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A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

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Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#471

Post by rglullis »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #467
rglullis wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much are you willing to bet that the price of a Waymo ride will converge to be within 10% of the price of an Uber ride today? (Also, followup question: how are the prices of Uber rides compared with regular taxi service, now that Uber has stopped subsidizing most of their trips?)

> How much are you willing to bet that the price of a Waymo ride will converge to be within 10% of the price of an Uber ride today? It should! That’s the competition! Hell, I’ll pay a premium for a quieter, safer (and for now, due to novelty, more fun) ride. And if Waymo maintain a monopoly that will stay the case. Otherwise, the normal thing will happen. > how are the prices of Uber rides compared with regular taxi…

Thank you for spelling out my argument for me: regardless of situation, the cost of labor has nothing to do with it.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#472

Post by zahlman »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #463
zahlman wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Add last-mile and model for the real American population distribution. Not an imagined America where everyone lives on Manhattan. Last I checked, Waymo also operates exclusively in urban areas.

> Waymo also operates exclusively in urban areas There is no proximate future where public transit makes sense in Wyoming. There are multiple where self-driving cars do.

Self-driving cars are public transit depending on the terms of use; but I assume we're really talking about mass transit here.

When I was in Germany 25 years ago, a district of about 25k people (less than 1k per square mile) had multiple bus routes (4 IIRC) connecting the main town to other settlements, running through farmland. It was not unduly expensive and the locals certainly seemed to think it made sense. Children would take it to school in lieu of a dedicated school-owned service.

There's a light rail system in Rennes, France (city population about 225k; metro about 750k - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennes) that's longer than the PATH system in the NYC area and almost as well used (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems).

Even Iceland has public buses, both local and inter-city (https://www.straeto.is/en).

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#473

Post by Reubend »

foobarqux wrote: post #394
Reubend wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> did we exclude drivers who were not eligible to drive One could argue here that it would be unfair to exclude the worst performing humans. Plenty of humans cause accidents for easily preventable reasons, but that's an honest part of our behavior. Or to rephrase, I think excluding the categories of people who drive terribly, but do still drive nonetheless, would be less representative of reality. > Did Waymo drive a…

> No, they didn't. Their methodology didn't adjust for things like highway vs city street miles, although it did adjust for city and state. Doesn't Waymo only drive in the city? And damage/injury is much greater on highways? If so that pretty much makes the study worthless.

AFAIK they drive on highways for testing, but they don't offer commercial rides on highway routes to customers yet. If that's still the case, I'd expect the majority of their miles to be on city streets. As I already pointed out, that's a big flaw in their methodology.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#474

Post by JumpCrisscross »

rglullis wrote: post #471
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How much are you willing to bet that the price of a Waymo ride will converge to be within 10% of the price of an Uber ride today? It should! That’s the competition! Hell, I’ll pay a premium for a quieter, safer (and for now, due to novelty, more fun) ride. And if Waymo maintain a monopoly that will stay the case. Otherwise, the normal thing will happen. > how are the prices of Uber rides compared with regular taxi…

Thank you for spelling out my argument for me: regardless of situation, the cost of labor has nothing to do with it.

> regardless of situation, the cost of labor has nothing to do with it

Sort of. The cost of labor is the cost floor of the competition. So long as Waymo et al are smaller than the competition, i.e. so long as they don’t need to compete on price, they should tack under their direction. They aren’t setting the market price.

The moment they need to compete, they can tank the price or increase service quality. (They could also stay put and milk it. But that invites new-entrant competition.)

Internet companies compete on price out the gate because we have low marginal costs. A company like Waymo has hardware costs that make competing on price out the gate prohibitive. So in a sense, their costs don’t have to do with labour. But that’s sort of true for any automation tech.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#475

Post by benhurmarcel »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #313
Brian_K_White wrote: post #93

I just heard someone mention in a podcast how as a cyclist they need to make eye contact with drivers to be safe, and there is no one to make eye contact with. Waymo would say "don't worry, it sees you" and maybe the numbers even show they do some percentage more than the average human driver, but that still does not reproduce the self-help aspect of you looking at a driver until you see that that driver sees you. I…

> I just heard someone mention in a podcast how as a cyclist they need to make eye contact with drivers to be safe, and there is no one to make eye contact with. Cyclist here. Are you worried Waymos are going to blow through stop signs (or red lights) AND run you over? Or are there other situations where you're making eye contact with drivers?

For example if a car is waiting at a stop sign, or getting out of a driveway, and I have priority, I always check if the driver is looking at me. If not, he possibly didn’t see me and might go while I pass.

It happens that drivers only check for any large moving object (because they expect cars) and don’t notice a cyclist.

Basically any time a car has to wait for me to pass, and I don’t have much distance to react if it doesn’t, I make sure the driver has seen me.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#476

Post by kiba »

zenonu wrote: post #320
Qem wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the advent of self driving cars will just help get the streets even more clogged with cars.

There's a future, not in the short-term, where 99% of folks don't need to or want to own a car. You hail a ride, and a vehicle shows up, perhaps with 3 of people in the vehicle in their own bubble internally designed into the car. You get in, it drops offs others in the vehicle, and then finally drops you off. The vehicle exhausts its entire electric charge, recharges, and then gets back on the road. The number of ve…

Like I said, a self driving car isn't ever going to be efficient as a bus. The bus can literally do the same thing as a car, but better.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#477

Post by mtts »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #289
mtts wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just as a cyclist. As a pedestrian in one of those huge Asian metropolises with absolutely bonkers traffic, you should never ever make eye contact either. It’s the only way drivers will stop for you.

Really? I've seen a number of drivers in Shanghai stop for me while I'm just standing in the middle of the road, waiting for a clear spot in the traffic. Actually, I got a fairly strong feeling that Shanghai traffic has gotten noticeably less crazy over time, but I can't rule out that I was just observing the local traffic of different regions of Shanghai at different times.

Haven’t experienced Shanghai personally but ten years ago in Xi’an and Chengdu, yes, this sometimes was the only way to cross roads. In Jakarta and Bangkok, however, this always is the only way. Compared to those cities, however, the traffic in Chinese cities I’ve seen was always very organized.

In Iranian cities, however …

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#478

Post by kmarc »

mulmen wrote: post #59
kmarc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite brain picker question: What year would the EU* ban human driven cars on public roads? That's it. Million different opinions ranging from "never" to "within a couple decades for sure", weak, strong opinions, and of course many interesting topics to branch out into. *: sometimes I ask with US, or particular countries, it doesn't really matter for the sake of conversation. Fun fact: people working in automot…

Have they banned horses yet? My money is on never. This technology doesn’t need a ban to succeed. It just needs to be allowed.

Change the question to "highways" then. (at least in most European countries, AFAIK horses are banned from them)

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#479

Post by anal_reactor »

tim333 wrote: post #387
anal_reactor wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard agree. Soviet Union built its economy around making sure that everyone had a job and, as a result... oh wait, nevermind.

That was one of the few aspects of their economy which was probably good.

At some point my country started borrowing lots of money and spending it on social programs, which eventually led to its bankruptcy. Some people still think that the guy in charge back then was a great leader.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#480

Post by rglullis »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #474
rglullis wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for spelling out my argument for me: regardless of situation, the cost of labor has nothing to do with it.

> regardless of situation, the cost of labor has nothing to do with it Sort of. The cost of labor is the cost floor of the competition. So long as Waymo et al are smaller than the competition, i.e. so long as they don’t need to compete on price, they should tack under their direction. They aren’t setting the market price. The moment they need to compete, they can tank the price or increase service quality. (They coul…

> They could also stay put and milk it. But that invites new-entrant competition.

And believing that this is likely to happen is the problem I have with the whole proposition. I don't see any real player with capital, data and tech know-how to get into this in a way to turn it into a proper competition.

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