Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981 wrote: »

But I'm not talking about buses, I'm talking about the home owned car, and for that a comparison is a taxi. If the taxi costs less than owning a car, then things will start to change.

But the issue here is that the journey by driverless taxi wouldn't be expensive, or pretty expensive, it should be pretty cheap. If that happens then folk are going to start to question the large cost or large investment in owning a car that they use very little.

If your trip costs the same in your car, or by car on demand, then why pay more on top for the large garden ornament (depreciation, tax, insurance, maintenance, even the space itself).

Tony's figures suggest that not only would a car on demand be cheaper than buying a new car, but that it would become cheaper than running your current car.

I appreciate that the picture he makes sounds crazy, but all of the jigsaw pieces he has look correct, so it can't be right, but at the same time I can't see how it can be wrong.

Hi

But when talking about transport which isn't readily available in the form of a personal car you have to consider all forms of transport as already mentioned ...

If we lived in a large city I'd look to use the most convenient/cheapest form which suited the journey ... in & around London people with cars already use the tube, buses, taxis, trains etc and have absolutely no need for a car because everything is pretty much on their doorstep ... for longer journeys to 'the sticks' there's a vehicle hire operation within a few miles ... now reverse the position & look at the same from the viewpoint of someone living in 'the sticks' or even a small town in one of the shire counties where a considerable proportion of the population live ...

Regarding 'owned car' vs 'car by demand' ... we're back to the same issue as previously raised, that's availability and wait time .... in our case that's already been stated to currently be around 15-20 minutes as a minimum for a driven taxi to arrive at the door, so there's no reason to believe that a driverless one would be any faster and plenty of reason to expect one to take longer overall based on there being some form of central muster-point with charging facilities etc .... to me that's exactly the form of lifestyle restriction as reliance on public transport provided to my ancestors a century ago & therefore cannot be considered to be progressive - this is exactly the reason why people with access to even the best public transport systems still own their own cars ... it's not a cost driven decision, it's convenience in a world where 'personal time' is considered valuable and therefore seen as worthwhile ...

MrsZ popped out a while ago and will be back in about 1 hour or so - semi-planned, but not to the extent that you'd book a transport timeslot there & the time that she'll want to return isn't fixed either ... at sometime later she'll be going out again for a couple of hours with the same variable-time requirements ... the time between, before & after is her own and to us that has a value .... now, without access to a personal vehicle, each of the four journeys involved would need a taxi - it's much too far to walk & there isn't any public transport running ... that alone would rob her of 1-1.5hrs of waiting for a taxi from the time that she could make the decision to book one ... the question is, would others place a value on their time? .. if so, there's a complete & major logical error in the reasoning for shared vehicles - convenience!

The point that the driverless taxi will have considerable maintenance requirements on the sensor equipment etc is overlooked on any cost comparison I've seen so far. This must be included because it will have to be, health & safety regulations will see to that! ... EVs may be good for longevity, but the sensors require to make them autonomous & their maintenance will be a pretty important and potentially weak point in the chain, else there'll be serious consequences!. A very likely result of this is that hired driverless vehicles will have very short operation licence restrictions which will increase the cost/hour of operation .... yes, that's cost/hour not cost/mile as they're depreciating all of the time and the licence period (/lifespan) clock ticks at the same pace for vehicles in urban areas where usage is high & in less populated areas where it's not, that's the very same reason why the average age of taxis around here is higher than many other places - investing in new vehicles simply isn't viable .... meanwhile the highly depreciated pre-owned private-hire cars around here cost very little in additional depreciation whilst parked and will continue to do so ...

HTH
Z

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Hiya.

I don't think so. If the issue is whether or not folk will stop owning their own car, then the real comparison is door to door transport, hence a taxi, as the impact of other forms of public transport already exists. One possible difference though might be cycling, as this could increase with more autonomous cars on the road as accidents should decrease significantly.

TBH I can't really follow the 20 minute issue. I can't actually remember the last time we needed to rush out, so waiting 20mins for a car to arrive isn't an issue to me. Though that would of course get balanced against annual savings, so unless significant wouldn't change the decision.

Talking about the sensors, what maintenance problems are there, I hadn't heard of any. I know the hardware already exists with Lidar, and soon solid state Lidar, and the Model 3 already has the required computing power, so it's just the software that needs finalising. There are some driverless cars being tested already in the US, so 5yrs to get it all working sounds reasonable. After that, as I said earlier, if a journey in your car or car on demand is roughly the same cost, then the other 90% of the time the car is sitting idle is a large expense (90% of depreciation, tax, insurance etc).

It'll be interesting to see what happens, but I suspect minimal city use and new drivers (or should that be potential new drivers) not learning, will be the first dominoes to drop, and once the secondhand market begins to crumble this will add additional 'depreciation' costs on the remainder, and so more dominoes fall (rinse and repeat).

Hi

As already mentioned there are plenty of times that having a car available adds convenience & saves time ... that's hours & hours of time per week for some and that definitely has a value which needs to be added into the equation ... wait until you have care & legal responsibility for elderly relatives and need to get up and go with no notice. So what's the value? .. well, that depends ... what happens if you have a table booked at a restaurant and want to meet friends, the taxi's booked & it doesn't turn-up ... questions are asked and it'll arrive in 15-20minutes ... you've already had a hiccup which could ruin the evening, but there's currently the option to drive & not drink to save the situation .. an option which wouldn't even be on the table in the future we're discussing ... what's the value? .. a ruined evening @ £50-£100 ... an argument ? ... but of course, this doesn't happen in the future because of all of the vehicles available and the technology ? ... well it happens around here - the scheduling technology already exists and is used, but delays happen now and will continue to do so ... this is the bottleneck which was mentioned in an earlier post ... when we go out for a meal on a Friday night it's at the same time as thousands/millions of others, so that's what the number of vehicles available need to cope with - maximum demand, therefore during 'slack' times there'll be plenty of redundant vehicles ...

