Serious question: why is cost such a common argument made here against emerging tech? This argument seems to come up every time some new expensive technology is transitioning closer to consumers' hands, and the current price, which is obviously expected to go down at scale as it does for nearly all widely useful technology, is used as evidence nobody will be able to afford it. I've seen this argument made for technology that is still in the R&D phase, for goodness sake!

Obviously, the assumption of all those involved is that the price will plummet as the technology becomes more adopted, so the goal is to get to a price point where the earliest adopters will be willing to pay. For self driving cars, talking about plumbers not buying this at the current price point is a bizarre argument.

Serious counter question; Why is nobody talking about cost? Cars are very expensive... is self-driving tech going to increase or decrease the cost of a vehicle? Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice?

Why does everyone assume the cost will decrease with scale? How many people can afford a Tesla right now? Let alone a fully autonomous car?

If flying were more affordable and less strict more people would own their own plane. It isn't and they don't. I see self-driving cars a lot like airplanes and John Deere tractors. That is, expensive proprietary tech that you have no control over. No thank you.

Why does everyone assume that most people want to share a vehicle?

"Serious counter question; Why is nobody talking about cost? Cars are very expensive... is self-driving tech going to increase or decrease the cost of a vehicle? Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice?"

Because you don't need to own the car - you could feasibly rent one on demand (like a taxi), since you can now rent a car without the necessary wage overhead of the taxi driver, or the minimum costs of car-rental (i.e. car rental typically is per-day, for logistical reasons) or the logistical problems of car-rental (i.e. you need to drive to and from the car-rental place, to pick up and drop off the car - and by "drive" I mean "get a lift or use public transport").

Plus, the self-driving stuff shouldn't be particularly expensive, and will be counterbalanced by lower insurance premiums, and likely tax incentives once voters realise that they really do save lives.

"Why does everyone assume the cost will decrease with scale? How many people can afford a Tesla right now? Let alone a fully autonomous car?"

Because just about everything decreases with scale, and it's not inherently hard tech. Tesla's main problem is their lack of scale. As are autonomous cars.

"Why does everyone assume that most people want to share a vehicle?"

Money. It's not "want", it's "can tolerate so as to save money". Your car, when adding together all the costs (purchase, fuel, rego, maintenance, interest payments if you borrow instead of buying outright) is one of the biggest expenses that most people have. Sharing a car between several people should decrease the costs by an order of magnitude, which could be used to buy whatever people spend their money on these days, or saved.

I live in the suburbs. I have a family with two grade school kids that participate in seasonal team sports and year-round gymnastics. They attend a charter school with no school bus system.

Let's say each ride cost $10... that is $20 to $40 per day just for the kids on most weekdays. Add in birthday parties, saturday games, doctor/dentist, trip to grandma/grandpa that live 7 miles away... and we are talking $1000 per month in "ride-sharing costs" for my children alone. We could add in my wife and I's costs, but it would be silly.

Maybe this service is less than $10 per ride, even at $5 per ride it is wayyyyyy more expensive than I currently spend on a 4 year old Toyota Highlander with low miles with insurance and fuel.

Who says you need to be the rider, and not the car owner? You could be making that $10 a ride renting your Toyota Highlander to other suburbanites when your kid's sports aren't in season? Or when you're on vacation, or at work for an 8 hour chunk? To say nothing of the convenience of a car that can drop off/pick up the little one from soccer practice on its own if you have a scheduling conflict.

This type of naive suggestion totally ignores the way that most middle-class American families actually use their cars not just as transportation but for storage and as a mobile base of operations. Please explain how I'm supposed to let others use my car as a short-term rental during the day while it's full of child seats, snacks, extra clothes, sports equipment, etc. Plus I don't want random people coughing / eating / having sex / using drugs in my nice clean cars. Outside of maybe a few affluent urban areas populated largely by young childless people it's just a silly unrealistic idea.

If you'd think instead of being naively condescending:

a.) Snacks and supplies in trunk - lockable containers inside. All could be accessible via app/key fob only.

b.) Who says the suburbanite your renting to won't want to use a car seat?

c.) Camera, ID, cleaning deposits, car self-drives to detailer on your lunch break.

$1,000 a month is a heck of a carrot to keep a car clean - even if that's not for you is your worldview really so small that you cannot imagine it being for someone not all that dissimilar from you?

No those suggestions are even more ridiculous and impractical. There's no way you're getting $1000 per month; you obviously just made that number up. SUVs/CUVs (which most people prefer now) don't have separate lockable trunks. I don't want other random kids in my child seats either: think puke and head lice. There are at least three totally different types / sizes of child seats anyway (rear facing, front facing, booster with or without back) and the straps have to be adjusted to fit the child so even if the renter also has kids the type and number of seats are unlikely to match what they legally need.

Just tons of drone cars picking up kids and delivering them to their parents. Owners of said cars collecting monthly AirBnB style rent from the people that can suddenly no longer afford a $3000 beater to get them around, but will happily pay $10 a ride in a self driving car. Oh yeah, don't forget about the vomit and drinks spilled all over the place in your ride share. Also sick people touching all the things. Where do I sign up? </sarcasm>

If the car you use is giving, say, 15 rides per day, then what you spend for 3 per day only needs to be 20 percent the cost of owning, fueling, and maintaining the car.

If the total cost of ownership is, say, $1000 per month, you might only pay $200, or about $2.20 per ride.

Your lifestyle is being subsidized by the negative externalities your transportation causes that you don't pay for, so it's not a great argument against advancing technology, because your comfort only matters to you.

We've already seen price drops for the most expensive self-driving components. LIDARs, GPUs and storage have already fallen in cost, and the products aren't even on the market yet. There is every reason to believe these price drops will continue as more resources are put into scaling production and more companies enter the game of component design and production.

> There is every reason to believe these price drops will continue as more resources are put into scaling production and more companies enter the game of component design and production.

Why? We literally never see that with top shelf products. This isn't an arduino solder job. This is going to be an integrated software and hardware package that will rival an aircraft autopilot/navigation. Please check you facts on the cost of these things.

I don't want walmart brand, everday low price components on my self-driving vehicle. I want top of the line if my life is in the balance.

How much does your 'top of the line' lane-staying sensor cost? How about your backup camera? How about automatic breaking sensors? How about all of the components required to integrate these sensors into your vehicle?

These are all things that started high and fell low. The historical prices for each of these systems reflects this fact, as does their gradual movement through the available product line-up. They all started in top of the line vehicles that cost well north of the average person's yearly salary, and are steadily creeping into the lowliest models.

I see nothing in self-driving systems that make them special in this regard. They're already largely an amalgamation of commodity components whose prices are trending downwards.

You can bet on them staying a niche product forever, if you wish. I just think it flies in the face of historical evidence.

>Why? We literally never see that with top shelf products. This isn't an arduino solder job. This is going to be an integrated software and hardware package that will rival an aircraft autopilot/navigation. Please check you facts on the cost of these things.

Google claims that it dropped the price of lidar by a factor of 10x once it started producing them. That seems like a significant, factual, drop in cost.

The iPhone is how much to produce? Very important point you missed in what I wrote; Hardware and software package. A lidar without software is useless.

The price dropped from something ridiculous (~100K) to something manageable for a luxury car (~10K), and certainly reasonable as a cost offset by multiple consumers (like in a rideshare environment).

So your argument went from "its economically infeasible" to "I don't like it!"?

No... in addition to being prohibitively expensive, the other model being put forth to make it less expensive, ride-sharing, also has drawbacks which make the idea a non-starter for most Americans.

If ridesharing was awesome, we would see it now with luxury cars. We don't because it is stupid and will not reduce the price of the car dramatically enough to outweigh the negatives.

I'll bet you would have said the same thing about a $5,000 personal computer in the early 90s.

