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A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

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Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#71

Post by jellicle »

amarshall wrote: post #8
l3robot wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not also to mention something often oversight. An autonomous car can park far away from it's user, meaning we could drastically reduce de number of space taken by parking in the city. First, giving back this spaces to the people as green parks and services places. Second, lower one of the biggest problem in our current city: urban heat island.

But then you’ll likely have a bunch of extra traffic created from the cars going to and from their owner to parking, rather than just to and from their destination. Or from the car just circling the block because the owner would rather not have to wait long for its return.

Right. You go to the opera, you order the car to drive around the block for two hours and then pick you up. Cost of gas is cheaper than parking and by definition, you're not affected by any traffic congestion caused as you're sitting watching your show. Sure, 1000 other people in the theater are also doing it, but that's not your problem.

30 minutes before the show is over, you order the car to wait in the "no stopping" zone in front of the theater for easy access. You exit the theater and find your car is tangled in a mess of traffic that takes 45 minutes to clear as most of the cars are double-parked and blocking traffic, waiting for their owners. For the duration of the show, no useful traffic has been able to move for a mile in any direction, as empty cars are just idling around and are content to wait, fully stopped.

Tragedy of the commons.

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#72

Post by jellicle »

ben509 wrote: post #41

There's a solution to the congestion problem that works even without AVs: private ownership of roads and automated pricing. Right now, you don't really pay to use roads, you only pay a gas tax to drive on any road. If specific roads were all tolled, and your navigation app (or AV) can tell you the cheapest route and time to drive, people can make better decisions. And people living nearby should be able to collect nu…

I bought the road in front of your office building and now I'm charging $10,000/trip for you to use it. Sorry. I'd be happy to buy the building from you, at a slight discount.

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#73

Post by OnlineGladiator »

kjksf wrote: post #57
Someone wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”The cars would no longer be an expression of personality and a status symbol” You’re not the only one claiming that, but I don’t think it automatically follows. People can currently afford to buy cars for themselves, so unless self-driving cars will be (much) more expensive, people still would be able to afford them. So, in this case, the question is what else, if anything, people would want to use their money on in…

When you use X and then a substitute Y arrives that is 10x cheaper and more convenient, you'll switch to it. Using robotaxi network will be much cheaper than total cost of owning a car, mostly because cars are dramatically underutilized. On average a car is used 1-2 hrs a day out of 12-16 hrs it could be used as a robotaxi. To start off we have 5-7x price difference. Then most use is not shared. Assuming robotaxis wi…

> The cars will last much longer. 500k miles vs. 100k miles of a typical car for personal use. 500k is already a reality with Teslas (https://qz.com/1737145/the-economics-of-driving-seven-teslas...) and Tesla is working to make 1 million miles cars.

First of all, thank you for an interesting article! Looking at it quickly though, if I make some rough extrapolations from their data, it seems like most Teslas will have lost about 40% of their battery life by 500,000 miles. So I really think it's disingenuous to say that a Tesla can drive that long, when its range starts to make it significantly less useful, when replacing the batteries would cost more than buying a cheap car. Basically I think you are just exaggerating the benefit of longevity for electric cars.

That said though, the Tesla batteries are holding up better than I thought and I agree with you electric cars are better for higher mileage applications!

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#74

Post by jacquesm »

Aloha wrote: post #32
jliptzin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you won’t need to park cars on valuable street area. Ideally they’d only stop to load/unload passengers, or to charge. That would free up many more lanes on city streets.

They need to go somewhere , no one is going to send their car home on a 40 mile one way trip.

Depending on the parking fees I might just take that bet.

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#75

Post by chadcmulligan »

I used chauffeured cars yesterday, I just shared them with other people. I went to the beach, and had no real plan, I thought I'll go here, clicked on my app and it told me where to go, usually walk a couple of hundred metres. I spent the day travelling and walking around cost about $20 and travelled a couple of hundred kilometres. I took my laptop and worked in between scenic spots.

I was thinking about this yesterday, I prefer catching trains and trams to buses - because trains don't throw you around when they turn corners, because the tracks can't have sharp corners. I was thinking if buses were made to be a little bit nicer - something like tour coaches then car usage would go down.

Self driving cars have a very real chance of becoming a nightmare scenario (and I used to think the future with them would be amazing), a world of roads everywhere always full of cars half of them empty going backwards and forwards all day every day.

Do other places have an app available like this - https://translink.com.au ?, there's a phone version to. If more people used public transport then it would become better. The system is also tied into a card which you can just tap on to travel, so if you change buses etc the final charge is just the number of "zones" you go through, there are 5 zones in the local couple of hundred kilometres.

One of the real problems with cars is that the cost of highways and roads isn't factored into the travel, it comes from the bucket of government, whereas trains and trams (and busways) have to include the cost of the rails. This distorts the relative costs and leads to suburbs created a long way from cities with ever increasing highways and highway costs.

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#77

Post by maxerickson »

CydeWeys wrote: post #58
maxerickson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, their point is clear enough. My point is that the politics of landuse are hopeless enough that other mitigations will be more beneficial for quite some time to come.

I disagree, I think the politics of land use are more easily solvable than the simple physics problem of too many cars, not enough space. Plenty of other countries in the world (and even some US cities) have solved the land use problem to the point that most people don't use space-inefficient private vehicles to get around. It's solvable and there are working models to emulate. This is not true of your alternative.

How does Northern Wisconsin emulate the Randstad? Does everybody move to Green Bay?

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#78

Post by desas »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #68
Spooky23 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is those numbers are off. With margin, the services are always more expensive. I drive a fancyish SUV, and my average per-trip cost is around $3. I can Uber for $8-10 minimum or ride a bus for $1.5. Robot cars are going to be more like Uber, as you won’t have the driver losing money on depreciation.

Robotaxis should roughly drop the cost of “Uber’s” to 1/3. Currently Uber only collects 25% of the fair for itself. The rest is for the human driving. Robotaxis can also be used 24/7 so better capital utilization on the initial investment for the car. Maintenance costs reduce with scale (+in house mechanics to improve margins). Maintenance costs reduce with electric drive trains. Maintenance costs reduce with better…

> Currently Uber only collects 25% of the fair for itself. The rest is for the human driving.

Who pays for the car currently? In the UK it's not uber, it's the human as far as I've understood it.

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#79

Post by desas »

neaanopri wrote: post #66
ben509 wrote: post #41

There's a solution to the congestion problem that works even without AVs: private ownership of roads and automated pricing. Right now, you don't really pay to use roads, you only pay a gas tax to drive on any road. If specific roads were all tolled, and your navigation app (or AV) can tell you the cheapest route and time to drive, people can make better decisions. And people living nearby should be able to collect nu…

Gas taxes are already an effective road use tax, with infrastructure for collection already in place

At what point do electric vehicles make that untrue?

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#80

Post by jedberg »

desas wrote: post #79
neaanopri wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas taxes are already an effective road use tax, with infrastructure for collection already in place

At what point do electric vehicles make that untrue?

Depends on the state. California is now charging a much higher renewal rate for EVs specifically to make up for the loss of gas tax revenue.
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