TechCrunch discusses Hailing a Waymo Driverless Taxi.
“Congrats! This car is all yours, with no one up front,” the pop-up notification from the Waymo app reads. “This ride will be different. With no one else in the car, Waymo will do all the driving. Enjoy this free ride on us!”
It marks the beginning of a driverless ride-hailing service that is now being used by members of its early rider program and eventually the public.
Limitations
- The company’s driverless rides are currently free and only taking place in a geofenced area that includes parts of Chandler, Mesa and Tempe.
- Even Waymo vehicles with safety drivers don’t yet take riders to one of the most popular ride-hailing destinations: the airport.
- The everyday interactions between a passenger and an Uber or Lyft driver, such as conversations about pick-up and drop-offs as well as sudden changes in plans, become more complex when the driver is a computer. It’s an area that Waymo’s user experience research (UXR) team admits it is still figuring out.
- Computers and sensors may already be better than humans at specific driving capabilities, like staying in lanes or avoiding obstacles (especially over long periods of time), but they lack the human flexibility and adaptability needed to be a good mobility provider.
Pooh Poohs Coming
I expect many readers will pooh-pooh this story with the usual nonsense about weather, old men on roller skates veering into traffic, liability issues, theft, and other silliness.
The fact of the matter is this is 2019.
I expected trucks, not taxis would be far in front. And they likely still are.
City driving where riders might change their minds is far more complex that point-to-point trucking from interstate hub to hub. Taxi adoption is likely to be slower.
The primary thing holding up hub-to-hub trucking is national regulation. I expect to see that next year.
Once allowed, interstate truck driving will quickly adopt. Commercial taxis will have a longer adoption period.
Personal Anecdote
The limo service I typically take to the airport just got rid of all its limos and drivers. The drivers are now contractors and must own their own vehicles. Those who refused were fired.
With that change, the owner’s business model morphed into taking a percentage of the fare for scheduling rides rather than owning any vehicles and hiring drivers.
Within five years or less, those jobs will be gone.
Driverless Has Arrived
Driverless is here. The only debate is how fast it ramps up.
I suggest that within a 2-3 years of federal regulation, the majority of truck on the interstates will be driverless.
Even faster would not be a surprise.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Have a Huge Flaw When It Comes to Jaywalkers
Uber shut off the emergency breaking system and the computer identified the dead woman as A) a motor vehicle B) a bicycle and C) finally as a person just one second before impact.
“The company’s system is now able to handle scenarios such as jaywalking in which people or cyclists are not following road rules, she added, though human drivers may still need to intervene at times.”
Right, you are paying ZERO attention to the road because the car is driven by cloud computing, a child runs out in front of the car, the reflex response time of a real human driver might save that kid or dog most of the time, but the response time of a human to intervene when they are not even paying attention to what is outside the car is never EVER going to be quick enough to stop in time if they have to intervene. And if you have to remain in position foot hovering over the pedals hands on the wheel and alert and looking for potential problems at all times then WHAT IS THE F&%$ point of a self driving car?
Let’s test out a possible scenario:
A self-driving car that can handle 95% of driving conditions (let’s assume that there are restrictions on use during blizzards or other intense weather or other situations) becomes available. The testing has proven that this vehicle is as good as a very alert, experienced driver and, unlike a human driver, can maintain that standard of driving 100% of the time. The car costs the equivalent of a regular car plus $50,000 (for the extra h/w and s/w).
The car gets adopted in wealthy communities and is a status symbol. It gets traction in L.A., S.F., and the wealthier parts of Florida. Celebrities in their self-driving car post photos and videos on social media. They are a “thing”.
Despite some inevitable, and highly publicized, fatalities, the driving stats hold up and the cars are far safer than human operated vehicles.
Status seeking individuals in every other community in the U.S. and Europe want to be the first in their sphere to have the cool car.
The cars gather momentum, and “executive” limo companies start offering service in them – achieving excellent profit margins from the premium fees and driver savings.
They start to become boring because they are just commonplace – like the iPhone after the 3G model when many regular people had them.
Ride sharing companies see the financial liabilities drop and start using them for their profit potential.
Regular car sales drop precipitously as the second hand market is flooded with discarded newer model inventory. Regular cars are seen as a liability (think tube TVs about 10-15 years ago).
Most households now have an “old” regular car they keep for unusual needs, and either a self driving car or a car service like Uber for most of their day-to-day needs.
