All you need is lots of sensors.

And engineers who can recognize every possible failure and make the car react to them.

There are two things where human beings far outpace AI in competence. The first is the ability to recognize when inputs just simply don't make sense and thus the intended algorithm is going to return garbage results. A related, but important issue (particularly if you talk about networking cars together) is being able to recognize malicious inputs.

The second issue is that humans are good at higher-order planning. An example as it relates to driving is what we do when we can't tell the state of the traffic light (direct sunlight, say). Humans naturally look for ways to indirectly infer the state: the status of the traffic light in the cross direction, the current disposition of cars around the intersection.

Autonomous cars will only be better at handling these situations if the engineers are aware that these situations need to be handled and take measures to make the cars aware of them. And history suggests that is sufficiently unlikely to happen to make me fearful of the future.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#49

Post by cakedoggie »

djyaz1200 wrote: post #7

Autonomous cars are going to kill people, lots of people. They are going to kill passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians etc. It has already happened and will continue. Even though autonomous cars will be (and Tesla argues already are) safer than human drivers the fact that these deaths will be at the hands of machines rather than people will outrage the public. The industry will become even more heavily regulated, and t…

Maybe. But cars seem to get a free pass with regulation, since they kill about 1.3 million people a year. We have all pretty much decided that this is acceptable, and having something traveling at 50 miles an hour a few feet from where you are walking is ok.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#50

Post by ruytlm »

idorosen wrote: post #46
normalfaults wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there is an economic/academic term for this? Vicious Cycle?

Tragedy of the commons?

Feedback loops and vicious cycles are more accurate, I'd say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuous_circle_and_vicious_ci...

Also if anyone's interested, the article I was referring to is this: http://www.mauldineconomics.com/the-10th-man/black-monday

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