Brett_Murphy said:How many of you are visualizing cars that look like Smart Cars or Fiat 500s in your view of what an autonomous vehicle is going to look like? Because when I envision them, that is what I am picturing.
I see Egg shape. Tighter turning radius, Less corner damage in crowded conditions. Plus easier to blow mold the plastic bodies.
In reply to frenchyd :
I would not envy the guy tasked with programing the "limits" for the mess. It's easy to spot a gum wrapper or beer can. What if the seat is soaked with the previous rider's beverage spill that won't easily show up on camera? How will a camera know if the liquid is soda or a bodily fluid? What amount of bodily fluid is acceptable, and does that depend on the fluid? Will the cars have a blacklight to automatically detect if there's been some sort of fluid mess created? What if the rider has an autoimmune disease and is sensitive or allergic to certain smells like cigarette smoke or perfume? That's not a visual mess, but it can certainly make a car seem dirty and unusable to the right rider. A human driver could easily notice something like that. A robot with a camera is a lot less likely to do that. And all of this added tech is starting to raise the purchase price of the vehicle and increase the maintenance.
Those are tangential issues to the topic of this thread (autonomous vehicles potentially improving traffic congestion), so let me try to bring it back closer to the topic. When a customer declines the vehicle that showed up you have to send another vehicle, which means at least 1 empty trip (the dirty vehicle to the cleaning location), and possibly 2 (the replacement for the dirty vehicle that would be rushed to the location to minimize inconvenience to the customer). The whole premise behind autonomous taxis is that they'd be cheaper to operate than manned taxis by eliminating wasteful driving and operating more efficiently. Multiple empty trips don't do that. That just increases costs and does nothing to decrease traffic congestion. It could even be making it worse, as modern ride sharing has been proven to do in many places already.
I was listening to a radio show about the original issue, circling empty cars, the other day and you all are doing a much better job of coming up with problems and solutions than the supposed experts they had on.
SVreX said:In reply to mad_machine :
I’m not sure I agree.
It would cure it for the “common man”. But the residents of a place like Manhattan in NYC are not common. They are elite by the very fact that they live in that city.
They are not gonna share a ride. And with an autonomous car, they wouldn’t even have to pay for a parking garage any more.
So, the visitors, tourists, and poor slobs like me would get to navigate a “per use” system through a city that was congested with increased numbers of vehicles privately owned by wealthy local residents.
I'm not sure Manhattan is a good example since there are already a number of options for transportation other than private cars. At least for existing city residents. Few who live in NYC use cars to get around whether they own them or not. They just take too long and other options are faster (mainly the subway). For commuters, the situation may be different.
I could also imagine different subscription tiers that would influence the type of car that picks you up. Pay $/month and you get a sub-compact. Pay $$$$/mo and you get a nice leather trimmed Benz with a lot of leg room and fast WiFi (although 5G will probably be a thing by this point). With various options in between along with "I need a car NOW" premiums.
Imagine parking lots strictly for self-driving cars. Without the need for a driver to open a door to get out, cars could be parked considerably tighter in lots and in tiered organization.
he same swarm programming that could give advantages such as advanced look-ahead via networking, or the ability for vehicles to safely travel together at 100 mph only 1 foot off the bumper of the vehicle in front of them, could also be used for the opposite: massive coordinated intentional traffic jams blockading entire cities and residential subdivisions.
I already saw that movie way back in 1969.
I have a few random thoughts:
I doubt either the smart car/Fiat/egg shape will be the future, for a while, anyway. Crash standards are the hang up. Unless we do a Demolition Man style foam.
Also, in shared vehicle situations, who gets/pays tickets, parking, or otherwise?
I don’t see this as becoming a problem. Right now traffic in much of Manhattan is already incredibly congested with vehicles and thanks to Uber’s odd business model of not having to turn a profit or pay its contractors much of that traffic is made up of cars either double parked or aimlessly circling waiting for a customer. The only difference there would be the lack of a body in the car. I don’t see how cars being driverless will increase the number of cars when there’s already a surplus of cars waiting for customers.
As others have pointed out “ride sharing” has been here for a couple hundred years as horse drawn carriages and taxis. Most of the actual private cars in Manhattan are coming in from outside, few car trips in Manhattan originated here as for short trips taxis, car services or public transportation is generally easier than having to drive yourself and finding parking.
As for a shared car making multiple trips during rush hour from outside of a city, that would only work if more people staggered their workday. Right now pretty much 100% of our fleet is on the road from 7-9am and 4-8pm. The rest of the day most of our commuter buses and a fair chunk of local buses are sitting. I don’t know how interested a private company would be in investing in cars that only ran those hours for one or two passengers at a time.
