541–550 of 769 posts
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It has be better than the best human driver or they'll get sued out of existance. You can't sell a product that you know will hurt or kill a certain number of people.
I'm pretty sure the car industry has been doing that for years.
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 But how is this going to work? In cities, everyone uses their car at exactly the same time: roughly, between 8-9 in the morning and 5-7 in the evening. If you don't own a car, chances are you won't get one when you need it to get to work on time. Or, if there are enough cars for peak hours, then demand for new cars will…
Have you ever been in a car?
I've gotten plenty of sleep in cars, but never has the word "comfortable" crossed my mind when I woke up afterwards. I reckon it's something about that whole annoying safety thing requiring you to sit still upright strapped to your seat that ruins the comfort factor for me. YMMV though.
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User is ubiquitous only because of its ability to burn an astonishing amount of money. Their bet is that they am do this long enough to make themselves the market leader. I am not convinced that they can continue to lose money at the rate they currently are for the future potential as a monopoly provider. At some point investors are going to ask for a return or bail on the company.
I don't disagree with you but people said the same thing about amazon for over a decade....
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> 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 can't add anything profound, but I will say that 40+ years ago I camped at Disney's Ft. Wilderness campground, with all my many brothers and sisters. The electric trams had a routine schedule that came around and stopped almost in front of your campsite, all of kids would simply jump on, go to anywhere in the park like the stores, the showers, the outdoor theater, and hop off again. It was incredibly liberating and…
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> Or, if there are enough cars for peak hours, then demand for new cars will not fall that much (although the structure of ownership may in fact change). Initially, no, but long-term you can move much parking to cheaper places around the periphery of the urban area rather than needing a parking spot where people live, one where they work, and fractions everywhere else they might go. So sustainable density of everythi…
In the shorter term, there are still huge efficiencies to be gained with smarter ride sharing. Imagine if something like uberpool served a majority of car commuters instead of a tiny fraction... you could get a lot of cars off the road but still provide a very high level of service.
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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.
> those who live in the urban centres Per the 2010 US census, over 80% of the US population lives in urban areas.
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> Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive But how is this going to work? In cities, everyone uses their car at exactly the same time: roughly, between 8-9 in the morning and 5-7 in the evening. If you don't own a car, chances are you won't get one when you need it to get to work on time. Or, if there are enough cars for peak hours, then demand for new cars will…
Peak pricing can spread out demand a bit, and also, people can use much smaller vehicles most of the time. We buy cars for worst case size or conditions. Look around the parking lot of a white collar work place that is filled up with four wheel drive all terrain vehicles and pickup trucks. Ride sharing for rush hour would use a ton of compact vehicles. Even if the number of vehicles is the same to account for peak us…
As for "much smaller cars most of the time": not if you want to maintain the current safety level while also being able to travel faster than 20 mph.
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 need to reliably deal with an almost infinite number of edge and corner cases, each quite different from the last. It doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be better than average human drivers. Sure there will be cases it can't handle. But the same is much more true for human.
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The page about technology says, "Our sensors observe that the cyclist has extended their left arm. Detecting the cyclist's hand signal, our software predicts that the cyclist will move to the left side of the lane." This suggests to me that they're trying to deal with situations like the ones you've brought up.
So far the focus was primarily on what it would take to produce an autonomous car, which is primarily a technological challenge. But what I see as a harder problem to solve is the one imposed on all humans participating in traffic: we will have to strictly adhere and be very self-disciplined in traffic, in order to make sure that the non-humans get the correct message. Imagine I am a cyclist and I don't signal but I…
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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…