Further, I expect the number of cars on the road to go way up because suddenly so many more people can use a car. For example, every one without a license. Kids, elderly, disabled. I also suspect it means there will be lots more long distance drives as suddenly it becomes "hey, wanna go to this place 3 hours away, we can play games and drink while the car drives us"
I'd certainly consider visiting my family 9hrs drive away more often if Friday at say 12am I could just climb in the backseat and go to sleep and arrive at 8am vs having to drive myself (usually 7am to 4pm)
The definition of "very very quick" is important here. The smart phone adoption took over a decade. to get to 80+%. [1]
Cars are much more expensive than phones, and last longer. The average age for a car in the US is 11.5 years [2] and people replace their cars between 5 and 7 years. [3] And my guess is self-driving technology will be used at the top-end of the market, and slowly trickle down. This is similar to pretty much any consumer technology: the technology starts off as a premium and becomes a commodity over a longer period if time.
So, if we use cell phones as a benchmark, it will take 10 years at a minimum. It likely will take 20 years given the duty cycle of vehicles. (Assuming we all still own a vehicle. If we all move to subscriptions, that might be a different story.)
Fleets will be replaced sooner, because the commercial ROI will be compelling. But it still takes a ton of capital to replace a fleet, and they need to get the ROI out of their _existing_ fleet before they invest in new ones. So even that won't be immediate.
But it might be uneven. I 100% agree with your example of sleeping through the night. If I can do that with a rental, and that's cheaper than flying, I might consider it.
[1] https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/US-Smartphone-Penetra...
[2] https://www.carchex.com/research-center/auto-warranties/how-...
[3] https://www.quora.com/How-often-do-people-replace-their-cars
Adoption was also spread unevenly. Some parts of the country moved past flip phones long before others. There are still holdouts!
Cars will be an entirely different matter. People are trained to accept internet enabled devices and ridesharing already.
Once insurance rates for manual navigation clear those of an autonomous fleet vehicle, people won’t want the oil can Henry’s experience anymore.
You can already tell most people don’t want to drive anyway. They are looking at their smartphones as they idle down the street.
Even if the system + retrofit costs $50,000 that's an ROI of ~8 months. These numbers are made up but even with the most pessimistic of assumptions I believe widespread adoption will happen much faster than 10 years.
On top of this retrofits for every existing model is a non trivial problem on it’s own.
However delivering electrons to a powerpoint doesn't :)
I get your point though. The last mile stuff is tricky and fiddly, and will be done manually long after the long haul stuff has been automated.
This could be developed along-side trucking automation. Thus developing 2 networks meaning more resilience.
These couplings are a massive upgrade over the common hook&chain freight coupling, which requires substantial manual labor for (un-)hooking. The new ones theoretically allow for fully automatic freight shunting/train re-assembly.
Now we "just" need to up the speed limit for freight trains to at least the 140/160 km/h most commuter rail uses for max cruise speed, and retrofit the digital part as needed to the already-used mechanical coupling to some electric multiple units that operate on congested links with demand for intra-day freight. A few (1-4) box/container/"swap body (truck/rail only deriviates of ISO 20ft containers)" cars should typically be no problem for these EMUs (especially the longer ones), and would allow to realistically compete with trucks on interstates (Autobahn). Just needs some very small shunting engines, probably ideally remote-controlled (from the rail yard's tower), to add/remove freight cars from the tail while the passenger doors are open. Timings is tight, but some automation for fairly aggressive acceleration/deceleration profiles during that shunting should suffice. Maybe later even add a low tier electric car's drive train hardware-wise to some such container carrier wagons, to let them do the shunting and possibly last-mile trip simply on battery power, as that'd greatly speed up the shunting (low speed acceleration is friction limited, and a separate locomotive can't use the freight weight on the freight axles for traction. They're only outfitted with brakes on typical freight cars.)
For example, these "swap bodies" which are like ISO containers with fold-out legs, should IIUC be able to get put on their legs coming from a freight car (just by folding them out and maybe using some small lifting jack style hydraulics to get an inch or two clearance), followed by that freight car (if it has a battery pack and some small motors) driving away under remote control, and the truck trailer driving under it. This would only need a switch and non-electrified streetcar-style concrete pavement integrated track long enough for one or multiple of these, on the side of an existing railway station. Some $50-100k plus whatever the concrete truck yard pavement itself costs. Adding the battery drive system thing should probably be around $20-30k on top of what the freight car (with the digital automatic coupling) would cost normally, at least if it's only manually operated with sight contact. (It'd recharge via the train's electric heating bus that was originally designed to replace the steam heating for passenger carriages. The coupling that was/is used with hook&chain is 600A@1000V 16.7 Hz AC (in Germany), with one coupling either side of the coupling. This should leave ample recharging power for a small battery pack on the attached freight.)
