561–570 of 683 posts
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Where'd you move to?
Connecticut - I've never felt safer walking around at 3 am and I've made more friends in the last 2 months (without trying) than I probably have in the last 6 years of living in the bay area.
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> is a nonstarter for probably most of the US population. I disagree. I grew up in Rural Australia, lived in the Yukon and have driven to many of the world's most remote and undeveloped countries. You are saying "Self driving cars will NEVER work in " When what you mean to say is "Self driving cars will first work in the easy cases, and then years later will work in more and more cases until they eventually work ever…
While self driving cars are provided by private companies, self driving cars will first work in the profitable cases, and then years later will still only work in the profitable cases.
The expensive bits being:
- road maintenance
- theft and vandalism policing
Surely, once Waymo covers most cities, the marginal cost of getting one extra waymo car on the road should be substantially lower than a Bus (and maybe even a Marshrutka?)
...And then, once you have the cars on the road, to avoid increasing waiting times too much (which will lead users to prefer alternative transport methods, walking, cycling, etc.) you need to have slack/extra-capacity in any area that you're serving.
This means that I don't see why Waymo might not expand even in remote mountain towns: they are not going to have a massive fleet, but keeping one or two cars there shouldn't have a different overhead than for a Waymo car serving a city.
(the only caveat might be in making sure that the overnight depot/parking lot won't be too far from the area served).
I think that would be pretty cool, if it means that people won't have to drive themselves anymore... but I'm also quite concerned about the consequences this might have for public transport: if its usage numbers falls, and thus public investments in it stops, entire small town might end up depending on extremely few (one?) self-driving taxi providers.
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> This commentary assumes self-driving cars are here to stay and become the de facto way we drive instead of driving ourselves. This seems like an extremely myopic "tech bubble" take to me. I'm trying to find a way to put this so that it doesn't sound like an attack, but have you been to suburban or rural areas outside of places like SF, NYC or Phoenix? Being reliant on third party transportation, on roads the are of…
This is fun because until the last couple of decades, private transportation wasn’t very common in China at all, people simply didn’t own their own cars and taxis were (and still are) ubiquitous even in small rural towns (though they might be breadbox vans to supplement shared minibuses). Almost everyone was relying in third party transportation and even today most still are. And really, this kind of thing was common…
What's different about the US and those other places is that far more large cities were built after private automobiles were common. There are cars everywhere in both countryside and cities in Italy, say, but there is ALSO more walkability and transit because the cities were there first (and even there, there are cities like Florence that didn't invest in rail for decades before starting to build some more light rail again very recently).
China is something of an odd one out for development patterns because of the much higher levels of state control.
What I don't really see is places voluntarily giving up point-to-point private transit after having it as an easy option for generations. Places where even the super-wealthy have turned in their private cars and drivers and take the bus with everyone else. I think the market that self-driving cars could potentially capture over mass transit is exactly those people who would rather have a private point-to-point experience. Which can be an overlapping set with the people who would also be willing to use mass transit if it was "good enough", in addition to the people who actively dislike mass transit. The total pool of users is very large.
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> Not many people will want a $100K self driving car instead of a $30k Camry What you said is true, but does not reflect reality. Today The Model 3 is ~$40k, and once self driving is "solved", there is no reason a ~$40k car won't be capable of it.
Sure, but that’s assuming the technology on a Tesla Model 3 actually is capable of safely self driving. Today, Waymo is the clear winner, and the equipment costs a lot more than a Tesla. I know Elon/Tesla can be a charged topic, but teslas don’t self drive today. It might be true, but I don’t think we can assume they’re capable with just a software update based on the info we have today.
I don’t think that is true. What costs a lot more? Lidar?
Call it $10k more on the very high end. So you have fully self driving cars for $50k. A very long way from your $100k
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The police department won’t have sophisticated government drones for at least another 20 years, that is if expensive drones prove to be worth the effort and cost to allow civilian level law enforcement to have one. The point of this conversation isn’t to trump how you can get around my lie. The point is that I can lie to get out of any spurious law enforcement pursuits, and that is freedom. A drone isn’t impossible t…
> The point is that I can lie to get out of any spurious law enforcement pursuits, and that is freedom. You know that police are known for their brutality in both rural and urban environs, right? My dad lied to the cops when he lived out in the boonies and he got the shit kicked out of him and was thrown in jail on bullshit charges. He was released the next day, but his rib wouldn't heal for weeks.