Now let's look at that ... it's Friday at some time in the future - our 'lift' in takes 20 minutes to arrive & 10minutes to the destination - the return journey takes 5 minutes to arrive & 10 minutes home then a further 10 minutes back to the urban 'waiting' destination ... fine, that's 55 minutes of a driverless vehicle use over the evening at peak demand time ... but then again, if we're eating out the table will be booked for somewhere between 7pm & 9pm as is the case for most tables across the country ... yes, in this situation we and hundreds-of-thousands of others don't need our cars, but in utilising the driverless vehicle for 20%-25% of the total time available during these peak hours, there's little chance that the number of cars on the road could be reduced by 90%, therefore the redundant time of the car would need to be added to the productive time cost ... it's simple amortisation of cost over hours used! ... worse than this, the vast majority of non-academic people start work at a set time (say 8am-or-9am) - even allowing for an average doubling of journey sharing there's nowhere near the potential for a 90% reduction in either journey-miles or vehicles ... the 90% figure is likely the amount of time that a current vehicle is sitting doing nothing during the day when people are awake, but what's missed is that the majority of the required fleet of autonomous vehicles would also be doing nothing for the majority of the same hours too, that must be the case in order to cope with peak demand ... The 90% vehicle reduction is therefore the result of a pure pie-in-the sky academic exercise conducted without applying any logic related to real-world conditions!

Without access to your own transport you lose the immediacy of availability so whatever transport is available at the time, whether it's scheduled public transport or driverless vehicles doesn't make much difference if available, it just becomes a cost & convenience issue ... however, in less urbanised and rural areas it really does make a difference - if there are no buses and no trains and no trams and no underground (get the picture yet!) then they can't be used .. you're forced to call a cab, which in our case would likely take 15-20 minutes to arrive - that's 15-20 minutes every time we need to move from where we are to anywhere at any time ... now, if the destination is more urban we can currently call a cab to get home & it arrives within a couple of minutes ... that's the difference that people in major urban environments don't really understand because transport is effectively available 'on demand', therefore there's no lead time, lag, waiting, wasted time or whatever you could call it .... and no, we don't live in the middle of nowhere, just the edge of a village which in itself isn't too many miles from a small town where any driven or driverless taxis are & would continue to be located ...

Now, drivers not learning to drive? ... really? ... of course, this would serve anyone looking to operate a 'cloud' based transport system because it suits them ... if you can't drive then you're forced to rely on the cloud, so where's the benefit of discouraging the learning process ... 'Cui Bono ?' .... and the cloud's always cheap - isn't it? ... maybe at first .. set up the platform, provide it at a subsidised rate to destroy the existing solution and it's supporting infrastructure - then change the business model to improve the revenue stream ... well that's been done so many times now that I've no idea why it's overlooked by anyone! ... 'Cui Bono ?'

Now to sensors ... at the moment there are many safety critical items on vehicles which need to have additional attention in the manufacturing process and need special attention throughout the lifespan of a vehicle (brakes, tyres etc). These items are pretty well proven and quite robust in operation, however whatever sensor technology is employed needs to have special attention .... before any journey you should visually inspect the conditions of a safety critical component of your current car, the tyres, but how many do ? ... now transpose this 'laziness' to visual or other proximity sensors in a driverless cab ... you may clean your specs when they need it, but in a driverless situation where the vehicle tells itself not to start or go any further until some remedial action is taken, what happens?, who cleans the mud-splattered sensors? ... I'll not even go into the technicalities of someone conducting DOS activities aimed at the sensors, or even sensor/processing errors caused by issues in extremely heavy traffic conditions where the same technology is employed by many vehicles .. but as it's a very real possibility with very real consequences it certainly shouldn't be discounted ...

On the geeky-technical front, I'd need to see a breakdown of the decision making process as programmed into any particular autonomous vehicle ... Mum, dad & their two precious children in the back seats and a cat runs out ... does the cat die, or the kids? ... a kid on a bike comes out from nowhere - someone else's child, or the ones on the back seat ? ... the school minibus? .. the petrol tanker ? .. what happens in that split second? ... not only that, what happens when the line of code required to make the situation safe hasn't been written yet ... fine, it's a learning process - the family of the kids in the autonomous [STRIKE]coffin[/STRIKE] vehicle could, for a reasonable sum, sponsor the addition of relevant lines of code and have them annotated as a memorial! ... I've used artificial intelligence and self learning systems and understand the process by which improvements and error corrections are made, so it'll take years & years of development and creating a safety track-record before I'd consider the level of risk to be acceptable ...


HTH
Z

silverwhistle wrote: »

Surely that's when you most need an autonomous car? My annual holiday is a drive to the Alps for a skiing holiday, but it's amazing how much northern Italian red wine you can bring back in a small hatchback!

Hi

You could simply hire the car, send it, have it loaded at the other end and wait for it's return, whilst having a 3D virtual skiing tour of the Alps in your own home ... just think of the NHS ... no accident on the slopes or in the car leaving intravenous red wine (which is currently good for you according to the latest reports on research .. well this week anyway, so make the most of it whilst it's still legal) so that the dose isn't too large and stays within healthy guidelines ... HSE's vision of utopia ...

Z ... :cool: