How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

Post by slyall » Thu, May 30, 2024, 8:12 AM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #110

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The economies of scale you get by packing people in larger vehicles mostly have to do with the cost of fuel and staffing. Trains (and train-like options such as metros) are vastly more efficient than cars in number of people moved per unit of time per area used. That might not be a big deal in suburbia, but in dense inner cities it's one of the most important drivers of public transport.

Autonomous vehicles could chain up or drive really close together and achieve similar space efficiency. Also, if you look at a train track. It's mostly empty space with a train passing occasionally. Very different than a well used road. And autonomous vehicles could collaborate to counter any congestion. What makes trains efficient has more to do with the cost of energy and drivers than anything else. Both of those g…

Post by 6510 » Thu, May 30, 2024, 8:12 AM UTC

namaria wrote: post #128

zellyn wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I’m really looking forward to is when autonomous taxis can run a net profit —- including maintenance and upgrades —- at which point, instead of letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world, I want to start an autonomous taxi company and then find an appropriate legal construction/shenanigan to give ownership of the company to the cars! The philosophical dilemmas would easily make the initial investment…

Glossing over the part where you try to tell a judge a company should be owned by its assets, why do you think the 'autonomous' in autonomous cars means they would also be able to do hiring, planning, assign work etc?

Post by namaria » Thu, May 30, 2024, 8:20 AM UTC

6510 wrote: post #143

namaria wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glossing over the part where you try to tell a judge a company should be owned by its assets, why do you think the 'autonomous' in autonomous cars means they would also be able to do hiring, planning, assign work etc?

I'm guilty of thoughts about autonomous companies. They don't require AI necessarily, just a formula to hire reliable humans. One could short cut to the gedankenexperiment by assuming the company owner is a p-zombie[0]. It would boil down to the same thing without scaring the humans. Even the judge would have to accept it. edit: What to do when people get brain chips? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_z…

Post by mavhc » Thu, May 30, 2024, 8:37 AM UTC

hnav wrote: post #48

jseliger wrote: post #3

I just left a version of this in another thread—I live in Phoenix and now take Waymo regularly, and it seems like we're close to a world in which most people take self-driving cars most of the time, crash rates plummet, and these kinds of articles come to resemble articles from 1910 about horse-related problems. Humans suck at driving: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall... Waymos avoid many…

The olfactory problem with waymos is that if someone gets in one dirty or foul smelling there isn't a driver to kick them out. Waymos are starting to get more ridership and some of those people are going to be absolute pigs. I gave feedback to Waymo about a recent ride where the entire car smelled like a fat, unwashed ass and the best case scenario there is that they took the car out of rotation immediately, the ride…

Post by akoboldfrying » Thu, May 30, 2024, 8:55 AM UTC

ein0p wrote: post #82

fragmede wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human driver's not going to stop a gang of hooligans from throwing a Molotov their way.

But they would. For one thing, a human would just drive away. For another, a mob would have no reason to attack a broke-ass taxi driver, while they have every moral justification to attack a $3T gigacorp built on surveillance capitalism.