Have a look at comma ai

I would hope geohot is exploring options to partner with one of the automakers. Because it sure looks like the future is not bright for their device. Cars are steadily switching to encrypted canbus and don't work with Comma. It's a dead end unless they work a deal with someone to be allowed on the bus.

George Hotz has done some interesting work, but Comma is far too indie/hacker. It's not at a scale where it can be 100% autonomous.

I think a fully autonomous car has to be designed around LiDAR and autonomy from the ground up. That's a hugely capital intensive task that integrates a lot of domains and data. And so much money and talent.

This is more in the ballpark of Google Waymo, Amazon Zoox, Tesla/xAI, Rivian, Apple, etc.

And as the other folks have mentioned, this becomes a really good prospect if one company can manage the autonomy, insurance, maintenance, updates, etc. A fully vertically integrated subscription offering on top of specially purposed hardware you either lease or purchase.

Hey @echelon,

Interesting thoughts on Comma. Ever thought of working in AV? We're quite similar to Comma but for construction vehicles. We have a couple customers, just raised our seed, and are now expanding our team with some very critical high-ownership founding engineers.

Some info about us: - https://crewline.ai/ - https://crewline.ai/blog/crewline-manifesto

LMK if this is of interest. -Freddie [email protected]

> This might turn big suburbs from food/culture deserts into the default places people want to live as they have more space for cheaper

This will certainly not happen. The reason these places are culture and food deserts is precisely because people drive everywhere and the driving infrastructure requires so much space that it is impossible to have density at the levels needed to support culture.

I'm really doubting this is the case. It seems much more likely to be due to zoning laws.

It's not really.

If you have cheap, abundant land it makes no sense to build densely.

Look at Houston with ~zero zoning laws and ~infinite sprawl.

"A neighborhood" in a high-sprawl suburb wouldn't be able to support local mixed use amenities because even singular "neighborhoods" are gigantic enough to warrant driving across them. Once you're in the car, why would you go to the place 2min down the road instead of the far superior place 8min down the road.

It only makes sense to sprawl like in Houston if you never mind spending 3-4 hours commuting to work and back. Or if you can't afford anything better.

Ask well-paid people who keep renting apartments in Manhattan, or in downtown SF, to say nothing of Tokyo or Seoul.

I realize "makes no sense" carries a double meaning here. I am speaking of the system-level decisions which end up actually producing infrastructure. You're right that sprawl is absolutely inhumane – we should absolutely nudge processes/incentives such that it's discouraged, but doing so is not as simple as just "get rid of zoning."

> It only makes sense to sprawl like in Houston if you never mind spending 3-4 hours commuting to work and back.

Much easier to do with self driving cars though. Remember the promise? “Take a nap in your car and arrive at your destination” or “be productive on your commute”.

I live well out of Boston/Cambridge. These days, I rarely drive in. (Mostly for flights or the occasional theater). I would absolutely go in more if someone/something were driving me for a reasonable cost. I'm actually fairly convenient to commuter rail but doesn't really work except for commuting during the day which I very rarely do.

Average commute time in Houston is just under half an hour (depend on which source you read, varies from 26-29 in my quick search). Sure you can do commutes more than an hour long, but people generally don't - if they get a new job more than about half an hour away they will move.

Houston doesn't have zoning laws, but it does have private deed covenants enforced by the city which effectively work as zoning laws. https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/Neighborhood/deed_restr.h...

These allegedly cover only ~25% of residential lots in HTX (mostly the wealthy ones). So sure that's a similar tool and probably distorts things, but I would be very shocked to hear this is anywhere near as important as the infinite supply of ultra-cheap land on the outskirts of town plus public subsidized roads (which will eventually bankrupt the city).

Houston has these, parking requirements, etc. I would argue if anything that mandatory parking requirements have a larger impact than zoning. Parking lots themselves push things farther apart and make not driving unpleasant.

I agree with you but I don't believe the marketplace does. If you get rid of parking requirements in Houston I doubt you'd see a significantly different development pattern because ultimately people there actually do need to park their cars.

If you remove parking requirements then the marketplace can discover the right amount of parking. Parking minimums keep the amount of parking artificially high.