If the "autonomous on demand pod" revolution ever comes to pass I am going to become a modern-day robber baron and hijack them and do all sorts of wacky stuff like paint lines into the side of a wall with a painting of a tunnel on it.
(*Note: It's not happening)
Javelin said:If the "autonomous on demand pod" revolution ever comes to pass I am going to become a modern-day robber baron and hijack them and do all sorts of wacky stuff like paint lines into the side of a wall with a painting of a tunnel on it.
(*Note: It's not happening)
Actually (acktully) there's been a bunch of recent studies that have shown it's pretty easy to trick the autonomous vehicle's computer into having the car do something pretty dangerous by painting a seemingly innocuous symbols on the ground, guide rails, or traffic control signs. It has to do with how the machine has learned to understand and interpret the environment which is much different than how a human processes information.
More to the point of the thread. The part that these studies seem to ignore is that the "summon a travel pod" model requires a modification to the current socially accepted work schedule in order to work. Basically there needs to be enough capacity to get everyone where they need to go during peak times and a lot of downtime in between. That means there will still be a similar number of vehicles on the road to what we see currently just without the convenience of owning your own car when you need to use it for something else. That's not an issue if you go to work at 10 am but if you're like a large swath of the populace, leaving the house between 7 and 9 am and leaving work between 5 and 6 pm, the number of vehicles will remain pretty much the same with basically the same issues.
So unless these companies can force some serious social change, it's a pretty thin bet that the proposed for rent model will work the way they seem to be assuming.
In reply to The0retical :
I don’t think they are going to force social change. They are going to force business model change.
If a self driving car can replace a taxi, then lots of expenses change. Payroll, liability insurance, throughput per vehicle, taxi medallions...
There could be a really big change in operating costs to an operator.
And the usable time per vehicle would increase. 4x as many hours in the work week as when there is a single driver working a 40 hour week
Owner/ operators could increase dramatically. A taxi driver could realize he could make almost as much money owning a vehicle he didn’t have to drive as he does driving someone else’s taxi. As soon as he can afford it, he can buy a second car.
There may also be a little bit of social change. Hailing a ride on an app feels like the user is in control, as opposed to running into traffic waving your arms. A map identifying exactly where the ride is and when it will arrive will also matter.
Also, a user would not have to get into the back seat of a vehicle with a driver who spoke with a weird accent or made them feel uncomfortable.
Users like to feel like they are in control. Don’t underestimate how much people feel like they are in control with a cellphone in their hands.
Uber doesn’t need to create social change or market share. They can steal someone else’s market share.
In reply to SVreX :
That's valid. Cutting the sentient meat out of the equation significantly reduces overhead in for operators enabling them to operate more AV taxis while still keeping costs semi fixed per vehicle. I'd be interested to see a study on how it would scale.
On the other hand I'm thinking about the inevitable 3rd trip to the parts store to fix whatever else I broke fixing something at 10-15 bucks round trip each time (which is 300ish miles of gas and just over a weeks worth of my normal drive or 78 miles at GSA reimbursement rates.)
A large enough self driving vehicle could actually be the office, and could pick you up at home. No reason why you can't work during the commute if you're not driving and you aren't giving away company secrets to total strangers on the bus/train/taxi.
A two cubicle vehicle wouldn't take up any more room than a taxi does now, and if it replaced physical office space think of the cost savings.
The0retical said:In reply to SVreX :
That's valid. Cutting the sentient meat out of the equation significantly reduces overhead in for operators enabling them to operate more AV taxis while still keeping costs semi fixed per vehicle. I'd be interested to see a study on how it would scale.
On the other hand I'm thinking about the inevitable 3rd trip to the parts store to fix whatever else I broke fixing something at 10-15 bucks round trip each time (which is 300ish miles of gas and just over a weeks worth of my normal drive or 78 miles at GSA reimbursement rates.)
I linked to a relevant MIT cost study on the first page. They found that an autonomous taxi might be significantly more expensive to operate on a per mile basis than the current system.
In reply to STM317 :
I guess I'm off to read the entire thing then so I don't look like more of a complete idiot...
STM317 said:In reply to frenchyd :
I would not envy the guy tasked with programing the "limits" for the mess. It's easy to spot a gum wrapper or beer can. What if the seat is soaked with the previous rider's beverage spill that won't easily show up on camera? How will a camera know if the liquid is soda or a bodily fluid? What amount of bodily fluid is acceptable, and does that depend on the fluid? Will the cars have a blacklight to automatically detect if there's been some sort of fluid mess created? What if the rider has an autoimmune disease and is sensitive or allergic to certain smells like cigarette smoke or perfume? That's not a visual mess, but it can certainly make a car seem dirty and unusable to the right rider. A human driver could easily notice something like that. A robot with a camera is a lot less likely to do that. And all of this added tech is starting to raise the purchase price of the vehicle and increase the maintenance.
