
A more realistic route to autonomous driving - dsr12
https://www.economist.com/business/2018/08/04/a-more-realistic-route-to-autonomous-driving
======
ashraymalhotra
IMHO this is how self driving applications should start. Driving on the US
freeways (say between LA and SF) isn't about your driving skills. It's mostly
just about trying not to fall asleep. And machines are way better than humans
at this!

Even outside the US, there are many areas (like UAE), which have amazing
highways, sparse traffic and there isn't rail/air connectivity to some places.
Self driving "shuttles" seem perfect for those applications.

~~~
ghaff
In general, highways seem like a pretty logical starting point. There are some
potential complications like car accidents and debris but they seem far more
tractable than random pedestrians, cyclists, and all the complex driving
behavior on city streets resulting from traffic lights, trucks stopped to make
deliveries, etc. etc.

It _doesn 't_ enable end-to-end autonomous taxis, so you need a sober,
licensed driver in the driver's seat even if they don't need to be able to
take over on a second's notice.

Handling long distance highway driving would actually be a big win. It just
doesn't stir imaginations the same way that completely eliminating a driver
door-to-door does--especially among people who really want to get out of car
ownership and driving entirely.

~~~
vonmoltke
> especially among people who really want to get out of car ownership

I have brought this up before and I still do not understand how or why this
idea is so tightly coupled to fully autonomous vehicles. I don't see how
removing a human driver from a car service is going to change the dynamics
enough to drive legions of people who own cars to get rid of them if they
haven't done so already. The only friction a human driver adds right now is
cost, but I don't see the cost savings of removing the driver being high
enough to move the needle.

~~~
ghaff
There seems to be an implicit assumption that autonomous driving would somehow
make the cost of effectively renting cars by the mile (and have them come to
your door) almost too cheap to meter. Whereas, especially for transportation
options that involve multiple people in a vehicle, the cost of a driver isn't
really all that much relative to the overall cost of operating a vehicle.

For any imagined scenario involving autonomous vehicles ushering in new modes
of sharing, renting, etc., a useful question to ask is: "Why don't we have
this today?" And, if the answer is anything other than "$10/hour for a human
driver makes it too costly," then you should probably reconsider.

~~~
zamfi
> Whereas, especially for transportation options that involve multiple people
> in a vehicle, the cost of a driver isn't really all that much relative to
> the overall cost of operating a vehicle.

Do you have a source on this? It’s my understanding that most mass transit
systems in the US spend a huge amount on operator compensation. BART, the one
I’m most familiar with, spends $500m of its $691m operating budget on salary
and benefits [0] despite the fact that BART trains already drive themselves!

[0]:
[https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/FY18_Budget_Su...](https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/FY18_Budget_Summary.pdf#page7)

~~~
vonmoltke
First off, you cannot ignore the $876mm capital portion of the budget; that
money needs to come from somewhere.

Second, that $500mm covers every employee of BART. The administrators,
maintenance personnel, police, and other non-operator functions do not go
away. Without knowing what portion of that line item goes to operators one
cannot make a judgement on how much cheaper the system would be without them.

~~~
zamfi
Of course you're right; my comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek. Actual train
operator salaries probably cost BART about $50m annually, not $500m. In both
the cases of BART and private cars, the money to pay for tracks or roads comes
from taxpayers. The trains themselves are now 40+ years old, and are finally
being replaced at a cost of ~$300m this year. Grandparent post specifically
talked about operating costs though.

All that said, trains are basically the most efficient mode of transport from
a (number of drivers) / (number of passengers) perspective.

But speaking seriously for a moment:

\- Lyft charges riders about $2/mile in the Bay Area [0] before fees.

\- The IRS lets you depreciate your vehicle at a rate of $0.545/mile.

\- A reasonably efficient car burns ~40 mpg on freeway, at $3.50/gallon that's
~$0.09/mile.

So, of the $2/mile the riders pay, about 1/3 of that is costs associated with
purchasing and operating the vehicle (according to IRS estimates) and fuel.

If we eliminate the rest via autonomous driving, and taxis became 65% cheaper,
I suspect many people would make much more use of them.

[0]: [https://www.lyft.com/pricing/SFO](https://www.lyft.com/pricing/SFO)

~~~
perl4ever
Utilization rates are 50-58% for Uber or Lyft. When you take it into account
that a taxi is not en route 100% of the time, and add the cost (interest,
depreciation) of a much more expensive vehicle, I think your 65% savings go up
in smoke.

~~~
zamfi
Sorry, I'm not smart enough for this comment to stick with me. Could you walk
me through how 50% utilization means the savings go up in smoke?

The most compelling thing I can pull from your comment is "autonomous cars
will be 3x as expensive as regular cars (at least), so you won't save
anything". That may be short-term true, but is almost certainly long-term
false.