That's kind of eliding the whole point of parking minimums (which I also hate, by the way). Parking is a classic tragedy of the commons issue where each individual developer would prefer not to build any parking and externalize that cost onto nearby lots/public streets/following developers.

In fact developers did do this, and "the market" responded by creating regulations that prevent it. Which are obviously causing their own set of serious problems.

What if it's both? People drive everywhere because zoning forces car infrastructure everywhere. There's few to no safe places to walk/bike anymore.

And further why are zoning laws the way they are? It's exactly because the suburbs people don't want a bunch of hippie trailer park riffraff around.

At this point it is more because they have always been that way and people don't think about it anymore. in 1920-1950 when they were first enacted they were for those reasons, but now people are more afraid of change.

It already has!

Ethnic food has thoroughly suburbanized, as has shopping.

What's ethnic food?

If you're in America, it's Italian/Greek/Chinese/Vietnamese/Thai/Japanese/Ethiopian/Moroccan/Brazilian/Indian food. Etc.

So basically any non-diner non-fastfood.

Well, there are some rural staples like BBQ, and Mexican to a degree.

But, yes. The sort of ... enduring narrative is that rural areas and suburbs have chain restaurants, diners, and fast food, because immigrants go to cities and open restaurants from their native cuisine, and that suburbanites think black pepper is spicy and sushi is gross.

In actuality I think immigrants are increasingly (a) enamored of the American big-car / big-house lifestyle (makes sense, they choose to come here) and (b) bought-in to the notion that cities are dangerous, with bad schools. So immigrants rent a place in a strip mall near the suburban school district some other immigrant said was good online and start restaurants there. Google maps exists, suburbanites think nothing of a 25 minute drive, so they ask around online after the best examples of a particular ethnic cuisine, and they drive there.

In Maryland, where I live, it's certainly true that the highly-regarded Chinese and Korean dining is in suburbs. Latin Americans, specifically Guatemalans and Salvadorans, are the only immigrant group moving in to Baltimore (where I live) with any sort of enthusiasm.

I suspect I can get a larger variety of ethnic food of very decent quality in 1 hour in NYC than in 99% of suburbs.

Shopping for large items, or large quantities, definitely tends to use suburban land because it's cheaper, and a shopping center uses a lot of it. The cost for the customers is the time to drive there.

I can't speak to NYC - best case it would take me 4 hours to get there (.5 to the airport, 1 hour security, 2 hours on the plane, .5 from ny airport to the city). Meanwhile I can get to nearly anywhere in my entire MSA in less than an hour, both city and suburbs (and even a few farms). Within that the majority of ethnic food is in suburbs, though the largest concentration is still downtown.

Well, NYC is NYC.

I live in Baltimore, and if you ask after Chinese, Korean, Indian, or Vietnamese, without specifying city limits, you will be directed to a place in the suburbs with a parking lot (I think this is essentially true of DC as well).

Same in Atlanta. Best ethnic food is in the suburbs.

If you think that culture is strictly a matter of consumption this is a reasonable clap back, but it belies its own shallow premise

While it’s true that there is food and shopping in suburbs, I think it’s also true that suburbs are still food and culture deserts, since the food and other amenities is typically far away from most houses.

Not really. Get in a car and you can be at all. For many in the city walking it is about as long to get to those things - the distance is less, but the time is similar and time is what counts.(which isn't very many!) the city is the food desert - there are bars and restaurants, but zero grocery stories. If you want to cook a meal you have to get to the suburbs to buy the supplies.

i take it you are not from the old world? Only in north america will you find dense cities without small, normal grocery stores.

These are incredibly common in all of the old world.

True. One other people you find in cities in the old world is people who are not in that weird place between college and kids where they can afford to eat out all the time and alcohol hasn't started catching up to their health

Even just paying for the roads for these cars to drive on is a challenge with the lack-of-density they require. So many suburbs with large lot sizes just learn to live with the potholes.

that is until autonomous pothole-fixers. Just the other way, looking at the Waymo driving by and with me doing small autonomy myself i was wondering what niche they leave for me, and looking at the road i thought that autonomous pothole-fixers is going to be multi-trillion business.

