tandempower

I really would be happy to discuss these issues, but the mods frown on it here. In P&R we can discuss the cost and value of urban forestry until the cows come home.

tandempower

As I said before this whole barrage of posts on the subject, there is local conflict that leads to planted saplings getting cut sometimes. I think the solution is for people to understand the full value of trees and ecology, but as your post demonstrates, many people can't understand the relativism of economic values. Since that is a topic for P&R, I will either discuss it further with you there or not at all.

Walter S

I disagree. With taxis the main operating cost is paying the taxi drivers, once the initial investment in equipment (cars etc.) is paid for. With driverless cars the initial investment will be higher at least for the foreseeable future. But then the operating costs will be WAY lower by not having to pay drivers. The technology will get cheaper and cheaper over time so the higher up front costs become less and less significant.

The cost of AI is just the initial investment. If you accept that *somebody* will travel in driverless cars then that gets developed and is not an ongoing cost in future years. Same for "mapping". Anything required will have to be engineered and paid for in order for there to be a market for even rich people to travel in driverless cars. Then once rich people put all this in place, continued refinement and market forces driven by demand make the costs lower and lower over time and the overall number of people that want and can afford driverless cars grows.

So yes it starts out for people that want the convenience or novelty or have disabilities etc. But then it quickly grows from that foothold. Taxis won't have a chance.

Mobile 155

While more complicated because of technology this is what happened with Bicycles when they first were developed, same thing happened with cars and trucks and buses. Once they are accepted "sombody" always seems to find a way to make then more affordable to more people. It happened with portable radios, TV sets, Computers, Microwave ovens, Walkmans, Ipods. I just don't know if on demand, automated transportation is in our grasp or simply a futuristic Si-Fi dream. I hope it is and I hope something comes up that will give us the selective freedom that Bicycles then cars and motorcycles gave the people with on demand, point to point transportation.

When I was in college we looked at designed cities that had transportation pods that could be called up to pick you up and drop you off and move off till needed again. Maybe we will live to see that day but I am not holding my breath.

Maelochs

The fact that so many major corporations have already invested so much in driverless cars and have done millions of test miles already ... kinfd of makes me think this argument is a little stale.

Her's a hint---google.

Not Just as in "google self-driving cars ... but as in "Google which has Google Maps and Google Earth and like the rest of us can use the GPS satellite network and has tons of the worlds's best programmers and has already been making driverless cars for many years ..... "

Mapping? Between Google Earth, Google Maps, and GPS ..... programming? Dude, if we could send men to the Moon with less computational power than an old smart phone .....

Here's a thought. Freaking Airplanes can pretty much do a whole flight from take-off to landing on autopilot and that is .... just a tad more complicated.

Do you think on space flights there are people "steering' rockets? "Fly-by-wire" is what makes weirdly-shaped airplanes like B2 stealth bombers possible ... the whole reason 'flying wings" bombed in the late '50s was because they are unstable and humans could not react quickly or precisely enough. Nowadays computers and servos do all that.

Lots of companies have already poured huge money into AI cars. Lots of AI cars are already out there. No, it was not cheap to start, and no it was not easy ... but it wasn't that complicated. Starting and stopping and turning? Has no one else ever seen a guy with a radio-controlled car or airplane?

The hardest part is preventing collisions .... but if humans can drive cars .... that's a pretty low bar.

The biggest obstacle and the toughest nut to crack isn't technical it is financial---insurance companies are freaking out about how they can no longer have the big-breasted blond get on the stand and sway a jury by crying when the black-box data and multiple on-board video shows the big-breasted blond was at fault.

The tech stuff is just tech. The human stuff ... man, humans are really messed up.

(https://waymo.com/ Four Million miles of testing in real cars ... 25,000 miles per week.