There are only two time periods that are important:
a/ When we will get to step 1 – my best guess 2022
b/ How long from step 1 to step 9 – my best guess three years
No, because they are spending TRILLIONS for the required technology (2 trillion at least for 5G wireless alone) and because it is already known that these monstrosities and human piloted cars cannot ever be compatible, they will end human driven cars and use of these will be compulsory. It will be done in a sneaky and politically opaque way though, via gas tax increases to $10 or more per gallon of fuel phased in over a decade or less. They will make driving ICE cars prohibitive and for the phase in period subsidize the ride share companies. You will not be able to afford a private vehicle and even if you could would probably be forced to pay a high subscription cost monthly to use the new 5G autopilot wireless connection the way you have to pay for cable TV now. You will be at the mercy of market pricing in a rigged market, you will not be able to go where you want when you want to, and when you do go anywhere that information will be tracked, stored, and in case you have not paid attention lately think of this; in a car where you are a CAPTIVE AUDIENCE with nothing better to do they will have screens instead of windows and you will be forced to watch advertising, and they will say the ad revenue helps keep the cost of your ride down. Even if they have an opt out so you can see outside the vehicle they will increase your fare. All in all going places will cost a lot more. We used to hear about people who cannot afford healthcare, then it was poor people that can’t afford housing, next it is poor people who cannot afford transportation, and America will just look the other way as they do with all other poverty, you will say man I am glad I don’t have to walk.
These cars are NOT driverless, they are computer driven, they are NOT autonomous, they are connected to the cloud, loss of signal will get you dead. The trillions spent on 5G and other technologies that this will require is the largest single misallocation of capital since the invention of war.
I will never get in one, even if that means living in a nation where they can’t afford the technology. You are all going to regret this if you live 15-20 years because right about then they will admit that these monstrosities and human piloted vehicles will never be able to coexist, and after misallocating trillions they will simply ban human driving not the computer driven.
Until then these will be slowing traffic because they really cannot cope with human driving, and they never will, there are some things computers can do better, and there are some things they will never do half as well.
Driving a car is one of those things where you must have a human conscience.
That “human conscience” kills 40,000 humans EVERY YEAR in the USA alone. What kind of monster are you?
There are hundreds of millions of car trips every day in the US, Billions of miles per day driven, nearly all just about as safe as getting on a jetliner. The people who die in crashes are dying because of their own stupidity mostly related to drunk driving and distracted driving, but remember that in the late sixties when there were half as many drivers there were 68,000 car deaths per year. Safety of roads and vehicles has accounted for most of the improvement.
I am pretty sure your comment was tongue in cheek, but, weigh the loss of your freedom to go when you want, where you want, without anyone logging those movements, against some few thousand suicidal Darwinian drunks and I say I am not sitting in some computer dispatched computer driven puke mobile that charges as much or more for a ride as a taxi. In a vehicle that arrives dirty, and has a driver that does not know or care about the difference between the lives of you or your kids and that opossum that just darted out in front of the vehicle.
Just no, this technology has a disapproval rating of 69% more than 2/3s of Americans do not want it but it is being shoved down our throats for one reason, they are going to make a butt tn of money off of you. Not me, I will be in Costa Rica where I can drive myself to some beach town for lunch and a swim.
My brother tests these vehicles and he stated that it is not going well AT ALL. The manufacturers are struggling with getting level 2 automation to function properly. Tesla’s system is in the lead with others lagging. Full automation will not happen for a long time. Partial or cordoned off automation has a chance in the near future.
It is endlessly amusing to watch all the naysayers and Luddites be wrong day after day, year after year.
Never gonna happen.
I am sure the Waymos will have the soft object detector installed, unlike this driverless Volvo:
link to youtube.com
OMG! No man you got it all wrong. This is the Volvo showing that he is your overload.
The Volvo does have a look of a extraterrestrial predator looking at his next lunch.
“So even if 90% of their time is on the highways, they still have to work flawlessly in the cities before they will be allowed on the roads.”
Wrong – Xil had an excellent comment on the “last mile” – a point I have made many times
We were promised driverless taxis in San Francisco in 2016, 3 years ago. And then this happened.
“The 2017 Volvo SUV was traveling at roughly 40 miles an hour, and it did not appear that the car slowed down as it approached the woman, said Tempe sergeant Ronald Elcock.”
Now, 10s of billions of dollars of investor money later plowed into Uber, and now up in smoke, we still don’t have driverless taxis. Oh but wait, Waymo to the rescue.
In Las Vegas in 2017 they introduced a computer driven people mover that slowly made a loop around downtown, on it’s very first day it had an accident, hit a truck. These things are a menace and can never approach the skills of a human driver, one they are subject to technological failure, ever had your computer suddenly start to run slow? If that happens to your car you be ded. And they do not do all the computing in the vehicle, they are connected to a central computer via the cloud, that is why they need trillions in 5G wireless technology and infrastructure. Dropped signal? You again be ded.
