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[lemon10]

I don't see much of a reason why the ads would need to be annoying. Businesses paying round-trip transportation fees to their regular customers is a powerful way to increase customer loyalty. Just set the screen to "This trip paid for by Generimart. We value our customers; thank you for shopping with us." for five seconds.

Advertising does not just magically make stuff cheaper, the revenue has to comes from somewhere. The only reason Genericmart would pay for your fare is if they think they can extract more money from you then you otherwise would have spent.

A one-off fare subsidy to take you to their business makes some sense, they absorb the cost and make up the difference with profit from new customers regularly spending money in the future.

But in Genericmart's case, they have to make up the lost money they keep spending on you somewhere, and it's going to have to come from their "loyal customers" through various means (increased price of groceries, for example). So all your really going to do is make the fare look free.

It could come from their advertising budget, so instead of seeing commercials for them online or in the newspaper you would simply see them in the cab. And, assuming that it does really work as an effective means of advertisement, then it could come from the increased customers they get.

Also, just because it would shift costs to something else wouldn't detract from the fact that it would be free for you to use then and there.

E:

Personally, I think stone tools are going to destroy the hunting and gathering industries,
and that's just terrible. Half the tribe will be unemployed!

I'm not saying it's a bad thing. But the transition to a post scarcity society might be difficult. According to a study done by Oxford University, 47% of all jobs are at risk of automation even with current technology.

It's extremely likely that there are people preparing for college right now who will never work a job for money in their entire lives. I think that an awful lot of people aren't mentally prepared for that.

The less brainwashed college age people are supporting transitional movements like basic income.

Being unemployed is not terrible if it doesn't mean destitution. I think we can do better than SSI and whatever it is Utah is trying to do.

Yeah, but it probably will mean destitution for many for a long time. Even if we only need a hundred million people to make/run/distribute everything for everyone in the world doesn't mean that the 7 billion without jobs will actually get the fruits of that.
Now, it isn't to say that its impossible for everyone without jobs to still get enough money to live well (in the the first world especially) via governments realizing its necessary for the economy. But it isn't in any way inevitable, I wouldn't be surprised if the economy keeps crashing because governments/corporations refuse to keep a consumer class in existence via welfare (which will be necessary because there won't be jobs for the people who want them), especially in the near future where the majority of people still need to work.

[GavJ]

I've realised the fundamental problem with the suggestion that this technology would somehow slash vehicle usage by 90% - the fact that most people use their cars at the same time.

Well first of all, we just need more trains for large scale commuting to cities than we have now in the U.S. That's the primary solution to commuting to cities long distances.

But in the meantime to stop the gap, or for shorter range trips during peak hours (like a restaurant rush or something), AND to get people to train stations if necessary: Carpools, dude. Mainframe-automated dynamically assigned robotic carpools. You can pay $2-7 for a carpool if you're in a dense enough area to warrant one profitably, cheaper the denser it is, or pay $12-15 for your own car, or whatever. Group people together by background check-verified and/or co-passenger ratings-based tiers if you're worried about safety or annoyance. Now you're back down to 80-90% vehicles slashed again, probably.

Sort of more like a micro-bus system that changes routes as needed based on who is asking for a bus on their smartphones for any given day.

ALSO though, as time goes on, commuting for jobs should become less necessary anyway. Due to A) technology making physical presence less necessary for more types of jobs, and B) Jobs in general become less common, and shorter in duration. If you only have a 10 hour work week, then you can go in on only certain days, lessening rush hour strain, and/or go to work in short shifts that spread out rush hour across the day (people going to work from 7:00am all the way to 3:00pm and coming home all the way from 9:00am to 5:00pm, etc.)

the transition to a post scarcity society might be difficult.

Yes, in two mains ways, I think:
1) Less-intelligent and/or less-creative people tend to get really depressed without a job for too long, due to not being able to come up with enough fulfilling things to do on their own. Simply providing more things for cheap and having fewer jobs is a perfectly fine recipe for needs being met, but a dangerous one for mental health on its own. This isn't necessarily that hard to fix, though, as long as conscious attention is paid to the problem. All you need to do is have large-scale community arts/social/whatever programs readily available. Basically beef up our community and rec centers 10-fold and give them more branches and accessibility and emphasis + public works for beautification + municipal programs for participating in human subjects research (psychology and such) etc.