I'd bet that if anything, it costs more to own an aircraft now than it does in the 1990s though, that might be a better comparison.

Airplane ownership and operations costs are probably higher than in the 90s, but the factors driving that are diverse, and I'm not sure they'd apply in any meaningful way to self-driving cars.

A lot of the regulation that drives the cost of planes up won't apply to cars because of the different economies of scale.

The most popular light aircraft in history is the Cessna 172, and since it was introduced in 1955, only 43,000 have been built. Ever.

By contrast, the most popular vehicle on the road today in the US is the Ford F-series pickup truck. Since being introduced in 1977, Ford has sold 26 million of them. So roughly 600x as many as Cessna has sold 172s over a period of time 20 years longer.

The US market alone was responsible for 17.5 million new cars and trucks being sold last year. Globally, it's approaching 100 million per year. Pretty incredible economies of scale available with that kind of market.

We still have $5000 personal computers in the '10s! Hell a new MacBook Pro with everything and some upgrades is $3499 to $4299... very few people can truly afford that.

That's not accounting for inflation - $5000 then was more like $10000 now. And a bare-bones minimum machine for running business software (i.e. no color graphics or floating point hardware) was still close to $2000 (more like $4000 in today's dollars). So, roughly speaking a maxed-out gaming rig today is about as affordable as a bare-minimum box in 1990, without even accounting for the massive difference in absolute power.

That's the point

The late Bill Machrone coined Machrone's Law which stated that "the computer you want always costs $5,000." This hasn't really been true for 5-10 years. You can build a $5K computer but you have to really push it. But saying that the figure is still at least $2,500-$3,000 is probably fair.

Sure, but you can also build a perfectly serviceable computer for < $1000. Even $500 would (obviously) get you something far, far superior to that 90s machine.

> Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice?

I'd quite like the freedom to be able to commute to work, go out for drinks with people after work and come home again at the time of my choosing without relying upon someone else to cart me around, paid driver or otherwise.

THAT seems freedom-enhancing.

But this doesn't always happen. We have yet to see any electric car reach the price of a low-end kia or hyundai.

In 10 years electric cars will be the cheapest cars. We're at the beginning of this transition right now, still in the early-adopter stage.

It usually just comes down to the person being against something without really having any good argument for why they're against it, and that's the only thing they can think of.

In my opinion, the primary use case of self-diving cars aren't personal ownership. Society as a whole wastes a lot of resources when every household has a car that stands still 95% of the time. With self-driving cars, we can plausibly improve that.

We could significantly improve it now with more Zipcar type apps (at least in cities where people live close together) but the most people want guaranteed access to a vehicle at 8am and 5:30pm weekday situation isn't easily solved just by making them mobile when not in operation. Nor - at least in the short term - is people's tendency to use cars, and especially cars with no previous owners, as a status symbol (many people could save more of their income not buying new models and premium marques than allowing it to be used by someone else at weekends and some evenings, but they choose the car that takes up more of their disposable income all the same)

Agreed. I also think another big reason for personal car ownership is having kids. With the increasing ages/weights recommended and/or required by law for car seats, that can be a hassle if trying to use a ride sharing service. It increases difficulty with increased number of kids at varying ages. For those without kids, while it's not crazy difficult to install a car seat, it can still take upwards of 5-15 minutes (depending on the style of seat). This amount of time lost can be a big hindrance.

Yes, I know that Uber has started to tackle this problem, but as far as I know it only provides 1 car seat, and a car equipped this way may not always be nearby. Maybe this will be a completely solved problem soon, which would be great!

Lots of people are single. Lots of people's kids are grown. Lots of people could own one car for the kids stuff and car-share the second vehicle as needed. Even with private ownership for cases like children, the total number of cars on the road could decrease considerably.

I don't really buy this argument. Most of he stuff I own is sitting idle 95% of the time (except for computer I guess ;) and it is similar with other people I know. The outcome will depend on many factors, including cost of the car, the secondary functions it will get and similar (will it become an extension of our living space?).

