Fully automated vehicles - 'not in our lifetime'?

kinger101

GreatApe wrote: »

Uber has about 40,000 drivers in London not all of them available at any one time.

Perhaps a peak of 20,000 drivers at any one time?

While a robot taxi fleet would be closer to 1 million vehicles just for London and available almost all the time.

Sharing became possible and usage becomes much better and much more useful. As I keep saying with a million robot taxis in London you'd likely never be more than ten meters from one. The wait times would be in seconds.

Why would you need 50X more capacity with robot taxis?

And if you're gonna share, you might as well take the bus. Sharing a vehicle with dozens of strangers is much safer than sharing with one.

AnotherJoe

Herzlos wrote: »

Replacing personal cars (which isn't going to happen for at least some percentage) will increase the number of journeys since the car won't be where it was left. It's going to decrease the passenger density because half will be empty.

It would eradicate the need for maybe 90% of car parks, which we can turn into housing

Where are these autonomous cars when they arent driving ?

GreatApe

kinger101 wrote: »

Why would you need 50X more capacity with robot taxis?

And if you're gonna share, you might as well take the bus. Sharing a vehicle with dozens of strangers is much safer than sharing with one.

Because these robot taxis will be a lot cheaper perhaps 70% cheaper than current uber taxis

The result of much cheaper robot taxis would be much more usage of these vs Human taxis.

50x the capacity will be required because there will be 50 x the demand.

Lots of people have no love for their cars they just use them for transport and if there was a robot uber which had a massive fleet so that the cars arrived within seconds and only cost 30p a mile it would be cheaper and better than owning your own car so that's what people would do. Especially young drivers. Why pay £2k insurance to drive a crap car that costs you £2k to buy and £2k of lesions and fuel. That's £6k upfront to start driving a crap car. Or just hail a nearly new robot uber for 30p a mile. A lot of the young will just stop learning to drive its a big upfront cost at a time in your life when you are poor. That's an additional three quarters of a million customers per year even if the old don't like them the young will

GreatApe

AnotherJoe wrote: »

Where are these autonomous cars when they arent driving ?

More or less where the current cars are, parked up on streets and drives and car parks

The good thing is one robot taxi will displace more than one human car
At the begining it might be as much as 5-10 displaced per taxi. Longer term more like 2-3 but that still means the overall number of cars in a place like London shrinks from 3 million towards 1 million

AnotherJoe

GreatApe wrote: »

More or less where the current cars are, parked up on streets and drives and car parks

The good thing is one robot taxi will displace more than one human car
At the begining it might be as much as 5-10 displaced per taxi. Longer term more like 2-3 but that still means the overall number of cars in a place like London shrinks from 3 million towards 1 million

That doesn't alter the number actually driving on the roads of London at any given moment, there will be more needed to account for 2 journeys replacing 1. So you are just decreasing the number parked outside peoples houses and increasing the number on the roads, worst case by 2x and they still need to park somewhere.

In this utopia of no ownership, good luck to the mum struggling to get 2 screaming toddlers, their 2 car seats, the weekly shop into and out of a robo car several times a day. Or the average person with their array of junk that they transport around, shopping bags, sports gear, work stuff etc, and having to lug that around every time they get in and out.

The whole thing is predicated on the fallacy that cheap wins , but if that was what drove car ownership, BMW, Audi, Jag, Mercedes etc would have been replaced by taxis and cheap Japanese and Korean cars years ago.

But they haven't been because people also buy cars because they are convenient. If I, not living in central London and thus substantially more than 30 seconds away from one of these cars supposedly prowling the streets looking for a hire, wish to go somewhere i can drive there right now. I dont have to wait for a robo taxi to pick me up, I dont need to schedule it, nor do need to send it away when the one that arrives is fully of someone elses stink or worse.

