If you are a pessimist about autonomous being bigger part of transpiration then add 2 years to DATES shown below.

2021 : Electric Self-driving on-demand FLEET Car 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION from Google, DiDi, Uber, Renault/Nissan,Tesla, VW,Toyota,GM for $400/month

2024 :same 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION $200/month

At $200/month Subscription price for 1000 miles/month (which is average US driver car mileage/month), savings are so big as average car ownership is around $400/month ( AAA Estimate ) , all inclusive of

- Car depreciation

- Insurance cost

- gasoline cost

- Repairs & maintenance costs

- extra 1 hours/day you get in NOT-Driving

(EDIT: This Model I mentioned is Summon only, there is NO OWNERSHIP of the Car, is it monthly pay instead of per RIDE Pay . In this Model, All the Major CAR Manufactures of today offer these FLEETS with monthly pay of 1000/miles month SUBSCRIPTIONS.

Being a) no-driver Cost b) ELECTRIC c) RIDE Sharing d) mass adoption -- is the key for Lower price tag of $200/month )

The above is Phase 1, in Phase 2 starting 2025 Google will be supplying only "end-to-end Autonomous vehicle Software system" for a fee of $5000/year per car for ALL the CAR FLEET companies .

Google will run small FLEET of Autonomous CARs for the purpose of "Reference implementation of Software" much like "Pixel Android Phones" to showcase the Reference implementation of Android ( for all other Android Vendors )

For example, right now I live on the west coast and my parents live on the east coast. 4 kids, Minimum of 40 hour drive or $3500 flight.

Here's one tiny example:

I can work remotely for a few weeks and my boss doesn't mind. The kids sleep for 8+ hours at night. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday nights driving for 12 hours (mostly sleeping) means I am at my parent's house on Tuesday and I either take Monday as vacation or work remotely from a friend's house in Ohio. We see friends in flyover country that we rarely visit or see national parks on Saturday and Sunday.

I can now take the whole family to my parents taking just 2 days of vacation/remote for the trip, for only the depreciation cost on my car. Car trip isn't too bad because the kids are awake for a total of the running time of 6 movies.

Car usage will go up by an order of magnitude because a major cost of driving isn't the dollars, but the time.

This is why I think self driving cars will make traffic worse, not better. The more comfortable it is to be inside a car and the less people mind long car rides, the more people will drive (self driving or otherwise). If road infrastructure is the same, that necessarily means a much higher density of cars on the road. It's possible that self driving cars will be more space efficient on the road, but ten times more efficient? I think it's more likely that there will just be way more cars on the road and traffic will worsen considerably.

In my home-town of 30k people, nearly 2,000 of those are high school students alone, plus probably another 1,000 elementary school kids, and maybe 800 middle school. No doubt they'd all want to use the cool tech to ride to school instead of taking the school bus. Add 4,000 more cars to the road please. (And as for ride-sharing, that may be fun once in a while, but why do that when I can get an entire entertainment pod all to myself?)

Currently Uber charges more during rush hour.

It's rather obvious that self-driving operator will implement similar price discrimination e.g. $10 if you drive alone, $5 if you share with one or more people.

And the more they want you to share, the bigger the surcharge e.g. if $10 vs. $5 doesn't have desired effect then maybe $20 vs $5 will.

It's a win-win during rush hour (operator makes much more money from the few people who don't care about money and minimizes over-all traffic by packing more people into a single car).

Personally I'm very skeptical of both the claim that a) self-driving cars will see huge adoptation at the cost of car ownsership and that b) self-driving cars will give less traffic, less pollution and be significantly cheaper than owning a car.

On the latter point, we have basic economic theory: say the average American today spends $600/month total on owning a car. Why would anyone price a self-driving service at $200/month? No, they'd go for an initial price of $400/month for a couple of years to get customers, then sneak back up to $600/month once they've caught most of the market.

That's assuming a monopoly.

> Why would anyone price a self-driving service at $200/month?

Because if they priced it at $400 then a competitor could price it at $300 and make more money.

Think about gasoline prices back when crude oil prices suddenly fell off a cliff. Did gas prices at your local station drop? No, not one cent. All of the competing stations kept the prices roughly where they were and raked in increased profits.

Petrol prices in the UK definitely have dropped (30% over four years, not including inflation) http://www.racfoundation.org/data/uk-pump-prices-over-time

In year 2000, in order to run a medium web site as a company you need 2 Servers one for each Database, WebServer. People bought each server box for $5000 and server capacity used is only at 15%

Come to 2012, Amazon AWS charged for the same Servers only $40/month . Amazon know It costs lots for website owners, why they offer all the server capacity for $40 ???

So why do they need 2 servers?

Also, I'm pretty sure VPSes and shared hosting were available in 2000.

Rackspace offered dedicated servers for $150/month and up. Smaller providers would rent you a server in their datacenter for around $60/month. I used a company called sagonet in the early 2000s that is still in business and still offering a similar service for about $30/month: http://www.synergyisp.com/dedicated-servers/

Most larger companies at the time contracted with a colocation provider and purchased servers for between $1000 and $4000 each, and paid in the neighborhood of $1000/month for a rack, or $500/month for a half rack, including power and network.

This was monumentally cheaper than the AWS based stack we have these days, though - no company with any complexity to their website has a $40/month AWS bill. A company with a similar SAAS offering to what I ran in 2001 for $40K up front and $500/month is probably looking at a $5000/month AWS bill at today's rates.