A 50% utilization compared with 100% utilization makes almost no difference in
vehicle cost structure -- if anything, it actually increases the labor
fraction of taxi cost.

If you're driving your car 50% of the time, then wear and milage is the
dominant depreciation factor (rather than age). But a human sitting around
doing nothing but waiting for that 50% of the time doubles the labor (time)
cost of the service, suggesting an even greater savings from eliminating the
human driver.

What am I missing?

~~~
perl4ever
I was assuming humans and self-driving cars both get revenue from riders, but
don't get paid in between. And I'm interpreting utilization as the percentage
of the time that riders are paying.

~~~
zamfi
The human's time has a cost, and even if the rider doesn't explicitly pay it,
it is factored in to the labor cost of the driver.

The machine's time cost is time-based depreciation, which is pretty low.

------
carapace
What I want is a self-driving golf cart that can take my mother to the doctor
and back. _It doesn 't have to go fast._

I make this point every time I can: kinetic energy is the killer and it goes
up with the square of velocity. Half-speed is quarter-deadly.

A golf cart-like machine, limited to a maximum speed not much faster than
walking, light-weight, and festooned inside and out with airbags (and other
anti-collision/-injury stuff), could be built today, I think it would work
just fine, and I bet you could sell a lot of them. ("Baby Boomers" he says
under his breath...)

Trying to go _straight to robot cars_ is hubris, it's biting off more than you
can chew and then trying to talk past the food in your mouth.

Also, can we please call them "auto-autos"?

~~~
mannykannot
I have had the same thought, and I have sometimes wondered if this approach
has not been widely pursued because it is potentially _too_ disruptive a
technology - disruptive of the current patterns of vehicle ownership and use,
that is.

~~~
falcolas
I’d say it’s not profitable enough to justify the R&D costs. You can’t sell a
$50,000 golf cart and expect the government to give additional incentives.

------
ivan_ah
I like the simplifying-the-problem approach a lot! Roads in the US/California
are so good that I can see it happen, and with clear labelling this could
totally "ship" in a few years (i.e. remove the safety driver).

The next step would be 1h-out-of-town commuters + close-suburbia to specific
dropoff points in downtown or wherever jobs tend to be. Again, stay on big
roads that have good signalling, and keep the bright colors so other drivers
will know to stay out of your way in the carpool lane.

It's basically what the big tech companies in the Valley are doing with their
commuting busses, but smaller and for everyone. The min-busses with flexible
routes are a common mode of transportation in certain Eastern European
countries, see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka)

~~~
ghaff
> The min-busses with flexible routes are a common mode of transportation in
> certain Eastern European countries, see
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka)

They are. But that makes me wonder why we don't already see a lot of this type
of thing in the US. My instinct would be the cost of a minimum wage-ish driver
isn't the difference between this mode of transportation working and it not.
Of course, it does exist in a sense with Lyft Line and Uber Pool although
those don't get a lot of attention.

~~~
maxerickson
A similar service is quite common in the US:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_responsive_transport#Un...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_responsive_transport#United_States)

Lower costs there can perhaps lead to a virtuous cycle of increased service
and use.

~~~
vonmoltke
The vast majority of such systems in the US are limited to people with
disabilities.

~~~
maxerickson
This is not the impression I have.

The one here is open to anyone and even sometimes runs a loop for a local
taproom.

I guess you could sample 10 or 100 of them and see how many impose
restrictions on rider eligibility.

~~~
vonmoltke
"Vast majority" may have been too strong, but I stand behind "majority". The
two programs on that Wiki page that actually have links are for disabled
passengers only. Looking at the three systems that have covered areas I have
lived, Broward County Transit and New Jersey Transit offer DRT only to those
with disabilities, and Dallas Area Rapid Transit has very limited DRT service
for non-disabled customers.

> The one here is open to anyone and even sometimes runs a loop for a local
> taproom.

If it is running a loop it isn't DRT, it's a jitney.

~~~
maxerickson
I imagine the urban systems tend to be more restrictive than the rural ones.

------
Eridrus
This is certainly more cautious, but it's not clear that this is any more
realistic than Waymo's plan which involves limiting vehicles to a predefine
area, mapping in great detail, etc.

~~~
IshKebab
It's clearly more realistic. They don't have to deal with roadworks, they have
preset pickup points (no need to figure out finding a safe space to stop),
they are relying on other drivers being cautious around a bright orange
vehicle rather than trying to act like a real car, they have explicit screens
for communication with pedestrians rather than trying to do it implicitly like
we would (I.e. slow down to let a car out vs having a screen say "after you"
or whatever).

Much easier (though still very hard).

~~~
Eridrus
Have they significantly reduced the challenge though? I don't think the core
task of driving is significantly easier than these problems that they have
elided.

I know it is a bit of a fallacy to say "we can fly to the moon, so we should
be able to have a self-driving car", but it's also not clear that the tools we
have (ML, simulators, planning algorithms, etc) are not up to the tasks that
have Drive.ai have engineered around.

It's a reasonable strategy to elide things you can and focus on the "core"
hard task, but if solving these other difficult problems is also meaningful
product-wise (and it clearly is meaningful), there's no reason you can't have
people working on both. And given Waymo seems to be gearing up for a large
launch, I have a hard time believing that these additional tasks are as hard
as Drive.ai want to make out.

------
fenwick67
> In March a pedestrian was killed in Tempe, Arizona when a self-driving Uber
> vehicle failed to spot her as she wheeled her bicycle across an empty road
> at night

Wrong, the car did spot her, but the emergency braking systems were turned
off.

~~~
jimmaswell
Of course no mention in the article that the pedestrian was crossing unsafely.

~~~
8note
isn't that the promise of a self driving car though? it can respond faster to
dangerous situations?

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kuroguro
[https://outline.com/5k67MD](https://outline.com/5k67MD)

------
jnurmine
Everyone is talking about autonomous cars but what about autonomous trains?

The problematics of autonomous trains are vastly simpler than autonomous cars.

Trains move in restricted paths (tracks), trains should stop only at specific
places, trains meet other trains in such a few possible places, and so on.

~~~
jl2718
Honestly those ‘features’ of trains have all been achieveable on pneumatic
tires for decades. The advantages of trains are all limitations actually. On
the other hand, limitations are good from a design perspective, improves focus
and prevents feature bloat.

~~~
Yoric
Also, I seem to remember that trains tend to be vastly more energy-efficient
than cars, even if you factor in the occasional cost of a nearly-empty train.

------
panarky
_Building a vehicle that can handle a busy street, with cyclists, pedestrians,
roadworks and emergency vehicles, is a tall order._

You can try to simplify the problem by limiting your routes to major highways
and making the vehicle ultra-visible so other drivers give you a wide berth.

But at some point there will be construction, or a car wreck, or debris in the
roadway. Eventually you'll need to exit the highway and drive on city streets.

Even if you manage to reduce the hard stuff to 1 mile out of 200, you still
need to deal with it.

If you can't handle everything, you're not safe to be on the road.

~~~
trocadero
>Even if you manage to reduce the hard stuff to 1 mile out of 200, you still
need to deal with it.

I think the minimum required to deal with it is to have the car pull over when
it identifies a situation it can't handle. Even an onramp to exit car that
pulls over if it sees construction will be extremely valuable to anyone
routinely doing highway driving.

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jl2718
This could have been built in the 70s, and I think actually was by Disney in
the 80s for park transportation (somewhere I recall had me at a very early age
on an autonomous vehicle that ran a planned route and would stop for anything
out of the ordinary and announce things.)

However, it is exactly as it should be. I applaud them for daring to be dumb
and focusing on the easy parts of the problem first. I think this will catch
on and get better slowly.

------
al_ramich
Going a bit controversial here but will self-driving cars be disrupted before
they even take off. The big factor that I feel will impact how autonomous
travel will evolve in the future is drone taxies/cars. Providing there is a
change in the regulation to support self-driving flying cars/drones, the big
advantage is that there would be no existing rules created for human driving
(road signs, traffic lights...) to adhere to. A centralized system could
calculate the best route to fly someone from A to B without the complexities
that self-driving cars have to solve. And flying would clearly be much faster
as well. Dubai, for example, is already testing, what comes after will be
interesting.

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41399406](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41399406)

~~~
friendly_chap
Given that we are probably heading into an economy where energy will get more
and more expensive (at least temporarily, due to a potential oil crunch
coming), not sure how flying will be an economical way of transport.

~~~
samsonradu
Can you elaborate? Why might a oil crunch be coming?

~~~
deathhand
Not parent but

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil)

~~~
slfnflctd
They've been talking about peak oil since the late 1950s, and just about every
single prediction about it has been wrong. I got caught up in the hype about
it 5-10 years ago, and it took a while before I realized it was mostly a
garden variety doomsday cult. [Yes there is such a thing as peak oil, and we
may have even already hit it, but it's not going to destroy civilization as
some have loudly declared.]

Gasoline consumption is not going up the way it used to, and there apparently
is a whole lot more oil than a lot of people thought-- I'm guessing due to a
combination of countries not providing correct numbers (it's a national
security issue after all), new oilfield discoveries and new extraction
techniques. Add in more efficient vehicles and alternative energy sources, and
you quickly realize the worst that's going to happen is some gradually
increased prices for products & services most closely tied to the current cost
of fuel.

