Waymo: Google's self-driving car company • Hacker News Board

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#471

Post by aetherson » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:23 PM UTC

galdosdi wrote: post #461

aetherson wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While driverless cars obviously make short-term car rental more attractive on a cost basis, I think that people here tend to overestimate the impact of this. * A large percentage of people will want to have their own car because they don't want to put up with the occasional hassle of unavailability of rental cars during a peak time, and/or occasional long waits for the car to reach them (particularly when they are be…

* Availability can be addressed with a dedicated option, where you pay extra (if a fleet) or get paid a bit less (if renting out your self driving car) to ensure there's always a car whose destination's time distance from you plus remaining trip length is less than some amount you specify such as 15min. * To address the mobile depot use case, I've heard of proposals to have storage areas (possibly trunk, but not nece…

Sure, availability can be addressed by paying more, but the entire value proposition here is that you pay less.

Is there a sweet spot where you still experience significant cost reductions but the inconvenience is small enough that you don't mind it? Well, certainly, for some people! But I think the number of people is going to be a lot smaller than many commentators think.

(The only cases I see where there's no increase in the rides-for-hire business after full automation is if the cost of cars drops to the point where there's very little incentive to try to reduce the costs for most people. Given that cars are quite expensive now, that seems unlikely. I can construct a scenario, but you basically have to believe that, first, the additional cost for driverless sensors+software is very low, second, that driverless software is so safe that you can drastically decrease physical safety features on cars, and third, probably that automation drives significant GDP growth).

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#472

Post by elmar » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:23 PM UTC

Angostura wrote: post #442

walrus1066 wrote: post #339

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…

A lot of these problems can be solved by simply making them fly. ... that's right, now you know what the driving force behind all those flying cars in sci-fi was. It's simply a way to separate the autonomous and old-style vehicles.

you are right, driverless cars are so passe the future are self-flying vehicles.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#473

Post by andrewljohnson » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:23 PM UTC

LinuxBender wrote: post #463

walrus1066 wrote: post #339

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…

I agree with all of this. I would also add; that I will stay consider these vehicles to be unsafe until the manufacturers can prove to be beyond a shadow of doubt that I or the local computer are the ones piloting the vehicle. When a random person can remotely take control of a vehicle; whether it be the windshield wipers, or full control of the vehicle, then it is not safe to contain a power source in the vehicle ne…

I'd consider autonomous cars to be more safe than a car I drive when statistically I'm less likely to get hurt or die.

If there was some chance my car could get hacked, or other weird vulnerabilities that robocars had that traditional cars did not, I would still want to be in a robocar if my chance of dying was cut in half.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#474

Post by ticviking » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:24 PM UTC

nec4b wrote: post #372

jcranmer wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think that people who believe that private car ownership will fall are those who live in the urban centres and have little understanding of the needs and living styles of rural or suburban population. It could just as well be that the opposite will happen, because cars will suddenly become much more accessible for people who can't or don't know how to drive.

> It could just as well be that the opposite will happen, because cars will suddenly become much more accessible for people who can't or don't know how to drive.

This is important to note. I'm on those margins, and have been saving for my first automatic car for ages. I live in a mildly rural community, and don't wanna wait for uber or whatever to deploy autonomous cars here.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#475

Post by walrus1066 » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:25 PM UTC

thaw13579 wrote: post #436

notatoad wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think the companies building autonomous cars haven't thought about all these things? They may not have solved them yet (If they had, we've probably see their products on the road) but I'm sure it's in progress.

I agree that it's safe to assume folks at these companies are aware of these issues. But if I'm going to risk my life by using one of these systems, I'd want to have good answers to how they have solved them. Until then, I think it's fair to keep asking to avoid unrealistic hype.

I think safety is fine, especially in cities with not too crazy weather.

It's more that if an autonomous car with no human stalls, due to a traffic light that's stopped working, or an oddly shaped plastic bag in the road, it's stuck, and would cause a traffic jam. Not sure how to resolve such a scenario, can't rely on someone remotely taking control, as mobile data doesn't have 100% coverage, so a human who is allowed access to the car would somehow need to get thorough the traffic jam to move the vehicle on. Can't think of an efficient way to resolve this situation.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#476

Post by slackstation » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:26 PM UTC

rb808 wrote: post #193

joeguilmette wrote: post #49

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…

> 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 really dont agree with this. Cars a so cheap now and I'd much rather use my own than some dirty shared car. Already renting a car is annoying as you never know if you'll get charged for some damage that you didn't cause, I can't imagine having th…

It's not either or. Autonomous service for commuting is still highly valuable even if you retain your own car.

