In 6 years I don’t want your laggy legacy system with unsupported apps. I want my new phone to power the experience. Most of my experience in a car is digital, the physical needs to do its best to get out of the way. I hope Rivian fails for missing this obvious point.
> Most of my experience in a car is digital What do you mean? My experience in a budget car from the early 2010s is entirely the opposite, so I don't understand fully.
I drive a 2013 VW diesel and literally every aspect of vehicle ownership today is inferior except for emissions.
Direct quote from RJ Scaringe, founder/CEO of Rivian: > This is a decision. It's generated, I said there's many millions of decisions, many of them will never get noticed and they're just under the surface. One of those decisions that's been noticed quite a bit is the fact that we've intentionally not included CarPlay in the vehicle. And that's not to say we don't think a close partnership with Apple is important. So…
I can think of an easy way to have the controls accessible no matter what's going on on the touchscreen, but then again that's probably what disqualifies me from being the CEO of a big car company.
Take that idea of buttons and knobs and just replace it with another ipad. Make it revolutionary, put the ipad in the middle of the steering wheel, boom.
> This might turn big suburbs from food/culture deserts into the default places people want to live as they have more space for cheaper This will certainly not happen. The reason these places are culture and food deserts is precisely because people drive everywhere and the driving infrastructure requires so much space that it is impossible to have density at the levels needed to support culture.
It already has! Ethnic food has thoroughly suburbanized, as has shopping.
History suggests it won't be that clean. 1. High-severity accidents might drop, but the industry bleeds money on high-frequency, low-speed incidents (parking lots, neighborhood scrapes). Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments. 2. Insurance is a capital management game. We’ll likely see a tech company try this, fail to cover a catastrophic liability due…
> Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments. It doesn't prevent chaos, but it does provide ubiquitous cameras. That will be used against people. I'm ambivalent about that and mostly in a negative direction. On the one hand, I'd very much love to see people who cause accidents have their insurance go through the roof. On the other hand, the insurance compan…
Yes, imagine you bought a Google self-driving car for $70,000, and one day their algorithm gets mad at you due to a glitch, and your Google account is locked, your car can no longer be unlocked, can't be sold, and your appeals are instantly rejected and you have no recourse. Just a typical day in Google's world.
I'm really doubting this is the case. It seems much more likely to be due to zoning laws.
It's not really. If you have cheap, abundant land it makes no sense to build densely. Look at Houston with ~zero zoning laws and ~infinite sprawl. "A neighborhood" in a high-sprawl suburb wouldn't be able to support local mixed use amenities because even singular "neighborhoods" are gigantic enough to warrant driving across them. Once you're in the car, why would you go to the place 2min down the road instead of the…
I'm really doubting this is the case. It seems much more likely to be due to zoning laws.
It's not really. If you have cheap, abundant land it makes no sense to build densely. Look at Houston with ~zero zoning laws and ~infinite sprawl. "A neighborhood" in a high-sprawl suburb wouldn't be able to support local mixed use amenities because even singular "neighborhoods" are gigantic enough to warrant driving across them. Once you're in the car, why would you go to the place 2min down the road instead of the…
Autonomy subscriptions are how things are going to go, I called this a long time ago. It makes too much sense in terms of continuous development and operations/support to not have a subscription -- and subscriptions will likely double as insurance at some point in the future (once the car is driving itself 100% of the time, and liability is always with the self driving stack anyway). Of course, people won't like this…
The other possible future is you rent the car for exactly when you need it and don’t pay a monthly bill— or your monthly bill pays for a certain number of rides/minutes/miles per month. In which case the subscription costs are managed by the provider, who might be the manufacturer and might not. At least in cities, a fully-functioning, on-demand autonomous fleet would probably be superior to car ownership in just abo…
There used to be a service like this, called Car2Go. Not autonomous, but more like how scooter/bike rentals work. It was fantastic, and in no way profitable.
> This might turn big suburbs from food/culture deserts into the default places people want to live as they have more space for cheaper This will certainly not happen. The reason these places are culture and food deserts is precisely because people drive everywhere and the driving infrastructure requires so much space that it is impossible to have density at the levels needed to support culture.
It already has! Ethnic food has thoroughly suburbanized, as has shopping.
I suspect I can get a larger variety of ethnic food of very decent quality in 1 hour in NYC than in 99% of suburbs.
Shopping for large items, or large quantities, definitely tends to use suburban land because it's cheaper, and a shopping center uses a lot of it. The cost for the customers is the time to drive there.
Interesting contrast to all this tech is that my wife liked the Rivian, but when I told her they won’t do car play that interest went to 0. Can CarPlay not play nice with these things or do they want to keep all the tech dollars to themselves?
Direct quote from RJ Scaringe, founder/CEO of Rivian: > This is a decision. It's generated, I said there's many millions of decisions, many of them will never get noticed and they're just under the surface. One of those decisions that's been noticed quite a bit is the fact that we've intentionally not included CarPlay in the vehicle. And that's not to say we don't think a close partnership with Apple is important. So…
Rivian's infotainment system uses Google Maps which I am not a big fan of. I wish they would support CarPlay in addition to everything else, so that I wouldn't lose my maps.