Heck. I have ladders/weedwhackers/etc. and other home/yard-maintenance and upkeep devices that probably sit idle for 99.9% of the time.

If your ladder could deliver itself to someone for $10/hr. (or a ladder could be delivered to you on demand) I suspect we'd have a lot less ladders.

Maybe. There's an equipment rental place about a 10 minute drive away and, while I have rented from there, it really needs to be a once every multiple years sort of thing for the economics to work out. Something I use even just a few times a year doesn't make sense.

That's why society needs rich people. They buy emerging tech first, then the tech drops in price as initial capital costs are recouped, manufacturing costs come down, and the tech improves.

Remember when LCD screens came out and very few people could afford them? We were complaining then too about how could people possibly afford this and who will buy it??!

Your arguments make no sense.

1. A Tesla with full self-driving hardware can be had today for ~$75k. And the model 3 will cut that in half. And the model after that will be even less. Millions of people can afford this.

2. Who said anything about retrofitting old cars? As far as I know, nobody is planning to do this.

3. This isn't a requirement, and it won't happen all at once. The plumber with an old F150 will continue to drive as he always has until the cost/benefit makes sense for him to upgrade.

4. Self driving tractors move at 3mph, and I don't think farm-field traffic fatalities are the big driver behind automated farming. Different use case.

I'm curious - where did you come up with your $75k cost for retrofitting existing vehicles?

Out of thin air. Why would it be cheaper? If you made the product, would you try to maximize profit or do it for SAFETY and the good of society?

Got it. I admittedly know nothing about what the pricing will be here - and comparing to Tesla may be apples to oranges, but per The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/20/13346512/tesla-self-driv...) the hardware for a Tesla is under $10k.

Additionally maximizing profit (and this may read as condescending but I do not intend for it to be so) does not necessarily mean maximizing price. Obviously if you are not selling at a loss you can potentially make more money with a cheaper price point on volume.

I do agree, however, that first adopters will likely pay a premium.

Eventually I imagine insurance companies will help subsidize these things too - if the price does not become trivial.

You seem to be arguing against technological progress in order to protect people. Most of us 'self-driving car' skeptics are just pointing out that the timelines presented in much of the press are wildly optimistic.

> Retrofit $75K work trucks with another $75K in self driving gizmos?

Absolutely they will. That's [at least] $60K worth of driver's salary/benefits costs you've just eliminated. $75K is cheap to eliminate the cost of a human employee.

I don't know where to start with this. The whole point of the truck is to get the workers! to the site. Said vehicle is also there to support the workers during the day with storage for tools and materials. SO no, the damn truck isn't going to replace a plumber or a/c tech. wow.

You said: "Also, what about people that rely on a vehicle for work?"

Most people who rely on a vehicle for work are local or long-haul trucking drivers, not local trade workers. The important work a plumber or a/c tech performs is separate from the driving. You're right, those people probably won't move to automated vehicles immediately.

But theoretically, in the future where they could have an automated van meet them at the job site with their tools? And return the tools to a secure storage facility afterwards? I don't see why they wouldn't go for that.

People won't buy self-driving cars (well some will, but not the majority). These cars will be running 24/7 in a ride-sharing service.

Sure people will buy self-driving cars. People want to own things for themself. If a car has a higher value with this feature even more people want to have a car. Consumers don't think economically.

People want the convenience of having access to transportation 24/7 no matter where they are and when.

Ever call a taxi (not in city) ? 30+ minutes.

Also, tragedy of the commons ... who was the last one to use the car has to pay for clean up.

How to accomplish that ? ... "No the other guy did it ..."

I'm skeptical about the "no one will own" meme. That said, there's no reason cleaning would be any more of an issue than it is with Zipcar today. If you go to pickup a car and it needs cleaning, you refuse it and report the problem.

Then what? What if you have something pressing to get to? All these rideshare arguments fall flat on their face when it is anything other than "going out" without much of a timeline.

yeah, the idea that this could cause you to be late for work seems to escape people.