Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco • Hacker News Board

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#491

Post by tim333 » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 9:41 PM UTC

ecshafer wrote: post #400

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #388

I am just wondering how many people have to die before it finally dawns on on us that the current approach is idiotic. The supposed smart cars can't even talk to each-other directly 'without internet' to warn of a car pileup! They can't report to city traffic control about their condition. We should be innovating in infrastructure instead - create standardised computer readable infrared road markings, equip each traf…

40k people are dying a year from cars, and the problem is that driverless electric cars are not the solution. They are the faster horse kind of innovation. If we were serious about reducing fatalities, improving health, and reducing pollution, the solution would be to drastically reduce the amount of miles driven per year and the number and the size of the cars. We need to encourage people to bike and walk and use pu…

Or 1m+ people if you count non Americans as people. I'm optimistic that self driving tech will be able to be repurposed to prevent accidents even if fitted to non electric non self driving vehicles. The switching to bikes etc. is a nice idea but probably won't happen in a hurry.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#492

Post by tim333 » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 9:51 PM UTC

sleepychu wrote: post #318

bjoli wrote: post #316

The promises of self driving cars have always seemed weird to me. Sure, I would love to have a world where all cars are self driving. The security benefits seem large. But decreasing congestion? We already know how to do that, and in many ways it seems like a safer bet than some kind of technogy with large problems and even larger unknowns; public transport. Cheap, well developed, reliable public transport will beat…

But you have to give up point to point, of course the overall throughput is better but the individual experience is (perceived) worse. This is why I love the idea of "public luxury" make sitting on a train or a bus nicer than sitting in a brand new mercedes.

My frequent train has that option if you go first class but it still just goes from A to B and is pretty limited if you want to go to C, D or E off the train line. First class is also too expensive for most.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#493

Post by olyjohn » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 10:34 PM UTC

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #470

ecshafer wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40k people are dying a year from cars, and the problem is that driverless electric cars are not the solution. They are the faster horse kind of innovation. If we were serious about reducing fatalities, improving health, and reducing pollution, the solution would be to drastically reduce the amount of miles driven per year and the number and the size of the cars. We need to encourage people to bike and walk and use pu…

> The zoning laws and car centric development of cities is the issue. Well, the main issue is that most of the cars on the road during the busiest hours have just 1 person in them. I think when the dust finally settles, the main form of passenger transit in urban-ish areas will basically be something that looks like autonomous vans. Unlike public transit today, they won't have predefined timetables, nor predefined st…

This is already possible today. You don't need driverless cars to do it. Uber can already do it, but it's not taking over. Unless you're suggesting we will have more cars just sitting around waiting for rides, because they're driverless. Then we get back to them being so convenient that nobody will want to ride with another person.

In other words, why does making the car driverless suddenly make everybody want to use it?

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#494

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

olyjohn wrote: post #493

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The zoning laws and car centric development of cities is the issue. Well, the main issue is that most of the cars on the road during the busiest hours have just 1 person in them. I think when the dust finally settles, the main form of passenger transit in urban-ish areas will basically be something that looks like autonomous vans. Unlike public transit today, they won't have predefined timetables, nor predefined st…

This is already possible today. You don't need driverless cars to do it. Uber can already do it, but it's not taking over. Unless you're suggesting we will have more cars just sitting around waiting for rides, because they're driverless. Then we get back to them being so convenient that nobody will want to ride with another person. In other words, why does making the car driverless suddenly make everybody want to use…

IIRC something like 70% of the cost of Ubers is driver compensation, meaning driverless Ubers have the potential to be ~3x cheaper.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#495

Post by asdff » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 10:58 PM UTC

ironmagma wrote: post #362

asdff wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every company currently trying to sell a self driving car

Just because that’s the current market strategy doesn’t mean governments won’t hire those companies on contracts to run buses. It would be a lot cheaper than paying human drivers most likely, but even more than that it’s probably easier to build and maintain a bus and dedicated tunnel/lane than it is to build and maintain a railroad track.

