What do Uber drivers make of Waymo? 'We are cooked' The Uber driver who picked me up the other day doesn't think the ride-sharing app has much of a future in San Francisco. Tim – a pseudonym as he asked not to be identified – expects Waymo, the leading maker of self-driving taxis, to broadly under-cut Uber's human-operated ride-hailing service in the US city at some point in …
Can I suggest some improvements to these self-driving car things:
Create a network of dedicated paths around the city for them.
Lay down some metal rods on the ground as guide-rails for the vehicles. This will make the steering algorithms much easier to achieve.
Instead of having re-chargeable batteries, run a cable above head height that the vehicles can pick up electricity from.
Make the vehicles much bigger, so that they can carry maybe 200-1000 people
Have them run on predefined routes, and have them stop at designated pick-up / drop-off points along that route. Then you don't need an app to book one of them, you just go to the designated pickup point and wait for one to turn up.
San Francisco's public transit is quite good, but there are things a passenger might need to do that a bus or rail line can't provide:
1) Go somewhere inaccessible to public transit
2) Travel at a time transit is not available
3) Get somewhere more quickly than public transit can provide
4) Transport heavy or bulky items such as groceries
Etc.
I speak as someone who preferentially takes public transit but who is also very grateful that Uber, taxis, etc. are available for those moments when transit won't do (or would have done had it shown up at all).
If you follow these items to their logical conclusion while trying to remain economincal, I expect you will wind up with...a road network.
If you want to allow people to get everywhere they might want to go via tram, then you are talking about replacing all the roads with tram lines. If you want people to go at any time then you need to run the trams constantly. Now...why don't we do that already...let me think...oh right, because it would be prohibitively expensive, so instead we allow the people who want to go to those locations at those times to pay the bulk of the cost themselves.
1 - Expensive and very time consuming. It's worth it, but people sometimes want to get there today, not in five years. When those years have passed and the new route exists, that will be great for the people in that area, but chances are that there will be a new one that could use a route.
2 - Expensive depending on the demand.
3 - It depends how many people want to go to the places you're talking about. If it works as it often does, where the trip on the public transit is pretty fast but then you have a long walk ahead of you, the benefits during the part where the dedicated rights of way are speeding it up can be wiped out in the walk later on. I generally don't mind that, but that's when I can spend extra time commuting and am not worried about how quickly I'll arrive.
4 - I suppose it depends how much groceries you're carrying. I could easily carry a medium amount on transit where I live, but the trains I've been on before won't be convenient if I'm trying to carry groceries for a longer period or a larger family. We're packed in too tightly and most of the things I'd buy are easily damaged.
Yeah but something nobody has mentioned in any of their dumbass solutions is time...if I can save 20-30 minutes 4-5 times a day...I'm going to pay a premium for it...no amount of efficiency in a schedule service is ever going to pick me up at one client and drop me off at the front door at the next one. In the time it takes to walk to a station, I could already be at the next client...this time saving could lead to me being able to visit 1-2 more clients in a day...which is a good chunk of billable time...traveling is not billable time...the more time I spend faffing around between clients, the less time I'm billing for...
Bog standard salaried office workers are not the target market for an AI taxi service.
This is why business class seats on an aircraft cost more...it's not because you're necessarily getting a fancier service (even though you are) it's so that you can arrive at your destination ready to go...you can have a nice sleep in a bed and a solid meal on the flight to ensure that when you get to the other end you waste no time catching up and getting yourself straight because you feel like shit after a 10 hour economy flight...you're paying to save time...with a business class seat, you can get off the flight and go straight to your client, you don't need to stop for a nice lunch, you don't need to go to your hotel for a nap...you're ready to go as soon as you land...if you're billing by the day, saving that first day probably pays for the flight...not to mention that if you don't feel like a sack of shit getting off the flight, you have more time to do the job you went there for and can do a better job, which allows you to charge more.
Depends on what you're there to do I guess and for how long you're expected to do it...if it's just a 1-2 hour meeting, then fine...but if you're an engineer or a surgeon that's being shipped in work on a critical problem that might require you to function into double digit hours, then the difference is massive because initially you might be fine, but the travel will catch up with you and curtail the time that you can operate at your best.
Not just cabs.
The last time I was in San Francisco (I think, unless I've forgotten some other trip), around a decade or so back, my wife and I went with private livery — a livery-licensed town car. It was, in fact, a Lincoln Town Car,1 immaculately maintained by its owner. I scheduled our airport trips ahead of time, which requires a bit of planning, but that meant there was no need to wait in the taxi queue or call for a taxi, much less deal with some accursed app.
Polite, door-to-door service in a reasonably luxurious vehicle. Sure, a Lincoln Town Car isn't a Jaguar, or a BMW or Mercedes (which is what I had for ground transport when I traveled to the UK); but it's pleasant and comfortable and has ample luggage space. Or was and had, since Ford stopped making them. But whatever.
And it wasn't much more expensive than the standard taxi rate from and to the airport.
As far as I'm concerned, Uber already enshittified hired cars. I'd be just as happy to see them driven out of business.
1Stock, not stretched. I'd rather walk than ride in a stretch limo. Horrible, tasteless monstrosities. And even worse these days now that they're being made out of SUVs.
Why are you obsessed with putting metal rods on the ground? That’s the give-away that it’s a religion, not technically-based. We can guide vehicles with centimetre accuracy using radio or GPS, that’s just a solved problem. Public transport and rail/tram have nothing to do with each other. There’s a strong argument that the catastrophic economics of rail/tram have prevented public transport being rolled out more widely for over a century, because they suck all the funding from buses, which are 10x cheaper.
The only reason why rail/tram gets built, is the political one of “naming plaque fallacy”. If you build rail/tram, the infrastructure is a big visible project. This comes with lots of fanfare and election manifestos, loads of project manager jobs that can be given to your mates, plus the chance to have an opening ceremony for the tram and railway station, with a plaque you can put your name on. Buses are driven by working class people, don’t have project managers, rolling out a new route involves one procurement person to buy the bus off-the-shelf,
and a summer-student to print out some timetables, and there’s no vanity signage on bus-stops.
The other claim “trams use less energy than buses” is obvious rubbish. Rolling friction is not a significant part of the fuel usage of a city vehicle, for something that stops and starts every few hundred meters.
Buses are slower, because they get stuck in traffic if you don't build dedicated bus lanes. And if you're doing that, why not put in electric wires and power the bus from them? And if you're doing that, why not put in rails and get that energy savings from rolling friction and be able to transport more people at the same time by making the trains longer?
The reality is that trains are just better if you've got a lot of people to move. And even if your off the shelf bus is battery powered (and it should be, diesel is NOXIOUS stuff) then it's not cheap either. And trains eliminate the heavy vehicle road damage, and the tire particulates.
The benefits of the lighter vehicle are related to energy efficiency and wear, not upfront cost.
Those are two numbers in a complex engineering decision that involves many numbers. They are not "the" numbers, they are just "some" numbers. I'm not advocating for busses or trams, I was merely highlighting a single engineering benefit of trams. You are merely highlighting one economic benefit of busses (assuming your numbers are reasonable which I have not verified). Neither data point is sufficient to make a decision between the two for a given application.
Trains and trams also cost much more than buses to service. Buses are serviced by mechanics you can hire in any town in the world. Servicing a locomotive or tram is a skill you to pay to the moon and back for, for a variety of reasons including unionisation. Train and tram parts cost 10x what the equivalent bus part would cost. As mentioned, the drivers are more expensive.
A bus stop not only costs a couple of thousand to stick up a pole and a bus-shelter, but have you noticed it has no maintenance staff? A train station not only costs tens of millions to build, it requires a continuously employed staff *just to clean it* let alone anything else.
*Everything* about the ongoing running costs scales brutally with rail, in a way it just doesn’t with bus network. And in the end, it comes down to one simple reason: once you have decided to build a train, you are locked in to a specialist system.
Funnily enough, that even extends to energy costs. If you look at what the electricity costs of the rail network actually *are*, which is publically available info, you will discover that they pay more per passenger-mile than a bus pays in petrol. Because, again, there’s speciality infrastructure that all needs to be maintained; its not free to provide on-demand high-availability 2 MW power per train for its peak demand during acceleration, not free at all.
Buy a tram now and it'll be running for 30 years or more. It'll require some (specialist) maintenance but that is fairly infrequent compared to the amount of miles it'll be doing. Your bus will last probably 4 to 5 years with maintenance calls every other day. You'll need many more backup vehicles to keep lines running too.
Busses have their place but on high frequency lines, trams win.
As to energy costs, I call bullshit. Diesel is only going to get more expensive.
Nonsense, for so many reasons. If it’s electric vs diesel that worries you…..the vast majority of buses being bought today, are electric, on a replacement basis. See how easy and flexible buses are? You don’t need to change the entire infrastructure, just to change the motor technology. What *possible* mechanism is there, that would make an electric motor in a bus require maintenance calls every other day; while an electric motor in a tram sized for the same load magically “just works” for 30 years?! This is magical thinking.
I’ve no idea why you think diesel buses only last for 5 years. They can (and do) last for thirty years. The reason why most of them are much newer than that, is that the internal refurbishment cost makes it often more economic to replace after 10-15 years. Whereas with a tram….the internal refurb wears at exactly the same rate, but it’s so expensive that there’s no money in the budget for a replacement. So you are stuck with the same geriatric broken seats for much longer. They. Are. The. Same. Object. They. Work. Identically.. The only difference is that one is coach-built in tiny quantities and the other is built using modern volume production techniques.
Have you SEEN how many miles busses rack up per day? Every other day they'll be in for basic checks and greasing of certain points. Oil changes happen roughly every month, tires don't usually last a year. I don't believe for a second busses will last economically for anything close to 30 years. Over here (Not even the biggest city in the Netherlands) they rack up about a million kilometers in that time and are worn out. Keeping them going would require new engines, transmission, drive axles and refurbished interior. Which makes buying a new bus cheaper.
As to "just" changing to electric busses. Uhh, no, it's not nearly that straightforward. The amount of infrastructure changes required in main bus stations and depots to accommodate that are not trivial in the slightest. It's happening more and more, but it's certainly not just a matter of buying electric busses and pressing the go pedal.
As to why busses require lots of maintenance? Tire and brake inspections mostly, plus just the general greebles you get in fairly lightly built (compared to a tram) vehicles like bearings, diff oil, coolant, electrical problems, etc.
Trams on the other hand are generally built HEAVY. That has downsides, but it means they generally last a lot longer and take a lot less "wear and tear" damage, or accident damage in case of the inevitable right-of-way conflicts with other traffic (trams always win). Tram interior fittings generally also last longer because of this. And contrary to your statement that there's never budget for refurb, that does happen. If it doesn't it's because of the same reason a company would keep 10 year old or older busses around, because there isn't money for anything other than paying upper management. That doesn't have to do anything with trams.
Trams are also generally NOT sized for the same load. An empty tram will probably weigh more than a fully loaded bus. Average bus capacity will be 80 (normal busses)-120 (Artic/bendy bus). Average tram capacity is more like 200+ That added capacity makes a difference in rush hour situations and is hard to achieve with busses.
This is also not an either or situation. Busses are good for less frequent and lower capacity routes or in difficult (hilly) terrain. On main routes with lots of passengers, trams will win out.
Sorry, this is just another bunch of special pleading to support the conclusion you want. A tram is a bus with an overhead transmission line, and metal wheels.
Now if you *want* to overdesign and overbuild it, by your own admission multiplying the weight by more than double, so that you can beat the hell out of it with a jackhammer and it still keep on going, you can. Whether it’s a bus or a tram. It will last perhaps three times as long, and cost twenty times as much. That’s why nobody builds them like that any more, unless they are spending somebody else’s budget.
I’m an old git. I’ve driven an old-style decommissioned and re-purposed school bus (USA) from the 1950s, way back in the 1980s for a few years, hacking back and forth from Iran through central Asia to Kazakh and Uzbekh. I added well over 200k miles on it myself, changed buckled axles and even a whole gearbox out on the high roads more than once. The logbook said it had over 5 million miles on it when I got it. And the company I sold it on to, was still running that same bus as recently as 2020. Covid did for that bus (company) otherwise it would still be running today. There are no trams on earth that have done the sort of starship mileage that is commonplace in those regions.
Yeah, but you don't need a bus replacement service for when buses break down. You just take the busted bus out and put another one in.
Trains, trams etc...when they're fucked, the whole network suffers...when one bus is fucked, you take it out of service and replace it with a spare working one. If a bus breaks down, you inconvenience maybe 100 people...if a train breaks down, the whole fucking sky falls in.
A train only has possible savings per passenger-mile due to greater theoretical capacity.
A train that is only used during rush hour and is empty the rest of the time will have much higher cost per passenger-mile than a bus route. You can put on or take off buses; trains come in much larger sizes. Yes you can put on a "half-train", but unless each car is powered (making them much more expensive) you still have a large engine for each one.
> Yes you can put on a "half-train"
Which is effectively what happens on uk railway lines today. Rush hour run 12 coach trains, out of rush hour break these into 4 coach trains to be reassembled into 12 coach trains for the next rush hour.
Much of the efficiency debate revolves around changing behaviours: how many car drivers need to switch to trains (and when during the day) to enable the realisation of some of those efficiencies. I think we do need to look to history as, I doubt in 10-15 years as many of us will be owning and driving cars in the way we do today and have done for the last few decades. Remember both the Uber and Waymo business models rely on them reaching a monopoly position and so being able to significantly increase prices (by rates well above inflation) to deliver a return on the amount of money being poured into them. I.e the end game is the consumer will be paying significantly more in real terms for a lesser service than they are getting today.
Forgetting the economies of scale; start producing trams to the same standard build, like buses(*), and in the same quantities and that price will come down.
(*) There is little reason why a tram that runs in the street needs to be anything more substantial than a bus, which is what they were before the recent “metro” obsession.
I forget the cost of the DLR carriages.
You cannot forget the economies of scale. That’s the single most important fact about economics.
“start producing trams to the same standard build, like buses”: this will not happen. Ever. Every local tram system, everywhere, feels the need to specify a custom-build with some little twiddles their local mayor decided was necessary. This is a sociological problem, not a technology problem. It is driven by the incentives of decision-making bodies. Do not make the mistake of thinking that the laws of human nature are any weaker, or ignorable, than the Third Law of Thermodynamics.
The only way to break this link, is to design systems that are small enough, boring enough, or invisible enough, that nobody wants to fiddle around with it. Small systems are efficient. Large systems are broken by design.
Meh, there's a thousand and one different tram designs, but generally they're all just commercial products picked from a catalog nowadays. The days of every city buying their own design from a local factory are long gone. Local flavouring will be almost entirely down to color choice and upholstery with some variations for things like aircon capacity (because a city like Oslo is going to have very different heating and cooling requirements from say Jakarta)
> Every local tram system, everywhere, feels the need to specify a custom-build with some little twiddles their local mayor decided was necessary.
This is a big part of the problem, I remember the two Dublin tram lines deliberately having different track, loading gauges etc, just so that the two lines could not interwork.
> You cannot forget the economies of scale
Agree, however, people do, like when comparing the cost per railway/tram carriage (small scale production) with the cost of buses (larger scale production).
Then build in dedicated bus lanes / dedicated bus roads. Did I say you shouldn’t?
“if you're doing that, why not put in electric wires and power”. Because it’s just irrelevant. The key point for everything is cost, which is driven by *volume* and production-lines. Buses are commodity generic items, you can buy them from anywhere, including Mexico, and they cost £300k. A tram costs £1.5M. Exactly the same thing, same capacity, in fact it’s “simpler”, the only difference is production volume. That’s it. That’s all there is.
Similarly, train and tram drivers make over twice the hourly rate of bus drivers. Because it’s a specialty thing. Again, that’s it, that’s all there is. *You* can drive a light goods vehicle. You can’t drive a tram.
You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But you aren’t even close. A train driver earns *a lot* more per passenger than a bus driver.
A bus driver earns £14per hour. It’s such a casual job, that nobody even quotes an annual salary.
A train driver in 2023 earned £60k-87k *before* the recent 15% pay-increase (back-dated). So that’s £100k *base* salary. But the industry runs on overtime. Almost everybody works an additional one or two six-hour shifts per week, @£600 per shift. Yes, the average train driver in the U.K. does indeed take home £150k, and those who do a lot of overtime can pull £200k+. I find that middle-class software engineers with degrees tend to get quite upset when they discover this.
Now do you understand why storing the electricity in a battery vs bringing it in on a stupid metal rod, is just *irrelevant*? Social factors win against naive back-of-the-envelope theorising every time.
@Justthefacts
You neglected to mention a key reason UK trains "run on overtime". The employers make the choice not to have plenty of train drivers, so there is almost no "slack" in the system due to that deliberate understaffing policy, a driver or 2 calling in ill and its a desperate search for someone to do some OT (or, as is sometimes the case, schedules get shafted by a cancellation or two instead).
I know a few people who work in the rail industry, including drivers, one of the drivers is a female and gets really irritated by the frequent requests to do OT (as she prefers just to do her contracted hours so she can see more of her family as base pay is decent especially for this area of UK & family time worth more to her than OT), occasionally she succumbs to pressure to do OT (& mainly because she knows what OT her colleagues have already committed to & so feels the need to do some just so they get a bit of a break from the cab). It's a high pressure job * so deserves good pay, peoples lives in your hands, need to be vigilant - plenty of situations where objects thrown on the line, or fall there ** (not to mention nasties like reckless drivers failing to beat barriers & vehicle getting stuck in a crossing, through to the trauma of the suicide by train minority - a depressingly large number of people choose that method & it can be very traumatic for drivers who have that happen to them)
There's a misplaced superiority complex view of many in the UK that makes them very upset that a train driver gets well paid, instead of celebrating the fact they are providing a useful service (more useful if train companies were not allowed to charge such extortionate fares) and doing a job where peoples lives are in their hands
* in addition to being responsible for passenger lives, there's lots of training involved as its not as simple as just following the tracks, plenty of UK lines are not straight for long and safe speed on certain sections of line can be surprisingly slow (drivers have to "learn" a route and its quirks*** before they are allowed to drive them ), plus regular health checks, regular very strict drink / drug tests (which could deter many candidates due to effects on social life). There's also issue that different types of train need a different set of training (different layout, different performance, braking, / handling etc.)
** trees / branches on line quite rare as most train companies have an over aggressive approach to vegetation and instead of regular trackside maintenance crews they just clear fell trees for a huge distance either side of the tracks (generally until they reach boundaries of land they own)
*** a lot to learn as anyone who has seen complex rail points systems and areas of multiple tracks e.g. near stations will know
> lot to learn as anyone who has seen complex rail points systems and areas of multiple tracks e.g. near stations will know
Back in the early 1980s, through the job I was doing as an apprentice, I got to know not only the names of all the points and signals on the Euston Rugby line but also their relationships and dependencies. Ie. Certain signals only showed green if the next four signals were also green and points set for straight through running, so driver knew they could travel at maximum speed. As for the rules about train movements between fast and slow lines…
The tree felling/vegetation clearance seems to be related to electrification as much as trackbed maintenance and general operational issues such as “leaves on the line”. We forget in the “golden age” of steam, trackside vegetation was kept very short, for obvious reasons. So much of the vegetation we see was a result of underfunding of BR once it converted to diesel and electric traction.
"You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But you aren’t even close. A train driver earns *a lot* more per passenger than a bus driver."
I thought the conversation was about trams not trains? Anyway, whatever, a quick search indicates, in the UK at least, tram drivers get more or less the same rate as bus drivers and something in the order of half what train drivers get. After all, driving a tram in the city is far, far easier than driving a bus, no steering needed :-)
> “Why are you obsessed with putting metal rods on the ground? That’s the give-away that it’s a religion, not technically-based. We can guide vehicles with centimetre accuracy using radio or GPS, that’s just a solved problem”
People.
Watch how people behave when there are no visual clues, or just painted lines. Plus go to a new city, it is obvious where a line/route is, follow the rails et al and you will arrive at a stop and (hopefully) more information.
As for the centimetre accuracy across our entire built environment using just the onboard sensors…
Please, for the love of god, take a step back. You are post-justifying a system which you truly desire in all your heart, and have already totally committed to emotionally. You are seriously suggesting building an entire transport system, complete with rails and electricity, as a substitute for a bit of street signage. If you are that desperate for location cues, you can buy a sign with a massive arrow and the word BUS and CITY CENTRE, and stick them every 100meters, for £50 each. As opposed to £200,000 for the street works.
This is not rational. Light rail is a religion.
> You are post-justifying a system which you truly desire in all your heart
Err no, just pointing out the environment needs to contain knowledge that helps people ie. Follow good design as expounded by people like Don Norman.
Rails in the road tell you a lot just by their presence, something signs don’t. But then so does a kerb and red tarmac (Milton Keynes redways).
“Anywhere you’d need a dedicated bus Lane”
And where is that, exactly? You are imagining a fixed built environment. But it isn’t.
Build a 500-place care home for dementia. If there isn’t a bus stop directly outside you have consigned those inside to never seeing family or friends again. Because family are too old to drive, that’s the reality. How many decades before a tramline stops there? The football ground that needs 50,000 people to get to it, and the Council builds a light rail station. Five years later, they fall out of Champions League, and attendance drops to 5000. Ten years later they go bankrupt. What happens to the £50M rail system? It’s a ghost town.
Your planned economy does not work. You cannot build fixed infrastructure for a living city.
And you think just plopping a bus stop on the street and having heavy busses drive over a street grid never designed for it is going to work out just dandy? It's what many politicians seem to believe, and it's exactly what is turning public transport in particular and city traffic in general into such a friggin clown show.
"And where is that, exactly? You are imagining a fixed built environment. But it isn’t."
Anywhere busses need to pass over the same roads (or in the same direction as) car traffic where roads don't have the capacity to service that amount of traffic. If your bus line drives at a frequency of one an hour, you don't care if it spends a few minutes in traffic. If a bus needs to pass every stop every ten minutes (as it does on main lines of a core network) then you can't afford to have that bus stopped at traffic or stopping traffic as people get on and off. So you need dedicated bus lanes. Or better yet, a tram line.
I'm not imagining "fixed built environment". I'm imagining effective city traffic engineering that is far more predictable than your one bad example.
But OK, let's take your bad example. You put in a TRAM (not lightrail, entirely different system) to your football grounds. It runs very high frequency service (every 5 minutes) when there's a footie match on and normal frequency (every 10 minutes) outside of that. Large part of the audience is serviced through the tram network from parking in the outskirts and the main train station. Some of it is serviced by busses. When there isn't a footie match on, people who want to visit the city or something park on the outskirts and take the tram into the city centre. When something else is organised at the stadium like a concert, very high frequency tram service is instituted too) Five years later, attendance of football matches drops to 5000. Instead of running every 5 minutes when there's a match on, they continue running in normal frequency and some trams can remain in the depot. Nothing much else changes (maybe they organize a few more concerts to make up a bit of extra cashflow). Ten years later the club goes bankrupt. The stadium is sold, demolished and replaced by high density office blocks. Instead of 5000 to 10000 people traveling there once a week, they now travel there every working day. City buys a few extra trams to replace old equipment and things just keep ticking along. This wouldn't make things a ghost town. YOU are imagining the fixed built environment here. The reality is that cities are dynamic and there's generally always a very long term predictable demand for the core transportation network. And how that traffic behaves when split over certain modes of transport. Trams work out quite well. Busses have a lot of downsides too.
> Your planned economy does not work. You cannot build fixed infrastructure for a living city.
Yet London and the UK rail network largely proves you wrong.
The primary issue is the upfront cost and effort, which as you correctly note is high for light rail/tram system where effectively nothing runs until the system is complete.
The secondary issue is change or rather adaptability. The bankrupt football ground is a prime candidate for redevelopment as businesses and homes…
I’m old enough to remember trolley buses running on electrickery from overhead wires. They had long wooden poles on the sides for putting the trolley back onto the wire. They went up steep hills which are not in short supply in that city making trams not an option except on limited routes.
I'm old enough to remember a mixture of trams, buses and trolleybuses on a holiday only last winter, when I visited Geneva.... or trams (the DART) when I visited Dublin 18 years ago, or the midland Metro., whenever I visit Wolverhampton or Birmingham... All these means of transport work well and are heavily used....
I can't argue much in urban areas. But spare a thought for those of us far enough in the boonies that trams, buses, or any sort of public transportation at all is fearsomely unlikely to work. (Might get you from the town centre to another town centre in some cases. But you may live some miles from such locations.) Uber/Lyft/taxis are similarly hard to come by in such places.
(Note that I don't speak here of whether self-driving cars are going to make money for their manufacturers/operators. I'm just saying that they would be useful to those of us in rural areas.)
Cool idea, but a bit old fashioned.
Scheduled cattle cars are all fine and well, but if I bounce around several times a day, the 10-20 minute waits plus the walk to stations add up...that and a cab can drop me near as damn it at the door of a client, a train cannot. I think you're confusing average commuters with people that the services are designed for. I pay the premium for cabs because I can fit more work in a day if I do, which pays off because what I earn per hour is considerably higher than the fee for a taxi.
An automated taxi I could arrange 20-30 minutes before I leave so that it is waiting for me as I leave the building...I don't have to lose 30 minutes to an hour walking to a station and waiting for a train (sure I'd save a tenner if I did, but I charge 7-8x more than that per hour, so saving a tenner can cost me £70-£80)...that could be the difference between me attended 6 appointments in a day and 4...given that I charge more per hour than a taxi charges me for a < 1 hour journey, it's worth paying the premium...that and my clients pay my travel expenses...not me.
So yeah, if you work in one place day in day out then an AI taxi service makes little sense and appears to be a frivolous expense...but if you're constantly out and about bouncing between sites...it makes perfect sense and can lead to higher turnover...remember, sensible people value time more than they value money. You can always earn more money, but you can never get your time back.
The in-car conversation problem could easily be solved—with AI! If I was in charge of Uber, right now I'd be secretly recording all of the conversations going on in my vehicles, and using them to train a giant LLM so that it could hold optimal 'taxi driver' chats with passengers. "Do you know who I had in my cab the other day...?"
I'm a bit puzzled by the business model for Waymo discussed in this article. Uber drivers drive their own cars and pay for running costs. So Uber has no costs when it comes to the fleet. Waymo are offering luxury $80,000 Jags and I'm assuming they don't get many years out of them. Taxi work is hard on cars and to maintain the luxury tag they might be replacing cars every three years. Are Waymo able to resell their old cars? They are heavily customised and it might be costly to convert them back into cars that can be resold. I wouldn't be surprised if they are sold for parts. Waymo is not sharing the fares with a driver but it sounds like Uber is not sharing much of the fare either. I don't know the costs involved in running Waymo but I have strong doubts that they can compete with a ruthless cost-cutter like Uber, unless they find a way to massively reduce their fleet costs.
I am not qualified to analyse businesses.
"Waymo only has to use a subsidised predatory pricing model until all the competition folds..."
I don't even get how that's legal in any sane economy. Selling your entire product line at a loss until you are the only game in town is illegal in most modern economies.
Maybe some local or national "authority" should be looking at the actual cost of providing the service and then forcing them to price at a reasonable level. That's how competition is supposed to work. You provide something better or cheaper so people will choose you. That forces the others to up their game too and everyone wins. Forced monopolies caused by having deeper pockets than the competition means only the winner wins and EVERYONE ELSE loses, especially the customers/users..
You don't seem to have read the article. At the moment, Waymo is obviously targetting a select section of the market and luxury vehicles is part of the way to do this. Every trip trains the system and customers are (partly) paying for this. At some point, however, it can decide to enter a pricing war and win, though it might be happy leaving some of the lowest fares for Uber, Lyft and the rest to scrap over.
The vehicles and all CAPEX can, and will, be offset by Alphabet's accoutants against some of Google's massive profits.
This was always the endgame for all of these services, but the excuse to get past regulators was that the market was somehow broken.
"The vehicles and all CAPEX can, and will, be offset by Alphabet's accoutants against some of Google's massive profits."
How do they do that? When Waymo fucked up and killed someone, Waymo was a separate business unit and Alphabet didn't end up in court. Theoretically, Google can only put money into Waymo as an investment. The only options to take money out are to sell the investments or to sell/cross-licence stuff. (You can probably tell I'm not an accountant and am naive in the ways of creepy financial shenanigans)
> How do they do that?
There is nothing that stops Alphabet from pouring good money after bad into an investment. An investment is a nice way of avoiding tax. However, the purpose of tax avoidance is to retain money, not blow it away, so at some point Alphabet will pull the plug and socialise the losses…
Well, yes, we've seen Alphabet open and close several moonshots, but Waymo is looking like one of its better bets. It had a headstart in the business due to the oodles of traffic data provided worldwide by users of Android, but credit should also be given to the fairly single-minded pursuit of autonomous vehicles without the sideshow of the gig economy.
"They are heavily customised and it might be costly to convert them back into cars that can be resold. I wouldn't be surprised if they are sold for parts."
Unattended electric Jaguars and a year's notice? I imagine they'll be getting sold as parts as fast as they hit the streets. The crims have a year to get their ducks in a row.
I can see it now, the car arrives for a pickup and 4 guys with NASCAR jacks have all 4 tires off the ground in seconds. A tinfoil lined car cover goes on, blocking all cameras and satellite signals. An enclosed truck backs up and extends a ramp with a couple of axles on it. The 4 guys roll the axles under the car which lets them roll it without the car's tires on the ground and pull it into the back of the truck. The whole operation from arrival to departure would only take a couple of minutes, and that's just off the top of my head in a couple of minutes. Give me a year and I could come up with a way to steal the car in about 30 seconds. Hell, once I stole the first one and studied it, I could probably come up with a way for the car to steal itself.
These cars are continuously monitored. I was surprised that someone tried to carjack one, with predictable results.
https://lamag.com/crimeinla/los-angeles-man-tries-fails-carjack-self-driving-waymo-taxi
I imagine stripping one before the police arrived would be quite challenging.
In which market? We know that his is what happens with phones, including fruity ones, but I think the market for luxury cars is much less fungible. It's not as if a fleet of them driving to the Port of Los Angeles or Mexico is inconspicuous. And there is also the trail from whoever ordered the ride in the first place, which is likely to include at least one payment provider with a vested interest in not being frozen out.
I'm sure there will be attempts and some of them will be successful but I don't think we'll see a mass attempt on the whole fleet.
The main computer will probably be hardened to the teeth and will need to contact the mothership in short intervals, else seizing to function. And an individual car‘s main components can surely be as tightly secured cryptographically. Think iPhones. I’m sure that, if deemed necessary, one could even have the tires need some DRM to them. And the seats‘ heating elements and motors. And so on. If HP can do it with their printers… But I digress.
Given how heavily computerized car parts are, I doubt there's much of value on these cars you could easily steal and sell without getting caught soon enough. You might get away with it in relatively small volume for the few Jag owners that don't want to look to closely when they buy a replacement part, but when you want to do it in volume, your main customer would be the biggest user of those cars. Which would be Waymo. So you'd be stealing cars, parting them out and then trying to sell the stolen parts back to Waymo.. Good luck getting away with that.
My garage mechanic told me there’s a Skoda car being driven 24/7 except for regular maintenance here. Different drivers obviously. Standard taxi model. Not sure Uber have come to Dundee Scotland yet. I don’t take taxis. I cycle as much as possible, drive when not and occasionally take buses.
And funnily enough, Jaguar recently discontinued that cushy SUV platform that the Waymo cars are designed around.
Will be interesting to see if they keep some special production going just for Waymo or Waymo's going to have to switch to a different (probably cheaper) platform instead.
Taxi work is hard on ICEs, its less hard on EVs. Once Waymo have their tech working, I doubt all their johnnycabs will be luxury jags (that they almost certainly aren't paying full price for anyway, a. its advertising for JLR, b. lots of ICE manufacturers have had to dump EVs to maintain their global EV:ICE ratio and not get fined by the EU)
No, not in my experience. The cars will go from passenger to passenger. However, there are cameras on board that use computer vision to watch to make sure you have your seat belt on, have got out of the car, haven't left anything behind.
I would imagine there is some CV involved to inspect the interior after everyone's out. I can't be certain. It's something that occurs to me when I get in one.
C.
It could be that Waymo is new enough and feels fancy enough that people "respect" the interior...? That said, I assume you can't use one without providing a credit card that can be charged for damages, and the CCTV footage would provide evidence. I recall one of them got burned down and the perpetrator was caught on camera and sued.
Since this is Alphabet, it's very likely there's already an AI system trying to detect from the CCTV whether the car is clean :)
diodesign:
there are cameras on board that use computer vision to watch to make sure you have your seat belt on, have got out of the car, haven't left anything behind.
Not a surprise coming from the likes of Google, but the idea of internal cameras permanently capturing passengers in detail and all their activities creeps me the hell out.
Which is why I (a SF resident) will probably never step into one of those cursed things.
(Yes I know that Uber/Lyft/etc drivers can install their own crappy little dashcams but the content from those is not all being systematically sent to the Googleplex to be data-mined and shared with all and sundry until the year 3000.)
Just imagine all those billions of venture capital going into public transport. For poorly serviced areas, run a smallish van/bus, or even hire the uber drivers for on-call service (e.g. hospital visits for elderly).
More importantly, Uber et al normalized below minimum wage working conditions without rights or benefits, something that previous generations have fought for for decades right after the industrial revolution up until the 80s. It won't come back, just like the right to privacy is not coming back.
Uber et al normalized below minimum wage working conditions without rights or benefits, something that previous generations have fought for for decades right after the industrial revolution up until the 80s. It won't come back
It struck me that when the first world started exporting industrial production and later services to the developing world with its historically woeful living and employment conditions that the first world was also implicitly ultimately importing those same unacceptable conditions.
I wouldn't be the first nor the last to observe "what you do to others, you do to yourself."
Here endeth the lesson.
Everyone hurts, @cow.
Try this, in my naivety,
//
"The more you try, the better
You make things for yourself,
For those you love,
And those they love,
And those they love.
//
Sometimes, it comes all the way around,
A serendipitous moment of love and beauty.
Sometimes, it doesn't."
> hire the uber drivers for on-call service (e.g. hospital visits for elderly).
Actually, hospitals won't let you take an Uber. They specifically ask how you're getting there, and will cancel your medical care if you say "Uber"
Source: Been there done that several times, since I'm a single adult and none of my friends are still local. So fuck me, then.
Edit: this is apparently because Uber drivers take advantage of patients. So an automated car would be a good thing, for me.
I could see how the hospital might have concern about how you are getting home after a medical procedure if you were still a bit drowsy from the drugs or were a vulnerable person in some other way, but i don't see how its any of their business how you arrive to the hospital.
If the hospital have concerns that Uber drivers are taking advantage of patients, that should be reported to Uber and also to the police if they think i criminal offense has taken place. Not ban the patients from using Uber.
A more subtle and under-tracked issue in the matter of AV versus Human drivers is the one of more general social interaction between drivers and passengers.
More than a few times a Human driver of a gig service and a traditional service sees their rider as social opportunity. Nice when the driver recognizes when their customer wants to interact. But can become a problem when either the driver or the passenger when the topic has changed. Or the conversation has ended.
The problem has become greater over time too. In the begging of gig riding my experience with drivers interactions tended to be more of a professional nature. Today many more of the drivers think a benefit of their time on shift with Uber and Lyft is the social interaction. To the point they don't really recognize that invisible separation of the self-employed contractor and their customer. I get it that some of the driver's main form of income might be one inside only a lonely home office. Or a hard physical job without much companionship. A lot of drivers have relayed as much to me during the ride.
I am happy and interested to listen to some of those one-way conversations. Or even participate in the two-way conversations. Just so long as the driver realizes their conversation and the topics discussed are welcome and timely..
But too many times the drivers don't know out to manage a drive and conversation. Their enthusiasm, boredom, or lack of understating conversational and social cue kill the conversation dead on the spot. But the keep on talkin till the end of the ride forces then end of their talk. The death of the conversation and the ride come with lasting effects that related to rider enthusiasm used to hail the ride. And those effects could easily lead to the faster adoption of a preference of autonomously controlled vehicle rides over human piloted rides.
If ever a customer ever became lonely during an AV ride they could always use a phone to strike up a conversation with person. An AV ride service might even get smart about that kind of rider aspect. Offering a feature to activate either a "Ride Bartender" who is either human, or AI, to provide some diversion during a trip. With the feature being integrated into the vehicle so the customer does not have to use their mobile data or phone's batter during the ride. Possibly a good way to improve customer loyalty and retention for the service.
There are other non-harassments, but still socially impactful ways an AV service can win out over human pilots that I have not mentioned. All of those will (and are) have a longer term impact during the general migration from human to AV piloted ride hailing services.
Sing it, bro.
I would even pay a STFU fee for Uber if I could. I do not want to have a conversation on a 45 minute drive somewhere.
For the same reason I preferred the automated ordering kiosks at McDonald's when they had them, I would prefer a Waymo.
Preach it Gene! The world expects everyone to be extroverted, but we're all not. I don't always like striking up convos with randoms, as being an introvert I've been sucked in to narcissistic relationships with damaging manipulation. If I'm stuck in a taxi with someone who creeps me out, I'm looking for an escape. This is why I learnt to drive instead of relying on public transport/taxis. If I give people rides, it's ones I know and trust and WANT to socialise with. And I'm a guy, not a woman.
The fact that Waymo is presently operating a functional autonomous taxi service in various locations serves to contradict your statement. In particular, given how challenging San Francisco is to drive in, it's pretty remarkable that Waymo vehicles are able to do so. Many humans who are apparently legally licensed to drive certainly do a worse job. In particular, I've noticed that the vehicles most prone to waiting for me to traverse an intersection on foot tend to be of the autonomous variety. Frankly, as autonomous vehicles become more common, I would support using them as a baseline for the standard of human drivers: if you can't drive on par with a Waymo, you don't get a license.
I wouldn't call humans driving off cliffs, crashing into restaurants, or mowing down pedestrians a success either, but that doesn't cause us to take them off the road altogether. In fact, there seems to be no feedback mechanism whatsoever to incentivize better driving among the human population, whereas the autonomous driving system receives constant updates and revisions.