But there is a more fundamental reason than this, it is that humans have an emotional makeup that allows them, requires them to prioritize in an emergency, to value life over property, to understand what it means to lose a child or loved one. The consequences of a wrong decision. Computers never had mothers, kids, a favorite dog, they do not contemplate the future or any errors at all. They cannot tell a child from a small deer for example, they are utterly devoid of any emotional content to their decision making and have no fear of wrong decisions. They may one day decades in the future become as good as we are at instant recognition of 1,000 variables at a glance the way we are, but they will never have that component that is required to make the right decisions. Based on human value. The lady killed in Tempe, you think the computer ever regretted killing her? It has no ability to regret, and it has no morality about distinguishing between property and human life. Many a driver has sacrificed their own property and even lives to avoid taking one human life, a computer is unable to make that decision.
“But the worries about operatorless elevators were quite similar to the concerns we hear today about driverless cars.” ― Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins
Beautiful comment thanks numike
See my reply, above–sorry, but it is a dumb analogy. Driverless will come, but it is a far bigger challenge than taking the operator out of the elevator.
Simple physical electronics and switches solved the elevator issue.
It’s checkers vs chess.
Hello everyone! This is my first post, and hope not the last one 🙂 When 5G will be fully implemented, geofenced area limitation will be gone, since every car will be connected to light poles (or whatever) within city streets and with any other cars, driveless or not. 5G has huge potential due to the amount of data transmitted but mainly due to the very, very low latency.
Once again, a commercial outfit begins a research project featuring new technology and a human in the driver’s seat. This is nothing new. This is not progress.
The fact remains that the arrival of driverless vehicles cannot yet be predicted. There is no schedule, there is no plan.
I have a short drive to and from work. Maybe 10 highway miles. Even on this short stretch, driverless trucks would have a big problem. There’s a lot of construction with old painted lines and new painted lines. Sometimes it’s not clear where the lanes are. You have to kind of guess based on where the other cars are driving. And to make room for construction, the lanes were narrowed. Sometimes a semi can’t even fit between the lines. If you want to pass, you have to wait until the lane on the other side is clear and punch it around the truck.
Mises Institute — a group out of Alabama that promotes Austrian economics and libertarian thinking (Mish’s thinking too?) — has an article showing how socialism has held Africa back, despite Africa having a bounty of natural resources (metal ores, crude oil, fertile soil, etc) and an abundant (and cheap) labor supply.
Colonial powers were kicked out decades ago. Billions in foreign aid has come in — from the world bank, from foreign investors, and most recently from China’s One Belt, One Road initiative…
…but due to socialism’s ugly reality, Africa continues to suffer economically decade after decade after century.
Mornin’ Vlad.
Scandinavian countries are ‘socialist’ too ; ALL are top ranking as far as ‘prosperity’, is concerned ….The problem in Africa is ‘divide et impera’ tribalism and its dictators bribed by our capitalism, rather …
Norway has lived off oil field revenues; the trouble with socialism is when Norway runs out of other people’s money and has to survive without subsidies.
Sweden is being overrun by illegal immigrants forced on them by the evil dictatorship in Brussels. SAAB is so messed up that even GM doesn’t want it.
Finland makes stinky cheese.
The three countries combined don’t have enough population to counter-balance the immigrants that evil Brussels is sending their way. So the big question is whether oil will run out before the middle eastern immigrants overrun the remains of what was once scandanavia. Maybe they become Muslim before socialism’s bill comes due!!!
There is no need to bring socialism into every discussion. It’s the protestant work ethic, community oriented society versus a society rife with tribalism and nepotism. You dilute one with the other, and you’ve got a degeneration to the lowest common denominator.
Also, there is no need to bash Brussels in this case; these Scandinavian cucks brought it on themselves. The root cause is one vote for anybody with a pulse, but no proof of a brain required.
Given the economic devastation caused by socialism EVERYWHERE it has been attempted, the notion that anyone would suggest imposing it on the USA, much less a major (collapsing!) political party, should be horrifying to anyone with a brain. The economic suffering (not the death toll, the economic suffering) caused by socialism is very comparable to war. Warren might get the democrat nomination, but her 3rd world policy proposals will cause economic devastation to Mish’s home country, ergo it is more important to many than the discussion of when the UK leaves/falls out of the Brussels dictatorship.