This obviously only works where trains and existing road infrastructure are level, but on cursory inspection, many train stations here in Germany already have that. On many commuter links there's hourly or even twice-hourly service here, so even fairly short trips could realistically make use of this shifting of traffic from street to rail.
Training people to pump gas is possible but slow and a huge shift? Are you from Oregon or New Jersey, by any chance?
The big assumption is the retrofit market. Is that something anyone is talking about? Is that something Waymo and the like will be offering?
My point is: it makes sense, but is it the low hanging fruit someone will be going after right way? Or will this happen down the road?
It’s not just physical instillation their models would have to be adapted for different camera placement, vehicle weight, etc.
I think CommaAI is the closest to a kit, but it probably will never quite reach "no-human-required" autonomous driving; I don't think they're even aiming for that.
https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/docs/CARS.m...
https://abovethelaw.com/2021/07/court-calls-bullst-on-cop-wh...
> The Court agrees with Gray that it is incredible that Officer Hiser—who self-admittedly does not have a heightened olfactory system—could smell the scent of two resealable sandwich sized plastic baggies of unburnt marijuana coming from a moving vehicle when patrolling in his cruiser. This occurrence is not only contrary to any common experiences, but is “implausible” and seemingly “contrary to the laws of nature.“
Even in modern times we still have a surprising amount of Americans still use feature phones. The Pew Research Center found in 2018 that 17% of Americans still use feature phones. https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/19/a-foolish-take-17-...
See also: the internet. People still discussed seriously whether or not it had staying power as recently as 2008. It didn't really take off until the 2008 election pushed so many people to participate in new mediums. 2004 was kind of a prelude with Howard Dean's campaign, but he mostly reached the already online set. I was already on in the 1990s, and it still surprises me when I meet people my own age who didn't get on until the 2000s or 2010s even though it's the more common experience.
I find the idea that the Internet’s adoption was related to US presidential election cycles a little bizarre. I know they dominate the mainstream media for a few months every four years but surely the utility of the internet vastly exceeds that?
What about online shopping or even email displacing paper communications?
What they used to call feature phones back then (which I think are practically discontinued now - most current feature phones would be considered smartphones in 2006) supported texting but it was used less than on the 2006 concept of smartphones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helio_Ocean
When they said social network, they meant SMS Twitter. It was a very interesting time with lots of companies vying to be the next evolution of mobile.
Not to mention the rest of the planet. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that the majority of the world is not-America, and views American presidential elections as a newsworthy diversion for a few weeks every four years, and not much more than that. Those elections don't really drive any changes in behaviour. Hell, my own country's elections don't really drive any changes in behaviour.
The main graph on the top of this page shows Internet Users as proportion of population in Developed countries went from 11% in 1997 to 31% in 2000.
It was basically right at 1999->2000 that you had internet stores completely melt down on Valentine's Day and Mother's Day.
This was the point where the Internet was escaping being some weird techie thing to being something that non-technical people were using.
Price is another really big factor. Car buyers are generally not willing to spend even $3k on optional bells and whistles. My understanding is a lidar system costs like $20k. You can buy an entire car for that price tag.
Sleeper buses and the like also already exist and demand isn't really that high. Greyhound shut down a bunch of lines during the pandemic. I.e. if demand drops, an operator can go out of business. What makes a SDV fleet operator any less prone to the same sort of risk profile?
Another factor that seems suspiciously absent from Waymo discussions is Google's abysmal track record wrt customer support. Comms from Waymo always come out as carefully written press releases, but people actually using the service have to sign NDAs. Seems... kinda fishy?
That's just assuming rides will be dirt cheap. I don't expect that. With billions invested in R&D, costly hardware for self-driving car and tax starved governments to make money, these rides will be nowhere cheap where anyone could take ride anything between 10 min and 10 hours without second thought.
With all said and done I believe pricing will be in range of cab rides not bus rides.
This is not going to be a fast rollout.