And usually the issues that Waymo needs a human intervention for aren't "driving off a cliff" either. It's usually a "I don't know what this sign is" or "I'm confused about the layout of this intersection". Something human drivers fuck up regularly without any real consequences either.
@idoitman The poster is correct. There are videos on utube that cover it. they are limited to a small area and the roads are pretty simple square French/American-style - you know miles of endless blocks and squares.
Waymo is prob the best. However, the AI is so so far away from usable in anger. The trails are in the strictest must-be-this-to-work conditions. There is no flexibility or stability in the system as the poor folks (1st gen ISP helldesk circa '96 dial-up 9600-level work) are not even able to consider that with the sh1t-nami of errors and failures they deal with.
It's a folly on the hill.
It would be simpler and cheaper to have human drivers simply drive the cab than have the remote huan driver thing.
THe day Waymo fills all the cities in USA with its current setup is the day they start going broke becaue they wont be saving money they will losing tens of Billions.
how challenging San Francisco is to drive in
SF is "challenging"? I suppose compared to, oh, Phoenix, that might be true. But I've been many places that are a hell of a lot more challenging to drive in than San Francisco, and that's just in the US.
Waymo is in, what, SF, a small area (63 square miles) of LA, Austin, and Phoenix? (Not sure about that last one.) Last I checked, only one self-driving-vehicle vendor (Motional) was trying to take on Boston, and they were only doing a couple of routes. And Boston's reputation for difficulty is exaggerated.
Let's see how Waymo fares in, say, Michigan, with snow and distressed roads. Not that they currently operate anywhere there's likely to be snow, of course, so they've hardly solved that problem, have they. Or in many rural areas, where many people live on private roads which aren't well-mapped. How are Waymo cars at navigating Forest Service roads?
Waymo and the other autonomous-auto firms are cherry-picking the easy markets, not the hard ones. San Francisco is an easy market.
hmmmm.... wonder if this stupid prediction comes from whichever marketing firm waymo uses posting on forums etc posting this stupid idea of becoming dominant hence the uber drivers "marketing manipulated" musings.. it aint ever happening baby
reason there are less uber drivers in SF is because the place is in its natural down cycle ... halycon days are gone
just the ways its supposed to happen.... evolution abhors stagnancy even fiat currencies cant lick it :)
When China subsides their industries and cause a flood of cheap goods to come into the west, we put tariffs on those Chinese imports. Yet Uber and now Waymo are doing the same thing domestically offering a service at a loss to drive the competition out of business, and they are allowed to seemingly get away with it with no repercussions.
Taxi drivers, cashiers, baristas and more will be automated at a certain point. SciFi movies have clearly shown that reality coming. And new cars already record lots of parameters so having a personal car for the sake of privacy is no longer a selling point against the use of a robot car.
But there is the question of disabled access and who/how someone can get in/out of a taxi if there is no human able to assist?
True in some cases like a wheelchair you need modified taxis as well, but there are quite a few pensioners or outpatients who cannot manage in/out of a car without assistance. That aspect is significantly more complex than the lift operator.
SciFi movies have clearly shown that reality coming.
Well, now, that is a compelling argument. Why, what predictions of the science-fiction-film genre have not come to pass? They're basically a window into the future.
Honestly, the things some people write.
- If payment is declining, then either there's less demand, or more supply. Maybe there's more companies in the market. Or Uber is holding back more since now apparently they're employees. Are they now doing payroll and income tax withholding? I bet that's a chunk of the "lower wages" involved.
- Waymo is new, with new cars. Uber has been around; the cars are likely older too. I think there's a lot of turnover in Uber divers, rather like with restaurants. Everyone thinks they can do the job, not many will keep doing it past the first setback or dry spell.
- Waymo will not be able to maintain those electric Jags, or purchase new ones every year to maintain that "new car" smell. The first time a drunk or drugged passenger vomits (or does something else) during the ride, you'll never get that smell out. Why do you think taxi cabs are generally somewhat run down?
They're already working on replacing the Jags with Geely-sourcef minivans with no steering controls. https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/12/24218528/waymo-zeekr-geely-robotaxi-china-biden-tariff-ev-import
The Jag is nice, but the capacity is the same as an Uber because you can't put a passenger in the driver's seat.
From what I've heard, the sensor package is so expensive at present that in the short term, it doesn't make much difference what cars you buy
He already participated in decimating what was formerly a job category that had been around for many decades. So technology that enabled him to decimate the taxi industry is going to enable the Uber/Lyft driver industry? Cry me a river!
It seems like he'd be able to move to another city if he really wanted to continue with this job, since autonomous taxis only seem feasible in cities that have been mapped down the millimeter by a countless thousands of supervised trips before the autonomous vehicles are set loose. That's a handful of cities now. Cities that don't have like say NYC or Chicago or Miami or Dallas aren't going to be able to shift in autonomous vehicles overnight - the state/local government is going to require the same period of supervised driving, recording of issues, etc. before it turns loose autonomous taxis. Some might choose to sit on the sidelines until the technology is more mature and being used in dozens of cities all over the map, to insure they get all the corner cases that your city might have.
It is hard to feel sorry for an industry that has hardly existed for more than a decade, and only made possible via technology, to be eliminated by technology. I would feel more sorry for the cab drivers who had a better living and got squeezed by the Uber hordes undercutting them, partially because they didn't have to obey the same laws about licensing and insurance. There will be a market for some cab/limo drivers for a long time to come, as some people prefer the "personal touch" or won't trust the autonomous taxis.
I don't think anybody feels sorry for Uber, although some investors might be feeling sorry they own Uber. Thank you for feeling sorry for "the cab drivers who had a better living and got squeezed by the Uber hordes undercutting them, partially because they didn't have to obey the same laws about licensing and insurance". It varies by city, but many of those dino drivers had purchased "taxi medallions" at several $100K, a price arrived at by city laws constraining the number of such taxi medallions, a widespread practice going far back over 50~70 years. Uber used their political lobbying clout to bypass that system and leave many of those medallion owners with a worthless investment and unable to pay off the debt they incurred to buy it.
Waymo’s Jaguar SUVs often seem to be driving around empty, and as someone who admires efficient engineering, this makes me wretch.
Even worse, those near-5000-lb SUVs are designed for 80-90 mph freeway speeds, so they’re fundamentally unsuited to typical 15-30 mph city speeds. Why don’t they just automate something safe, cheap, and normal, like an electric golf cart?
Hey, if my truck is on the move with nothing in the bed, it's going somewhere to have something put in the bed.
But then my truck is 30 years old (so the "bound energy" of manufacturing has been well amortized) and gets around 20 mpg (US gallon, ~ 0.12 l/km), which is pretty good for a pickup anyway.
But, yes, there are a lot of large, inefficient, mostly-empty vehicles on the streets in the US. And elsewhere, of course, but it seems to be particularly prevalent here.
From business insider at the time Here's who's getting rich on Uber's massive IPO (Worth a look with the advantage of retrospection).
Today- macrotrends dot net :
Uber Technologies net income for the twelve months ending June 30, 2024 was $2.011B, a 639.14% decline year-over-year.
Uber Technologies annual net income for 2023 was $1.887B, a 120.64% decline from 2022.
Uber Technologies annual net income for 2022 was $-9.141B, a 1742.94% increase from 2021.
Uber Technologies annual net income for 2021 was $-0.496B, a 92.67% decline from 2020.
2019 was the year that markets started to falter until the rules were changed for how much money financial companies could borrow against the US Bonds they held. That effectively flooded the markets with 2 trillion+ in easy credit. Boom! Anybody who got in at the bottom then could sell a year later and repay their debt with plenty to spare.
It's not capitalism. It's a rigged as Las Vegas. Incidentally, crypto peaked 2 or 3 years later with a market cap of about 2 trillion.
The biggest loser is US manufacturing. Can you imagine having to tie down capital in something that could not repay any sooner than 5 years? It's not competitive with the faux framework of "success" dictated by US economic policy.
"To put it bluntly, we are cooked," said one person posting to a forum for San Francisco Uber drivers, in response to my solicitation for thoughts about Waymo. "We're done for. In the age of artificial intelligence and automation, we're the first to be impacted in a major way."
I'm sorry but wasn't this always Uber's gameplan? Didn't they once say publicly (in their SEC filings?) something about their end goal being an end to taxis, public transport, and private ownership of cars, where everyone would just take a self driving Uber everywhere. Everyone driving for them ahs been fuelling their own extinction and Uber openly told you so.
Anybody complaining about not being able to make a living (or soon getting replaced) from their gig-economy "jobs" doesn't have to expect much sympathy from me. Yes it sucks, but what were you expecting? ALL of those jobs are based on exploiting people desperate for a job using legal loopholes or just plain ignoring of regulations. Similar for food delivery apps exploiting both the restaurants they're picking up from and the drivers doing the delivery.
Universally these companies (or more specifically the upper management of these companies) are making bank while those on the bottom tiers can barely scrape by.
I respect these people for scraping a living, but I don't respect their choice of company to work for. Companies like Uber and Deliveroo are despicable and exploit people desperate for income or unable to see the economics of the job and they can go get f&cked. Those doing the driving aren't by and large actually making a living if you take things like vehicle maintenance and depreciation into account. I'm also not seeing where you see "overt sympathy". I have no skin in the game and I don't use these services.
This is a bit off-topic, but might be of interest to readers of this rag - a recent DOJ report: Two Individuals Charged in Multi-Million Dollar Scheme to Defraud Rideshare Customers, Drivers and Others August 28
The defendants allegedly sold scheme applications to Driver Co-conspirators on manipulated—also known as “jailbroken” or “rooted”—cellular devices (the Scheme Devices). A jailbroken or rooted cellular device has had its operating system security restrictions modified or removed, thereby allowing the installation of software, including applications, that the device manufacturer had not made available for the device. Driver Co-conspirators utilized the Rideshare Company-1 Application on their Scheme Devices. ... Fake GPS was a GPS spoofing application developed by the defendants and others. Fake GPS enabled Driver Co-conspirators to manipulate or “spoof” their locations within the Rideshare Company-1 Application and make it appear as if they were located in an area with surging fares when, in fact, they were not. ... Screwber is an application developed by the defendants and others that provided Driver Co-conspirators with information about prospective Rideshare Company-1 rides that was not otherwise available to Rideshare Company-1 drivers prior to accepting such rides. For example, Screwber enabled Driver Co-conspirators to obtain prospective riders’ destinations and approximate fares for prospective trips, thereby allowing Driver Co-conspirators to accept or decline the prospective rides based on information to which they were otherwise not entitled and, in turn, cherry-pick only the most profitable and lucrative rides offered to them through the Rideshare Company-1 Application. ... The defendants caused outdated versions of the Rideshare Company-1 Application to be downloaded onto the Scheme Devices provided to Driver Co-conspirators. By installing outdated versions of the Rideshare Company-1 Application, the defendants ensured that the Fake GPS and Screwber applications were not detected by security features implemented in newer versions of the Rideshare Company-1 Application. ... As part of the scheme, the defendants sent Driver Co-conspirators information about how to avoid detection, such as the following: “Using 2 iphones with FakeGPS is very very risky. If you need FakeGPS for airport I recommend doing it one time a day. Do it when you wake up in the morning before you go to the airport.” The defendants also spoke with one another about their strategy to profit from the Driver Co-conspirators. For example, on or about November 2, 2018, Suarez wrote to Paldiel, “You know Screwber is like drugs .. once you get into it you’ll get withdrawals when you can’t get your fix.” In another message, Paldiel wrote to Suarez regarding the Driver Co-conspirators, “I get them hooked on the software, even a drug deal[er] throws in a few extra grams of weed in the beginning.”
Software as a gateway drug? That would explain a lot.
I don't care if it is an robot Jaguar. They will quickly turn in to the likes of grungy bus stops where everyone stands and no one dares to sit. I would rather ride in a clean used Prius with a human driver, than in a top-of-the-line robo-car filled with stink of an uncertain origin.
If the previous passenger pooped or puked in the car, I am not getting in it. Watch for the passenger to get automatically charged for refusing to ride in a filthy vehicle.
next passenger will report if the vehicle is dirty and previous passenger will be billed a soiling charge. soiling can be confirmed while taxi is empty between passengers.
iPace was chosen due to being big and having a big battery.
The minuaturization phase for sensors and computing are under way.
purpose built robotaxis will be smaller with system on chip solutions and cheaper sensors.
At the moment I pay a fair chunk of cash each year, in depreciation, tax, insurance and the like for the 2nd household car to sit there doing diddly squat for most of its time.
But I can't sell it as we really do need a couple of cars for family life and outdoor pursuits.
Renting is simply pants, and the alternative is calling a taxi.
With the other guy
Talking, breathing and smelling.
No thanks. Second car it is until autoboxes rule the earth.
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