I feel like this will honestly be the big beneficiary of autonomous vehicles, far more than people buying a driverless Toyota. Making shipping and deliveries much less dependent on a fleet of people forced to stay alert for 8-12 hr shifts of driving on freeways can only make our roadways safer.
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Maybe. But they may need to take regular drivers off the road for it - which I don’t see happening soon. I also don’t see them knowing when to break the law as regular operators know to do - when to pull over in a no stopping to let you client out etc on a busy city street. The drones won’t come quickly to cities - the FAA restrictions cover within 5 miles of an airport - which is almost all of downtown.here.- it only takes one drone interfering with a jet to shut that idea down. And a lot of people actually like driving.
It could end up being like the food pill idea - people like to eat real food. Or just like other inventions that flopped. Jet packs etc.
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I’ve been wondering how Uber expected to survive in the era of autonomous vehicles given that A) Uber is subsidized in part by their own drivers and B) GM has explicitly said they’re going to be in the ride-sharing business more than the car-selling business once that happens, and no doubt other auto manufacturers will be the same. It seems like, no matter what happens, their long-term future is in doubt.
And the scary bit is Uber has already made itself somewhat indispensable - apparently a number of municipalities have replaced their public transit with (further) subsidized Uber rides in the US. In the long term they could find replacements, but for people who need the service, the loss, even in the short-term, would be disastrous.
My impression from the story is that this could tank Uber because their current business model isn’t sustainable. I.e., there business model is spending money to drive other competition out. Because it is very easy for their drivers to move to other companies, Uber’s only fundamental advantage is having lots of money to spend. The loss in this suit could stop them from moving to a more sustainable next step where they own the technology and a large fleet of autonomous (and in theaoy cheaper to run) vehicles.
The article may be correct. The only real advantage I see here is the technology. Without that, outspending the competition in a field that is easy to enter is a horrible business model.
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It’s going to be a compelling justification. Anyone driving a normal car on a highway loathes having to deal with the big rigs. There will be some serious infrastructure changes (e.g. lane barriers, concrete or virtual, and warehouse and depot positioning) but they’re doable without additional R&D. Legal and regulatory issues won’t be a problem in America, given the corporate lobbying weight that will be brought to bear on the issue.
Once people are comfortable with this situation, I’m sure we’ll start seeing “highway mode” autopilot features on regular cars in short order. It’ll be sold as a hopped-up and safer version of cruise control.
[quote=“KathyPartdeux, post:22, topic:96983, full:true”]
Maybe. But they may need to take regular drivers off the road for it - which I don’t see happening soon.[/quote]
In the case of the big-rigs, they’ll take the regular drivers out of one lane of the highway, which already happens to a lesser degree for HOVs.
After 15-20 years of motivated corporate efforts when it comes to autonomous taxis, it might not be a matter of breaking the law anymore because the law might be changed. And city streets will likely be less congested if the promise of increased efficiencies from automated vehicles come to pass, because there will be fewer human drivers on the road. But again, that’s long-term stuff.
I agree that the airborne drones are less likely in the short term inside cities – the focus there seems to be rural and exurban deliveries. But ATV-sized delivery drones are on the way to city streets. I can easily see Amazon and Walmart starting both initiatives within 5 years from warehouses and depots at the edges of major cities.
Like all insane people, they’ll hold out until the end, but that isn’t where corporate America is focused. The first goal of the stakeholders in automated vehicles isn’t taking people who like driving out of their cars, but about taking the people who drive for a living out of their jobs. Which brings us back to Uber and its problems.
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Note that the article corrects the 41% number i’ve been seeing all over the place. If Uber were only charging 41% of cost, then fares would be miniscule, and that doesn’t seem to be the case. The corrected number is around 79%, still unsustainable but it means instead of tripling fares to make a 20% profit, they will only need to raise them by 50% once they’ve achieved monopoly status.