Those are tangential issues to the topic of this thread (autonomous vehicles potentially improving traffic congestion), so let me try to bring it back closer to the topic. When a customer declines the vehicle that showed up you have to send another vehicle, which means at least 1 empty trip (the dirty vehicle to the cleaning location), and possibly 2 (the replacement for the dirty vehicle that would be rushed to the location to minimize inconvenience to the customer). The whole premise behind autonomous taxis is that they'd be cheaper to operate than manned taxis by eliminating wasteful driving and operating more efficiently. Multiple empty trips don't do that. That just increases costs and does nothing to decrease traffic congestion. It could even be making it worse, as modern ride sharing has been proven to do in many places already.
Really? You want solutions to all future problems? I can probably come up with some off the cuff but that doesn’t mean they will be the best solutions.
The luddites feared the future simply because they failed to anticipate the additional opportunities the future holds. Things we can’t see today because we haven’t got the right perspective.
Who knew a person could make a nice supplemental income stream just retrieving and recharging electric scooters? Two years ago it didn’t exist.
What other opportunities are just around the corner? A decade ago only a tiny few had a lawn service. Now those darn trailers are blocking traffic every non rainy day of the summer.
A decade ago I was selling $85,000 construction telehandlers to framing contractors like popcorn. Selling wasn’t hard, getting enough to meet demand was the problem. Today finding carpenters who need one is what’s hard.
wheelsmithy said:I have a few random thoughts:
I doubt either the smart car/Fiat/egg shape will be the future, for a while, anyway. Crash standards are the hang up. Unless we do a Demolition Man style foam.
Also, in shared vehicle situations, who gets/pays tickets, parking, or otherwise?
Why would an autonomous car get a ticket? Surely it’s programmed well enough to avoid such things. Without living in the future our perspective is all skewed. Will we still have smart devices or will that chip simply be embedded? Or not even needed? What wonders will AI do? What horrors? Silly, funny, foolish things?
Will it figure us out and recorded in the cloud somewhere what you will do in a given situation?
Wally said:I don’t see this as becoming a problem. Right now traffic in much of Manhattan is already incredibly congested with vehicles and thanks to Uber’s odd business model of not having to turn a profit or pay its contractors much of that traffic is made up of cars either double parked or aimlessly circling waiting for a customer. The only difference there would be the lack of a body in the car. I don’t see how cars being driverless will increase the number of cars when there’s already a surplus of cars waiting for customers.
As others have pointed out “ride sharing” has been here for a couple hundred years as horse drawn carriages and taxis. Most of the actual private cars in Manhattan are coming in from outside, few car trips in Manhattan originated here as for short trips taxis, car services or public transportation is generally easier than having to drive yourself and finding parking.
As for a shared car making multiple trips during rush hour from outside of a city, that would only work if more people staggered their workday. Right now pretty much 100% of our fleet is on the road from 7-9am and 4-8pm. The rest of the day most of our commuter buses and a fair chunk of local buses are sitting. I don’t know how interested a private company would be in investing in cars that only ran those hours for one or two passengers at a time.
Will the office commute even be the norm in the future? With face time, Skype, and etc. won’t the office be at home?
Javelin said:If the "autonomous on demand pod" revolution ever comes to pass I am going to become a modern-day robber baron and hijack them and do all sorts of wacky stuff like paint lines into the side of a wall with a painting of a tunnel on it.
(*Note: It's not happening)
AI will note your comment stored in the cloud, anticipate the likelihood of you actually following up on it and dispatch Robocop accordingly.
SVreX said:In reply to The0retical :
I don’t think they are going to force social change. They are going to force business model change.
If a self driving car can replace a taxi, then lots of expenses change. Payroll, liability insurance, throughput per vehicle, taxi medallions...
There could be a really big change in operating costs to an operator.
And the usable time per vehicle would increase. 4x as many hours in the work week as when there is a single driver working a 40 hour week
Owner/ operators could increase dramatically. A taxi driver could realize he could make almost as much money owning a vehicle he didn’t have to drive as he does driving someone else’s taxi. As soon as he can afford it, he can buy a second car.
There may also be a little bit of social change. Hailing a ride on an app feels like the user is in control, as opposed to running into traffic waving your arms. A map identifying exactly where the ride is and when it will arrive will also matter.
Also, a user would not have to get into the back seat of a vehicle with a driver who spoke with a weird accent or made them feel uncomfortable.
Users like to feel like they are in control. Don’t underestimate how much people feel like they are in control with a cellphone in their hands.
Uber doesn’t need to create social change or market share. They can steal someone else’s market share.
I like your thinking. Maybe the future really is in human carrying hover craft so roads become multi level.
The future is going to be so exciting. But I’m reminded of that ancient Chinese curse. May you live in interesting times.
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