People writing in other comments about cost of roads, new and repair - it all will change with autonomous road paving hardware.

I very much hope that this doesn't happen. So much wasted energy for so little benefit. What's one to do in this world if they don't have the money to own a car that constantly drives them around? What's one to do if they like becoming familiar with a place, rather than watching place after place whiz by? What's one to do if they want to build relationships with the other humans in the world?

> What's one to do if they like becoming familiar with a place, rather than watching place after place whiz by?

They stop at that place and become familiar with it?

Doing it on a highway is not as easy as if you were walking past it.

Your dream sounds like a nightmare for everyone else in America. I hope it never comes to fruition.

Get a Model Y or even a Cybertruck. It's not there quite yet but holy shit it's almost there.

This would be an absolute energy and efficiency nightmare. I hope to god this never ever happens.

> No sharing space with people on public transit.

If people really want their own private suites they should be paying thru the nose and ears for it. Cars are a worse version of this and the car-centric lifestyle is heavily subsidized by everything from taxes to people's lives (air pollution from ICEs yes, but tire pollution is actually worse in many ways and is made worse with heavier EVs).

This will not fix food deserts, it will make them worse. If your car isn't packed to capacity on every single trip, it is less efficient and worse than public transit.

Roads are awful. We should be trying to minimize them, not expand them.

Whatever ungodly sum you are prepared to pay, I'm certain the actual cost is yet higher.

Public transit is a dream turned nightmare consistently for seventy-five years. Autonomy will be less efficient -- but not that much less efficient given closer car spacing, speed, and remote parking -- but it will be spectacularly more convenient and comfortable. I'm all for it. You'll survive the tire pollution.

> Public transit is a dream turned nightmare consistently for seventy-five years

*In the United States. For reasons we have avoided in much of the rest of the world...

The United States is freaking huge. By the time modern transportation arrived, people were already living all over the country in pockets every which where. We opted for cars and planes to cover the vast distances. And as it turns out, we have some of the best in the world of both of these - and in vast quantities.

We do have dense pockets. NYC, in particular, has a nice metro (it just needs to be cleaner and more modernized - but it's great otherwise).

Most countries are small. Their dense cities are well-served by public transit. America is just too spread out. Insanely spread out.

China is an exception in that, while a huge landmass, its large cities emerged as the country was wholesale industrializing. It was easy for them to allocate lots of points to infrastructure. And given their unmatched population size and density, it makes a lot of sense.

As much as I envy China's infrastructure (I've been on their metros - they're amazing!), it would be a supreme malinvestment here in the United States to try to follow in their footsteps. The situation we have here is optimal for our density and the preferences of our citizens. (As much as people love to complain about cars, even more people than those that complain really love their cars.)

Public transit in the US is probably going to wind down as autonomous driving picks up the slack. Our road infrastructure is the very best in the world - it's more expansive, comprehensive, and well-maintained than any nation on the planet. We'd be wise to double down. It can turn into a super power once the machines take over driving for us.

The fact that we have this extent of totally unmatched road infrastructure might actually turn out to be hugely advantageous over countries that opted for static, expensive heavy rail. Our system is flexible, last mile, to every address in the country. With multiple routes, re-routes, detours. Roads are America's central nervous system.

Our interstate system is flexible, and when cars turn into IP packets, we'll have the thickest and most flexible infrastructure in the world.

We've shit on cars for the last 15 years under the guise that "strong towns" are correct and that cars are bad. But as it may turn out, these sleeping pieces of infrastructure might actually be the best investment we've ever made.

Going to call this now: in 20 years' time, cars will make America OP.

Those things everything complains about - they'll be America's superpower.

The rest of the world with their heavy rail trains and public transit will be jealous. Our highways will turn into smart logistics corridors that get people and goods P2P at high speed and low cost to every inch of the country.

Roads are truly America's circulatory and nervous system.

I'm so stoked for this. I once fell for the "we need more trains meme" - that was a suboptima anachronism, and our peak will be 100x higher than expensive, inflexible heavy rail.

In a way, a fusion of both is possible

Autonomous cars that move largely along the same route could form temporary "trains", or rather convoys, moving in a coordinated fashion. That would simplify navigation, reduce chances of accidents, reduce energy consumption, and definitely give the passengers more peace of mind during the commute.

Such convoys would split when needed, join together when needed, notify other convoys and drivers about their route and timing. This would alleviate traffic jams considerably even under heavy load.

At the same time, they would consist of cars and trucks that would be capable of moving completely separately outside highways.

This, of course, will require some kind of centralized control over entire convoys, and a way to coordinate them. Railways and airways definitely can offer examples of how to handle that.

> This, of course, will require some kind of centralized control over entire convoys, and a way to coordinate them. Railways and airways definitely can offer examples of how to handle that.

Not at all. A simple peer to peer protocol based on proximity and mixing in traffic data distributed like the national weather service will do just fine.

These convoys seem like a perfect example of swarm algorithms fitting well where you don’t need a central coordinator.

Within a convoy, yes. Between convoys, a dispatcher service could be beneficial, distributed and federated, again, like air traffic controllers and railway dispatchers. The same self-driving car companies that produce the software and require subscription could offer it.

> The United States is freaking huge. By the time modern transportation arrived, people were already living all over the country in pockets every which where. We opted for cars and planes to cover the vast distances. And as it turns out, we have some of the best in the world of both of these - and in vast quantities.

You have this narrative precisely backwards.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious: the great sprawl that made us dependent on cars happened after cars got popularized.

Yes, the cities were already spread out relative to each other, but that distance can be covered with trains well enough. What made us need cars, and what cars encouraged, was a huge amount of spread within a city or metro area. If you sprawl out over a city such that population density is constantly low, then public transit and walking can't work effectively anymore, and everyone needs to own a car.

US cities that were already large and well populated before the advent of cars tend to be densely built. Their cores, at least, are walkable as a result. This is true even for non-major cities -- just google "streetcar suburbs" as an example.

No, GP is right. Check out the urban/rural populations in 1900 [0].

Cars allowed for suburban sprawl but the country was already really spread out before cars.

Maybe if cars didn’t exist we would have eventually consolidated into dense population centers.

You’re right that US cities were large and well populated, but that’s not where most people (60%) of Americans were.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...

> The United States is freaking huge.

Completely irrelevant. I'm not interested in public transport across vast areas from city to city, I can drive or fly for those (very rare) occasions.

Public transport is most useful for the hyper-local day-to-day movement. I'd just want good reliable public transport within my town and neighboring areas.

(Actually I'd prefer to just bike, which requires secure bike parking in all destinations. I can already bike anywhere in town, but my bike will get stolen if I stop anywhere to shop or eat, so I can't do that.)

> We opted for cars and planes to cover the vast distances. And as it turns out, we have some of the best in the world of both of these

You actually believe that?!

It is true. The US has great car infrastructure. The US has a lot of airplanes. For longer distances both work very well.

We have terrible transit though, and there are many short trips where transit should work better than it doesn't work at all. However the subject here is vast distances and the US has those and does well.

> Roads are truly America's circulatory and nervous system.

Thanks to massive lobbying by car manufacturers that did their best to destroy all traces of public transit infrastructure that existed in the US before the country moved to car dependency.

That's one opinion. My opinion is public transport is phenomenal. It's relatively reliable (very in some places), generally clean and safe, low cost, encourages urban/high efficiency development, protects greenspace, and employees people.

I'm not sure where you live, but that doesn't match my experience at all. And I think most people agree given the overwhelming majority of people who choose to drive, notwithstanding traffic and parking. The declining public transit ridership in most metropolitan areas over time is well documented.[1] It's because in most places -- but evidently not where you live -- public transit sucks relative to private transportation and ride-hailing services. As discussed above, EV autonomy will only increase the difference.

[1] https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/fta-transit-ridership-p...

most people in the US are forced to drive, they don't willingly choose to sink large sums of money into a rolling metal cage.

Speak for yourself. I love my cars. For a relatively modest expense they allow me to go wherever, whenever I want and bring all my stuff with me. This is a miracle of modern civilization.

as is the consequent traffic, pollution and inefficiency that choices like yours add up to.

Well I guess it beats having horse manure in the streets.

What are you talking about? In most cities public transport sucks, hardly goes anywhere, gets more expensive year after year, makes housing prices go up, and is slow and inflexible enough that people still end up needing cars to go around

It's interesting to read such an opposite opinions on public transport from Americans and Europeans.

Worth noting that only 17% of passenger transport activity in the EU is public transit (trains and buses).

https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/share-of-bu...

> It's relatively reliable

In most places it is not, which is a big drawback. Every week I hear on the news how the train shut down some stations or got massively delayed for random reasons. I couldn't possibly rely on that if I need to be at work at a specific time.

> You'll survive the tire pollution.

I tend to expect better from HN commenters. I don't have an interest in having a discussion with such a callous and dismissive comment. I hope your day gets better.

Tire pollution is worse than tailpipe emissions and the full effects aren't known. You're dismissive of other people's and the environment's health and you're wrong.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...

> Tire pollution is worse than tailpipe emissions and the full effects aren't known. You're dismissive of other people's and the environment's health and you're wrong.

Tire pollution is now as large or larger than tailpipe particulate pollution, but it’s not a complete apples-to-apples comparison.

Tail pipe pollution includes CO₂, NOx, SO₂, CO, and fine particulates (PM2.5 + PM10) and is strongly linked to asthma, heart disease, climate change.

Tire pollution on the other hand is microplastics, synthetic rubber particles, zinc, and volatile organic compounds. Toxic to aquatic life; long-term human health effects still being studied.

A typical ICE car will consume at least 500 gallons of petrol (gasoline) per 1 gallon of tire tread worn. The environmental impact per volume of tire is certainly greater, but it's not remotely five hundred times greater.

I'm not saying we should disregard the issue of tire pollution. But if it was as serious as you suggest, it would be making more headlines than it is.

Why wouldn’t it be 500 times greater? Gasoline is combusted for energy, converting most of it into mostly harmless byproducts; tire tread is just released as is.

The best evidence that tyre tread is significantly less consequential than gasoline consumption is that such criticisms overwhelmingly arise in discussions of electric cars.

Have you thought about how much brake dust subway riders breathe in? At least I can buy a car with a hepa filter

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-07/new-york-...

Hell yeah man screw all of those people breathing the outside air from the car brakes. What losers. We'll just dump the pollution everywhere all the time instead of in specific areas where mitigation for everyone is easier and cheaper.

Screw the people in the nyc subway that don’t want to breathe in brake dust and also don’t wanna spend 100b+ digging up every single legacy station to accommodate full height platform doors

> I'm all for it. You'll survive the tire pollution.

Will you enthusiastically support the taxes on you needed to entirely offset this negative externality?

Rubber ppm over some threshold safety level is a negative externality worth maybe a few billion in remediation, healthcare costs, etc. (As a society, we're still not convinced pulmonary health as impacted by particulate inhalation is important - which is a mistake. It absolutely is a big deal and negative externality driving a whole host of bad health outcomes.)

Malinvestment into public transit in a way that serves only a limited few of the population and that costs 10x the already high initial estimates is a negative drain on the balance sheet worth 500 billion or more. And this infra is woefully inflexible and static.

California HSR alone is already suboptimal vs. flights, and once we have long distance autonomous self-driving, that'll meet the same demand with 1/100,0000,000th the cost (if you average out the costs and benefits of self driving over all other routes).

California is just uniquely dysfunctional in many ways.

Can we solve the poisoning of fish while we're at it?

> I hope to god this never ever happens.

Then I'll never buy an autonomous vehicle.

I get that most people just want short trips around a major city, but given we, I'm sure it's shocking, don't all live in places like that, or want to spend our time in places like that, it might behoove y'all to solve for other use cases if you want widespread adoption (or at least accept that it's ok to solve for those use cases).

Or, I guess, you can hope that everyone will suddenly decide that all they want is to live in modern Kowloon City because "roads are awful" or whatever memetic nonsense is trending on TikTok.

"we" here is a minority of the population in any developed country. The vast majority of people - almost globally - live in dense areas.

Rubbish.

Population density varies, and your cutoff between "dense" and "not dense" must be tautological.

> If your car isn't packed to capacity on every single trip, it is less efficient and worse than public transit.

Cost is a great proxy for costs versus benefits. People choose cars because they are efficient for them.