I imagine a self-driving car packs a ton of servers, I'm not sure it can be cheaper than your average mid-range car...

A town could say, for instance, "we will only allow 3,000 self-driving cars to be actively driving within our borders". If transportation needs are not met, then it's time to start thinking about other improvements like walkability, biking, buses, etc. Realistically though, this would never happen in the United States. Either people would sue to get that law repealed, or every time the cap was hit those in charge would just raise it to keep their constituents happy...

Without strict agreements ahead of widespread self-driving car adoption, I think it's just going to be a free-for-all with lots of car companies freely pushing their products into towns, and the people of course are going to welcome it.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/24/news/singapore-car-numbers-l...

I think for self driving to realy work well, we have to ban humans from driving (and perhaps make it a felony to interfere with a self driving bus the same way we cover assault on a bus driver).

I thought it would be easier to implement self driving trains than to implement self driving cars. Who is working on that?

I didn't know that but I assumed it would be cheaper than roads? I mean four tracks of trains (two local, two express) compared to four lanes of road?

All of that is expensive - like the difference between 80% and 99.9% reliability.

We already have self-driving light rail systems (London's DLR for instance).

I could see them charging something like $10 for one person and $7 each for 2 (which is close to actual Lyft pricing). That way they give a price break to the user, while they themselves also make more money, so they have an incentive to offer that pricing even if the trip takes longer, or they can't find a 2nd rider.

What? Per year or once? If per year I wonder what amounts of corruption must be going on. A simple 31-seater bus from Mercedes costs approx. 285.000€ to buy new (https://www.busplaner.de/omnibusmagazin/omnibustest/10035/Me...), which means over a 5y life it's 57k/y... add the same for insurance premiums and the driver, and still I can't get anywhere close to that figure of 1M/bus per year.

If it is class/status, what is the view of a public conveyence like Lyft vs the personal car?

I'm waiting for the ability to, rather than pay for parking, have my car circle the block while I eat lunch. The cost of running an electric vehicle for a few hours is far less than paying to park.

I definitely see your logic towards higher density with things like 'office cars' so people do more travel. Or sleeping cars but that would be outside typical peak hours. But would self driving increase volume that much? Possibly if people stopped getting trains/busses but this should be remain cheaper and faster via priority lanes most cities have.

Also in general;

Freeways; most traffic jams are caused from someone breaking and then the next person breaks a bit more and so on creating a jam. With self driving car the computers will be able to talk and do a 'everyone accelerate on this mark' and get the flow happening even on very crowded roads. And ideally accident reduction that often creates traffic jams.

Cities: Algorithms will start making little efficiency improvement to driving. All the little things like removing unnecessary lane changing. People double parking to drop something off. And like those futuristic car intersection scenes where cars dont stop at lights but all go through an intersection from every direction reducing traffic back-ups.

We will need to make rules to adapt and keep the flow, e.g. stop people have cars driving around the block rather than parking. Ensure we have 'road neutrality' so the wealthy dont pay a premium for faster trips where other cars in the fleet move aside and slow everyone else type deal.

Anyway, I dont profess to know the answer. Its all a guess! I do suspect the benefits will outweigh additional trips people might take. Besides, who knows, maybe by then we'll have the 'Boring company' or equivalent making private roads so only the plebs use public roads anyway....

This won't even be necessary as the self driving cars will have vastly superior reaction time when compared to humans. Especially if the cars are electric and thus have almost instant power to the wheels.

Especially if you use tricks like radar underneath the car in front of you so you can react to what the car one car ahead of you does etc.

Also a lot of the highway traffic jams are caused by too small distance between the cars. A self driving car should be much more efficient in keeping enough distance between the cars to keep up the flow.

Absolutely. Not even accounting for induced demand, you'll see ~30% more vehicle-miles due to empty-vehicle repositioning.

As you say, accelerations and decelerations can be synchronised, accidents reduced, and standing wave behaviours eliminated, all of which will indeed help traffic flow more efficiently. But this is not by any means enough to compensate for empty-vehicle redistribution, much less induced demand.

> And like those futuristic car intersection scenes where cars dont stop at lights but all go through an intersection from every direction reducing traffic back-ups.

That's only possible in environments where there are no pedestrians or cyclists -- eg., segregated motorways/freeways, which already have no intersection conflicts. At best it represents a space saving, not really a time saving.

Yeah, of course self driving cars are going to make traffic way worse! Who even thinks otherwise? Suddenly you are going to have millions of disabled and homebound seniors wanting the cars to take them to do grocery shopping and errands, kids being driven around to and from from school and practice, and low income residents sleeping in their cars commuting to work in higher income areas of the country. Self driving cars will make traffic exponentially worse.

What might be interesting is how they deal with peak usages like commute hours. Would swarms of cars try to hop over to the next time zone when it's easy?

Without a source, this is just a made-up statistic, i.e., worthless.

Here's a source for you, though [1].

> Sixteen studies of cruising behavior were conducted between 1927 and 2001 in the central business districts of eleven cities on four continents (see Figure 1). ... About thirty percent of the cars in the traffic flow were cruising for parking. The data varied widely around these averages, however; on some uncrowded streets no cars were cruising, while on some congested streets most of the cars were cruising. Cities have changed since these observations were made, and the data are selective because researchers study cruising only where they expect to find it.

[1] "Cruising for parking" by Donald Shoup http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/CruisingForParkingAccess.pdf

Instead we could be sleeping, playing video games, working on laptops, etc.