In addition, each taxi will be replacing at least 10 cars, if it is sufficiently cheap and convenient.
Electric cars are heavy, so expect more suspension failures. Running gear doesn't really change. AC is identical but with electric motors (prone to failure). Electrics will be worse if anything.
Tire wear may increase, but a robotaxi can also optimize driving style to reduce it.
None of those costs matter, compared to ICE. EVs just have less things that can break, and even less things that result in EOL or catastrophic failure. The more miles a taxi runs for, the more money it makes. Even if costs increased, the profit would easily make up for it.
Only because we regularly service them by replacing bushings, CV joints and ball joints regularly. And shock absorber failures are still commonplace.
> EVs aren't that much heavier
They're much heavier. It's obviously hard to make a direct comparison because there's no such thing as "equivalent but with an ICE engine" but a Golf E weighs about 250kg more than a Golf GTI.
> there are plenty of crazy heavy ICE vehicles that work without issue
And they have heavier duty components which require more servicing and are more expensive to replace.
> None of those costs matter, compared to ICE.
Can you show me some evidence for this? I am not making the claim that EVs are more expensive to maintain than ICE cars, but you made the claim that wear and tear costs (aka maintenance costs) on EVs are "negligible". You will need to show some receipts for a claim like that.
For an apples to oranges comparison, a Tesla Model 3 is 3,648 to 4,250 lbs; a Honda Accord is 3,150 to 3,430 lbs. Totally difference cars, but same-ish external size class. Those battery packs are heavy!
Personally I'd call 10% tiny.
Also you save a third of that when you remove the driver.
According to RepairPal, the average Tesla maintenance cost is $832 per year. That compares to an average of $652 per year for all car models sold in the United States. Depending on which services your Tesla needs, you may end up spending much more than the average car owner on yearly maintenance needs.
Also, Tesla's aren't known for their reliability:
Though not much information exists yet about the overall reliability of Tesla models, early results aren’t encouraging. In the J.D. Power 2021 U.S. Vehicle Dependability StudySM, Tesla ranked 30th of 33 car brands for overall reliability. That’s better than only Jaguar, Alfa Romeo, and Land Rover among all automakers across the country.
J.D. Power reported an average of 176 mechanical issues per 100 Tesla vehicles, compared to an industry average of 121 issues. The organization notes, though, that it doesn’t rank the electric car brand with other major automakers because it doesn’t meet the study’s criteria.
What can be known is that Tesla models break down relatively regularly and that Tesla maintenance costs are pretty steep.
https://jalopnik.com/advisor/tesla-maintenance-cost/
Unreliable cars and a pretty steep per year cost to maintain them, along with steep repair costs (a broken door handle will run you about 1K plus labor)? This doesn't sound like the pipedream you're selling me here.
I would be very careful before relying on those maintenance cost figures - they are very dependant upon the age of the vehicles and neither figure sounds realistic, if you look at the following information.
https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/the-most-and-least-expe...
The link shows the cheapest average cost to maintain a vehicle over 10 years was $550/annum for a Toyota in 2016, and the most expensive was $1780/annum for BMW.
More importantly, further down, the article shows the cost increase over time for maintenance is about +$150/annum. At age 10 years the average maintenance is $1500, and it plateaus at about $2000/annum (because people retire vehicles when they get too expensive to maintain).
A Tesla doesn’t have oil changes or combustion engine problems, so some maintenance costs are reduced. However the battery eventually needs replacing, which is a large expense, so you must know whether the battery replacement is included in average yearly maintenance costs or not, before the figure is useable over the long term.
Your source seems to argue in favor of the numbers as well. If we just look at your Toyota and BMW numbers, the average holds true if there are 11 Toyotas to every BWM. That sounds plausible.
Gotta love how these numbers are both a decent sized integer multiple away from what you would think they are if you got your advice from the internet.
True reliability metrics are average years on the road and miles driven.
I wonder whether the average amount spent on non-warranty repairs would be a good metric to add to "average years on the road and miles driven". That would hopefully remove initial defects from the first few years and also remove defects that are so minor that most people won't pay to have them fixed.
Therefore Tesla's reliability might be even worse.
Also, if there is an unused resource for most of the day, capitalism will find a use for it!
Maybe the demand would be even higher than that - I'm thinking of all people that cannot drive (e.g. because of age in a few years for my parents & other relatives), the ones that don't own a car (too costly, don't want it, whatever), introverted people that don't like driving in a taxi/uber (that's me! hehe), etc... .
