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Could Cruise be the Theranos of AI? And is there a dark secret at the core of the entire driverless car industry?
(garymarcus.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Technology
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Autonomous cars would complete the hellish dependency on cars in many cities.
As a partially sighted person that's unable to legally drive, an autonomous car is an absolute dream to me and would give me a personal freedom many currently take for granted.
In our car dependent society, I understand that. But a lot of us would rather have better public transit so you wouldn't have to have a car to have your freedom.
I definitely understand that perspective and I would never say no to better public transport. However, as someone that has spent their entire life entirely reliant on public transport, I can assure you that even good public transport isn't a solution to all problems.
For example I can't just nip out to a hardware store to pick up some supplies because I fancy doing a bit of DIY, I am reliant on friends or Taxis to carry bulky items. I can't even do a large shop because it's too much to carry, I have to either have it delivered in which case I'm not able to easily see what I am getting - an issue be it fresh produce or just not realising how big a jar of something is, or I am forced to turn one shopping trip into several smaller trips. I certainly can't buy in bulk to save money.
I can't just go somewhere on a whim, I have to plan ahead and make sure I'm able to get any connections or be aware of any disruption.even when public transport is good, it still has issues.
You make great points that sighted people like myself might not ever consider.
IMO there should exist public options to take care of these gaps that you have. Right now I don't think there are really any groups of people who have both the means and the motivation to solve any of these issues. It sucks. I believe these issues are solvable.
Isn't delivery an option in this case?
Believe me it's often the only option I have and it has a whole host of problems. Things sometimes aren't in stock and you get dumb substitutions or no substitution at all - which means I still need to go and pick up whatever I'm missing or make do without.
For fresh produce, it's entirely random if I get decent selection or bruised up leftovers. If I want baked potatoes I have no way of picking them myself and end up with crappy tiny things unless I buy the more expensive explicit "jacket potatoes".
It's a nightmare.
I'm hoping they are sorted by the time I'm 80 and can no longer safely drive myself.
They offer the chance to push the average number of occupants per vehicle below one.
They also offer the chance to push it above one. Ride-sharing will be a lot more attractive with autonomous cars.
Why?
I see the more realistic probability of the car picking up and then dropping off a passenger, and then picking up another. I don't think customers would be happy if the car they were riding made their trip longer in order to force them to share the car.
You just need price incentive, make it cheaper if it is shared, it's economically sound.
There will be taxis that work pretty much like they do today. But there will also be mini buses that carry secret passengers and are cheaper. It's not an either/or situation.
It could reduce the need for individual cars by increasing car sharing.
That's Car Sharing, not autonomous vehicles, no? Car Sharing is a good thing, definitely, but we really need to get rid of cars. Not completely, but to a point where it's not the default.
With autonomous cars, you don't need a driver to bring it to the next person who needs it. That's a big limitation of current car sharing, it prevents a lot of possible sharing from happening as cars spend 95% of their lifetime parked. Indeed, we need less and smaller cars, and I think autonomous car would help with that by increasing sharing and usage time.
But how would I flex my wealth to the peasants then? /s
Easy, buy a $15,000 dollar bike.
But you can do car sharing with any kind of car. In Germany there are cities that run a rent service for their citizens who only need a car occasionally.
Obviously this only works in the context of a robust public transport infrastructure and in cities built for humans rather than cars, so that the need for a car becomes a rare occurrence.
American cities don't generally fit that description and until they do the type of car they use won't change a thing, because it's not addressing the core problem.
Same answer as the other similar comment: https://jlai.lu/comment/3237143
No they wouldn't. Once most cars are robotaxis, there will be drastically less space needed for car parks which will free up huge amounts of space. That can be used for bike lanes, so cycling becomes safer and more convenient. And I don't expect most rides to be single occupancy. People will opt for shared rides if they are substantially cheaper, which would cut the number of vehicles on the road. Autonomous cars are actually the best chance we have right now to escape the car centric hellscapes of our current cities.
Bus. That's called a bus. It can also fit more than five people and doesn't use as much energy to transport each person. You just reinvented a shittier bus
Wrong. I invented a better bus. Well, i didn't, none of this is new. A bus that goes straight to your destination with few or no stops. A bus that always tells you exactly when it's going to arrive. A bus that can go to a lot of places a large bus can't. And of course one that's a lot quiet and cleaner. What exactly is your problem with that concept?
Traffic jams and cost. You can't be this stupid, can you? I literally pointed out buses take up less space and use less energy. Why ask your question as if I hadn't pointed out the negatives of your solution compared to buses (or other public transit vehicles).
Also, it's not quiter or cleaner, since more cars = more noise compared to one bus (you can't consider the vehicle without considering it's capacity), and you generate a lot more pollution (rubber tires produce a lot of particles, and you have more vehicles and more tires with taxis). So stop lying.
