Are any self driving solutions considering letting the passenger pilot after the car has arrived autonomously?
Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel
231–240 of 634 posts
Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel
#232It will be interesting to see how Lyft's partnership with Waymo evolves given this tech announcement and Waymo's acknowledgment that they plan to offer their own ridesharing service. Lyft's approach to self-driving partnerships in general seems to rest on the assumption that self-driving providers will catch up to each other before any of them can fully handle everything a human driver can do. If this assumption is c…
Here is the most probable scenarios I foresee. If you are a pessimist about autonomous being bigger part of transpiration then add 2 years to DATES shown below. 2021 : Electric Self-driving on-demand FLEET Car 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION from Google, DiDi, Uber, Renault/Nissan,Tesla, VW,Toyota,GM for $400/month 2024 :same 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION $200/month At $200/month Subscription price for 1000 miles/month…
I still think that proper self-driving cars are such a paradigm shift that predictions of how it will work are still up in the air.
For example, right now I live on the west coast and my parents live on the east coast. 4 kids, Minimum of 40 hour drive or $3500 flight.
Here's one tiny example:
I can work remotely for a few weeks and my boss doesn't mind. The kids sleep for 8+ hours at night. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday nights driving for 12 hours (mostly sleeping) means I am at my parent's house on Tuesday and I either take Monday as vacation or work remotely from a friend's house in Ohio. We see friends in flyover country that we rarely visit or see national parks on Saturday and Sunday.
I can now take the whole family to my parents taking just 2 days of vacation/remote for the trip, for only the depreciation cost on my car. Car trip isn't too bad because the kids are awake for a total of the running time of 6 movies.
Car usage will go up by an order of magnitude because a major cost of driving isn't the dollars, but the time.
Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel
#233I was really excited, until I read that the change they made is not to have no employee in the car at all. They moved the safety employee from the front to the back.
Why is that not exciting? It means Waymo is confident enough to have the driver seat unoccupied. It's really a "look ma, no hands... I can do this all day" kind of moment.
Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is the most probable scenarios I foresee. If you are a pessimist about autonomous being bigger part of transpiration then add 2 years to DATES shown below. 2021 : Electric Self-driving on-demand FLEET Car 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION from Google, DiDi, Uber, Renault/Nissan,Tesla, VW,Toyota,GM for $400/month 2024 :same 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION $200/month At $200/month Subscription price for 1000 miles/month…
Why would you want to own a self-driving car? You'll just summon it from the nearest parking lot when needed.
There is no Ownership, it is Summon only
When I said, $200/month for 1000 miles/month is one time pay, there is NO per ride PAY. It is like you pay your Cell Phone Bill.
Use those 1000 miles in that month whenever you want .
Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
The video shows the vehicle operating at 25 MPH in residential blocks, approaching speed bumps at 10 MPH, respecting a temporary 15 MPH school zone, and coming to a full and complete stop at stop signs and red lights. That is how you are supposed to drive a car.
Yes. The current situation is funny since it's a game of "what's the most effective limit to tell people to stick to" rather than "what's the most effective limit to stick to". Maybe once all cars drive under the limit we will decide that the limits are too low and increase them. And maybe a lot of stop signs will turn into yield signs at some point too.
Yeah this is precisely the point I was trying to make.
Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If there is a service that's 10x cheaper Why would a ride service based on autonomous cars be 10x cheaper? It's not like 90% of the current revenue or costs are human labor. I'm not sure the exact ratio of driver labor vs. gas/maintenance/depreciation, but I'm pretty sure it's less than 10:1.
Using china as an example, taxis (and Uber equivalents) are much cheaper there to use than the USA while non labor costs (gas and cars) are actually more expensive than in the states. So I would guess labor is a large part of the cost, or it doesn’t really make sense. Maybe not 10x cheaper, but half as much is probably reasonable.
50% of rideshare rates with a driver seems like a very reasonable ballpark. There are reasons it might be somewhat more or less but it's probably pretty close. Which means you probably change car ownership outside of dense areas where it's already marginal a lot less than many assume. I might use my own car less at those rates but I'd absolutely still own one for a variety of reasons.
Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel
#237I was really excited, until I read that the change they made is not to have no employee in the car at all. They moved the safety employee from the front to the back.
Yeah, I have been waiting for them to announce that everyone in Chandler could download the Waymo app and hail a Waymo when they wanted and there would be no employee in the car.
I think they are just doing all of the incremental announcements and steps that they can think of though. I would guess that the next step would be to remove the employee entirely from the car and just have a remote human monitor all the time.
Then after that they would remove the continuous remote monitoring, and then the next one would be to maybe open it up to the public via the app.
If its 600 or 900 cars or whatever, I can imagine people will be so curious to try it out that they might be swamped. If its cheaper than Uber or Lyft then that will almost certainly be the case barring some major incident. The fleet could be fully booked almost all of the time.
Anyway I think that the truly open to public no safety driver service will come in the next month or so unless there is a setback or someone talks Krafcik out of it.
Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel
#238Wow! Waymo is now confident enough in their vehicles that they're willing to risk letting the public use them completely unsupervised? This seems like a huge milestone for self-driving car tech. I wonder what their current disengagement rates are for Chandler; at this point it has to be really close to zero, right?
No public rides quite yet: "The current passengers for this test are Waymo employees, however, so it’s not as if the Alphabet-owned company is throwing caution to the wind; instead, it’s showing that it’s ready to move to the next major phase of operations after around a decade of working on this incredibly complex problem."
Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is the most probable scenarios I foresee. If you are a pessimist about autonomous being bigger part of transpiration then add 2 years to DATES shown below. 2021 : Electric Self-driving on-demand FLEET Car 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION from Google, DiDi, Uber, Renault/Nissan,Tesla, VW,Toyota,GM for $400/month 2024 :same 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION $200/month At $200/month Subscription price for 1000 miles/month…
Why would you want to own a self-driving car? You'll just summon it from the nearest parking lot when needed.
My car doubles as a "everything I need when I take the kid out" storage. We always have:
- diapers
- changing pad
- strollers
- extra clothes
- kids movies for the tv in the van, queued up to where we left off
Sure, people in places like NYC just carry all that stuff with them when they take the kid out, but they also take the kid out less often or move to the burbs because it's a huge pain in the butt.
I'd much rather own the car simply so that I can keep all my stuff in it that I need when I go out.
Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you want to own a self-driving car? You'll just summon it from the nearest parking lot when needed.
I store tons of stuff in my car so I can have it available at all of the various places I end up, and while I would happily believe I am not in the majority, this does not seem to be something that would be rare. While I don't feel the need to "own" a car (I literally rent a car continually, paying in 30-day cycles), it would be extremely annoying to not have consistent control over most of the storage space in a car…
It would be pretty easy for a fleet service to also provide a bin that you can persistently store your stuff in. When you summon a car, the system puts your bin in before it goes to get you.