So people will drive their sedans around the city delivering flowers and cakes and laundry? And instead of picking up flowers at the flower store, or laundry from the laundromat down the street, I'll pay $5 more for everything to have it delivered? Uber and Lyft's master plan for superior returns is to become Postmates?
Somehow I'm skeptical.
> picking up passengers serves as a baseline load ... to keep drivers incentivized to be on the roads, but the real prize will be the courier tasks.
Why waste valuable space with bodies if courier tasks are the real prize? Drivers are incentivized by money. If drivers could make more money driving dresses than humans, most would fill their car with dresses and kick the humans to the curb.
That's a market for sure - but really not such a big market.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/the-on-demand-economy-2014-7
That vast majority of Americans do everything they can to save a few bucks, even when it's an inefficient use of resources (time and money).
I'm not sure "nickel and diming" a few wealthy people for home delivery is a $60BB business. There's not a huge barrier to entry and margins are low. But what do I know.
A few? With between 11 and 13 million millionaires in the US, it's a $60 billion business. And that's ignoring the vast number of people in the US earning $150,000+ in a household while not being millionaires; people that can easily afford such services.
And then there's this:
"The Richest Generation in U.S. History Just Keeps Getting Richer"
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-12/the-riches...
The boomers are getting older and richer, and will benefit massively from courier services.
What are you basing that on, without knowing any financial information? If the mere existence of millionaires makes a massive company viable, then what company isn't?
Do you believe that the very wealthy, today, are doing these things themselves, and that an Uber courier is solving a huge problem for them? Paying people to deliver stuff isn't new. Neither is driving people around. What Uber has done is made in convenient and, thus far, inexpensive. Do you think Uber will reap massive margins here? The barrier to entry is very low.
If Lyft is burning $50M/month driving me across town for $15, or me and two strangers for $5 each, how does substituting a person for a dress or a shaving kit or a bag of groceries suddenly make it hugely profitable?
And if this is the case, why isn't Postmates / Instacart/ etc. getting billions in VC money to expand and corner this underserved market? Why did all the courier startups immediately go belly up in the dot-com bubble last time around?
We had to wait another 15-20 years for those feverished VR dreams to become a reality
I reckon it'll be the same for self-driving. We are 20-25 years away, not 5-10
A self driving vehicle would do the long-haul and a human would do the tricky city/country lane leg of the journey.
Automating the whole journey is a long way off as you say.
Multiply that by the number of states/countries where you want to operate and by the level of bureaucracy in each country.
I'd say that from the day the tech actually works properly (which might be many years away, still), it will take at least 10 years for its availability across the globe, if not more.
I'm not saying Tesla should be stopped or that Elon should go to jail. But I think it's a clear case of false advertising, where lives are on the line.
Since you know about historical autopilots I suspect this will be redundant, but here it is anyhow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot#Modern_autopilots
"Modern" autopilots have been around for a while, something like 40-50 years. Sure if you go back 80 years you can find autopilots that aren't as advanced. If you want to move the goalposts like that, relative to what a reasonable person might expect, knock yourself out.
And there are plenty of systems below that. For example:
http://sarasotaavionics.com/category/autopilots/certified-au...
Note: single axis and 2-axis. Just like what I said it can be.
But yes, the people insisting that "autopilot" does not imply autonomy, simply because no autonomous autopilot exists on any commercial aircraft, are torturing the language. Sure.
Ask those same ~10 people what an autopilot does for a car. They'll say something like "it drives the car". Given what the Tesla Autopilot (tm) is capable of doing, their understanding of what the name means and what the software can actually do only has maybe a 20% overlap.
So yes I would call that torturing language. It's an autopilot that can drive the car under a very limited set of circumstances AND it requires that Jesus (you, the driver) is always 100% alert and ready to snatch the wheel the second the car starts to do an unsafe thing.
It's a totally different control problem in cars than it is in airplanes, and it's impressive that they're doing well enough to where people will trust the system enough to get into this kind of trouble. But right now it seems like Tesla's in the uncanny valley of self-driving. Good enough to make people say "huh, it works" but not so good that it works 100% of the time, always, forever, no matter the conditions, other crazy drivers and all the freak occurrences that are literally 1 in a million, but given that there are 1.1 billion car trips per day in the US will happen 1100 times a day. Even at 1 in a billion it'll still happen once per day.