The reason people in cities with proper transportation don't worry that much about getting a bus directly to their destination is that the network is comprehensive enough to cover all manner of trips, from any one point in the city to another. Same with frequency, if it's arriving in less than 5-10 minutes it doesn't matter when exactly it arrives.
Have you ever gotten on a bus? My car is in the shop and I've been riding the bus to and from work for about a month now. The bus smells of pee, a fair few of the denizens who ride with me smell of pee, and last week a guy got pepper sprayed or maced by the police for being high (near as I could tell) at the bus stop. I've ridden transit all my life (quite literally grew up riding public transit to school and so on), and I gotta tell ya, I'll ride share before I'll actively ride a bus. Especially considering the ride share would get me to work in half an hour and the bus takes about an hour and 45 minutes.
Those are reasons to fund better public transit, not double down on smaller cars.
Better public transit than Seattle, NYC, Philly, Chicago, and San Francisco? Seriously. Seriously. I've lived all of these places and I gotta tell you, it's bad everywhere in the US and the problem isn't the transit. It's people.
Literally any city in Europe or china has better public transit than anywhere in the US, and it’s not even close.
So your suggestion is to attack transit in America in a way that would not work for American because of America's unique problems with scale. Good to know. Do you know what would happen in most major cities in the US if all the car drivers suddenly had to take public transit? It would overwhelm any system you put in place. And the pollution would be astronomical.
I'm all for walkable cities and suburbs, and I'm even good with reducing the number of people who need to drive and therefore cars on the road. But this isn't a zero sum game. So unless you can show me a plan that is viable to take the place of the system I don't really want to hear naysaying about electric robotaxis or any of that.
This has been studied.
Americans don't have problems with scale, they are just toi car dependent to think of anything else.
Those people that stink, guess what: they are desperate and don't have any other form of transportation than to take an underfunded Bus.
Imagine the busses would receive a checkup and cleaning everytime they complete their route, come every 5 minutes, and wouldn't have to wait with the car traffic. Suddenly, it sounds much better doesn't it?
Just out of curiosity where are you from. Because when I said scale I meant people vs available usable land vs cost to update the infrastructure. America has a similar population to the entire EU. But the EU is 1,707,642 sq mi, and the US 3,794,100 sq mi. We have almost three times the size to cover with transit. Japan has 145,869 sq mi and 125.7 million people.
If you had read the article posted you would perhaps have a better understanding of why it is a scale problem and a funding problem. Those aren't the only problems but they are some of the big ones.
It cost Japan something like $1BN USD of today's money to implement high speed rail.
Just to cover San Francisco to Los Angeles in California was estimated to cost $9BN in 2008. It's now estimated to cost between $88BN and $128BN. That's just to cover 350 miles.
The checkup and cleaning of busses, trains and so on is a thing. It's called preventative or scheduled maintenance and it is being done. But to expect that every route would get that kind of maintenance after every single completed run? While being actively used by 207 million people daily? That's a fever dream. We don't have the kind of man power that would take with the expertise it would take. It sounds better yes. But I want to see the plan you (or anyone) has to make it work. Where would these people board these buses and trains? Who is going to clean them? Who is going to service them? The automotive industry as a whole has a shortage of technicians. The aviation industry has a shortage of technicians. The average age of an aviation tech is 55. These people are retiring and nobody is replacing them.
I'm not blaming them for stinking. I fully understand that homeless people ride public transit because it's dry and warm and relatively safe. I understand that most homeless people work and aren't homeless on purpose. I also don't blame them for their lot in life. But people will absolutely pay money to use rideshare when and if it is available to forgo having to deal with having their senses assaulted. They absolutely will forgo spending their valuable time on public transit in order to get to and from work faster because the average work hour here isn't 8 hours for a full time employee. It's 10. And adding an additional hour or more to that per day for transportation? It adds up.
According to this article Seattle (where I live) has a good score for its public transit and the median income of drivers to transit commuters and still only accounts for something like 9% of transit users. And that's with a city that is "super walkable".
Just like regular taxi, they reduce the need for parking spots. Personal car taking valuable real estate all day long are a big problem.
I firmly believe the solution is autonomous shuttles, not cars. Imagine having bus routes that can dynamically change and adapt to demand. Say we replace every bus with 2 smaller shuttles: during normal service the route could have the same capacity, but if there is an extraordinary event (sports event for example) you could divert them from the low-demand areas to the extraordinary-demand zone.
During lower demand times, you can also have more routes at no extra cost. If you're clever and make an app to call the shuttle (think Uber but through pre-established routes) the demand can be determined in real time to ensure you don't have empty shuttles.
And because they're bigger than passenger cars you're still increasing the ratio of passengers per vehicle, unlike robotaxis which merely replace private cars, with mostly 1- or 2-passenger trips.
Cities that have studied it believe on-demand car service is necessary (but often much more expensive) to reaching 100% transit coverage. But they also said you could reach like 95% with just busses.