And I think it’s easy to see that benefits of AVs far outweigh any issues that you can foresee. It’ll be hard to imagine a horseback rider even fathom the idea of having asphalts paved across the entire globe, yet here we are. Entire cities are built in under 10 years.
I’ve never once denied the advantages of fully functioning AVs.
I’m just pessimistic on when the technology will be fully functioning. Where “fully functioning” means “at least as good as me in virtually all scenarios”.
Sure, and to me the ground breaking moment will be when it can replace a significant number of Uber eats and Uber rides and truck drivers.
That probably has something to do with me living a different kind of life than Twig.
It’s been a year since I’ve been grocery shopping. Maybe 5 years since I’ve been in a store like Costco, and decades since I’ve been to a mall.
For the record, I’d love to be able to take a nap on a road trip or send my car to pick up my niece from my brother’s house while I stay home and cook dinner.
I just think that stuff is a lllllllloooooooooooooooooonngggg ways off.
The tech will get there faster if infrastructure is also improved with its existence in mind, similar to roads and cars. Essentially you have to go all in. Government ban of manual cars (horses) on the road, newly designed traffic laws and roads, etc.
Having public acceptance would be nice too, so get optimistic already!
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Yeah, there’s potential, certainly.
But I think the first step is going to be something that is only functional on highways. Maybe only certain highways at first.
To replace the Uber Eats driver you’ve got to be able to handle snow and ice and garbage trucks and knowing the difference between a plastic bag and a chihuahua and that it’s ok to drive in the lane of oncoming traffic when the electric company is trimming tree branches and the employee directs you around the truck while he holds the cars coming the opposite direction.
I think that stuff is orders of magnitude harder than something that works only on 20 specific interstate highways.
That’s going to take probably 50 years from when the first fully functioning AV hits the market. I won’t be alive when it happens for sure.
Another issue with Uber Eats… so say I’m in a high rise condo, which I used to live in.
An Uber Eats driver will park in the driveway and bring my food inside, up to my door on the 11th floor.
An AV is going to mean that I have to put on a coat and boots and take the elevator down to the lobby and go outside in the snow.
Or if I’m ordering food for the quarterly actuary lunch where all of the actuaries in the company get together for a pow wow. That’s way more food than I can carry. It’s really nice that it’s not my problem to get the food from the vehicle to the conference room.
There’s a considerable loss of convenience there. We might end up with two levels of delivery, kind of like ordering furniture online. A “white glove” service where the food is brought to your door (equivalent to what we have now) vs a “standard” service where you have to go retrieve it at a location outside but closer to your home/business than the restaurant.
what did I just say about optimism…
I’m optimistic you’ll see the full advantages of AV in your lifetime
Sure, this I agree with.
Advantages of AV… sure. Depending on how you define it that’s already happening. I’m (mostly) enjoying the Level 2 features on my car.
But you’re not being realistic. You think that the government is going to outlaw the older cars that poor people drive while allowing the newer cars that rich people drive.
I do not think that will happen.
Let’s start at a point where a level 5 (no steering wheel or brakes) AV first hits the market, It’s going to be one of the most expensive cars out there, not counting Lamborghinis and Ferraris and such. Only the very richest people will be able to afford it. It will come down in price and in 5 years or so actuaries and other upper-middle class folks will be able to afford it. Some will opt for it, others will buy cheaper cars and save their money for trips to Europe and fancy McMansions. 5-10 years after that it will be cheap enough that virtually all upper-middle class and a substantial portion of middle class buyers will buy it. 10-20 years after that manufacturers will start to limit their manually driven car offerings. 10-20 years after that all new cars will be AV. Maybe the shorter end of that range if governments require it.
It will be 25 years after THAT point before most poor people with cars have AV cars. That is what must occur before governments will ban manually driven cars from roadways.
Sheesh, one of my BFFs has a 40 year old RV and she’s middle class. When are we going to hit the point where 100.00% of new RVs are AV? And how long until 99% of the non-AV RVs are naturally off the road???
what? why? I keep telling you to be optimistic yet you keep coming up with these numbers.
I’ll grant you the 5 years it takes for tech to adjust and rich people buying them in big cities, where AVs will first initially thrive with no issues. After 10 years, AVs will be cheap, but also the first AVs will be 5-10 years old. That’s very old in car age. Poor people don’t need to wait 25 years, they buy everything second handed, just like now.
Also, government doesn’t need to wait for anything, they can grant subsidies, but they can ban manual cars at anytime, just like they didn’t wait for everyone to have a car to ban horses.
You know what? California will be an interesting test case with their EV requirement. I’ll bet a lot of GoA bucks that they’re going to roll back the mandate that all new cars must be EV by… whichever year they originally picked (2025??) And as far as I know they’re not even remotely discussing banning non-EVs from the roads.
And there’s a much more compelling case for banning non-EVs than there is for banning non-AVs in my opinion.
The nice thing about Ride/Food share is that it doesn’t have to work everywhere all the time. It just has to be economical to work some places and some times. The decision about whether a given delivery or ride should be computer-driven or human-driven could be handled semi-automatically, determined by both the customer and the company.
I’m not 100% sure why we don’t already have trucks on limited highways. Maybe because the cost of a screw-up is simply too high. But meanwhile AVs are definitely learning how to navigate suburbs, including stopped trucks, okay. Obviously they are all still failing, right now, but I suspect unprotected-lefts are a bigger deal than identifying hand-signals.
Undoubtedly true. I was thinking about how hard a problem might be to solve… not how much of a problem it is that it remains unsolved.
I’m guessing that unprotected lefts are easier to solve than hand-signals, but leaving it unsolved will cause more problems.
If it can work enough of the time that employers of delivery drivers can reduce their staffing then that would indeed be significant.
I think they still require enough human intervention that they are not really safe enough to send alone.
I remember “Otto” made a lot of noise several years ago, but I haven’t heard much since about Otto. I’m open to being proven wrong here.
I guess I mean: we are solving a lot of the more subtle problems you talk about, like garbage trucks and chihuahua-bags, but still failing at more basic things like turning left.
I gave concrete examples. My friend who can see well enough to drive slowly to her local train station, and park, but not well enough to drive on a highway. A tween who could be dropped off. An elderly person who would get out of the car and ask the attendant to park it on the grass. A middle-aged man who drove himself to a party, but is now drunk enough that he lets the car drive him home.
And yes, your car would know how to park in your garage. Probably, you’d have the option to either tell it “this is spot a and this is spot b, learn them for the future”, or “I’ll park the first several times and you tell me when you know what to do”.
You might or might not have to put a cheap beacon on the floor for it to know exactly where it is.
Yeah, just as we needed to pave most of the roads for automobiles, we are going to need to put some kind of machine-readable indicators on highways for self-driving autos, I expect.
I think human drivers are likely to be banned from the express lanes of interstates in my lifetime, and yours.
Exactly – you may need to pay extra for a human to assist in bringing your food upstairs. And in some markets, that won’t be viable and you’ll be stuck having to find a couple of volunteers to help you meet the car to unload the food. In others (I’m thinking downtown Manhattan) delivery won’t be practical without the human – who will be dropped off while the car circles around so as not to block traffic, and will then pick up the delivery guy after he’s dropped off the food.