Of course alternatives exist already now but often they lack something (e.g. bus to remote location X drives only once every few hours and/or only up to a certain time, taxi is very expensive and/or availability is unreliable) => a cheap robotaxi would be a game changer, there would be many indirect consequences (and in my opinion many would be positive, like less parking spaces needed, more mobility for old people, more flexibility about where-to-go-for-what, room in the trunk, etc...).
> Main cost now are the driver, and then fuel, and then vehicle wear/tear/depreciation
Especially thinking about an idle taxi vs. robotaxi (waiting for somebody wanting a ride): unbeatable, as the driver's cost not generating any revernue would not exist anymore (only vehicle deprecation based on time and cost of capital used to buy the vehicle, which are both very low) => the difference related to fixed costs would be incredible (but I assume that some additional/new cost will show up, e.g. some data-exchange-service to keep maps/routes extremely up-to-date, coverage for remote-assisted driver in the case that the car would get stuck, etc..., but that would probably still not increase costs a lot).
Another thing that would increase demand would be the cheaper cost of AI driven miles compared to human driven ones. Today, it's somewhat expensive to get anything delivered from local shops, due to how expensive it is to do local point to point delivery. But if the local bakery or restaurant could deliver for a dollar or two, that would change a lot of behaviors.
How does autonomy reduce fuel consumption and wear?
I don't understand this line of thought. Ownership will be relegated to ultra-luxury status if cars can drive themselves.
"FSD" is another 12k IIRC
Total 59k
You're assuming that the cost will be much less with self-driving than ride share or cabs. It likely won't be a significant reduction for a while.
The same way a taxi or ride-share would drive you right now?
I actually agree that today’s Uber/taxi rates are probably a good estimate for many years even once self-driving is practical.
This could also play out totally opposite to that - think cheaper on demand rides, no need to park near your work if your car can just go do something else, etc. This might play out as actually less people owning a car, or families owning just one car instead of two, etc. I remember a prediction from a few years ago that it may reduce the number of cars by 80%, which I doubt, but I also don't think it will necessarily mean more people buying cars.
But let's ignore that fact, and instead look at a different definition of number of cars on the road: Instead of how many cars actually exist, count how many cars are on the road at any given time. It's not just that there might be more cars in the end, but even with fewer cars, each car will be doing more miles, because you don't need a driver. Children visiting each other while being less of a nuisance for parents mean more trips. Old people that are uncomfortable driving. People going further away in geneeral, because being driven would be less stressful when the technology is doing well. More visits to the bar, now that you don't have to call an uber, or risk a DUI on the way. And let's not forget letting the car go back home to park, instead of paying for expensive downtown parking: Same number of miles with a passenger, but bonus congestion for everyone else.
When driving is cheaper, the number of miles driven goes up, and therefore the number of cars that you actually find on the road goes up, even with fewer cars.
This sounds horrific for those of us who live in cities that are already overrun with cars.
Have you ever done it via the bus. Because that gets you exactly what you want and overnight buses exist almost everywhere.
There's a reason most people prefer to fly.
This is the wrong direction for the world to move in. We need to make our transportation efficient both to reduce emissions and not pillage the earth for rare minerals for these self driving electric cars.
MOST (not all) 3 hour drives can and should be done through train trips. Trains are efficient, they offer more equitable access to transportation, and they can be very fast. The American obsession with the automobile, and the way that obsession is pushed internationally through exported media, will ruin us all.
With autonomous vehicle adoption, we may see the concept of blockchain "gas" (fees paid with rates based on real-time demand) come full circle as a real-time congestion tax.
And in areas with already bad traffic, it will only get worse. Much worse. You thought LA or SF pre-COVID were bad? Those will be the "good old days." And that's not just traffic, that's also hunting for parking everywhere you go (those cars have to be stored somewhere, after all).
A comprehensive public transportation system means people unable to drive can still get around. People act like self-driving cars are the solution when we already had a solution but (at least in America) proceeded to tear it apart as soon as we heard "cars are the future, get with the plan" and derided public transit as "welfare".
Fundamentally, we cannot "fix traffic", self-driving cars or no, because a 15-foot car holding 1-6 people cannot hope to compete with a 30-foot bus holding up to 30 passengers (on top of the driver), and that still doesn't hold a candle to a single train car (an 85-foot Bombardier MultiLevel railcar, for example, holds 132 people...and has a bathroom).
