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Lyft Self-Driving

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Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#71

Post by hateduser2 »

ttul wrote: post #58
greentrust wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hypothetical – since flights are relatively expensive, people usually just go for the cheapest option, so airlines race to the bottom and lose profits. With autonomous vehicles the cost of a ride will be very inexpensive–a few dollars probably–so consumers may focus less on cost in favor of brand loyalty, cool cars, etc, leaving room for providers upsell certain services and profit (turning a $4 ride into a $5 isn'…

I know I will. I’m not going to ride in the Crapton Expresss.

I’ll gladly ride in the crapton express. It’s more important to save money on frequent purchases than rare large ones.

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#72

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

I recently read a couple (long) articles basically arguing that the simple answer to transportation woes is not about self-driving cars and hyperloops, but basic simple steps to make cities more pedestrian friendly and improvements to mass transit:

http://www.kevinklinkenberg.com/blog/autonomous-vehicles-a-v... https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/12/what-elon-mus...

So I tend to not get excited about Lyft/Uber and autonomous vehicles when presented as a solution for transportation. Whether they will be successful companies is a separate question.

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#73

Post by [deleted] »

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #35

GM owns 9% of Lyft, and also acquired Cruise, a YC company working on self driving tech. Since you can't invest in Lyft or Uber today, I would advise people to buy GM. I own about 5 times more Tesla stock than GM but I think GM is a really great value today trading at a P/E of less than 7. With the economics of this business transforming fundamentally over the next decade, making cars more of a "tech" business, I thi…

[deleted]

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#74

Post by hateduser2 »

perennate wrote: post #64
rocky1138 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He or she is definitely right about the second point. For more detail on the thought behind the second point, read up on the Jevons Paradox if you're not already familiar with it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox I'm not convinced about the first idea, though. I think we shouldn't get confused with equating not covering all trips with lack of success. Even if driverless only works for commutes in one or…

I am skeptical of claims that autonomous vehicles would decrease congestion even without taking into account this paradox (i.e., even if the density of cars on the road remained the same). All the claims seem to reference the same study [1], but per the abstract they are just simulating one circular lane of traffic. No "lane changes, bottlenecks, merges, or changes in grade". Intuitively, it seems like once you add a…

The original post even mentions that it’s if deployed on a wide enough scale. The point is that f it is, it will end traffic. I haven’t seen any arguments that address what they’re talking about it here in this thread so far.

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#75

Post by perennate »

hateduser2 wrote: post #74
perennate wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am skeptical of claims that autonomous vehicles would decrease congestion even without taking into account this paradox (i.e., even if the density of cars on the road remained the same). All the claims seem to reference the same study [1], but per the abstract they are just simulating one circular lane of traffic. No "lane changes, bottlenecks, merges, or changes in grade". Intuitively, it seems like once you add a…

The original post even mentions that it’s if deployed on a wide enough scale. The point is that f it is, it will end traffic. I haven’t seen any arguments that address what they’re talking about it here in this thread so far.

The original Lyft post references a news article that references the article that I linked to. This is under the "The end of traffic" headline.

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#76

Post by smt88 »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #72

I recently read a couple (long) articles basically arguing that the simple answer to transportation woes is not about self-driving cars and hyperloops, but basic simple steps to make cities more pedestrian friendly and improvements to mass transit: http://www.kevinklinkenberg.com/blog/autonomous-vehicles-a-v... https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/12/what-elon-mus... So I tend to not get excited about Lyft/Ube…

Walking and mass transit suck for people who are: traveling with kids, obese, disabled, short on time, carrying groceries, elderly, and/or in a place with bad weather. That's not even mentioning people who can't afford to live in dense, central urban environments.

Self-driving, solar cars solve all problems of mass transit and are far cheaper, since they use existing roads.

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#78

Post by Pyxl101 »

nradov wrote: post #61
alasdair_ wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The airline industry is unprofitable mainly because the pilots capture most of the money. Their union gives them nearly unlimited pricing power. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average salary of a Commercial Pilot is $73,490 per year. This seems low given the sheer number of hours of training involved.

The average is meaningless. New regional airline co-pilots barely earn enough to eat. Senior captains for major airlines are paid very, very well.

Why would that be? Is there a difference in competence significant enough to warrant such a difference in pay?

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#79

Post by jsjohnst »

greentrust wrote: post #38
bendauphinee wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla already has a fleet of cars mining driving data for it, putting them way ahead of Uber.

The amount of data collected by your average Goog/Cruise/Uber autonomous vehicle is on the order of gigabytes per minute. I highly doubt Tesla is phoning home data at that level of detail.

Correct, but how many cars does Goog/Cruise/Uber have on the road daily collecting this high data rate? 1k? Let’s be overly optimistic and say 10k. Remember, normal driver driven cars don’t apply here generally, just the research cars.

Tesla on the other hand has hundreds of thousands of cars on the road and is rapidly on their way to 1M cars. Data won’t be as raw and abundant, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t potentially very useful none the less.

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#80

Post by andy_ppp »

Has anyone seen anything to suggest this will happen for sure in 10 years? I’m sure there will be improvements in safety with these features but there are basically zero AI demos out there that are what I’d call good. For example Siri and even Google Assistant quickly show how limited they are after years and years of real world use. If these rely on the same Deep Learning technology won’t it just be the same limits apply to this much harder problem?
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