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> This commentary assumes self-driving cars are here to stay and become the de facto way we drive instead of driving ourselves. This seems like an extremely myopic "tech bubble" take to me. I'm trying to find a way to put this so that it doesn't sound like an attack, but have you been to suburban or rural areas outside of places like SF, NYC or Phoenix? Being reliant on third party transportation, on roads the are of…
> is a nonstarter for probably most of the US population. I disagree. I grew up in Rural Australia, lived in the Yukon and have driven to many of the world's most remote and undeveloped countries. You are saying "Self driving cars will NEVER work in " When what you mean to say is "Self driving cars will first work in the easy cases, and then years later will work in more and more cases until they eventually work ever…
That is, for many areas, I don't think it's just a case of the tech improving bit-by-bit and taking over more and more areas. I think that will happen in some ways, but take for example a friend of mine who lives in Pennsylvania. Where he lives is a far-out suburb, but he often drives out to rural areas on the weekend to go camping, or he drives long distances to various client sites. Forget the tech, I just don't see how an economic model of a self-driving car company would make these kinds of trips feasible anytime in the foreseeable future.
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This is fun because until the last couple of decades, private transportation wasn’t very common in China at all, people simply didn’t own their own cars and taxis were (and still are) ubiquitous even in small rural towns (though they might be breadbox vans to supplement shared minibuses). Almost everyone was relying in third party transportation and even today most still are. And really, this kind of thing was common…
Private car ownership has not been unusual in developed countries. There is a reason so many large car manufactures are not American, after all. It's not just to sell to people in NA and Australia. What's different about the US and those other places is that far more large cities were built after private automobiles were common. There are cars everywhere in both countryside and cities in Italy, say, but there is ALSO…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This commentary assumes self-driving cars are here to stay and become the de facto way we drive instead of driving ourselves. This seems like an extremely myopic "tech bubble" take to me. I'm trying to find a way to put this so that it doesn't sound like an attack, but have you been to suburban or rural areas outside of places like SF, NYC or Phoenix? Being reliant on third party transportation, on roads the are of…
This is fun because until the last couple of decades, private transportation wasn’t very common in China at all, people simply didn’t own their own cars and taxis were (and still are) ubiquitous even in small rural towns (though they might be breadbox vans to supplement shared minibuses). Almost everyone was relying in third party transportation and even today most still are. And really, this kind of thing was common…
Lots of tech folks love to shit on "car-culture" in the US, and while I agree it has resulted in really crappy urban design for a lot of US cities, you can't ignore that a lot of people love their cars because it gives them a ton of freedom. People like being able to go off at a moment's notice, independently, and drive long distances.
America may be an "outlier", but that still doesn't mean that it's reasonable to think we'll move from where we are now to getting rid of our cars because that's how China does it.
Genuine question: What is stopping some small percent of drivers from installing cameras and using ML to identify cars driving dangerously (e.g. speeding, running reds, changing multiple lanes at once, etc.), and when their license plate is identifiable, finding and informing their insurance company? If even a small subset of users did this, and insurers did something with this information, it would substantially dis…
Setting aside the obvious dystopian next steps, I think the main problem with automated traffic law enforcement is that our laws are quite bad in the sense that they rely on enforcement being loose and somewhat subjective to even work at all. The speeds on various roads, the timing of traffic lights, the places one can park and for how long, etc, are not carefully planned or thought out enough to actually work if eve…
Genuine question: What is stopping some small percent of drivers from installing cameras and using ML to identify cars driving dangerously (e.g. speeding, running reds, changing multiple lanes at once, etc.), and when their license plate is identifiable, finding and informing their insurance company? If even a small subset of users did this, and insurers did something with this information, it would substantially dis…
It's so very HN that we get into fits about Google and Facebook and Apple and so on tracking us to make a buck, but the idea of an insurance company deputizing millions of cameras to perform mass surveillance to make a buck is suddenly okay because drivers that make us angry on the road get hurt by it. The obvious answer to this proposal is that I believe that I have a right to not be monitored and penalized by auton…
And to make roads safer.