2) Companies are going to fight tooth and nail to survive with profits, even if they aren't needed anymore, simply because capitalism is a self-sustaining and self-defending system. They will act parasitically even if scarcity is unnecessary to try and CREATE scarcity or a perception thereof. Things like lobbying for legislation to mandate consumption, and advertising to convince people they need-need-need the new type of fashionable solid rhodium hover-shoes or whatever.

I'm not sure if this feedback loop can be broken easily without some amount of violence or at least illegal coups or things. (In a place like the U.S. or maybe only here, I'm referring to. Europe already has a culture of clamping down on privatization bit by bit and people mostly accepting it and building momentum. Places like China already have mechanisms in place to simply declare government control when deemed beneficial)

[alexandertnt]

It could come from their advertising budget, so instead of seeing commercials for them online or in the newspaper you would simply see them in the cab. And, assuming that it does really work as an effective means of advertisement, then it could come from the increased customers they get.

Thats not what I was referring to. Paying loyal customers to come to your shop isn't really advertising. Those people have already been advised of your existance and your products/services. This sort of thing is designed to keep current customers comming moreso than attract new customers.

If newspaper/online advertisments are in any way effective (which I would have to assume they are to some degree) then why would they stop using them? Especially considering these advertisments are more likely to bring in new consumers than paying for already loyal customers to come, why would they put more money into the customers they already have at the expense of new customers?

One-off, yeah I could see it working, it would be easier to get new people into your store if you pay for their trip (what have we got to lose?), but for this sort of loyalty thing, I don't see how it would work to anyone's advantage.

Also, just because it would shift costs to something else wouldn't detract from the fact that it would be free for you to use then and there.

And the fact that it's free shouldn't detract from the fact that it wouldn't really be saving you any money. So it doesn't really make that much of a difference. I would remain in the same financial situation. (again, here referring to paying for loyal customers, not for potentially new customers). If my budget ends up being about the same (less for fares, more to the company paying those fares) why should anyone really care?

It reminds me of how phone companies sell phones on plans. They make it look like you get a phone for free because that they subsidise it if you agree to be with them. But when you look at the price of BYO phone plans you quickly discover your subsidising your own phone. You don't save anything (infact it usually ends up costing considerably more), its just set up to fire those little "free stuff" neurons in your brain.

It may not quite be a zero-sum game, but it seems pretty close.

[sneakey pete]

Vehicles that are one forth the mass can be estimated to cost approximately one forth to purchase."
Lol, nope. A lot of parts of vehicles have an inherent fabrication cost, something which wouldn't scale unfortunately.

I don't know enough about vehicle manufacturing to say how realistic that cost estimate is, and I'm guessing neither do you.

Well, I'm a mechanical engineer and almost minored in materials enginering (caveat: currently employed in oil and gas construction) and my major hobby is modifying cars. So i'd say I have bit of an idea...

But, we do have other precedents to compare to. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Nano

Looks an awful lot like the podcar, doesn't it?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/tata-nano-3000-car-coming_n_1967753.html

Short version: car costs $3000. They're adding features for a planned 2015 US release that will up the price to $8000.

Hold up there, that isn't a fair comparison to make. You're comparing a car made in a developing country to cars made in first world countries, the costs associated and the end product are going to be both wildly different. I doubt that Google could get away with using cars with the fit and finish of the Nano, not cars with the safety rating.
Remember, in your example, the car's only replace half the cars in the city, safety rating is going to be just as important as it would in a normal car.

I think it's pretty reasonable to suggest that an electric robo taxi with no mechanical interface like steering wheel, pedals etc might be cheaper to produce.

Honestly i'm not sure you could save that much money. You still need to have all of the mechanical components of a car, eg steering rack, throttle body/control etc. the difference is that a computer is inputting commands not a human. you might save a few hundred bucks at most i'd suggest. The cost of mass producing sticks of metal to be pedals isn't much.