[quote]With significant negative margins, no way to become profitable in sight, and a terrible media narrative after the Alphabet lawsuit, sexual harassment, aggressive/illegal behaviour, e.t.c., they cannot IPO.[/quote]I didn’t realize they hadn’t had an IPO yet. I suppose that means there’s no easy way to bet on their failure.
(Also, is “e.t.c.” a thing now? That’s troubling.)
It’s funny how, in the last 10 years, driverless cars went from “100 years away” to “tomorrow!”
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I think it’ll be the testing ground, not taxis. For the first few years we’ll see new big rigs with drivers still required, but not in active control, letting the rig do the long haul driving with the driver just hitting a button once in awhile to confirm course changes or exits – semi-autonomous driving. Probably in 5 years or less, we’ll see the first (Amazon?) fleet of fully autonomous shipping vehicles with no humans present.
I’m looking forward to whatever company brings autonomous driverless car-sharing to market first, successfully. I’ll happily give up any car ownership to be able to order up a ride downtown as-needed.
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Increases in efficiencies aren’t going to be that dramatic, and streets will only become more congested in the future with greater populations and reliance on a motor vehicle based mode of transportation that doesn’t scale (robot cars or not).
I like driving. This might make me odd, but it doesn’t make me insane.
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That describes pretty much any startup (and to a great extent established companies on the stock market).
Most startups have no real profit, just a plan to some day have a huge profit. The ones with a profit have a fairly small one relative to what they need to “grow fast”. The very very few that have enough profit to grow fast don’t seek outside investment (why would they? They have self funded, and the founders will be able to keep more of the profits).
This is true of the 95% of startups that fail, as well as the 5% of startups that make it.
VCs don’t aim to pick only the 5% of startups that will make it. They aim to average more out of the successful startups then they shove into the whole set of startups. If a successful startup gets 100x return on money (and a failure gets zero return) picking 1 out of 20 winners will be more then good enough. If you really only get a 10x return then you need to pick 2 out of 10 or better (2 from 10 isn’t bad, but it isn’t that good compared to more conservative investments).
There are a lot of hurdles, not all of which are necessarily going to be passed. Robot trucks will have a lot of money pushing to get them on the streets, but in more than half the states in the US driving is the most common job. It wouldn’t be surprising for politicians at some level to build political capital fighting robot trucks/creating regulatory hurdles to kill them. If truck driving was automated away, we’d be looking at the last large blue-collar non-educated job base going away and would see massive and dangerous social upheaval. It’s not like the greed-heads killing jobs with robot trucks would be interested in paying to retrain former employees, and there’d be very little they’d be able to be retrained to do.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state
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Much like Netflix’s stratagem of “become HBO faster then HBO can become Netflix”…can Uber either learn to build cars faster then GM can learn to ride share? Or can they at least outsource building of cars faster then GM can learn to rideshare? (GM should be able to produce cars for it’s internal use inexpensively, but maybe someone like Uber can get close by contracting that out en mass to companies that already make cars but are just bit players in the US market, like maybe the new China owned Volvo?)
The issue isn’t so much GM making rideshare software (that is about 1000x simpler then self driving car software, right?), but GM being reluctant to really eat it’s own lunch by using out rideshare hard enough that it damages the existing car sale/lease business. That is why it is frequently hard for an incumbent to make the next disruptive product (and yes, you can use Apple as a counterexample here, but Apple is unusual in this regard, you can also use IBM and the PC in the 1980s, but these are pretty big exceptions).
The one thing GM really has going for it here is existing car sales are done through dealerships with the dealership taking a chunk of the profit (and in some cases outside finance companies as well). GM’s rideshare transition would cut into outright sales, but GM would be keeping much more of the profit from running that business then they would from selling cars…
…then again that could be a liability. Car dealerships might be able to prevent them from operating in many locales in much the same reason they claim Tesla shouldn’t be allowed to sell cars directly (you know, because private capital car dealerships have a god given right to exist and take money from consumers before passing some of that on to manufacturers, obviously!)
