
Self driving cars and beyond - yogrish
https://a16z.com/2018/02/03/autonomy-ecosystem-frank-chen-summit/
======
letscavort22
It’s great to explore this topic. You can have a lot of fun in picking a
random industry and imagining the effect that self driving will have.

Health - beyond the obvious effects on the emergency room, what else?
Ambulances willl quite clearly be affected. Why would someone wait minutes for
one to arrive when they can just hop in an autocar to go the hospital? Or
would the entire emergency room itself be on wheels? (Less likely.)

Will seniors stay at home for longer? Absolutely. How will this affect the
need for aged care nurses? Will their doctors come to them?

But we can go even deeper. How will autocars affect people’s desire to
exercise? Will more people ride bikes as a result of the increased safety of
the roads?

Education - at first glance, it’s hard to see. But this is the one I’m
currently most excited about. Primary and high school education are both built
on cars - we just don’t realise it, but a crucial underpinning factor for
parents using a local school is its convenience for them in dropping their
kids off and picking them up. When that goes away, what happens next?

The demand for better public high schools will explode as the friction in
going to a high school 25 minutes away in an awkward direction evaporates...

This makes for much more fertile territory for new schooling concepts - if I
want to start a new kind of high school, one where the kids spend a bit of
time each day tending to farm animals or perhaps studying entrepreneurship, it
now becomes 10x easier to build critical mass. And given how much people care
about their kids educations, I expect the movements in this space to be highly
disruptive.

Those are two. On health, I’ve barely scratched the surface.

Then there is \- tourism \- logistics \- distribution (imagine Amazon’s FBA on
steroids) \- housing (what happens to all those garages? Do we build shipping-
container sizes homes that fold it wherever they park?)

The best way to understand the depth of the upcoming changes is to pick a
seemingly unrelated industry and explore how current car-related assumptions
underpin it. It becomes clear, to me, that the internet of vehicles will be
even more disruptive then the internet itself.

~~~
brudgers
Every and each of the proposed benefits of vast public policy initiatives
supported by a generous public purse in support of autonomous cars could be as
easily derived from a similar public policy initiative to create public
transit infrastructure.

~~~
jsloss
I’m not convinced that’s true. The friction involved with public transit
(limitations schedules, routes, and sharing of vehicles) are enough to limit
much of the usage outlined in the above comment.

~~~
brudgers
Vehicle fleets don't solve the spatial and temporal realities that are
reflected in the schedules and routes of public transit. A fleet of vehicles
has to be staged to meet fluctuating demands.

Mathematically, on demand vehicles are probably harder to schedule because of
random variation in queuing. Consider a population of workers each of which
sometimes works from home. Some days an unusually high, but not statistically
unlikely, number of riders all stay home: the idling vehicles need to sit
somewhere. Other days, a statistically likely but atypical number of riders
don't work from home and there are not enough vehicles to go around.

Public transit addresses fluctuation with a low nominal cost of providing
surplus capacity to normal operation in the form of standing room. Public
transit can be sized more closely to peak demand. On the other hand, from
20:00 to 06:00 the peak demand capacity of an autonomous car fleet needs to be
parked somewhere. Between 06:00 and 08:00 and again between 18:00 and 20:00
the fleet needs to be moved to storage.

------
KKKKkkkk1
A couple of years ago there was a new article on the front page pretty much
every day about the great new thing that will change our lives--3D printing.
I'm worried that whatever happened to 3D printing is about to happen to self
driving. What _did_ happen to 3D printing?

~~~
chubot
Yes, I agree that you shouldn't take the premise for granted (that self-
driving cars will be here soon).

A high-profile Uber investor has said that level 4 self-driving won't be in
the U.S. for 25 years:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/bill-gurley-uber-investor-
se...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/bill-gurley-uber-investor-self-driving-
cars-25-years-away-in-us.html)

That means they can service people without driver's licenses and people who
can't drive -- the old and the young.

Also, Chris Urmson said the transition will take 30 years:

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/sel...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/self-driving/google-selfdriving-car-will-be-ready-soon-
for-some-in-decades-for-others)

[https://mondaynote.com/autonomous-cars-the-
level-5-fallacy-2...](https://mondaynote.com/autonomous-cars-the-
level-5-fallacy-247ae9614e14)

Here's my negative scenario: self-driving is "AI-complete"; you can't really
hit all the edge cases without solving AI in general, which is more than 30
years away (Kurzweil is the wild optimist and predicts 2045).

You CAN use self-driving in limited circumstances, but those limitations are
precisely the ones that make driving yourself around more attractive. The
expense doesn't go down as quickly as anticipated because of this. They are a
niche technology for DECADES.

Just like 3D printing -- the tech obviously works to an extent, but it's just
not appealing for many use cases. Same with VR -- the tech works to an extent,
but the content is not appealing to general audiences.

I'm happy to be proven wrong though, because I would be the first one to buy a
self-driving car where I could fall asleep behind the wheel. I would love to
take a trip from SF to Portland or LA like this.

Another good link: [https://medium.com/self-driven/a-decade-after-darpa-our-
view...](https://medium.com/self-driven/a-decade-after-darpa-our-view-on-the-
state-of-the-art-in-self-driving-cars-3e8698e6afe8)

~~~
selimthegrim
What are people doing abut this?

[https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-cars-power-
consumpt...](https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-cars-power-consumption-
nvidia-chip/)

~~~
maxerickson
The Wired article you link discusses Nvidia hoping to deliver a system with
lower power draw.

I think the intro kind of overstates the downside. Lots of people will be
happy to pay for more fuel if it means they don't have to drive.

------
brudgers
The presentation doesn't take long to leap from inevitable market forces to
totalitarian restructuring of public life in the US by city planners to
provide those market forces with a chance of inevitability.

All those cell phones didn't require drastic changes to public space. They
didn't come about by massive new principles of public policy. They came about
because cell phones layered on top of existing lives and policies in a
generally unobtrusive way. The cell phone created market forces that didn't
require the displacement of large swaths of humanity. It was a rising tide
that lifted ships other than those of venture capital.

------
ilovecars2
This is kind of a meta comment, but I’ve been lurking on HN for a while on car
posts in particular.

I have the impression that HN in general doesn’t like cars all that much, and
in fact we would be much better of without them.

I can’t argue with the facts: congestion and pollution in large cities, such
as London, have never been higher where almost all on-road public transport is
still run on diesel.

However, I think driving for a lot of people is a liberating and pleasurable
experience. and, before we go there, I’m not talking about being stuck in
traffic, which is often a issue with poor planning and lack of infrastructure
investment rather than an issue with cars themselves, but the pure pleasure of
driving.

I’m quite concerned that self driving cars will take this simple pleasure and
satisfaction from us, and perhaps that’s just a selfish opinion. I don’t know?

~~~
userbinator
I agree, but it's more than just that --- self-driving cars will take more
control away from individuals and put that in the hands of corporations and
governments, who will have a much easier time tracking --- and even
controlling --- the large-scale movement of the population. When they decide
to outlaw non-self-driving cars almost completely, "the frog will have been
thoroughly boiled."

Of course, it's all done under the argument of safety. But I don't think a
perfectly safe world, one with no risk at all, is one worth living in either.
There's enough dystopian scifi around to predict rather accurately what will
happen.

~~~
visarga
You already got one or more GPS wireless tracking devices in your car, though.

~~~
userbinator
I have a GPS but I can turn it off when I don't want it, and I'm pretty sure
it's off because it ceases to function when it's unplugged.

~~~
visarga
Do you also turn your phone off, because phones can be triangulated by cell
towers.

------
ehnto
I am an advocate for autonomous cars, but I have to wonder if tech behemoths
aren't forgetting a huge portion of people live outside of cities. It's
important to note that rural people will be needing and buying new non-
autonomous cars for decades yet and I don't know that there is actually a way
to integrate autonomy into rural driving habits.

~~~
joshhart
I'm not so sure. I bet the suburbs will spread out into rural areas when
people don't have to drive and can just hang out and watch Netflix on the way
to work.