In theory public transit is efficient. In practice, only if you live in a very high density area, or you value your time at $0.

cars are barely efficient in terms of time. In cost terms, cars are incredibly expensive once you add in infrastructure costs, insurance, fuel, the cost of land use, etc.

Public transit is efficient even outside areas of high density - see suburban Europe or India. Why are so many people here utterly car-brained?

Have you ever actually been to Europe? Public transit is pretty good in first-tier cities like Vienna / Stockholm / London where tourists spend most of their time. But out in the smaller cities and rural areas where regular people live there's very little public transit except for slow and inconvenient buses. So everyone drives. Or if they're too poor to afford a car then they just don't go anywhere.

are you familiar with population distributions and the fact that more of the word lives in urban areas than rural?

>So everyone drives

Citation needed, because this is obviously false.

>Or if they're too poor to afford a car then they just don't go anywhere

What a horrible thing to say.

Horrible how? I'm telling you that's the reality, not that it's a good thing. Unlike you I've actually been to those places and talked to the locals.

This is my observation as well, it's also true in the USA. Places like Chicago and NYC have good public transit. You can easily live there without a car, in fact it's easier and certainly cheaper to not have to deal with owning a car. If you visted NYC and formed your impression of public transit in the USA based on that, it would be very wrong. Likewise you cannot assume that because Copenhagen has great public transit and bicycle infrastructure that all of Europe is like that. Get out to the smaller cities and towns and you'll find that many more people own cars and drive everywhere.

There are a few low density places around the world where public transit is efficient for the average person.

You must be a lot more comfortable as a passenger than I am, because that honestly sounds like my personal hell. I don't mind driving, but I hate being in any vehicle for extended periods. Have you considered a chauffeur?

How much would you pay? Why not hire an actual human driver?

human drivers are inconvenient. They need sleep, and food, and probably won't be willing to take a 5 month trip south of the border for giggles. They poop. Inevitably they will try to do weird shit like have a conversation.

This.

My car is my property. I own it. It does everything I want it to. It is an extension of me.

That question is like asking, "Why own a computer? Why not hire a mathematician to do all your computation for you?"

The problems a self-driving problem solves are 100x deeper than a human, and the second order effects to greater society are enormous. When everyone and everything is self-driving, the roads aren't roads any more - they're TCP/IP and logistics super highways. Anything can go anywhere for any reason at any time. This is a huge societal unlock.

Even thinking about how frictionful ordering an Uber is is exhausting when thinking about the idyllic future of simply jumping into my own car - my own space - and having it do exactly what I want.

This future is magical and I want it now.

> no more traffic

How? There would be a huge increase in demand on the roads. You said it yourself, you’d have to build more roads.

Unless you meant, no more [suffering] traffic, since you could just take a nap.

The only way I see self driving to be a true win if it is so efficient that you can remove all the roads and they become part of the mass transit system.

I would demand personal vehicles to pay a premium (cost plus) as they take up more space per person and add to infrastructure maintenance cost

>> no more traffic

> How?

There would be no more traffic for the driver, who would be sleeping or watching Netflix

There are a bunch of it depends. A large part of traffic is because someone messes up - accidents cause large delays, but even a small mistake in merging can slow down several others. Though human drivers regularly tailgate, if self driving cars maintain their proper 3 second following distance we could need a lot more space. (though perhaps self driving can safely maintain even a closer distance than humans do - I don't know)

Absolutely wild to me how a dystopian hell world scenario for me can be someone else's utopia.

I'm lost on why you fantasies this so much and don't just buy an RV or something?

Do you really hate driving that much?

I don't think this would change the world as you imagine it. I don't mind driving long i will just make sure i get entertainment for the purpose. Like an audio book. My wife doesn't say 'Lets go soemwere you can drive me around and i can finally do that many things in parallel'.

And plenty of family drive today with RVs while the parents are in the front and the kids are in the back. No one is showering while the parents drive. Do you know how slow Cars now would need to drive to make this suddenly that much more comftable than what we have today?

You would need to rebuild the car and streets to get to this point.

> People might simply live on the road, traveling all the time.

I think this is the plot of Kamakiriad.