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The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

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Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#451
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that it uses vision processing algorithms on a camera nowadays, and works just fine in rain. Snow is an issue because the car can't see the lane markings through the snow -- a human drives through snow by remembering where they were or making a guess.

There's a relatively simple fix for lane markings, that would help autonomous cars even in good weather. You know those reflective lane marking doodads they embed in the road surface? We start replacing them with magnetized nails that are pounded into the asphalt in intervals. Sensors in the car could recognize the lanes even in deep snow or pea-soup fog. And homeowners could easily outfit their driveways with a trip…

They don't use the embedded ones in most parts of snow countries like Canada, because it's hard to get them flush with the road so that they work with snowplows. AFAICT, Toronto still uses just plain old paint on most of its roads.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#452
post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the higher standard question will be resolved in a couple of ways: * NTSB review: Airplanes face higher scrutiny than automobiles (despite the lower overall casualty rate). Part of the reason people have grown comfortable with air travel nonetheless is because the NTSB analyzes what went wrong after each crash and recommends (mandates) certain changes. Moreover, as far as government agencies go, the NTSB do…

UPS employees are unionized, and driving routes (vs. working in the warehouses) is a sought-after position that is one of the benefits of seniority (as I understand it). I expect that they might have issues rolling out a computerized delivery fleet.

I hope they replace the workers in the warehouses first; since UPS/FedEx/Amazon own them, they could put QR codes on the floor or other craziness to automate those workers first.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way to only see everything with rose-colored glasses. Has it even occurred to you there might be any possible cons to your scenario? First of all, the lot the cars come from is going to require real estate, so subtract that from your windfall. Where will they be at night or other low-use times? Second, subtract the additional resources in gas/electricity it takes to get to my house from god-knows-where it came from.…

Of course I'm way late to the game here, but thought I'd add one more voice of dissent: The real estate costs can be extremely low for self-driving cars. Imagine a tower of, say, 10 cars stacked vertically with an elevator mechanism to bring them to and from ground-level. Since each autonomous car is interchangeable, you can just treat the vertical parking lot as a stack. When demand is high, pop off the stack. When…

If demand is low traffic should be low too, why not just use empty lanes of streets for the same purpose? Or at least, some variation on that theme. Maybe things work out so well that streets usually only have 1 lane.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#454
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe surge pricing equivalents will motivate people to buy their own cars. If the advantage of a car-sharing scheme is cost savings, and then you start charging more, what's the advantage again? In any case, I don't think that that's a feasible option for the majority of jobs.

Charging more than the cheaper default. Doubt it will be as much as the depreciation, registration, insurance and servicing of a car. Right now, my wife and I have two cars. One of them is only used 2-3 days of the week. The other is only used for a small portion of each day. If taxis weren't needing to cover wage costs, I'd already be better off switching from the second car to using a taxi to get to and from work.…

I don't think that insurance is a good cost to include in the comparison. In a driverless car world, we imagine that insurance costs will be pretty much a constant per mile traveled -- there are no better or worse drivers -- and probably lower than they are now. And you'll have to pay for them (directly or indirectly) whether you rent or own.

If your costs for the second car are more than $1k in just registration and servicing are more than about $500 a year, that, first, suggests that you're not very cost-conscious today. My car's cost service and registration fees are much less than that. Second, service costs also are basically a per-mile fee -- your car's quality doesn't degrade when it sits in your garage, and you'll pay the service costs of a vehicle you use directly or otherwise.

You didn't mention fuel, but of course again that's essentially per-mile, and costs what it costs regardless of the car ownership model.

That leaves registration, which is a small cost, but would be shared in a shared ownership model.

Now, of course, the actual major expense is the cost of buying the car in the first place, defrayed over the lifetime of the car, minus any price you get for selling it. The big advantage of a car-share service would be that you could share that cost with others. If a driverless car costs $50,000 (and we have no idea how much they would cost), and you use it for only 5 years, then sell it for $20,000, you get $6k per year. In a shared ownership model where you share it with three other people, and the company that you're going through makes about 10% gross margin, you're looking at $2.2k instead of $6k, so yay, savings of $3.8k per year. That's a lot of money.

If, on the other hand, a driverless car costs $30k and can be sold after five years for $15k, then it's $3k per year to own and $1.1k per year to rent, you're saving $1.9k instead $3.8k, and that's still not peanuts, but you suggest that right now you spend more than that for a not-very-highly-used second car. The advantages of owning are considerable.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#455
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is your insurance company. If you get in an accident, they're not going to want to pay for it, and they're going to go after Google for the damages. Now we're right back where we started.

No. Current driver-based insurance policies might be based on the ability to hold the driver personally responsible if they are negligent. Insuring a vehicle is just figuring out what the likely payout ratio across a cohort of those vehicles is going to be, then working backwards from there to come up with a premium that will cover the claim amounts, administrative costs and provide a pool of funds to invest. Lots of…

I don't understand why you think this. Yes, for small incidents, it won't be an issue, but if there's ever a claim over $X (where X is a figure that outweighs the cost of the time to hire lawyers to seek compensatory damages for that claim), you can bet they'll go right after the maker.
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