 But at the same time it also has to have computers, camera, etc. We don't know yet how much that's going to cost. But we do know that the most expensive element of the system, the lidar, which cost $70,000 in the original prototypes is expected to cost $250 per unit. That's a pretty big cost reduction. And we know that Audi's system cost only a 'couple hundred dollars. And simply looking at the general trend of diminishing costs in electronics in general, I think it's reasonable to suggest that the costs don't need to be astronomical. Cameras, processors, LCDs, GPS and wifi are not expensive.

I wouldn't quite be so optimistic about the tech there. Your article mentions that "a" LIDAR unit costs $250, but doesn't indicate that a LIDAR unit of the type Google needs (eg, resolution, speed, useability in different conditions etc) is going to cost that much.
The AUDI system that costs "a few hundred dollars" uses a camera, its a different kind of system entirely. Kinda neat though, this is the sort of slow, small methodical expansion I expect to see as the true introduction of "self driving cars", not some kind of massive, instant world changing event.

So let's arbitrarily stick with the $8000 figure. Hey...let's bump it up to $10,000 per unit, because why not? 18,000 vehicles at $10,000 each? That's only $180 million.

Google could do that every single month, year after year, and it would still only be roughly half of what they've been averaging in acquisitions over the past five years.

So maybe it'll be $30K, or $40K? I'd say it'd be more than your arbitrary 10K figure for sure! don't forget you need bigger vehicles too, they increase the average.
Can Google afford to buy all that? sure. But because these small price increases add up. The costs compared to traditional transport, as per that report, go from being 20% to say, 40%, or 50%. And this means that the self driving taxi fleet potentially goes from being a profitable venture to an unprofitable venture.
Regardless of how much money Google has, as a listed company, they have a responsibility to their shareholders to make a profit. You will find that all of the acquisitions that Google has made are made because they will pay off (eg, youtube). Now, Google has poured money into self driving cars, and bought a lot of robotics companies of late. However these things combined do not mean that Google is aiming for a self driving car taxi fleet, just that they see money in making self driving cars and robots.

[Sheb]

It would be interesting to know what fraction of a car's cost in "unshrinkable", thing that you need anyway (brake, engine, lidar for the driverless cars etc) and whose cost doesn't diminish much with size.

[Zangi]

So... will google cars come with a radio?  What about wireless internet?

[GlyphGryph]

Leafsnail, anecdotally I could see it making huge changes. Lots of people are reluctant to lend or share cars, extremely so in my experience, because of trust issues and liability and insurance concerns.

How does having a driverless car negate either of those issues?  Unless the driverless system is able to completely override the operator (which is pretty unlikely, as it would result in your car basically kidnapping you) the trust problems would remain, and so would the insurance problems.

Lolwut.

You don't have to have to trust someone to now crash your car when they aren't driving it. You don't have to trust someone to bring it back when they are done when you can tell it to come back anyway. You don't have to worry about whether or not they are insured or what-the-fuck ever because they aren't going to be driving the car.

I don't get what is so difficult to understand about this situation that you can conclude the same identical problems would remain. Perhaps you could put forth an actual argument here, because you just seem to be mounting a defense that is the equivalent of "nuh uh!"

[andrea]

Most importantly: aren't we talking about a fleet of robotic taxis? You don't own the car, that is why you won't be worried about sharing it.
And good central planning can make picking up passengers along the road more efficent. Although that is not an inherent advantage of driverless cars.

[Leafsnail]

Well first of all, we just need more trains for large scale commuting to cities than we have now in the U.S. That's the primary solution to commuting to cities long distances.

But in the meantime to stop the gap, or for shorter range trips during peak hours (like a restaurant rush or something), AND to get people to train stations if necessary: Carpools, dude. Mainframe-automated dynamically assigned robotic carpools. You can pay $2-7 for a carpool if you're in a dense enough area to warrant one profitably, cheaper the denser it is, or pay $12-15 for your own car, or whatever. Group people together by background check-verified and/or co-passenger ratings-based tiers if you're worried about safety or annoyance. Now you're back down to 80-90% vehicles slashed again, probably.

Sort of more like a micro-bus system that changes routes as needed based on who is asking for a bus on their smartphones for any given day.