General Motors Self-Driving Car Fleet Grows to 30 | Fortune

“General Motors now has 30 self-driving all-electric Chevrolet Bolt vehicles that it’s testing on public roads in Scottsdale, Ariz., and San Francisco ...“ That’s real cars on real roads in real traffic. No deaths, no panic, no news reports of massive flaming wrecks or ridiculous traffic jams ..... And that article was from October 2106.

Now, i am not saying Forbes knows anything at all about business ..... https://www.forbes.com/sites/olivier.../#752cc77e5087 10 Million Self-Driving Cars Will Hit The Road By 2020 -- Here's How To Profit

Interesting bit from Wiki-alwaysthetruthia---"As of July 2015, Google's 23 self-driving cars have been involved in 14 minor collisions on public roads,[34] but Google maintains that, in all cases other than the February 2016 incident, the vehicle itself was not at fault because the cars were either being manually driven or the driver of another vehicle was at fault."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo

Mobile 155

It is true that technology is speeding things up a lot faster than I ever imagined it would. I was watching a video on how Amazon is moving to make the grocery line and checker a thing of the past.

https://www.geekwire.com/2016/amazon...grocery-store/

Maelochs

"Price check on buggy whips, register three."

cooker

Most of the costs you are listing already apply to cars driven by private owners or cab or uber drivers etc., which are obviously affordable now, since there are hundreds of millions of them out there.

So the question is - will the added AI/electronic costs eventually be cheap enough that self-driving cars become economically viable? As others have pointed out, some of the world's largest or richest corporations think so.

jon c. 

They built something like where I live. Or they tried. A cooperative venture with the developer building a large (and still growing) development in conjunction with the State moving many of their offices to the site, building a complex on land donated by the developer. But the single family housing is out of the price range of most state office workers and the 'village center' doesn't really have much in it. There's a major supermarket but it's on the other side of a six lane road and practically speaking isn't really walkable for most anyone. It sounded good on the drawing board, but in the end it was just another suburb.

350htrr

It's practically a given... That is where everything is heading with vehicles for the masses, now vehicles for the rich or specialty uses like "off road" or people who just has to drive their own vehicles everywhere despite the extra cost or regulations, that will take a bit longer to switch over. JMO

Maelochs

I was in an environmental group which tried to stop one being built in a flood plain (genius!) of a large, protected river ... and the state and city were falling over themselves to give the "modern, cutting-edge concept" whatever they builders wanted.

What the residents wanted, it turned out,w ass not to walk anywhere.

Like the one you saw ... pretty good ideas, not thought all the way through, with too m,any compromises and to many miscalculations, sinking under the weight of dreams or good mixed with dreams of greed.

What I say is, no matter how good the system, if you put the same old people into it, you aren''t going to get a very different result.

I-Like-To-Bike

You missed the point that the electronic gizmos of a self driving car do not replace all the mechanical systems on motor vehicles or their associated costs. There is no particular reason (other than wishful thinking and industry PR flackery) to think that building, operating or maintaining self driving vehicles will inevitably be cheaper than current vehicles.

Some of the world's biggest money burning unicorns (Tesla and Uber) also think so. It will be interesting to see who Google will get to build and/or operate the vehicles equipped with their software package, or who GM is going to get to buy or operate sufficient numbers of the self driving cars that they build.

I expect Tesla and Uber to go bankrupt either before they ever sell any or operate fleets of self driving cars, or because of their failure to sell or operate them for profit

cooker

No, I get that the individual vehicles won't be any cheaper, but their for-hire usage may be more economical than the current car-for-hire systems because the cost of the AI might eventually be less than the cost of a human driver (which is what automation is all about, after all, and is what I assume Maelochs was saying). Also if commercial car services expand to replace a good sized chunk of current private ownership, more people will share fewer vehicles, that are not idle most of the time, as private cars are, creating additional efficiencies. They may also have fewer collisions, further reducing costs.

cooker

People act very differently in Copenhagen compared to Phoenix, and presumably "the system" is what explains it.

Maelochs

What, the educaaional system?

