This is the right move but I hope they get back out there quickly. We need as many competitors chasing this as possible — it’s a complex problem and is more of a marathon than a sprint.
We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets
141–150 of 395 posts
Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets
#142Earlier 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…
So, trains?
Think smaller.
Trains are enormous, costly, and extremely inflexible to changes in demand. Have you ever seen a train car small enough to only carry a single person? The existence of 4000lb cars and 200000lb trains is because we lacked the ability to quickly and safely move only the necessary atoms from A to B, so we had to bundle them up with a ton of other atoms until it became practical to implement. We can free ourselves from this constraint.
Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Public transit can be solved in the US. Plenty of other countries have done it. That's why it's so exhausting that so many of our brightest minds AND the public's imagination of the future are dedicated to turning our unsustainably-car-centric cities into possibly-safer-but-still-unsustainably-car-centric cities instead of, you know, modern cities with good transit.
"Plenty of other countries" isn't the US. For reasons that have nothing to do with cars, the US will never achieve the clean, safe, reliable systems like you see in Asia that are often heralded as the posterchild of ideal public transit. Wave a magic wand materialize the Tokyo or Seoul subway system into an American metropolis, and within a short period of time, you'll see it devolve. We just cannot have nice things…
You're making big assertions without giving any details.
> Ironically, the contingent of people that are most aggressive/ambitious about promoting public transit are often the same that are most against taking the (admittedly, not always the most pleasant) steps needed to sell the idea to the masses.
Like what?
Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean? Cars are a marvelous solution to traveling a medium distance rapidly. They are ubiquitous as a result. I doubt we will ever have effective public transit across the US. It’s just too big and most places have too low a population density to make it cost effective. And the price of convenience would be high. I used to be bullish about autonomous driving but no longer am. Ten years ago it felt like a m…
I'm hopeful that robotaxi services end up teaming up with mass transit agencies so you plug into your app "I'm going to X" and the options are: - point to point in a private vehicle: x time, $y - to the RT station: x * 1.2, y * 0.3 - to the bikeshare cluster: x * 1.6, y * 0.1 Governments have a role to play in creating the proper incentives here too, ensuring that congestion is properly paid for— every time any road…
A pet idea of mine is app-driven robobus that scales in vehicle size all the way down to that robotaxi and where picking journey by app is encouraged because when you do there is a "wait time guarantee" for the bus service where holes are plugged with robotaxis/minbuses.
Being able to more or less promise a maximum wait time and being able to dynamically scale a bus service in smaller seat increments without the cost per seat going through the roof (I looked up UK coach hire costs breakdowns, and when hiring a 70 seat coach the cost of the driver still added up to about 40% of the title cost including amortisation of the vehicle itself; drop vehicle size and presumably that goes much higher and the per seat costs accordingly), combined with being able to flexibly feed passengers to transit hubs in smaller seat increments on routes where demand can't fill a full size bus all the time could make transit services vastly more convenient.
Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets
#145Earlier 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.
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…
> Then imagine cars halve in size and drive bumper to bumper and twice the speed.
And now imagine one of those cars hitting a large pothole
Beyond this, how will there ever be 100% adoption to support that dream? There will always be a desire to have a steering wheel on some cars to go off road. It's really hard to see how that 2x2x2 dream could ever happen.
Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean? Cars are a marvelous solution to traveling a medium distance rapidly. They are ubiquitous as a result. I doubt we will ever have effective public transit across the US. It’s just too big and most places have too low a population density to make it cost effective. And the price of convenience would be high. I used to be bullish about autonomous driving but no longer am. Ten years ago it felt like a m…
We should frame public transportation as a defense issue and use that obscene budget to fund and subsidize it
I don't think I follow. Rail lines are fixed targets and extremely vulnerable to attack. Cars can route around damaged roads and even drive off-road in some cases.
Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets
#147Earlier 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.
I mean, a ton of people spend time driving, freeing that time would be huge efficiencies. Not to mention that it would mean cars can be shared between people, hugely reducing cost of operation and greenhouse emissions. Parking areas are reduced and put farther away from city centers, freeing land. If cars learn to share the road with us, they can also used optimized lanes and traffic patterns, speeding up commutes and reducing accidents.
Like it's not any one thing, but a self driving car really changes a lot of things about how cities and transport are designed. Interesting thing is that it's harder to have a self driving car now than it would be in 20 years, because as they get closer and closer, the roads are going to adapt to them.
Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If we (North America) had more walkable streets a lot of these problems would be solved: grocery stores are easier to place in population centers a short distance with less car and more foot traffic and you can rent a car for occasional "off-road" recreational driving. In terms of transportation and city design, the US could learn a lot from Europe if it weren't so addicted to cars. It's better for the environment, m…
No thanks. Even if Costco was only a few blocks away I wouldn't be able to carry that much stuff home on foot. I drive back with my car pretty much filled.
The places where I go most often in Europe, people are nearly as car dependent as in North America. Get out of the big cities and you'll see how regular people live.
And rental cars can't be taken off road. It says so right on the rental contract.
Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets
#149Earlier 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.
Do we have to have this conversation in every single thread that mentions driverless cars? We get it, an extremely vocal subset of reddit/HN who lives` in downtown cities likes public transit more than cars.
It's a technically impressive technology that's right at a key inflection point with potentially huge ramifications to how 15% of the economy is structured.
I think I'm an outlier because I like trains, bikes, and cars, but you have to pick the right tool for the job. In the US, new train lines are almost never the right tool.
Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets
#150Earlier 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.
Over a million people die annually from traffic accidents.
That number could be cut by more than half by applying technology that already exists today. If reducing traffic deaths is the goal then there is no particular need for autonomous vehicles.