I agree - what you need to ease congestion is public transport which can take more people per vehicle, not hundreds of taxis with only two seats each (which is what LB seems to be suggesting).  I guess it may make carpooling a little bit easier, although I wouldn't want to carpool with random people and I'm not sure how any proposed background check system would work.

ALSO though, as time goes on, commuting for jobs should become less necessary anyway. Due to A) technology making physical presence less necessary for more types of jobs, and B) Jobs in general become less common, and shorter in duration. If you only have a 10 hour work week, then you can go in on only certain days, lessening rush hour strain, and/or go to work in short shifts that spread out rush hour across the day (people going to work from 7:00am all the way to 3:00pm and coming home all the way from 9:00am to 5:00pm, etc.)

This may be true (although the impact will be limited unless schooling from home becomes common) but it doesn't have anything to do with automated cars.

You don't have to have to trust someone to now crash your car when they aren't driving it. You don't have to trust someone to bring it back when they are done when you can tell it to come back anyway. You don't have to worry about whether or not they are insured or what-the-fuck ever because they aren't going to be driving the car.

I've touched on it already, but for these things to be true there would have to be
1. no way to manually override the automated system (otherwise the trust issues surrounding driving it/taking it remain)
2. a way for people to remotely issue orders to your car (otherwise the trust issue about giving it back remain)

Would you actually be happy to ride in a vehicle like this?  A vehicle which allows the person you're sharing with to kidnap you if you get caught in traffic and stay in the car too long?  A vehicle that could most likely be controlled remotely by law enforcement, or hackers, with no way to override their commands?

e: I resent the implication that I'm going "Nuh uh", considering that I've clearly explained all my reasoning, in the face of articles that have been uncritically repeating Google's bullshit estimates

[GavJ]

You don't have to trust someone to bring it back when they are done when you can tell it to come back anyway.

As he pointed out, you can't just allow cars to drive off at exactly 3:07 no matter what, because a person might have the door open and be halfway inside the car grabbing their purse or something, and you rip their arm off. Or if they are inside, it becomes unclear whether you're kidnapping them, since even if the doors are unlocked, you can't expect somebody to bail out of a moving vehicle. etc. etc. But if you put in a safety check for "don't drive off when the door is open or a person is inside" then I can just hold your car where I want it by merely leaving the door open 24/7 or putting a bag of sand in the seat.

Also, what if it's in a garage? Google software can't open other people's garage doors, and I'm pretty sure you don't want to drive through somebody's wall, as you're going to owe an awful lot of money probably, unless you had a professionally drafted contract for exact return time outlining such contingencies, which you wouldn't. Or I can tie the axle to a wall.

Also, if I have a car in my possession miles and miles away from you and I know what I'm doing, I can presumably hack into it or rip out some relevant electronics or whatever. At the very least I can chop it up for parts for resale. Google software isn't going to save you from that.



You have to have SOME trust of people no matter what, and/OR accountability for them if they are complete strangers (such as swiping credit cards or IDs before a taxi will run, or aforementioned contracts)

I wouldn't want to carpool with random people and I'm not sure how any proposed background check system would work.

Background checks: The company makes you submit to a criminal and possibly other things background check before you're verified for that brand of taxi to let you be a passenger (you can't call for one or swipe a card or whatever until you do this)

Ratings systems: I believe some of those crowd source taxis do this already. Other customers can leave reviews of you after a carpool is done, and if you're an asshole who gets low enough and consistent reviews, you're banned from the service.

This may be true (although the impact will be limited unless schooling from home becomes common) but it doesn't have anything to do with automated cars.

Sure it does -- if you only go into work occasionally or if rush hour is spread out, then one car can run around and service a dozen people, versus needing one for everybody if rush hour is every day at the same time.  I.e., non-personally owned cars make a lot more sense the more people telecommute or don't work. And personally owned cars make less sense.

Yes I suppose it's logical for either human driven taxis or robotic, if that's what you meant, but you can say that about almost everything in the thread.

[10ebbor10]

The cat is in the bag. Release the Albatross.

[GavJ]

who are you talking to, ebbor?

[10ebbor10]

Communists.

Edit: My bad.