I think that vehicle design will shift a lot once we start optimizing for these new use-cases, and this might make a big difference to how tolerable road journeys are.

This is all very hard to predict though...

When it comes to commuting in the Pacific Northwest, for most of the year an extra half-hour of available daylight at the end (or start) of the day is the difference between getting out climbing during the work week, or not.

Personally, I'd trade a comfortable commute for that extra time, no question. Of course, maybe a self-driving car could allow for working during the morning commute, and getting off earlier... Hmmm.

That's what I'm hoping for. It's already sort-of possible in the special-case of commuting on a bus like Google/Apple/etc. offer in the Bay Area.

Can we reach the point where working while in transit is as productive as being on site (face-to-face meetings notwithstanding)?

Surely you mean turning your 8 hour shifts into 10 hour shifts?

Maybe self driving car fleets will be so numerous, they will optimize via carpooling in busy urban pockets. Maybe people will stop driving there own self driving car to work and use these. Maybe people will own/ride in really small self driving car that network to optimize and self park.

> The more comfortable it is to be inside a car and the less people mind long car rides.

This may not be generally correct. People also like to commute quite a bit by rail in certain areas. Living on the east coast I can tell you this because of #of people using NJ Transit and Amtrak is big. Cars take much longer to get to NYC already. Commuting to city via subway trains is so that there is shortage of housing right in manhattan where no one goes by cars.

Couple that with the ability to reclaim a lot of space designated for parking, and forward thinking cities might make themselves much more walkable as well.

  once people are okay with sharing seats in a van

I think it has a lot less to do with the bubble factor than the fact that public transportation in the US just sucks, period.

My 3-mile commute from Menlo Park to Palo Alto would take

- bus: 58 minutes (2 minute walk from home to bus stop + 12 minutes average wait for ECR bus + 10 minutes on ECR + 12 minutes average wait in Palo Alto Transit Center for bus 22 + 15 minutes on bus 22 + 7 minutes walking to work)

- train: 51 minutes (4 minutes walking from home to station + 30 minutes average wait till next train + 5 minute train ride + 12 minutes walking to work).

- running: 35 minutes end to end

- bike: 15 minutes end to end

- Uber: 13-20 minutes

- driving: 8-12 minutes

I bike, but I can see why others would drive. Public transportation is basically defunct here. I can run faster to work than taking public transportation. That says something about seriously how bad it is.

So, while the efficiency of public transport might be a concern, car-as-a-status-symbol seems to be near-universal.

Do the trains really not go on a timetable there, instead arriving completely randomly?

- The signs about which train is actually arriving are frequently wrong, resulting in boarding the wrong train

- The time I need to be at various destinations is fairly uniformly distributed. with a bike I can just leave for work exactly 20 minutes before my first meeting, allowing 5 minutes to freshen up.

In many cases, running, biking, driving would all waste less time because I can leave on-demand, even if the actual transit time takes longer.

Public transportation needs to be either frequent enough (e.g. Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, New York, etc. where rush-hour trains arrive about every 1-2 minutes, non-rush-hour every 5-8 minutes or less) or on-demand (e.g. UberPool, autonomous cars) to cut the time waste.

In my limited sample group of one (1), these are rarely true.

There certainly must be places in the world where trains are so unpredictable that the average delay is 30 minutes, but (not having been there, I should say) Menlo Park and Palo Alto sound like places where trains should be a bit more punctual than that?

1: https://jalopnik.com/5344758/six-door-prius-limo-totes-kids-...

I assume, you are a technical person. If you look back at year 2000, In a typical IT company there is a server Box for each category. A Database server box , a WebServer Box ( physical machines ) etc.. very few people used viruvalization etc.. Physical Machines capacity utilization is around 15% . Come to 2017, with Amazon AWS cloud is providing on demand servers to thousands of companies, all of them TIME Sharing tens of thousands of Servers.

Same thing applies with self-driving cars. Higher utilization by ride sharing leads to FEWER cars on the Road. Today average occupancy in a car may be 1.3 with Self-driving RIDE sharing, if it goes to 2.6 that is HALF the CARS on the ROAD compared to today.

Doubling the average people in car from today is much EASIER, since that BEHAVIOUR of Sharing is tied to FINANCIAL gains to people. If you ride by yourself , 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION cost is $500 vs. If you Share it is $200/month, that motivate people to SHARE and leads to LESS cars.

But I see your point though. If people are incentivized to share a car then that might reduce the load.

That said, my suspicion is, once you take the driver out of the equation, you can do so much more than just ferrying people. E.g courier/shipping services, or mobile food stalls (food truck that sells food while moving on the highway, once engineers figure out how to safely and autonomously speed match two cars), etc. The induced demand may be greater than the savings from ride-sharing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

I will give you one great example of 'Exponential adoption' happened in recent history of technology.

In the year 1998, at the early days of Internet, we used have only WIRED Broadband Router. Everybody has a 100 Feet CAT 5 cable in the home, when you need to connect a different computer/laptop you change that CAT 5 to that ROOM from Router. 100 Feet CAT 5 wire used to cost $75 those days.

When Wireless ROUTER are released in the next 10 months, at the cost of $100 every body bought, it is no brainer instead of Buying couple of CAT5 100 Feet wires which each cost $75 and still inconvenient .

In my memory this is the most RAPID adoption in a matter of one year , whole USA moved to Bought WIRELESS Routers.

Same thing will happen with , Electric Self-driving on-demand summon CARS where it costs $200/month using it any time vs. owing CAR costs $400/month ( insurance , Gasoline , etc.. )

That's the only thing that keeps me from using something like Uber Pool today -- I don't want to spend extra time picking up/dropping off another passenger.

