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

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

#171

Post by jackvalentine »

Raidion wrote: post #147
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.

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 an…

Nothing you’ve described is a new way of living though.

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

#172

Post by jackvalentine »

johndevor wrote: post #131
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.

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

The world I lived in was kid friendly when I grew up and there weren’t self-driving cars. There were just fewer cars. We can achieve that again with sane urban planning.

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

#173

Post by selcuka »

janalsncm wrote: post #164
selcuka wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China accounted for a third of the cars sold in 2022 Yet they have almost the same number of cars as the US, with 4 times the population.

This misses the point. It doesn’t matter that the average Chinese has fewer cars. They still need cars, which means public transportation can’t eliminate the problem. I’m a fan of bullet trains myself. I think it’s way smoother than flying and I wish the US could build some high speed rail. But the reality is, even in places with great public transit like Singapore, people still use cars. What matters is that cars ki…

> It doesn’t matter that the average Chinese has fewer cars. They still need cars, which means public transportation can’t eliminate the problem.

This sounds like the Nirvana fallacy [1]. The dilemma is not about eliminating all cars. It is whether we should invest in public transit which would also reduce noise, pollution, energy usage, or in self driving cars, which won't fix any of those.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

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

#175

Post by jackvalentine »

npunt wrote: post #137
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.

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 m…

Sounds like an old way of living to me, and one achievable by removing cars almost entirely from our lives. The most connected I’ve ever been to community was living in large asian cities without a car.

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

#176

Post by dvngnt_ »

kdmccormick wrote: post #122
TheDong wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the fact that it's solved outside of the US is irrelevant here. the American Dream requires that each successful American owns a Car (and House, which is another reason American Cities can't be like other country's cities). they don't have to drive it, but since you have to own one, you might as well drive it, right? places like the uk, germany, china, japan, etc all have working public transit, but they don't have t…

We don't need all Americans to give up their cars. We just need fewer people to drive in urban centers. Much of NYC, SF, Boston, DC and Chicago are already on board with this. They have been for decades. It's wannabe-suburbanites constantly driving through dense cities that's the problem, not Chuck from rural Maine driving to the town grocery store.

WMATA sucks. a car is extremely useful in the dmv.

too many service interruptions, doesn't work late night, underfunded, homeless, getting robbed by youth

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

#178

Post by tuatoru »

npunt wrote: post #137
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.

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 m…

This reads like utterly history-blind fantasy.

You need to explain why all the other times and ways we have tried what you propose did not work, and what will be different this time.

Start, perhaps, with "The Tyranny of Structurelessness".

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

#179

Post by tayo42 »

xnx wrote: post #146
tayo42 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The us spends a ton on defense, the money is there. im not a defense expert but im sure we can squint enough and figure out how to make good use of that money instead of spending it on wars

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

#180

Post by AlotOfReading »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #74

Cruise's death knell was when they were bought by GM. There's something insidious about US Detroit-based car companies that keeps them from innovating almost as a rule. It seems they often deliberately prioritize making their cars worse if it can drive up profit.

Their death knell was in 2016? That's a heck of a long time to find out for a startup burning billions.
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