
Self-Driving Taxis Will Become the Most Disgusting Spaces on Earth - rhapsodic
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2017/07/self-driving-taxis-will-become-the-most-disgusting-spaces-on-earth/
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jacknews
Perhaps, if you let your personal vehicle join the taxi fleet.

But I suspect (dedicated) self-driving taxis will become the most intimately
surveilled space on earth, and anyone littering etc will be fined for it,
certainly to the point of covering cleaning costs, and most likely as an
additional revenue stream.

Additonally I suspect, far from ushering in an era of care-free, and almost
cost-free travel, the self-driving fleet will be metered like cell-phones
(ridiculously complex price plans), and part of the 'price' will be that your
travel data is sold on.

True freedom will be a bicycle - assuming viable routes between "bicycle
friendly areas" remain open - a danger is that inter-city/town/village roads
become robot-only, and you can only actually travel 'manually' within bounded
living areas, eg a city precinct, village, etc.

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konschubert
I expect cities full of robotic cars to be great bike cities. The reason why I
don't bike every day is because with human drivers, I have to fear for my
life. A robotic car, however, will not turn into me, will not speed, will not
run the red light.

~~~
jacknews
That's the hope, yes. It depends if robot cars can deal well with cyclists or
not. If not, the two may not be allowed to mix, and guess which will get
priority.

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Ensorceled
I'm pretty sure robot cars won't randomly drive into bike lanes or park in
them or make illegal turns or ...

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sitkack
Luxury robot cars will definitely have an, "asshole mode". So yes.

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jpatokal
_Airplane interiors experience havoc within the first hour of a flight as the
worst of us begin defecating into the seats, too lazy and weak to control
ourselves_

Wait, what? The author seems to have problems with more than just self-driving
cars...

Anyway, the problem seems pretty trivial to solve: have a button so riders can
report disgusting cars, send the bill to the previous occupant. This works
pretty well with people who smoke in non-smoking hotel rooms.

~~~
JadeNB
> Anyway, the problem seems pretty trivial to solve: have a button so riders
> can report disgusting cars, send the bill to the previous occupant.

The workaround seems to be: do whatever you want to make the cab disgusting,
then press the button. (If the button has to be pressed at the _beginning_ of
the ride, then press it at the beginning, _then_ do what you want.)

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Ensorceled
If only there was a modern way to make a quick daguerreotype or even a
watercolor of the state of the car at the end and beginning of rides ...

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mc32
That depends on a few of things:

1\. culture 2\. surveillance and consequence 3\. maintenance.

some cultures are cleaner than others (Japan vs US, or India). if you record
activities (remotely stored) and you can impose consequences plus you maintain
the fleet properly (routinely and specially when people intentionally or
accidentally soil interiors, that will go a long way.

I know I'd want vehicles which get routinely cleaned (BART vs JR subways and
trains)

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jack9
Adding a "reject for maintenance" button to an app that summons an automated
car is the obvious solution to a problem that was brought up years ago. To
avoid abuse, you use a consensus pattern (2 or 3 rejects in a row).

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_jn
This whole article is based on the presumption that the interiors of
driverless taxis won't be recorded... and yet security cameras in Ubers
already exist[0] (and aren't dissuaded by the company)

[0]: [https://uberpeople.net/threads/security-
camera.52864/](https://uberpeople.net/threads/security-camera.52864/)

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gambiting
Interior of the local metro trains is recorded from every possible angle you
can think of, yet almost every night they turn into garbage cans on wheels.
The problem is always reviewing the footage, finding the culprit and making
them pay. If an automated taxi comes back to the depot after 12 hours of
driving and you find it in a messy state, are you just going to pay someone
$50 to clean it, or are you going to spend time reviewing 12 hours of footage
to find out who made the mess and then spend weeks trying to get the money
back?

Which of course creates a self-perpetuating problem, because if the behaviour
is not punished, it will never be corrected and it will become "ok" to make a
mess in an auto taxi(not vomit, but just leaving your rubbish behind).

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EliRivers
_or are you going to spend time reviewing 12 hours of footage to find out who
made the mess and then spend weeks trying to get the money back?_

Fortunately, I can get that done for me at a cost of much, much less than 12
hours of my own time. I can farm it out overseas to somewhere with a large
supply of very cheap labour. I wouldn't be surprised if sitting in front of a
bank of a half-dozen taxi-interior replays running backwards at triple-speed
(with the empty periods already taken out by some relatively simple
processing) from a point at which the uncleanliness is visible was seen as a
good job, compared to some other options available.

Wouldn't be surprised if I could have that done for me at a cost of a few
dollars a time; if I then charge the culprit a hundred bucks on their already
registered credit card or taxi account for cleaning (fifty sounds too low), it
becomes very economical for me.

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phire
Triple speed?

You know exactly what time your customers entered and left the vehicle. All
you have to do is pull out a set of freeze frames from before and after each
customer and compare the two.

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Sharlin
This is basically a git bisect. You don't even have to linearly check every
customer, you can do a binary search in log time.

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akadruid1
Hotel rooms should suffer all the same problems. In practice, some do and most
don't.

If your SDT brand equates to Four Seasons people will pay top dollar, and vice
versa.

Unlike hotel rooms you have flexibility to design the cars for easy
sterilising and automate some cleaning tasks.

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nsgi
Hotels cost orders of magnitude per night than renting an apartment, largely
because of the cost of cleaning them. The ones that are cheaper are the ones
that tend to suffer problems with cleanliness.

Taxis currently cost orders of magnitude more than owning a car. One of the
main goals of a self-driving taxi service would be to radically reduce this
cost, but it would probably be too expensive to do a manual clean between
trips.

Maybe we just need to design cars that are self-cleaning as well.

