451–460 of 769 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook and Google are also everywhere except China.
I'm not aware Facebook and Google are burning $1B to be in China though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The industry will change/disappear overnight. Trucking will be 4x cheaper with 2x the transportation capacity when you remove the trucker. Doesn't matter how much unionized, etc. the industry is now. No group survives that.
How are costs divided between fuel, driver, vehicle capital? I'm not sure the driver is the most expensive part...
Vehicle-based
Fuel & Oil Costs $0.590
Truck/Trailer Lease or Purchase Payments $0.189
Repair & Maintenance $0.152
Truck Insurance Premiums $0.067
Permits and Licenses $0.038
Tires $0.042
Tolls $0.017
Driver-based
Driver Wages $0.460
Driver Benefits $0.151
TOTAL $1.706
So driver ~ 36%
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are costs divided between fuel, driver, vehicle capital? I'm not sure the driver is the most expensive part...
But it's the part that limits the usable hours of a truck most. A self driving truck can pretty much drive 24/7 but the driver has to rest more than half the day. Truck drivers are allowed to work 70h per week.
Is that not typically the case?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can buy cars with better safety systems being cheaper to insure, whether you're talking assistive driving systems or something more. But why would the existence of cars with better systems make driving vehicles like most people own today more expensive than currently?
> But why would the existence of cars with better systems make driving vehicles like most people own today more expensive than currently? Safer options will, as they become available, be disproportionately chosen by the safety conscious. This can, potentially, make the less-safe legacy option more dangerous (per use) than before the safer option became available, because the safest users of the less-safe option befor…
It feels there's a mountain of hype around autonomous vehicles. I think the core challenges to a fully autonomous vehicle (with no human backup), are still far from solved. They need to reliably deal with an almost infinite number of edge and corner cases, each quite different from the last. For example: - communication with other human drivers. In London, this is required all the time, like when parked cars block th…
They just have to make them safer than human drivers.
And these days with everyone swerving as they text, the bar isn't exactly set very high.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find that notion very frustrating. 30,000 people die on the road in the US every year and no one seems to bat an eye, a self driving vehicle has one and it's the end of the world. The expectations seems rather unrealistic and the media seems to love creating a controversy.
Well, in the former case, that is the fault of the driver (or another driver). In the latter case, it would be the fault of the manufacturer. It's not even remotely the same thing. Remember those out-of-control Priuses, where the manufacturers were at fault. Toyota got plenty of backlash for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a difference between "trying to deal with" and "product on sale next month". These cars are overhyped. They've been just around the corner for the last 10 years. They are the Duke Nukem Forever of Silicon Valley.
>These cars are overhyped Not really, they're correctly hyped. The concept is revolutionary. > They've been just around the corner for the last 10 year B-S. Holy revisionism BS!! We were NOT talking about self-driving cars in 2006! There was no company seriously designing fully autonomous cars in 2006! It was fully in the realm of science fiction, no investment, no major players, nothing. And you make it sound like i…
I don't know how serious it was, but part of the initial PR about the Grand Challenge included the goal that it would enable the US military to convert some significant fraction of their fleet of ground vehicles to autonomous operation within ten years.
I do think the previous poster was overstating their case a little, but not so badly as you seem to believe.
In my town (a suburban town with a low crime rate), the police spend the majority of their time enforcing traffic laws. The municipal courthouse is always filled with people, and if I had to guess, I’d say that 80% of the people are there as a result of a traffic violation, while the other 20% are there for drug offenses/other.
It seems like autonomous cars would lead to a drop in traffic offenses and thus revenue. Even if only a tiny portion of the town’s revenue actually comes from traffic violations (when compared to local property tax), there would probably be a lot more idle time for police.
I suspect that they will first start to raise our property taxes to compensate for the lost revenue, but I would think that the long term effect would be a reduction of municipal workers/police.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to other areas like Philadelphia, where police spend only a small percentage of their time enforcing traffic laws.
I'm interested to see where all the major players end up in 5yrs: • Tesla bootstrapping a ride service on the backs of buyers • Waymo directly rolling their own fleet • Uber trying to get a self-driving fleet up, burning mountains of money to maintain their "monopoly" on Uber for rides • Lyft working with GM to get a fleet up • All of the other car manufacturers trying to get autonomous vehicles going, presumably hop…
> Also: Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive. Which probably means general demand for vehicles will fall off a cliff. I've seen this sentiment so many times now that I have to ask a serious question to anyone who echoes this sentiment: Do you own a personal car right now? If so, why? All of this... excitement over the transformations that self-driving vehicl…
Self-driving vehicles could be at your door within a 1 minute timeframe (say). That's a huge change, and will nullify the benefits of owning a car.
Of course, this will be possible because driverless taxi companies will have the logistics in place to make this happen (they know where every car is, and they can compute where to send empty cars to increase the capacity).
I can imagine that a cheaper service will offer the same but, say, in 5 minutes.
Also, you will never have to find a parking spot, which may be an even better argument.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a difference between "trying to deal with" and "product on sale next month". These cars are overhyped. They've been just around the corner for the last 10 years. They are the Duke Nukem Forever of Silicon Valley.
>These cars are overhyped Not really, they're correctly hyped. The concept is revolutionary. > They've been just around the corner for the last 10 year B-S. Holy revisionism BS!! We were NOT talking about self-driving cars in 2006! There was no company seriously designing fully autonomous cars in 2006! It was fully in the realm of science fiction, no investment, no major players, nothing. And you make it sound like i…