~~~
ehnto
America is huge, it would take hundreds of kilometers of suburbia to reach
many towns. And there are tens of thousands of small towns that are themselves
hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest burb.

Part of my comment about rural driving habits involves lifestyles in towns
too, getting to work isn't such a big deal. Work is only 5 minutes away but
they will still drive because after work they might need to drive 30km down
some dirt track to get the kids from a friends house. Parking at the football
club which is actually just a grass patch requires communication between
humans about who is leaving first or maybe Stuart needs to get out to the
jetty by 5 so we need leave room for him at the back. That kind of stuff is
hard to solve autonomously. Driving in the country is just a bit more socially
aware I guess.

The thought of autonomous cars on thin country roads is hard too. Sometimes
there are dips or parts of the road that you know are dangerous through tribal
knowledge and experiencing it previously. The car would have to have full
geometry of the road for one. Second it would have to know that people
sometimes pull out of this blind corner driveway and that if you continue
doing 110kmph past it assuming it's a sealed highway you will one day have a
head on no matter how quickly your car can react.

The conclusion I come to is that fully autonomous, no controls in the car, is
unlikely to happen at all, as there will always people needing non-autonomous
or semi-autonomous driving.

------
stillsut
The most interesting phenomenon is "sleepers": people who sleep Friday night
as their car drives to some scenic overlook sunrise and drive them home from
retreat on Sunday night. Rural back roads will be moving at full stream in the
dead of night with 'ghost cars' when they were once were completely quiet;
zoning will limit noise, speed, illumination, toll's win go up, but airbnb's
will flourish.

In the urban zone, there will be competition for scarce roadway as businesses
no longer paying a driver, go increasingly JIT, and elite commuters value door
to door service. No city gov't will be able to resist the right to tax per
mile, tax rush hour surge charges, and tax luxury idle vehicles. This will
push the middle and lower market into on demand rentals. And without the
driver as an informal superintendent of the vehicle, there will be a very
annoying problem of getting into a car that a gross person knew they were
never going to be in again. Enter the eye in the sky. Except for customer with
a 4-star reputation or higher. This will create a race to the bottom for
anyone who can't or won't establish reputation to get passage on an autonomous
vehicle.

I think we can't even fully contemplate yet how alienating and de-humanizing
self-driving cars are going to large parts of our society, and how amazing
they're going to be for others.

~~~
Treegarden
I think the part about gross cars is a trivial problem. You pay a 100$ deposit
for the account and if you puke in the car you lose the deposit. If that
happens to often you get banned or whatever.

~~~
stillsut
The problem is you can't cut people off of the only form of urban
transportation available. Who is banned from the subway?

And the other problem is there are a lot of people who want to get around
without getting their identity associated or reputation checked by a
centralized system.

------
patman81
On the Tesla earnings call last week, Elon Musk stated that a software update
coming in 3-6 months will allow Tesla cars with Autopilot HW2 to drive fully
autonomous. At least on highways.

He's predictions are always late, so it may not be ready in August. But his
predictions seem to come thru in end. If he can deliver by the end of the year
or even next year, he would still beat all other car manufactures schedules.

------
Animats
We'll probably see self-driving before widespread electric car use. Self-
driving is an auto accessory. It's going to come from companies like
Continental and Delco, which make auto parts for manufacturers. The big
players are targeting 2020 as the year self-driving becomes a more or less
standard option. That may slip; Volvo's big Level 4 demo with 100 real users
has been pushed back to 2021. But it's getting close. The hardware is here;
it's now a software problem.

Electric cars need more infrastructure. Many more charging stations. Cheaper
batteries. More lithium and cobalt mines. That will take a bit longer.

Self-driving cars and electric cars are independent technologies. Uber's self
driving cars are gasoline-powered Volvos.

~~~
dmix
True, this (great) video series doesn't make a clear distinction between
electric/AI. But the key evolutionary shift in the next 10yrs is the massive
shift towards fleet-based cars, delivery drones, and the post-car-ownership
era... it's not just about plugging sensors+AI into today's cars:

\- self-driving fleet cars can drop you off and go automatically pick up next
person OR recharge at base stations eliminating need for most parking spots
(currently 14% of city real estate)

\- reduction in average car size, as cars with single occupants no longer need
4-5 seats + cars can drive very close together + synchronized higher speeds...
meaning less roads per car & less cars per road

\- cars automatically linking up like trains on highways to conserve energy

\- repurpose above unused lanes for dedicated high speed delivery drone lanes
+ drop-off/pick-up zones replacing of parking spots

\- removal of traffic barriers in the middle of all multi-lane roads (so
middle lanes can automatically be shifted to the opposite direction depending
on traffic load) ala SF Golden Gate Bridge
[https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hMkLcAstxgA/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hMkLcAstxgA/maxresdefault.jpg)

..but with software, and not just for rush hour

\- redesigns of car interiors to support leisure time and work activity
(swivel chairs, tables, screens, etc)

\- eventual elimination of traffic signs/lights

Both electric/AI requires completely rethinking how traffic, infrastructure,
and cars are designed, and both often compliment each other...so why not do it
simultaneously?

------
zerostar07
Nobody talks about the infrastructure though. Roads, signs etc can't stay the
same, they have to adapt to facilitate autonomous vehicles

~~~
dmix
I guess you didn't watch it before commenting...this video series mentions
infrastructure multiple times throughout.

Almost a whole video in this series talks about infrastructure financing and
taxation. As gas taxes, driver's licenses, traffic tickets, parking fines, etc
will be eliminated. And 30% of court time currently dedicated to traffic will
be eliminated.

It mentions taxing each Uber/Lyft/Waymo fleet ride or automated toll roads
with surge pricing instead...

It's going to be a GREAT time to be a city traffic engineer in the next
decade....

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>It's going to be a GREAT time to be a city traffic engineer in the next
decade....

No. It's gonna suck. The people who drive Teslas are the people the politicans
will be leaning on you to please. Reality will still have 1995 Camrys and
E-series.

------
SemiTom
The ecosystems that will be disrupted by self driving cars are vast
[https://semiengineering.com/giant-auto-industry-
disruption-a...](https://semiengineering.com/giant-auto-industry-disruption-
ahead/)

------
wannadub2
Roads...where we're going we don't need... roads
[https://youtu.be/flge_rw6RG0](https://youtu.be/flge_rw6RG0)

#crashfunction.com kubernetes generators of virtual autonomous drones?

------
chairmanwow
The final video [1] has a pretty compelling argument for the conversion to
self-driving cars happening quicker than expected:

Chen shows a picture of Easter morning in NYC in 1900 and asks the viewer to
play "Where is the car?". After several seconds he highlights the one car in
the frame surrounded entirely by house-and-buggy carts.

He then shows a picture of the Easter morning in NYC in 1913 and asks the
reverse question: "Where is the horse?", as there is only 1 horse visible in
the picture.

Obviously this is a carefully selected anecdote, but this is a really
compelling argument that forward progress will be faster than expected.

[1] [https://youtu.be/YSdspVJgSFE](https://youtu.be/YSdspVJgSFE)

~~~
Avshalom
It's remarkably hard to find 40 year old used horse though.

------
indescions_2018
Great analysis from A16Z as always. I love seeing the myriad form factors. How
they map to different use cases. And how pipelines of these vehicles and
drones could be used to transport to any place on the globe!

A good place to get started with the tech details of EV design is with the
Tesla, Inc patents themselves:

US Patent Application for Integrated Electric Motor Assembly Patent
Application (Application #20170291482)

[https://patents.justia.com/patent/20170291482](https://patents.justia.com/patent/20170291482)