Over the medium term, this will only encourage ever more massive and distant suburb creep. Also, with longer commutes less tiresome, the negative cost of having a longer commute will be mitigated.

As for the stranger effect, there are many innovations on that front as well. Google is already has a working app that tries to arrange commutes for true ride sharing where passengers only compensate the driver for the pure cost of the ride. It's cheap and effective if you are a bit flexible in the morning.

I can see autonomous services being so cheap that they become the new corporate perk and companies find value by having employees ride together, share ideas, socialize, etc.

Also, the economies of scale alone would make a private automated car trip still cheaper than owning privately an autonomous vehicle.

The technology will move fast enough that the vast majority people will be switching from a human operated car to a self-driving car service. I can see the ad campaigns now. Basically showing people how much cheaper and safer and more convenient it is.

Cars can be seen like horses were before them, an expensive hassle that requires land for storage and usage. If you think about it, people have whole buildings just for storing cars, garages, like we did with horses, barns.

15 years from now suburbs will be built without garages and driveways. There will be a cottage industry for people to convert garages and carparks into more usable space.

20 years from now, multistory car parking lots will be the new conversion buildings like the old meat packing and textile plans that used to be in downtown areas that were turned into lofts. Polished concrete floors will feature the original parking space numbers. The open sides will feature panoramic views.

Lastly, having your own car will be a throwback element. People who like to 4x4 or work on their own cars (a huge market that might actually grow in the medium term) will fill this but, even then they'll use automated services to commute. The number of people who have hobby cars (off-roading, auto racing, vintage collectibles, restoration) will skyrocket because a car no longer has to be a daily driver.

Or people might care less about cars, I don't presume to know the complex of a future of human desire. But, in a world full of cheap cars that you driver yourself, automated car services will still create so much value that people will still switch.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#477

Post by paganel » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:27 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #434

walrus1066 wrote: post #339

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…

A lot of that will be best solved by making a lot of other actors communicate directly with the car. Traffic lights will send out the same messages they send to humans by red/green lights to the cars using radio. Emergency vehicles, roadworks, traffic signs etc will do the same. Or so I assume, because it makes so much of sense. I know there is vehicle-to-vehicle communication in the works: https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

> Traffic lights will send out the same messages they send to humans by red/green lights to the cars using radio.

I live in the capital city of an EU country, population 2 million, and there's a traffic light about two blocks away from where I live which has not been functional for about 2 weeks now. And the bad thing is that the other traffic lights from that intersection DO work, so you cannot rely on the road-signs, like one usually does when ALL traffic light from an intersection malfunction (from loss of power, mostly). So I'm a little skeptic that traffic lights will be able to "reliably" guide no-driver vehicles using radio signals anytime soon.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#478

Post by j_jochem » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:27 PM UTC

alooPotato wrote: post #414

moxious wrote: post #399

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.

If you use autonomous miles driven as a metric, there is actual progress happening. That metric is increasing exponentially btw. This tells you nothing about time to market, but it does tell you that the time to market is a definite (but maybe unknowable number). In contrast, fission reactors have been around the corner for a long time, however, there if you use the metric of net power generated from fission as a met…

I think you meant to say fusion. Fission reactors have been in productive use for decades.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#479

Post by linkregister » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:28 PM UTC

readams wrote: post #439

linkregister wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is suboptimal vertical integration. Hertz is a fleet buyer for a good reason; it doesn't want to be reliant on its Hertz Automotive subsidiary to meet a production quota. It doesn't want that capital expenditure. It wants to buy cars at volume and sell them as they depreciate.

Hertz lives in an equilibrium where lots of people buy and operator their own cars. Autonomous cars may well move us to an equilibrium where most people do not own cars and instead rely on services. That totally changes the economics of the situation.

How does it change the economics of the situation? More volume or shorter rentals? Would having more frequent rentals mean that rental companies would want to produce their own cars?

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#480

Post by londons_explore » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:28 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #404

londons_explore wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

inter-state . Ie. you're gonna have to get new laws in place allowing empty vehicles in not just one, but many states. Current driverless carpool plans might well only allow use when someone is in the vehicle, and they will likley only operate in a single state. The people-transport industry is also worth more than the goods transport industry.

> The people-transport industry is also worth more than the goods transport industry [citation needed]

1% of the US population are truck drivers[1]. 13% of an average american's income is spent on transport [2].

I'm going to assert that 100% of the income of that 1% of the population is less than 13% of the whole population's income.

[1]: http://www.alltrucking.com/faq/truck-drivers-in-the-usa/ [2]: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm