Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 395 posts

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#131

Post by johndevor »

jackvalentine wrote: post #110
npunt wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think bigger. "Driverless cars" are a technology that moves atoms without the need for people, a lot like how we move bits around today. There are innumerable benefits to moving the right atoms to the right places at the right time. There are many form factors that moving atoms can take, only one of which looks like a car. The car is a good place to start for many reasons, including everyone needing transportation, e…

> we unlock whole new ways of living Please speculate on what some of these ‘whole new ways of living’ might be. I’m struggling to picture it.

Kids can go to friends' houses when they please... Making suburbia kid friendly.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#132

Post by piffey »

melling wrote: post #111
piffey wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are over 30 US cities with trains to the airport. Another half dozen on the way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airport_rail_link_syst... US also has almost 350 miles of high speed rail, not 0. The Northeast is where it’s all concentrated with Acela being the fastest. If you live in a major city in the States it’s often way easier and faster to take rail. In Seattle for instance you can beat a driver to…

I’ve taken the train from New York to Boston. While it does go pretty fast for a couple miles, think the average speed is about 82 mph. My 4 mile commute from Hoboken to midtown took anywhere from 45 minutes to 90, if there was a problem. Try getting to the East Side of Manhattan. See people fighting congestion pricing for driving? If mass transit was good, few would drive into the island

Few people do drive to the island. Over 60% of workers in Manhattan take mass transit to work versus 21% driving. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/planning-le...

And mass transit adoption keeps growing for the workforce. Because sitting in a car in traffic sucks that much. So we make self driving cars and all those people pile into personal vehicles? That only exacerbates the problem.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#133

Post by xnx »

lmm wrote: post #103
melling wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve?” 40,000 deaths in the United States every year. Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents We can’t get great transportation even in the New York City area. We have 0 miles of high-speed rail, while China built 25,000 it’s great that you want to start building some mass transit, but it’ll take a century if we start now. Let’s start by having trains take you to the…

> Let’s start by having trains take you to the airport directly… I thought the US had legalised those now, so they'll happen as new systems come online. > In the meantime, getting self driving cars that are all electric will be a big win. Why? They're still going to take up as much road space (maybe even more, since they'll be moving around empty half the time). They'll still be spewing particulate pollution around o…

> road-use pricing, bicycle priority at junctions, better parking laws, building more transit...

Excellent suggestions. Road-use pricing could easily be added as a rule to self-driving fleets. Self-driving cars could always yield to pedestrians and cyclists. There will be a glut of empty parking spaces when self-driving cars are common. Self-driving cars are transit.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#134

Post by djrobstep »

huytersd wrote: post #42
polalavik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead. Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.

Public transit is no good. I don’t want to walk to a station and then share the space with other people. I don’t want to lug grocery bags around. I want to make pit stops. I want to go off road. I want to live in the suburbs or semi rural areas so I can have a lot of land.

What's wrong with sharing space with other people? Do you have some kind of phobia?

You don't need to lug groceries around - just get them delivered.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#135

Post by verve_rat »

npunt wrote: post #105
polalavik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead. Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.

Think bigger. "Driverless cars" are a technology that moves atoms without the need for people, a lot like how we move bits around today. There are innumerable benefits to moving the right atoms to the right places at the right time. There are many form factors that moving atoms can take, only one of which looks like a car. The car is a good place to start for many reasons, including everyone needing transportation, e…

So, trains?

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#136

Post by uoaei »

pests wrote: post #119
jackvalentine wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we unlock whole new ways of living Please speculate on what some of these ‘whole new ways of living’ might be. I’m struggling to picture it.

You're house could be mobile and drive itself to new locations every night while you sleep. You wake up in a new location every morning to a new sunset. I meant this to be sarcastic because we already have this with campers and RV's - but it does sound kind of cool on second thought. Pointless, but cool.

> Pointless, but cool.

Lovely turn of phrase to describe a whole swath of "why shouldn't this make money" startup ideas. If your goal is revenue, maybe don't base your entire marketing strategy on people with disposable income and decent financial literacy, because once an economic lull hits you're going to be stranded with a whole lot of responsibilities and a huge drop in income.

I keep thinking back to Jupe[1], and how YC actually put their money behind it, as a synecdoche of the absurd and surreal decade we've had with all that money flying around. Some people got very rich on a wish and a promise -- maybe some think that's laudable, I think it's sociopathic.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37886420

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#137

Post by npunt »

jackvalentine wrote: post #110
npunt wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think bigger. "Driverless cars" are a technology that moves atoms without the need for people, a lot like how we move bits around today. There are innumerable benefits to moving the right atoms to the right places at the right time. There are many form factors that moving atoms can take, only one of which looks like a car. The car is a good place to start for many reasons, including everyone needing transportation, e…

> we unlock whole new ways of living Please speculate on what some of these ‘whole new ways of living’ might be. I’m struggling to picture it.

Rebuilding the tribe.

We have divided ourselves into neat little nuclear family boxes and thrown ourselves together with a bunch of other randos in neat little boxes, with the unstated assumption that the family unit is the end all be all of human lived experience.

This has separated us from our physical (atom-based) communities, to many ill effects including our friends and extended family being further away. This makes having and raising families more difficult than it should be, as we work rando jobs in order to hire rando nannies to do the job that a community otherwise would.

A lot of this comes down to proximity, and available space for people to group up in spaces larger than apartments or single family homes. We've simply lost a part of our daily lived connection to our close community, and being connected to them via only bits is a poor substitute.

When atoms and bits are easy to move around, we have the best of both worlds, pushing the frontier out for having a community experience and having the positive aspects of what we have today.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#138

Post by djrobstep »

conk wrote: post #95
pcchristie wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got a lot of answers already but ... wow... Allow me to say first of all that I agree we should have denser cities/towns, better public transport to get around, and we should all use it more. But some stats (no citation, these are rattling around in my memory, feel free to fact check). 90% of cars are not utilised 90% of the time. That is insane wastage for energy intensively manufactured, expensive pieces of…

Who cares if a car is only utilized 10% of the time. At 10% use the car is going to last an average of 20 years. Use it 90% of the time and it’s gonna get junked in 1-2 years.

> Who cares if a car is only utilized 10% of the time.

You understand that each car takes up a car-sized plot of (usually very valuable urban) land 100% of the time, right?

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#139

Post by nradov »

xnx wrote: post #45
polalavik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead. Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.

It's definitely an immensely complex challenge, a legitmate "moonshot" scale effort. The benefits can also be huge. Think of the huge portion of a household's budget (purchase price, fuel, insurance, maintenance) and time is spent on cars. If someone can provide a better alternative to private car ownership (and goods transportation), they stand to capture a meaningful portion of those billions of dollars and billion…

Even if autonomous driving is made to work I'll still buy private cars. It will just be another optional feature. I like my cars to be clean and ready to go as soon as I want to. And many of us keep a variety of stuff in our cars like tools, snacks, spare clothes, sports equipment, pepper spray, first aid kit, etc. You're going to need some of that stuff occasionally, especially if you ever drive through rural areas. Parents also tend to have additional stuff like car seats, diapers, and baby wipes. It's a huge hassle to load and unload that stuff every time.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#140

Post by xnx »

dangus wrote: post #99
janalsncm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has 25k miles of bullet trains and China accounted for a third of the cars sold in 2022. A third. This is a country that limits imports and even limits the number of drivers in some cities. So it’s silly to suggest public transit can replace cars. ETA: Replace all cars. So as long as we will have cars, we might as well make them safer. > getting self driving cars that are all electric will be a big win. I will…

> So it’s silly to suggest public transit can replace cars Ew. This is so flawed. What is china’s car ownership per capita? Trips taken per day? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_... China has 2 cars for every 10 people (#99 in the world), while the United States has 9 cars for every 10 people. While China buys a lot of cars (duh, they have a population of over a billion), they would buy eve…

> you would need 15 lanes of highway to handle the same amount of passenger load as a two-track subway tunnel.

Certainly true for some cases. For the trains I'm familiar with, the parallel road carries many times more passengers in a single lane over the course of an hour.

Post reply on HN