But let's say it's true. Why would people think that, when that's not how they actually work? That's an honest question I asked above when I said, "Where did everybody get the idea that 'autopilot' implies full autonomy?"
Do we at least agree that actual factual airplane autopilots are fairly analogous to Tesla's? If so, how is it "torturing the language" to use the term that way? Overestimating the intelligence of the public when creating a term is a long way from "torture."
Nope! That's the whole point of contention, actually. Autopilots are very advanced and can do almost the whole flight. Because the control problems for airplanes and cars are very, very different.
If something goes wrong with the autopilot in an airplane you've got minutes (at least) to figure it out and not die. ~30,000 feet of altitude and huge glide ratios and nearly empty skies do wonders.
In a car your average car-to-car separation in rush-hour traffic is a few seconds along the line of motion, and perhaps less sideways. If you're not on the freeway you might be a jerk of the wheel and half a second from a head-on collision.
Now you might say that the technical capabilities of both systems are the same, but nobody really cares about that. They care that it can meet some criteria that they already have in their head and they aren't going to go to school for 5 years to understand that it's not the autopilot's fault that their kid enabled in bad circumstances and died, they're going to sue Tesla to hell and back. And judges and juries will quite likely be sympathetic.
I keep talking about the simple end of what "autopilot" covers and you keep countering me by pointing out the advanced ones. I'm not denying the advanced ones exist, I'm just pointing out that the simple ones exist too, so using the word "autopilot" for simple systems is entirely appropriate.
I'm not terribly interested in the legal aspects of it, I'm just curious where everyone got this idea that "autopilot" implies autonomy (if in fact everyone does have that idea, which I'm not sure about), and I strongly disagree with your assertion that using "autopilot" to describe Tesla's system is "torturing language," given that using "autopilot" to describe a simple wing-leveling system is perfectly acceptable.
I have argued that when people hear the word "autopilot" they think that it's very advanced. You argue that technically, something that just keeps the wings level is also an autopilot. I agree! I just disagree that the average person would know enough about the finer points of what a particular word actually means versus what just about everyone thinks it means.
Finally I would argue that if just about everyone thinks that a word means a particular thing, that's what it means. It might technically be incorrect, but words are just noises that people say to convey an idea from one brain to another. If you know what someone meant well enough to correct them, they probably used the word correctly.
Here's a major news website reporting on what an autopilot is and is not in the wake of the germanwings crash about a year ago. It maintains that autopilots on commercial jets (what people tend to think of when you say "airplane" or "flight"). This was the 3rd or 4th google hit for the phrase "what is an autopilot" http://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/26/autopilot-what-the-system-can...
I fully agree that if just about everyone thinks a word means something, then it means something. I'm not trying to argue based on some technicality. What I am arguing is:
1. I'm not at all sure that this understanding of "autopilot" is as ubiquitous as you say it is.
2. Even if that understanding is nearly ubiquitous, I can hardly fault someone for using "autopilot" to mean something simpler if they are doing so because they are familiar with actual autopilot systems and are naming by analogy to the systems, not to popular understanding of the term.
3. If people really do all think that "autopilot" means a fully autonomous system, the fact that no such thing is found on real airplanes means that they're a bunch of idiots, and I'd really like to know where that idea came from.
If things were implemented really well, I could imagine travelling part of the journey in self driving car and then jumping to regular one for the "last mile" (or the other way round). This way one could use the self driving cars in the easy, but time consuming sections (for example congested high ways leading to airport).
Until they can prove a self driving car can navigate a road at night in horrible weather conditions with and without other cars then its not self driving.
If anything the current crop should be emphasizing that they can warn of bad driving habits.
But wouldn't everyone use self-driving cars and that level the playing field again? If you can't make a profit now, would that really change later?
But the real play here is to use taxi service as a pretext/generator for building up an on-demand courier service [1] with superior returns -- and performance that vastly dwarfs any incumbents.
[1] https://rush.uber.com/how-it-works
EDIT: after the introduction of courier services, picking up passengers serves as a baseline load [2] (to borrow from electricity distribution terminology) to keep drivers incentivized to be on the roads, but the real prize will be the courier tasks.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load_power_plant