There are places with comfortable public transport today but it seems most prefer would prefer a 40 minute drive than a 1 hour train ride even though it frees up their time.

A train ride frees your time up less than an autonomous car ride because on a train you have no personal space. You always have to be aware of people around you and where your own belongings are, watch for your stop, etc. In a car you can focus on whatever you're doing.

In the long term a critical mass of well-behaving self-driving cars may be able to regulate traffic much more efficiently than humans currently can.

In the medium term we may also see dedicated self-driving car lanes with higher speed limits.

In my experience Public transportation sucks. It's fine for getting around locally, but is terrible for commuting.

For a short 3 month period I found uberpool to be far superior to taking a train. Some days it cost a dollar more. Some days it cost less. The travel time was pretty much equivalent plus it was more comfortable.

I hate driving in rush hour traffic but as a passenger I didn't mind.

It sounds silly - but the more automation the more I want to spend within my fictional camper-van. Soccer away match - no problem. Trip to the beach again, overnight.

It is like an sleeper train - only more comfortable and spacious, as it would be my families camper-van.

I just want to point out that there is a pretty decent sleeper train that departs from the center of London and will have you wave up in the center of Glasgow. You'll have a full-size bed with sink, toilet etc. and a dining car and a bar if you want to avail yourself. Tickets are pretty cheap too.

They leave a little earlier, at 21:15, and stop at the stations in the Highlands between 7 and 10 the next day.

If you wake up with the early sun, like I did, then the views from the train are wonderful.

https://traintimes.org.uk/London/FTW/21:00/today

https://www.seat61.com/CaledonianSleepers.htm

It is in no way comparable to a sleeper train, which rides on relatively smooth, straight rails and isn't constantly swerving about and dumping everybody on to the ground. You need to "sleep" in this tensed up position where you're wedged in between ends of the bed using your core to keep you in place.

On the sleeper buses in China, you'll often see people standing in the aisle, getting a rest from "sleeping" while building strength for another bout of it.

So yeah, you'll get to Scotland the next morning. But next time you'll take the train and rent your van at the station.

It's really sad that the United States has let passenger rail deteriorate to the point that people are forced into this situation. Really, really poor foresight.

Logistically speaking, empty places are really, really easy to build rail through. (Politically they may not be).

These rail networks already exist, but they are often not dual line, aren't engineered to support fast trains, and there aren't passenger rail options that utilize them. All of these factors are due to consistent under investment because of chick-and-egg and political problems. It's a real failure of national investment.

You can Google around but the cost per mile of new railroad track is comparable, if not a bit less, than interstate highway. And there are _tons_ of miles of interstate highways.

The US has just chosen poorly.

From https://letsgola.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/capacity-101/

A typical freeway lane today can carry around 3600 passengers per hour. Reduce the headway between cars to 1 second and put 4 passengers in every car and that goes up to 14,400 pax/hr

However, run a heavy rail line and run trains every 3 minutes, and it can carry 54,000 pax/h, or 90,300 pax/hr crush load

Add to that that freeways don't have a single lane, but usually at least 2, if not 3, according to your numbers you get 7000~10 000 passengers per hour with cars.

Now consider than most of the trains are not running full, and don't run at night at all between 10 pm and 5 am, and you can clearly see that there is an inherent advantage in terms of flows towards cars (since traffic never stops) per day. Plus you have mass transportation on freeways with buses, too.

And still the major advantage of the car is that you can stop exactly where you want to go. The train may get you from A to B, but most people want to go to C, D, E or F and not just B so trains are always a trade-off unless you have a very standard route every single time.

And I'm not even talking about cost yet. For passengers, trains are way more expensive (even in Japan, where trains are highly developed) than the same trips by car (even though the freeways are heavily taxed).

Some JR lines run at 4 minute headways during peak times and subways run reliably at 2 minute headways.

No freeway today has has 4 passenger cars running at 1 second headways so you end up with a more realistic 1000 to 2000 pax per hour. Which is about the number of pax you can fit in a single train.

A 3 lane freeway takes up about the same amount of space e as 4 sets of train tracks. And the areas that have heavy congestion are also typically the areas that have little space to spare for more lanes.

The road toll from Osaka to Kyoto is $20. A local train costs about $5, a slightly faster JR train is $12. The toll from Nagoya to Fukuoka is $160 and the drive takes 9 hours. I paid about $165 for a Shinkansen bullet train that took about 3.5 hours. And the toll prices ignore the cost of the car

A) why should we care about ideal rather than real world scenarios? If the train is only 30% full on average, it doesn’t matter that if full, it would transport more pax per hour. And based on the number of cars on these highways, I don’t think the trains will be very full. If the trains are going to be empty, operating them and building the tracks is probably not cost effective.

B) Without knowing the all-in cost of the two options, comparing these prices is meaningless. It’s very likely the Japanese government sets tolls high enough to incentivize people to take trains. That doesn’t by itself mean trains are a better option... I could point to plenty of places in the USA where driving is cheaper than taking Amtrak. What does that illustrate? That American states pay for roads with taxes instead of tolls? That Amtrak is inefficient and expensive? I have no idea.

Some London tube lines run with <100 second headway, and the highest capacity London underground trains have a capacity of nearly 1200

And my local heavy rail station regularly handles 3-4 trains to the same station in a 10 minute interval. E.g right now there are 3 trains for London Victoria scheduled to leave in a 7 minute period, and that's not peak time.

I was talking clearly about long distance trains. Not Kyoto to Osaka distance.

Self driving cars work well with railroads -- the cars can get passengers from their lower density neighborhoods to the rail stations, and rail can take the passengers to the urban centers where their jobs are. It makes little sense for a self-driving car to take a worker from his suburban home all the way to the crowded urban center where his car either needs to find someplace to park, or join thousands of other cars looking for someone else to ride until it's time to go home.

You can also then optimize to drop people off at stations they might not otherwise pick if traffic makes it more sensible, or tell them to get off a station early/late and pick them up there if it helps the overall journey.

Over the long run it may even fundamentally alter construction of new lines, in that there may be more optimal location of station placements for stations e.g. feeding commuters when you have detailed data on the precise journeys.

Trains have exceptional capacity. You can make them longer, you can increase frequency. Cars routinely max out capacity in roadways where equivalent area train systems would have vastly more capacity without breaking a sweat.

Last-mile is better for cars, though.

I assume you mean “less densely populated” (bigger, per capita) rather than actually bigger; it's actually smaller, not bigger, than Europe.

The US covers roughly twice as much area as the EU (4.5 million km^2), which includes most of the countries we're talking about. If we want to add the rest of continental Europe (mainly western Russia), we might also add the rest of continental North America (mainly Canada).

Visit China sometime. Lots of space, lots of high speed rail. The high speed rail is incredibly nice to use, puts airplanes to shame.

What we need is more large metro areas to take trains between. Over here on the west coast, our largest cities are not even what China would consider a tier 2 city.

(To be fair, by Chinese standards, NYC is the only reasonably sized city America has!)

It takes longer than driving, and a sleeper car is more expensive than flying. The cost is similar to driving for a family of 4, once you account for depreciation on your car.

Anyway, indeed self-driving cars can be disruptive for long-distance travel, also in Europe.

Suppose you are traveling between two small towns that are hundreds or thousands of km apart. I think the most reasonable model would be self-driving car from town A to nearest high-speed rail station, high-speed rail to station close to town B, and then self-driving car to town B.

Rail companies could sell the ticket for the whole thing, and owning a car for long-distance travel would make no sense.

I suppose as long as you get in the hours you need to as a remote worker and the sleeping is comfortable then this would be pretty sweet for even very long journeys.

It would take a complete redesign of car interiors to something far more comfortable/secure for lying down but no reason that problem couldn't be solved.

Also perhaps more people would start buying VW camper vans. VW are planning an electric version [1].

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-tesla-camper-mode/

[1]: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40998128

Well, it's solved. They're called RVs. As a kid (or even as an adult), I think I'd still find it being pretty cooped up. It's one reason that I've never taken long-haul Amtrak that I suspect I'd find is more interesting in the theory than in the practice.

There are some pictures of various Amtrack train interiors at [1], aimed at tourists. That toilet next to the seat is weird, I think I'd prefer a shared toilet at the end of the corridor. But overall, the US has very spacious long-distance trains.

(I have taken one long-distance Amtrack train, for about 11 hours. The standard seat was as big as a first-class seat in most of Europe.)

[1] https://www.seat61.com/UnitedStates.htm

So you're at $700, or $1400 both ways.

With advanced purchase, you can get flights from SFO to NYC for $250, so that's $1500 for your family of 6.

I find it hard to get good sleep in a car, I can't imagine having a good experience trying to sleep 4 nights in a row. Nor can I imagine spending 40+ hours in the car over 4 days with the kids, even if they are sleeping a lot of that time.

However, flying:

$550 after taxes and fees is the cheapest I've gotten an LAX/IAD roundtrip for in a while, so $3300 minimum for flying.

Parking for 3 weeks is about $200

$3500 is the flying price, and often I can't get tickets for under $600 that match our schedule.

Depending on the 405, it can take 3 hours to reach LAX and park. You really don't want to have to be running through the airport with little ones, so plan to be there 90 minutes before flight. It usually only 4 hours in the air going west-to-east (east-to-west is longer) but figure time sitting at the gate an taxiing means a minimum of 5 hours on the airplane. So nearly 10 hours of travel time.

Issues with flying that were non-issue in car:

We cannot change our schedule even by a few hours without incurring fees with the airline.

LAX/IAD, plus price sensitivity means almost certainly flying United. I'm not paying the economy plus price times six, so my knees are touching the seat in front of me the entire time.

We had a 20 month old, already nervous from flying for the first time fall asleep on the taxi-way with her seatbelt on, resting her head on my wife's lap. The flight attendent insisted she must be sitting up for takeoff. Said child was screaming for the next 90 minutes from being woken up.

kid potty training? Not while flying, since the fasten seatbelt sign always goes on at the most inopportune times.

It's true that none of these were enough to get us to stop flying (having a kid with PTSD was what did that; you don't want to be locked in a box with 200 strangers when he gets triggered), but it was surprising how much less stressful it was even compared to flying before we had him.

Perhaps cross-country will still be niche, but certainly day-long road trips will jump in popularity when nobody has to do the driving.

When that fully autonomous self-driving car exists, then cheap self-driving cars for car-share will exist.

edit: changed a few words for clarity

I assure you it's not the human driver which means that most people strongly prefer other methods of transport.

For example, right now the idea of a folding bed in a car isn't something you'll ever see as an option, since it would only really appeal to people trying to live in their cars, which probably don't overlap much with the "people who buy fancy cars with fancy extras" market segment. However, in a future where a car can auto-drive you on a long-distance trip, why not offer an actual bed mode in the car as a purchasable option?

It's not about the driver for me - I would hire such human-driven limousine today (for a reasonable cost). I think the costs of finding the driver a place to stay and planning their trips in order for the driver to get home frequently makes such a service impossible today. This problem would go away if the car was self-driven - the service becomes scalable.

https://www.singaporeair.com/saar5/images/navigation/flying-...

It just takes one person to decide to go carmageddon and now every car will have weight restrictions, luggage restrictions, then there will be ~~economy cars~~ pods and more.

The moment you start paying for a seat, and the car is owned by someone else, the owners are going to see exactly how LITTLE they can keep in the car, and still get someone to use it.

Unlike flying which benefited from budget airlines, car transport is not likely to benefit more people by going this route.

All this thread is filled with people talking about some sort of benevolent firm wanting to take care of its customers.

The moment the market place hits it's growth plateau, people will be cutting corners to reduce weight, and improve fuel efficiency.

As for rapey scans - they will just expect people to get to a hub, and from that hub pick up their cars.

The hub will have the rapey scans.

The point of the TSA is to make the public feel that something is being "done", post 9/11.

Its a product of fear, not of security requirements.

So you can take it as a bet, that if any of the scenarios come true here - you will eventually return back to TSA levels of security theater.

Because motion sickness prevents a large amount of people from watching movies or doing work in a car, even if you could make a decent enough workspace. The start and stop mode of car traffic is much different from an airplane or even train, and the road surface varies so much by area that potholes would make sleeping, working, or what have you a nightmare.

A lot of this discussion seems dominated by people who don't use a car or understand driving.

Would happen to me as a teen when we were going down well-made freeways to go to the beach, I had to just watch the scenery go by and ruminate about the lives of the residents of the various districts. Never happened to me as an adult in a plane, even reading tiny low-res screen of netbook. Can't imagine reading on a sailboat, I've got a job to do, or I'm drinking and socializing. No problem reading or walking around on the one cruise ship I've used.

Of course there are individuals out there who can't read or even sit quietly in any of those scenarios without motion sickness.

But "executive" back seats are very common on luxury brand vehicles in China.

This is the Jevons paradox applied to time cost. Definitely true.

Ignoring fuel!

I think you drastically underestimate the possible values of pessimism. In my opinion, truly autonomous vehicles driving in arbitrary, real world, public roads in my lifetime sounds optimistic ...

I mean, we were able to do level 5 trucks in the desert two decades ago! But the human world is much less benign, and the perception problem is hard. And the history of AI is littered with limited solutions that failed to scale.

So I'm more curious about the purported GM testing of level 4 in Manhattan, it's a much more realistic and far less forgiving driving environment.

That makes these subscriptions much more convenient than having to pick up/drop off a share car in a fixed spot.

The user uses the car for a while in semi-autonomous mode (car can drive 90, 95 or 99% with user supervision) and then the user can return it by letting it drive back. If the car is stuck it just stops and a driver from the fleet company comes along to drive it.

I think a scenario like that could be viable in small scale for some metropolitan areas (good climate, limited user base etc) within 5 years.

“Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.”

Just my two cents.

Which means the little benefit of daylight savings that is there will disappear, which would be awesome. Long-live the driverless car subscription model.

- diapers

- changing pad

- strollers

- extra clothes

- kids movies for the tv in the van, queued up to where we left off

Sure, people in places like NYC just carry all that stuff with them when they take the kid out, but they also take the kid out less often or move to the burbs because it's a huge pain in the butt.

I'd much rather own the car simply so that I can keep all my stuff in it that I need when I go out.

And if you want to take a long stroll down the waterfront, you don't need to return to your car to go home, you just hop on a different train.

However: unless you are planning a very large family, this is a transitory phase. I noted as my kids matured the amount of crap you have to lug around drops precipitously. I can't see that many people needing to carry the stuff on the bulky end of this for years and years. I carried my kids sequentially in a back-pack (3 years separation, so #1 was walking everywhere when #2 came along) and managed to fit all the above (aside from movies) into the back pocket of the kid backpack (strongly recommended for the transition to walking, incidentally, as a backpack is almost zero hassle when empty, while a stroller is just as hard to push empty as full).

But back on topic: you could lease a car/van for the Peak Kid bit of your life and still save money.

I fully expect to be using at least one driverless vehicle before they leave to college. I'm just not sure if it will be exclusively a rented driverless car or something else.

Having to install one just won't fly. if you can't get one with the right car seats, it's a no go for a daily use family car. On the other hand it might easily work as a second car in such families. I'll probably need to own/lease my own car for the foreseeable future, but I'd be very happy to not have to own two like I do now. And my requirements for a second car are much simpler.

Everything must be a service. Ideally provided by google.

Next thing your going to say is that waiting for 15 minutes in the rain with a crying baby while you get gouged for triple price because of nearby concert is a problem for you. Just suck it up and accept that car ownership is a outdated idea and you need to bow to the will of the tech hipsters and conglomerates.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BzOVUGrIIAAH8c9.jpg:large

There won't be everything as a service, because you won't have anything. There's no need for you to do anything in this fiat-advertising-bubble-money future world. Expect maybe a stream of soylent and a ventilated cage, unless you have pro-tier skills in extracting money from Stanford Prison Experiment 'customers'.

Now when some thing is available for $200/month , you won ONE CAR like OLD way ( for Kids etc.. ), and your spouse may use FLEET CAR .