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jlg23
Self-cleaning public restrooms and sanitary units for hotel rooms have been
around for _decades_. Why shouldn't the same technology be applicable to cars
or why shouldn't a self-driving car be able to drive itself to the next car
wash?

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Theodores
Maybe there is some opportunity to embrace the trash.

What if we replace the dashboard with a selection of recycling bins and expect
people to be unpacking their shopping, eating food on the way and creating
waste, putting facilities in place?

Perhaps we even expect people to just bring their wastebin contents with them
because it is easier than putting it in street collection bins. Time in
transit can be spent 'doing the recycling'.

Well filtered fresh waste may even be preferable for recycling and perhaps the
autonomous car driving company has a nice sideline in collecting raw materials
for recycling.

Tesla are leading the way with a minimal aesthetic, where the fiddly knobs and
switches are all gone and there is just one massive touchscreen instead. There
is also no central tunnel to disguise or carpet over. Soon all cars will adopt
this look and it may even be possible to offer a selection of power-wash
friendly trim levels.

Given the choice of a regular car, e.g. my dad's or one of my workmates, or a
power-washed autonomous car, I would imagine the latter to be cleaner even if
it had seen multiple vomit stains in the last month.

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chrismealy
Car2go and ReachNow cars are always clean, at least in Seattle (I think once I
saw a wrapper in a side door). When you're paying by the minute there's not
much time to make a mess.

This won't be a problem for self-driving cars because they're purely
vaporware.

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sitkack
I find half filled coffee cups and food wrappers all the time. Last one was
bare gum in the cup holder, cleaned it out myself so it wasn't on me.

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mark212
a car not having a driver isn't at all the same thing as a car not having an
owner. The owner will care about cleanliness to precisely the same extent as
its customers do.

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ChicagoBoy11
I love this article because it reveals just how terrible many of us are at
truly understanding the impact that new technologies can have in the world.
The author takes the possibility of self-driving cars and then basically
predicts what the world would be like if we did EVERYTHING EXACTLY THE SAME
except for the fact that there is no human driver.

Except that's not how this works. No driver means many of the costs of
operating the vehicle change -- including the cleaning cost. It will become
far, far cheaper to clean the vehicles, not less. Fleets will be able to
intelligently organize themselves to drive to cleaning stations in the most
efficient manner. With dedicated self-driving cars, it will be trivial to
install a ceiling mounted camera in the car. You could simply take a picture
of the car before the customer enters and after he leaves, and simply diffing
it could give you some estimate of how "messy" it is -- and it could even be
used to alert customers if they left something in the car. Accountability for
what the customer does in in the car will be higher than ever.

Self-driving cars will make taxis cheaper AND cleaner.

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watter
If someone barfs in the taxi (which I think is quite common tbh) it may not be
visible to the camera even if they wipe it up.

In either case, that car still smells like barf until it is _really_ cleaned.

Pretty sure if I got in a car that was full of barf while on my way to the
airport I would stay in the car (and probably barf a bit myself, too).

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jackvalentine
It amuses me to think somewhere there is a team of engineers developing barf
detection systems for driverless vehicles. Perhaps using a combination of
camera, sound (imagine collecting the training data for barf sound machine
learning!) and scent detection.

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tpae
Isn't this the same for all types of public transportation? I sometimes find
BART very disgusting. If you ride it 11PM on a Friday night, the whole section
reeks of drunken people smell. Not to mention, you sometimes see throw ups
that never gets cleaned.

It also has a lot to do with competition and the self driving taxi market. If
self driving taxi company A is consistently giving riders bad experience with
dirtiness, then there's going to be a company B that will come out with
cleaner solution.

If you think about it, there are far more places that's more disgusting than
self driving taxis..

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Doctor_Fegg
Not all types, no. I'm currently sitting on a 3-coach (UK) train halfway
through its daily diagram and though it's not 100% spotless, it's pretty good.
It'll get a light clean in the depot at the end of the day and be back in
service first thing tomorrow.

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MichaelBurge
Automatically snap a picture of the backseat and have some remote operator
decide if it needs to be returned for cleaning. A couple operators and
cleaners are a lot cheaper than a fleet of drivers.

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fellellor
There are few things more effective in controlling people's behaviour than
shame and humiliation. Of course you need to be a part of a strong community
for that to be effective as well. Shame and humiliation, I suspect has less of
an effect in societies based on transactional relationships.

In either case, I feel we'll see a return to older type of punishments, like
public flogging or being tied down in a post to enforce shame. That's if,
companies come to this realisation in order to protect their bottom line.

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rabboRubble
Or, I don't know, maybe the companies will sign cleaning contracts with car
wash companies, and send their cars to the wash once a week?

Even well behaved humans make goo. This is why even the most obsessive person
has to take a bath and clean their house.

If a company can't keep their cars clean, the well heeled consumer will change
their habits to prefer the company's cars that are cleaned out from time to
time.

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superplussed
I predict a reputation system that impacts the cost of the ride. Nowadays the
reputation system is unidirectional from rider to driver, but in the future
perhaps it is unidirectional from the car to the passenger. Bad behavior dings
your reputation, a dinged reputation costs you money.

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aianus
The reputation system is not unidirectional today. I don't accept rides from
any Uber passenger with less than 4.5.

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zaxomi
So.. self driving cars... I'm not sure I can trust them. Looks like an easy
way to kidnap people.

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maxerickson
For someone willing to do it, what (non police, non legal system) impediments
do you currently see that inhibit kidnappers?

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Nanite
Maybe we'll see self cleaning taxi pods akin to those self cleaning public
bathrooms in Paris. Cleaning cycle after every ride...

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tyingq
I suppose they will just end up with interiors similar to the walls around
urinals. So someone can hose and mop them regularly.

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konschubert
Has the author never used car sharing?