Compounding this is the American obsession with single-family housing and large minimum lot sizes: it is a fundamentally inefficient and unsustainable use of land. There is not enough space to build in this manner in the areas most in need of housing (which are, not so coincidentally, the areas where most of the jobs are), and it is this same inefficient use of land which makes public transportation difficult to run frequently enough that people stop using their cars for most trips.
When you build densely, you can run comprehensive public transportation that alleviates the need to have a car every time you need to go to work, the doctor, the grocery store, the park, etc. This also means people who cannot drive are afforded far more freedom than if they were to live in your average American suburb where sidewalks and pedestrian infrastructure more generally are an afterthought.
Far from a utopia, the future self-driving car advocates proclaim would be a nightmare. A nightmare where people are more isolated [0], more municipalities are struggling with debt [1], and even worse climate change [2]. This is not the future we should be excited for, it should be the one we are attempting to prevent at all costs.
Self-driving cars are fine (not having to deal with the TSA would be wonderful), but the way people think they will reshape society is nothing but a net-negative - we shot ourselves in the foot, but the proposed treatment is just putting on a band-aid and calling it a day. A high-tech band-aid, but a band-aid nonetheless.
[0]: https://citymonitor.ai/environment/citymetric-advent-22-snap...
[1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
[2]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-charac...
Edit: Another thing to consider - if self-driving cars enable way more people to get around, this isn't good for the environment because only 40% of US electricity is from renewable sources [3] (20% of that being nuclear, which we desperately need more of but which many environmentalists have an existential panic over due to envisioning them all as impending Chernobyls). Burning gas might be bad for the planet, but electric cars don't have a perfect footprint, either. In isolation, replacing all gas vehicles with electric (minus stuff like trucks) would likely reduce emissions, but adding a massive increase in trips would be far worse than if we had comprehensive public transportation in more cities and towns.
They won't get stuck at left turns, on-ramps and rotarys due to an inability to use the skinny pedal to its full capacity.
That won't solve the sheer numbers problem but it's probably a solid sized constant factors improvement.
You understand. If the government can tell you that you can only drive even or odd days, tell you that you can't drive at all (and must use self driving cars inside the 4th or even 5th ring road) is a very distinct possibility.
Congestion arguably will worsen first.
Isn't that kind of the point of technological progress?
Job automation is great, but there are externalities that should be accounted for ahead of time. You can ask, "who pays for this?" Well, the obvious answer is the companies that will be enriching themselves due to society's sacrifice. Although, that has happened during the pandemic, so it's clear corporations aren't going to do so out of some sense of civic duty.
I think hampering technological progress to protect jobs is the wrong approach though. We need to contend with the fact that traditional supply-side economics will start to break down as we enter an era where most or all human needs can be met with automation.
1) We'll all need to collectively let go of our societal ideal that work is virtuous. We will need to accept that a significant portion of people have little to no productive work available to them, and that there is nothing wrong with that. It's just the natural culmination of increasing automation and societal advancement. UBI would be a necessity in this scenario.
2) We'll see an increasing number of "make work jobs" that exist solely to keep people busy, and to generate an illusion of productivity. These jobs may ultimately be government funded, although governments may obscure the source of the funding to keep the "productivity illusion" going. For example, governments may provide business grants to keep a certain number of low-wage workers employed. I suppose this essentially would be an indirect UBI program, except that we'd make people do some nominal amount of unproductive work to "prove" that they're worthy of the UBI.
I strongly suspect we'll head towards option 2.
I honestly can summarize it this way. Savers keep saving even when there is nothing left to save because there is no downside to having too much money but lots of upside to having more even if each single dollar is incrementally less useful. To maintain full employment all savings must be invested. The reason for that is quite simple. When you spend 50% of your income you are working more than you really need to. The extra hours that you are putting in mean someone else does not need to put in those work hours (50% less employment for them). So, you use the money which was previously sitting idle on a bank account by lending it out. Of course, the modern system has no direct connection between savings and actual money being lent out, rather it is the money hole (the money you have saved is not circulating) in the economy which causes unemployment that is driving further borrowing to restore full employment.
One could say that if you are working twice as much as you need, every second hour you are working is actually charity, it's not productive in the sense that you need it to maintain your lifestyle and it is not productive in the sense that anyone else has a need for it. There is no way you are getting a return off that charity when the economy is already saturated and everyone has everything they need. Yet money does not represent this act of charity, instead we pretend that you are still owed the same amount of products and services for all eternity, meaning what you are doing is not for the benefit of society, it's for your own benefit at the expense of someone else.
Probably the worst thing you can do is do what the Germany did before WW2. Do massive austerity programs during a depression hoping it makes things better. Homeless and starving people don't care that all the jobs are done by two thirds of the population if that means they don't get to eat. As I have said, if you are working more than you need to work for yourself, then you ought to work for the sake of someone else, anything else is selfish. If two thirds of the population is doing all the work and only doing it for itself then the rest is going to get angry very quickly.
> The extra hours that you are putting in mean someone else does not need to put in those work hours (50% less employment for them)
that's only true if you set the amount of necessary goods/services to a constant. I dont think that's true in the real economy - people have unlimited desires and demands, constrained only by the amount of money they have. The economy cannot be saturated, at least not until the world reaches star-trek level of tech where there's zero effort duplicators and materializers, and where no human labour is ever needed for anything.
Therefore, a person choosing a particular life-style that is less costly than they make in income is doing so because they expect to stop working in the future (and thus consume what they "save up" now, plus any improvements via productivity increases since). This savings takes a long and complicated path to turn into investment, but ultimately it would increase productivity, which is where the returns on investment comes from.
> if you are working more than you need to work for yourself, then you ought to work for the sake of someone else, anything else is selfish
well, the case study of communism ideal - that of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi... , vs what actually happened, tells me that this idealistic viewpoint doesn't work in reality. People will work more if it benefits themselves, and only if it benefit themselves.
If you shatter the "lie" that excess work is not for yourself, but for "charity", you also stop people from working more than bare sustenance, and it would stop the savings->investment->higher productivity cycle. Society would be poorer for it despite the equality that would result (everyone is equally poor).
> Not everyone is cut out to be a software engineer, doctor, or lawyer.
Society used to say the same thing about reading and writing (not everyone is cut out to do that), and society was (mostly) wrong. Pushing people higher and higher up the value chain has been happening forever. Eventually we will hit singularity, but even the software engineers, doctors, and lawyers will be obsolete then.
That doesn't follow, it just means that the demand structure changes. One thing that happens is the comparative advantage for being human increases, but you are human so that makes it easier. eg YouTube is a new kind of automation that produced a job called YouTuber.
Technology has a robust history of displacing jobs, and humans have a robust history of learning new skills. Change is never comfortable, but predictable.
That case isn't true. The new generations had jobs well enough (increased productivity grew the economy much faster than before), they weren't committed to weaving clothes by hand. The Luddites themselves didn't fair as well in the short term, but many of them would have aged out of the work force in a few years anyways (manual weaving is pretty unforgiving on the body).
Truck drivers are rapidly aging as well, if self driving vehicles move retirement up by 5 or so years, it isn't going that huge of a deal (we can rely even on America's social safety net), and their kids didn't want to be truck drivers anyways.
That's quite optimistic. When did politicians ever talk about moving up the retirement age in the last decades.
The internet brought insane growth through productivity gains in all industries. Even more than I'd expect from self-driving cars. And we haven't talked about moving up the retirement age.
Also the question is what these people do now? In the next twenty years of unemployment until they reach the current retirement age?
For that same reason, I think you're likely wrong about trucks. I suspect that autonomous - at least for the over the road portion of tips - will be highly compelling. American industry loves to substitute capital for labor costs, and that exactly what autonomous trucks do
Just some napkin calcs. In the US alone there are a total of 12.5 million heavy trucks registered (1). There were 288k heavy trucks manufactured in the US last year, up 20% from the last year (2). That works out to 43 years to replace the current fleet at the current production rate. It also passes the gut check because you'd expect to see trucks manufactured in the 80s to still be running, not so much trucks from the 70s. So even if we double production rates, it would be 20 years before we can replace all heavy trucks. That won't meet demand.
My takeaway is that there is a lot of money to be made in an add on solution that can somehow add the value of autonomous driving without manufacturing a new truck. This is low hanging fruit. It's a big deal to build and tool up an automotive plant. It's a different story when your bolting on a few parts and adding complex software controls. You don't need million dollar presses, welding robots, etc. You just need a few key components sourced from existing suppliers (motor drives for steering, brakes) a computer, likely with some nvidia edge computing stuff, and some fancy software that is hard to make initially, but easy to install on millions of trucks with the above hardware. This is a much more easily scalable business than making whole trucks, and therefore has potential to capture more market share faster, and ultimately could meet the demand faster. In a rate limited situation anything to increase that rate adds value, and I argue that this business model has a lower cost of entry, is more easily scalable, and avoids many of the pitfalls of starting an automotive/truck company.
It'll be a combination of both new autonomous heavy trucks and retrofits I imagine.
1. https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/ourroads/large-trucks-and-buses-nu....
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/412815/heavy-truck-produ...
Battery powered trucks are also expected to have lower downtime for maintenance and overhaul, so you can shave off another 5%. Rebuilding an engine and gearbox is an expensive maintenance activity that is completely eliminated, along with brake servicing due to regenerative braking.
Once the charger situation is figured out, probably an overhead catenary and dedicated charging lanes to keep the trucks in motion while charging, the savings will be compelling.
It's not true that brake services are eliminated, these trucks will still need conventional brakes. Yes there are some servicing savings, but these trucks have already been refined to be very reliable and have long periods of time between maintenance activities. The time savings due to less maintenance will be in the noise, maybe a few percent. The cost savings will be more, less fluids, etc.
The big factor here is the labor savings, all other efficiencies are there, but insignificant in comparison and will not be the driving factors for adoption - the labor savings will.
Any source on that claim? I thought they reduced the costs of lidar to be in the order of a few k.
Waymo claims they will cost somewhere in the 150k range.
But regardless, I think even 100k is still quite different than "hundreds of thousands".
Not to mention the kid with the $500 Civic is almost certainly delivering faster than any autonomous vehicle will, robots won't chase lols and tips.
As soon as a tipping point is hit, major areas will open roads to self driving cars only.
Add to that that the latest generation of cars are electric (quiet, cleaner, more efficient, longer lasting), and as more people move to that there will be fewer gas stations, more ICE hate, etc.
The result will be a very sudden shift to electric self-driving cars. Which will create a loop, and perhaps a shift much more faster than one might think. My guess is two years from when Waymo is convinced their vehicles can go anywhere to where such cars are mainstream, and another two years till ICE are outlawed on all major roads.
Maybe living in lala land with that, but even if it takes 8 years - that will still throw a lot of people out of a job.
This is going to be singularly the biggest money making vector for any car/delivery business.
Whoever is first will be able to go to ford or any other car manufacture and buy/rent their business to 100% switch to their full-auto cars at whatever cost.
There will be no way to compete with autonomous vehicles, unless you are a train.
Even given transition would be slower 5-10years, you are still talking about massive support sector of the drivers' related economy wiped.
How do you recon all of those businesses and people adopt?
Millions of jobs will be lost within a few years.
And your comment didn't address of where these drivers will go in any way. "Adapt" is not an answer. Your average 46 year old truck driver will not be learning Javascript.
The issue in warehouses is that even before talking about control software behind automating, we simply don't have hardware for manipulators that are as versatile as human hands. That's why top of the line automated warehouses have sort of converged on automating everything except stations where humans can act like task reconfigurable pick and place machines. Better manipulators than biological hands is still an open research problem.
Automated cars don't have the hardware barrier, and as soon as the control software meets the required error rates, we should expect a rapid switchover to automated fleets.
When people hear that term they think of the robots that amazon installed that move product around the building for you and massive conveyor systems like UPS has for sorting packages. While those kind of machines are getting better and are slowly making their way into "smaller" companies (i.e. not the size of amazon) the biggest changes are on the ERP and data management side, tbh.
Cheap/plentiful handheld devices and robust/cheap wifi tech has been a game changer for us compared to the physical processes of using paper to direct staff on the floor. The processes we used 10-15 years ago are night and day to what we use in 2022, at least in my mid-sized fulfillment company.
As in, a significant % of tractors are without human drivers, or as in, a significant % of tractors with human drivers have GPS-based assistance?
I live in a rural area and see several dozens of tractors every day, and FWIW, I've never seen a tractor without a human driver. Yet.
So, the grid won't collapse. Drivers won't starve overnight. Legal issues will sort themselves out as early adopters encounter them, etc. Plenty of time for everybody to adapt.