People tend to travel at similar times. Your total number of cars required is still going to be high.

There will be different flavors of pricing for needs like yours, like 'Keeping CAR With you'. How about this pricing

Option 1: The CAR will be in serving people 10 streets around your Home, will be available whenever you want but costs you $300 /month ( It will have two Locker boxes in the Truck to keep your Items ALL the time, and your LOCKER BOX opens only with your Smart Phone ).

Option 2: you lease Autonomous car, it is all yours to keep, but the price is like $500/month Lease .

When I said, $200/month for 1000 miles/month is one time pay, there is NO per ride PAY. It is like you pay your Cell Phone Bill.

Use those 1000 miles in that month whenever you want .

when I said $200/month SUBSCRIPTION for 1000 miles, no Per RIDE pay

The cars would also probably have to be inspected and possibly cleaned between each use...

I'm also uncertain the tech is advancing quickly enough to justify a 5 year timeline. Not to mention ensuring society and the government is onboard with this. It would suck to be stuck in an automated car by a picket line of displaced drivers.

If you just want to steal a car, cities are littered with them. If you want to rob people, humans are also not hard to find. And an autonomous vehicle will have excellent video recording, fast notification of police, and hard-to-disable vehicle tracking.

Weather, though, is a giant issue. Chandler, AZ has 90% dry days and rarely gets more than an inch of rain per month [1], so I think it's no coincidence they've started there. As a Michigander, I grew up driving in all sorts of shitty weather, so it's astonishing to watch San Francisco drivers fall apart in heavy rain. I expect auto-automobiles to be no better.

[1] https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/arizona/united-states/...

Fleets will change their tires for the conditions and the automated system will be just as good at driving in adverse conditions as it would be if it drove in them all year. The sensors will see things human eyes can't.

I don't know how long it will take to happen, but it's inevitable.

Worse, the risk shoots way up, and people will be much less tolerant of risks that aren't under their control. "Driver Ends Up In Ditch" is never news in places with real winter. But "Google Almost Killed My Family" sure will be.

But for a lot of northern and central europe, northern US, canada etc where people are used to changing tyres and driving for several months in snow, the autonomous cars will have a harder time.

On one hand like you say, they can see things we can't. But on the other hand, there are zero lane markers, and sensors are typically covered in snow.

For example: I have parking sensors and a rear camera on my car and those are completely covered a lot of the time in winter. I still use my car and just ignore that the parking sensors scream constantly and the rear camera shows the inside of a wad of snow. That situation would be worse for an autonomous car because those sensors aren't just nice-to-have, they are fundamental to to the operation of the car.

Rocks thrown, sensors spray-painted over, side panels (and sensors) graffitied, interiors damaged, forced into stopping and their chassis stripped (or their occupants held up).

And while the police may be quickly notified, they will not be so quick to respond. Ask someone in a big city about the police's response time to their car being vandalized or stolen... Not to mention, all those fancy cameras? Ask a small business owner with CCTV how useful it is to catch robbers.

What? Is someone going to try to steal a car without a steering wheel?

Let us take the established known history of 'Evolution of Android on smart phones'. By 2010 as Android share is growing world wide, everybody know there is big money to be made in FUTURE ( By Ads and other means ) by supplying Mobile OS even at free of cost at THAT time.

But nobody is able to do it, even microsoft with it Billions even after after offering Mobile OS Free to vendors .

Now with self-driving Car software, google with DeepMind, Self-driving Teams hundreds of Deep Learning engineering working and developed advanced Neural nets have at least the edge of few years over competation.

Again in 2025, google will choose to limit as "software system supplier" from the "position of strength" that is

1) Let the FLEET companies compete for LOW MARGIN monthly SUBSCRIPTION FEES and provide high value software

2) By limiting as software players, it treats all FLEETS as equals avoiding the "formation of Consortium of" FLEET & Car Manufactures".

Beyond 2025, both FLEET and Car manufacture will be SAME ONE Entity, With out running FLEET, you can not Survive as CAR Manufacturer as there are FEW "end User Buyers" left as majority start moving to "on-demand Summon Monthly Subscription" pay model .

2017 US new Car& Truck Sales are at 17 Million Vehicles , by 2022 it will reduce to 14 Million, then by 2025 10 Millions, then the decline Accelerates .

Even number of different CAR Models are around 500 worldwide, by 2025+ they should reduce to 100 models and Lots of mergers and shutdown of CAR companies

Those same concepts won't necessarily be applicable to self-driving car tech.. unless Google is able to establish auxiliary services required to support the self-driving network (public monitoring stations, deep mapping, etc) that can further solidify their position while continuing to distribute just the software. This would further raise the bar for competitors to enter the market.

As you said, there will be all kinds of Demand pricing.. one example You will have 1000/miles per month general rate. If you use peak hours 8 AM to 9 AM , then it is counted as 2X miles of real distance etc..

They might just build a service to the extent of push a button and a vehicle will come, and take you where you tap. That's enough to work inside a controlled town environment. As times goes by there'll likely be a merger with an actual ride sharing company.

The software they run on is complex, but not so complex that it can't be replicated.

So if you're a company with the secret sauce, that being a validated autonomous OS, you would most definitely want to run the consumer facing end of the business yourself, because that's where the real profit margins are hiding. Back-end software, fleet maintenance, and harware: this stuff is all eventually going to become commoditized. Customer experience will be the differentiator.