This is all a fantasy driven by a misunderstanding of what drives peopel's behaviour. Convenience trumps cost. Sure, there may be one day (a long way away) autonomous cars, but it will be mine and it will drive from my house to the airport or the theatre at the exact time i want, no waiting, then send it off to park and summon it when i'm back.

GreatApe

AnotherJoe wrote: »

That doesn't alter the number actually driving on the roads of London at any given moment, there will be more needed to account for 2 journeys replacing 1. So you are just decreasing the number parked outside peoples houses and increasing the number on the roads, worst case by 2x and they still need to park somewhere.

In this utopia of no ownership, good luck to the mum struggling to get 2 screaming toddlers, their 2 car seats, the weekly shop into and out of a robo car several times a day. Or the average person with their array of junk that they transport around, shopping bags, sports gear, work stuff etc, and having to lug that around every time they get in and out.

The whole thing is predicated on the fallacy that cheap wins , but if that was what drove car ownership, BMW, Audi, Jag, Mercedes etc would have been replaced by taxis and cheap Japanese and Korean cars years ago.

But they haven't been because people also buy cars because they are convenient. If I, not living in central London and thus substantially more than 30 seconds away from one of these cars supposedly prowling the streets looking for a hire, wish to go somewhere i can drive there right now. I dont have to wait for a robo taxi to pick me up, I dont need to schedule it, nor do need to send it away when the one that arrives is fully of someone elses stink or worse.

This is all a fantasy driven by a misunderstanding of what drives peopel's behaviour. Convenience trumps cost. Sure, there may be one day (a long way away) autonomous cars, but it will be mine and it will drive from my house to the airport or the theatre at the exact time i want, no waiting, then send it off to park and summon it when i'm back.

That's fine you can buy your own personal self drive car that just drives you around that's all your problems solved

I use taxis far more than I ever did before uber. And I'm sure many more people will use a uber competitor with half the price and one tenth the wait times thanks to it being self drive.

There is also the convenience of not owning your own car. No maintenance no break downs no fueling no shopping around for insurance no need to spend days looking for and buying a car and then selling it a few years later no need to take lessons to learn to drove no need for a lot of things.

They will arrive soon and once they do it will change a lot of things sure there will be the minority who still want flesh driven cars and a minority who do not care to share but the majority will switch to self drive fleet taxis of better quality and cheaper prices than buying a used meat driven vehicle.

Herzlos

GreatApe wrote: »

I share ubers sometimes the problem is the uber network is still too small to make it viable. With a fleet of 10 million taxis sharing a taxi will be super efficient. As I keep saying it won't be like now where the nearest uber is a mile away and you need to wait ten minutes. There will be so many that you will almost never be more than 10 meters away from one.

I also envisage that most of these taxis will be stationery most of the time. They may only average 40,000 miles a year. So roughly moving for 5 hours a day and stationary for 19h a day. At the beginning that won't be the case they will be working nearly 24h a day but as the fleet grows the average milage and usage oer day will fall. It will still be 2-4x that of a normal human car

Your theory works if people are following the same route, but they'd be doing that already.

How do you manage the sharing as I didn't think they had any official support for multiple drops yet?

Herzlos

You'd need an awful lot of cars roaming around to get one to a house within seconds.
5 minutes is more a more realistic goal.

On the no private cars thing; how do you propose they deal with things like car seats? We need 2 of them. We also keep 1 or 2 buggies in the cat, change bags and stuff and use the car daily. That's a lot of crap to move in and out of taxis.
Also how is cleaning handled if everyone is using these things round the clock?

Or caravans bike racks or trailers?

AnotherJoe wrote: »

Where are these autonomous cars when they arent driving ?

They'd presumably spend a lot more time driving and can park themselves more densely somewhere the land is cheaper. You can really pack cars in if you don't need humans to take them back out in any order.

kinger101

Herzlos wrote: »

We also keep 1 or 2 buggies in the cat

Poor old Tiddles

Herzlos

kinger101 wrote: »

Poor old Tiddles

I hate predictive text.