Economics: it’s complicated.
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The big-rig “drivers” will also be there to act as security guards for a while. What’s important to the corporations is that they’ll be able to pay them minimal rent-a-cop wages instead of the lower-middle-class wages a lot of them can make now with only a high school education. As soon as they’re able to, though, the long-haul trucking industry will eliminate the driver entirely from the picture.
I think it will be Walmart that will be the first big brand to put fully autonomous big-rigs on the highways, given their focus on supply chain. As I said above, Amazon seems more interested in smaller ground-based and air-based drones for short-haul deliveries.
Same here. As it is, I take public transit wherever I can. The cities I live in are usually well-covered, and most of them have GPS tracking and transit apps that make the buses and trams and rail close enough to on-demand.
It’s more the idea of better flow of traffic resulting from better syncing, tighter spacing of vehicles, etc. that’s supposed to come with automation. Ultimately, though, you’re correct: the only way cities will be able to overcome congestion that results from increased population is to put in more mass transit. The smarter municipalities in N. America and Europe are doing it now, before the situation gets dire and the costs go up even more. The stupider ones are counting on for-profit ride-sharing fleets to save the day, and the stupidest ones are counting on Uber.
I know. Just my joke. Except on certain streets at certain times (e.g. Sunset Blvd outside rush hour) I’m a very UNhappy motorist.
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Half my commute is on a winding little road with tree canopy covering it ~30% of the time with 4-5 bridges that cross a creek running alongside it with little waterfalls here and there. I spot deer and foxes and a lot of species of raptors and shore birds. It’s the kind of road rallying is made for, and it’s glorious to drive on. Then there’s the last couple mile stretch on the highway with too many lights, and that’s when I’d be okay with letting the robot take over.
Birding from cars where one drives a bit until you hit the right habitat then cruise around to look for the right spot to park and walk around isn’t really optimized for robots either since it’s not point-to-point.
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From what I’ve read, the car manufacturers have started coming to terms with that in recent years. They see where the economic future is for the Millenials and younger, and they see those generations’ waning interest in spending their dwindling salaries on a pricey and constantly depreciating asset that sits unused 90% of the time. So, suddenly ridesharing and on-demand short-term rentals become more of a priority for GM.
The dealerships have had a cushy ride for a long time, but ultimately they’re dependent on what the manufacturer wants more than vice-versa. The forward-thinking ones could transition into service and parking centres for the ride-sharing business. The profits wouldn’t be nearly the same, but the combination of large well-maintained asphalt lots and garage and body shop space in ideal locations are still worth a lot to a ride-sharing service, automated or not.
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Uber trips are subsidized by driver incentives. The passengers do not see the end week of fairs the add to promotions on a daily basis as boots. Drivers barely make ends meat with boost.
Take that away and for sure a loss to drivers. This is considered price fixing which I can’t wrap my head around why the FTC hasn’t step in and shut Uber down. Sony, Microsoft and many others have done this and slapped with big fines. Uber’s service has also gone down the toilet. Drivers and cars are WORSE than cabs now. Uber has become trash but they have nobody to blame but themselves.
I meant “ride-share” in the sense of “scheduling autonomous vehicles to pick you up,” once autonomous vehicles are on the roads, i.e. my understanding is that GM’s long-term plan is to pivot to being a service company that’s selling you individual rides, not cars. But yeah, it’s a question of who gets there first. Although I’m unclear how far Uber intend to go with this - I hadn’t really thought about it, but they surely have no plans to actually build cars themselves? Which makes their research into autonomous vehicles all the stranger, because, by the point where the technology is actually workable for street use, actual car manufacturers will be releasing cars that are already fully autonomous; Uber won’t be retrofitting the tech into cars. Surely Uber isn’t just hoping to be bought up (for their ride-sharing and autonomous auto software) by a car maker, or just license out the software?
And more local deliveries will still require someone to bring out and carry stuff at each individual stop.
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