Re:Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
by AlotOfReading on Saturday February 15, 2020 @03:04AM
(#22334002)
It's way more difficult from a fleet operational perspective and more importantly, way less profitable. Take LA<->SF as an example. That's about 6h driving, and buses do it for $25-50. That's a measly 7-14 cents per minute. Once you've made the trip, the company has to find someone going the other way. If there's any directional or temporal imbalance, the fleet ends up with a lot of cars sitting idle or driving hours to be useful, further reducing utilization. If the car has an issue halfway, now someone has to pick the customer up hours from a company facility and get them to their destination. All this for pennies. You don't even get an easier problem, because you still have to drive in the city to drop people off.
Compare to city driving: 10 minute drive, $5. That's at least 5x more profitable and takes less capex. Plus, if anything goes wrong, your facilities and backup vehicles are already nearby.
Re:Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected
by ghaff on Saturday February 15, 2020 @07:52AM
(#22335001)
I'm assuming individuals still own cars with autonomous features (or rent them like they do today). Which is sort of my point. This capability doesn't really help those who want (or need) to be driven everywhere. It's a convenience (and safety) feature for car owners. It would be a very nice one. But it doesn't really help eliminate car ownership or the need to drive.
Long highway drives may be something they don't do that often. So the ability to own a car that can automate that subset of their driving probably doesn't strike them as all that interesting.
Personally, as I've said elsewhere, this seems like a much more tractable problem and gives me a lot of the total benefit of self-driving.