Wildly different cultures ... are you saying that if a bunch of New Yorkers were all flown to Denmark, they'd suddenly become Danish? Their views on everything would instantly change? because while I haven't been everywhere. I have beent o a lot of places, and while people are still people, people think differently in different places.

If you brought a bunch of Danish citizens to new York would they suddenly become rude and aggressive and anti-bike?


Actually, the answer (IMO) Ia the educational system. Cultural change takes a long time .... and just changing the laws doesn't have a lot of effect. Racism, for instance, persists because children learn it at home before they join the rest of society.

Look at the U.S. in 18659 and 1869----in most of the country being a black man was a huge liability ... even though the System had nominally changed completely. The People were still the same.

(All opinions expressed here are the responsibility of the poster, not of the thread manager. No support is impled .... but hey, everyone knows I am right.)

cooker

No, but they'd act a bit more like Danes while they were there, because the milieu supports it. But New Yorkers were a bad example by you, because New York is already a bit similar to Copenhagen with its subways and density and reduced car ownership. In fact, even if you brought Phoenicians (isn't that what you call people from Phoenix?) to Copenhagen, they'd act a bit more Danish.

jon c. 

There was a video going around a year or so back of several Swedish cops on vacation in NYC detaining a miscreant on a subway. The manner is which they acted was night and day from what we've come to expect from cops in the US.

I-Like-To-Bike

1. I assume that Maeloch meant exactly what he posted about the cost of making self driving cars becoming cheaper with the introduction of more electronic self driving components just like an iPhone.

2. "Might" cost less and especially "If" commercial taxi service evolves in the way you predict and If people decide that sharing vehicles daily with strangers is preferable to their current transportation preference and If they have fewer collisions are the key words for this prediction.

3. I will give you credit for using the qualifying words If and might (happen) and may be (cheaper) when discussing predictions about self driving vehicles, many crystal ball prognosticators don't use such qualifiers and make similar statements as givens and sure fire certainties.

cooker

Just track back and see. Roody (post 1519) said he doubted self-driving would work because of the cost of "sensors, AI and mapping". Maelochs (post 1522) replied that the "development and electronic tech" costs would come down. Neither of them was discounting the other costs of the vehicle.

Walter S

It’s not a given that the cost of driverless will stay higher. In the meantime driverless will become irresistible like cell phones. For example if people don’t have to pay for parking or can at least get their car to go to a cheap lot down the street, others will look twice as it gets harder and harder to function without one.

Steering wheels and their linkage/controls/power steering pump and belts, turn signal controls, and various instrument panel interfaces eventually disappear. Granted the initial cost of software development and sensors will more than offset any such savings. But in the long term you eliminate the investment in quality apolstery/buttons/knobs/instruments/aesthetics and replace that with weightless (now free) AI and hidden computer and sensors (rugged and ugly) with the user interface being a touch screen, where the same hardware costs are shared by all its functions.

Not an obvious outcome and nobody can say today.

Maelochs

LOL people will talk into the implanted mike in their throats which will be activated by pressing two fingers together or something, and "keyboard" will be a word associated only with musical instruments ... they will order cars like we order pizzas, or ask for a projection from their lapel projector onto some wall surface which will show vans and buses in the area, and will tap the wall with their active fingers (glue-on nail covers) to order a ride.

Bicycles will be used primarily by poor and daring kids who will hold onto the back of driverless cars.

I-Like-To-Bike

Nothing is a given about the future of self driving cars other than a lot of money will have been spent on their development whether or not they ever successfully enter the market beyond a being a curiosity or not.

Maelochs

Well after the asteroid hits and the zombie apocalypse gets rolling, we will all need tanks.

tmac100

Tanks of oxygen/air, I suppose...

tandempower

Nothing is a given about the future of human-driven cars other than a lot of money will have been spent on cash back offers and other marketing gimmicks, whether or not they ever successfully enter the market beyond a being motorized umbrellas to justify excessive public infrastructure/paving expenditures.