People claim its an easy pivot all the time but these sorts of industries just do not seem to overlap, and these companies today seem to have zero interest making a go at this sector. There is no tesla articulated bus or a ford articulated bus. Maybe driverless busses will happen, but will it be waymo or anyone available on the market today? I doubt it. I would think it would be whoever makes an articulated bus today licensing that tech from whoever based on the fact that no one in the car market cares to bother with the articulated bus market today.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#496

Post by asdff » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 11:00 PM UTC

astrange wrote: post #257

asdff wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for how many of their trips do they actually need a two tonne automobile instead of e.g. an electric rickshaw or golf cart? Sure not everyone can walk, not everyone can bike, but its still insane to think that for every trip most humans take, 95% of the energy consumed is going to just moving the vehicle around versus you.

Children and heavy groceries can use bike trailers as well. Golf carts are definitely less dangerous but they still fail the “makes you out of shape” test. I’m going to make you exercise and you’re going to like it.

Definitely, but the context was about people who can't walk or bike presumably because issues with mobility. Getting in shape is important but if you can't move at all because of other health reasons, asking someone with terrible knees and no endurance to bike everywhere is not going to be realistic. They practically need paratransit.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#497

Post by rob_c » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 1:50 AM UTC

planb wrote: post #341

rob_c wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Harsh reply for a perfectly valid argument. I'm all for pushing public transport, but in most places of the world it is still more convenient to drive a car for 20 minutes than to walk 5 minutes, jump in a bus for 5 minutes, wait for 10 minutes at a station, jump in a train for 15 minutes, walk 5 minutes, even if you have to drive yourself. And remember we were talking about self-driving cars here.

No post body was provided.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#498

Post by ironmagma » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 2:11 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #495

ironmagma wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because that’s the current market strategy doesn’t mean governments won’t hire those companies on contracts to run buses. It would be a lot cheaper than paying human drivers most likely, but even more than that it’s probably easier to build and maintain a bus and dedicated tunnel/lane than it is to build and maintain a railroad track.

People claim its an easy pivot all the time but these sorts of industries just do not seem to overlap, and these companies today seem to have zero interest making a go at this sector. There is no tesla articulated bus or a ford articulated bus. Maybe driverless busses will happen, but will it be waymo or anyone available on the market today? I doubt it. I would think it would be whoever makes an articulated bus today…

Whether it’s the specific car companies that exist now is sort of uninteresting to me, I guess. Once AVs are deployed, the whole sector becomes way less risky because there is an example of a successful business model, and more funding can be attracted by various parties to support more AV development, both by startups and governments.

Either way, the exact vendor of the vehicle is a matter of trivia to the AV company, since the majority of the hard work goes into the software. Private companies have been servicing government contracts for decades, so I think it would happen if a government wanted it to.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#499

Post by unnouinceput » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 2:57 AM UTC

al_borland wrote: post #248

unnouinceput wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 - they burn in atmosphere 2 - each satellite is under observation by a team 3 - how many satellites do you think are there actually? Not that many, unlike the driverless cars we are setting up nowadays 4 - Earth is actually big. Satellite pouring down all at once and you'll have maximum like 100 casualties - worse case scenario if 1). doesn't happen. Cars OTOH are in busy cities. One battery to explode and can easi…

How many? I figured thousands. When I looked it up, there are several thousand. I saw numbers between 4k and 8k. However, the rate of launches seems to be increasing and is over 1k per year now. Musk says he is looking for have 45k up there just for Starlink, and they won't be the only company looking to do stuff like that. So it doesn't seem unreasonable that the number would be in the hundreds of thousands in the n…

Let's do worse, let's say 100k satellites in total. And let's say in 5 years will be a million in total. Now compare that with only how many Tesla cars are so far in the world, not to mention all other car manufacturers who wanna do the same.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#500

Post by unnouinceput » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 3:01 AM UTC

redisman wrote: post #238

unnouinceput wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 - they burn in atmosphere 2 - each satellite is under observation by a team 3 - how many satellites do you think are there actually? Not that many, unlike the driverless cars we are setting up nowadays 4 - Earth is actually big. Satellite pouring down all at once and you'll have maximum like 100 casualties - worse case scenario if 1). doesn't happen. Cars OTOH are in busy cities. One battery to explode and can easi…

> One battery to explode and can easily do 100 casualties That’s definitely not true. A 66KWh battery is not a tactical nuke

Watch on youtube any video that shows puncturing a cellphone battery what happens. Then scale that up and imagine a scenario where one idiot on drugs drives one in supermarket or mall entrance and the car's battery gets punctured. After that comeback and tell me you still think 100 casualties are hard to happen from only one EV car.