A thing to keep in mind is that a fleet of sensor riddled robotaxis will gather far more granular data about the world than just a standard human driven taxi, so the potential is there to take fleet management logistics to another level that no conventional rideshare can hope to compete with.

Really, if you let your imagination run wild with what can be done with that kind of data about the world, well, oh my gosh. You're building a live action parallel universe made out of networked lidars and running annotated data through pattern recognizers.

The privacy implications would make the hairs on your back stand-up if conceptualizing the astronomical amount of data that's going to kicked around hasn't already made you dizzy. It varies from company to company, but a typical test vehicle gobbles up something in the neighbourhood of 4 terabytes a day. In the future that number will go up. Thousands and thousands of Robotaxis.

Unique, regulated and highly complex software and hardware components seems far less likely to become commoditized than ridesharing apps that essentially already are, and of course viable markets for the driving tech exists even if the driver can't be dispensed with altogether.

But Lyft (and Uber for that matter...) doesn't really have those capabilities today anyway, at least to the extent they will be needed for autonomous fleets. They have blunt tools for supply and demand management, but drivers take on much of the risk in terms of positioning, routing, and deciding whether or not to get on the road in the first place. If Waymo owns their fleet, will they let Lyft have complete control over their assets without some balance or at the very least data to make sure the vehicles are being used efficiently? And if Waymo learns enough about scheduling, routing, etc. to make sure Lyft is using the vehicles efficiently, how much harder is it for Waymo to just run the vehicles efficiently themselves and capture the value of owning a direct relationship with the end rider?

These things come along the way. If there is a service that's 10x cheaper than Lyft, I could imagine most people would churn to that service. The technology shift from human to completely autonomous driving is so huge that it could just disrupt the current market structure.

Why would a ride service based on autonomous cars be 10x cheaper? It's not like 90% of the current revenue or costs are human labor. I'm not sure the exact ratio of driver labor vs. gas/maintenance/depreciation, but I'm pretty sure it's less than 10:1.

Presumably the cost for a heavily utilized vehicle is going to be lower per mile. OTOH, any commercial fleet service is going to have costs on top of the base mileage cost. (The $0.53 figure also ignores any distance the vehicle might have to travel to pick you up.)

So it's probably reasonable as a back-of-the-envelope swag to assume that, if a fully autonomous vehicle were available today, you could probably undercut a "ridesharing" service by about 50%. It's definitely not suddenly going to be almost too cheap to meter just because you take the driver out of the equation.

If autonomous cars don't crash, the insurance will be super cheap. If they are electric, then maintenance and operating costs should be very inexpensive.

When cars don't crash, they don't need to be designed to crash, so you can start building the cars out of lighter materials. When the car is far lighter, then the drivetrain can be simpler and energy consumption should be less.

I could see taxis serving city centers that are more like a golf cart than a Crown Vic. So the cars should be cheaper to buy or lease as well.

Some of the same technology that's needed for autonomous driving could be applied to the maintenance and repair side as well. So when the cars do break, I think they could be repaired inexpensively by other robots.

I can imagine all the people involved in the taxi industry being replaced by taxi.py.

> I could see taxis serving city centers that are more like a golf cart than a Crown Vic.

http://www.tqsmagazine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/john...

That will never happen. When my car can drive itself, I'm moving further out of the city.

Just leave your car parked out in the suburbs somewhere, program it to move to another parking space at least once every 72 hours so it doesn't get towed, then call it to come in and pick you up whenever you want to use it.

No matter how good Waymo's driving is, unless they're the only things on the road, their cars will need to be collision-safe.

Having move back, I now own a car that I have to fill up with gas once every couple of months (I don’t drive it much, but with a baby uber isn’t an option)

I came across a (possibly outdated) Uber pricing model for LA of a $5.60 minimum fare and a $0.90 per mile charge, and among other fees, NYC cabs are $2.50 per mile. Compare both of those numbers to the IRS mileage rate of $0.53 per mile to get a very rough lower bound on some of the costs.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/passenger/taxicab_rate.shtm...

Sorry, I was going off "Plus 50 cents per 1/5 mile" to mean $2.50 per mile. Where are you getting $0.505/mile from your link?

https://www.waze.com/carpool/

Only Apple has more with about $260b cash but over $100b debt and over 90% offshore so tax liability yet to be paid.

What better capitalization are you speaking? Also realize Alphabet could also raise additional capital bpver easily. They are the only ones truly able to so level 4 and they are miles and miles ahead of everyone else literally.

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/california-dmv-autonomous-car-... The Numbers Don't Lie: Self-Driving Cars Are Getting Good - Wired

I think it will be very hard to convince French regulators, for example, to allow any foreign corporation to have more visibility and control over the national transportation system than the French government itself.

And unlike ridesharing, which appeared practically overnight, self-driving car technology is under mainstream scrutiny several years before achieving meaningful scale. This means regulators have more time to prepare.

The car industry, and the national transportation infrastructure, is considered a matter of sovereignty, and a politically sensitive topic. This won't be anything like ridesharing, consumer electronics, or advertisement.

I think (and hope) that the result will be that Waymo will fail to get a winner-takes-all stranglehold on the global self-driving car industry. Instead it will be forced to compete on a relatively level playing field, against Didi, Apple, Amazon, or whoever decides to compete in the space. The more the better.

I am rooting for the regulators on this one. If they fail to protect our national transportation systems from Google-style walled gardens... Then that sends us down a very scary road, where almost every aspect of society and government ends up privatized, and managed from either the US west coast or China, with no accountability or representation.