The dictatorship in Brussels came into play because the other commenter is named “FromBRUSSELS” RTFD
its all about isms so anyway Lets Go Here in Norway! link to mossandfog.com
“But let it not be said that we did nothing. Let not those who love the power of the welfare/warfare state label the dissenters of authoritarianism as unpatriotic or uncaring. Patriotism is more closely linked to dissent than it is to conformity and a blind desire for safety and security. Understanding the magnificent rewards of a free society makes us unbashful in its promotion, fully realizing that maximum wealth is created and the greatest chance for peace comes from a society respectful of individual liberty.”
― Ron Paul
“Whoever perceives that robots and artificial intelligence are merely here to serve humanity, think again. With virtual domestic assistants and driverless cars just the latest in a growing list of applications, it is we humans who risk becoming dumbed down and ultimately subservient to machines.”
― Alex Morritt, Impromptu Scribe
“But the worries about operatorless elevators were quite similar to the concerns we hear today about driverless cars.”
― Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins
At least I’ll never have to play chess again!
Lets review that dumb analogy again…
A box traveling all alone in an enclosed shaft that has a very limited number of defined stop and door opening positions and in which the customers choices and outcomes are defined by pressing only one button.
Yup, exactly like driving in urban traffic.
Sort of like checkers and chess, isn’t it, Gary?
Seems to me Kasparov LOST to a computer. But the analogy of automated cars to automated elevators is seriously one of the stupidest things I have ever heard, maybe he is good at chess, but he appears to know nothing about life.
Driving on highways by computer does seem easier to do than driving in the cities. But the trucks still have to be able to go into the cities to load and unload. So even if 90% of their time is on the highways, they still have to work flawlessly in the cities before they will be allowed on the roads.
what you are referring to is what mish calls “the last mile” which will remain non-automated for the foreseeable future — the vast majority of driving will otherwise be automated. see, link to globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Thanks xil
It sounds like the solution has been to have trucks pull into truck stops just outside of major cities where drivers are waiting to drive them into the cities. I stand corrected.
However, this is ultimately a political issue, as permission to operate automated vehicles is only granted if politicians feel like the benefits outweigh the negatives. The big negative is people dying from mistakes, which happens from time to time. The airplane literally never would have gotten off the ground without the deaths of countless pioneers. But there is less tolerance for risk in today’s society. Especially when it is big corporations profiting from those risks.
The problem Quatloo is that these autonomous vehicles are never going to be compatible with human drivers. I have seen them in action, they are SLOW, they follow at far too long a distance for liability reasons (no, not safety reasons) and human drivers will just go around them and cut them off. That in turn slows them down even more. I have see way too many Youtube vids and read too many stories about how the optics and computers were fooled into crossing into oncoming lanes by wet spots, or bits of tape on the road.
Since your human driven car will eventually be banned from public roads you will HAVE to use these monstrosities and they will not belong to you, you will have to call one of the ride share pilotless companies and order a ride via some smartphone app that tracks your every move 24/7. I do not want them knowing where I am all the time, I have the GPS function turned off though I know they can still track the phone everywhere. Once you have no alternative but to use these vehicles for transportation you will be stuck with them. And they will just keep raising the prices. You think you can call one and go to the market to get groceries? Sure, then it dumps you there and god knows when it’s replacement will arrive. Ah a football game just ended and 70,000 people are in line in front of you while your ice cream melts. No problem you say, you grocery shop online and a driverless car delivers your goods to your house. Well, fine, you will be the one to get the bananas with all the brown spots, or so green they will not be edible for a week, or an avocado that is harder than a hockey puck. Or the worst looking steaks you ever saw, oh right, your steaks are fake meat or lab cultured cells, man, if you think all this is great then you really have a CACA life to start with, but wait, it is going to get a lot worse when this BS technology is in use.
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Mish, when politicians in podunk cities are willing to accept graft and in turn allow their city to be the ‘playpen’ to test these technologies, don’t mistake this as automation going full blown. It is inevitable yes, however, not for long time. Until they can outlaw every single driver from being on the road, full automation will not happen except in ‘cordoned off’ areas.
Automated vehicles cannot share the road with callous, IDGAF for the rules, retard drivers whose numbers have exponentially skyrocketed in the past 3,4 years.
The only viable means of this becoming common is dedicated roads/lanes such as HOV/toll lanes being converted for this express purpose.
“The company’s driverless rides are currently free and only taking place in a geofenced area that includes parts of Chandler, Mesa and Tempe.”
My ex-wife has invited me back to Arizona (Chandler) for Thanksgiving so maybe I’ll have a chance to give it a shot, assuming the demand isn’t greater than the supply. If they’re really driverless, my guess is that the Phoenix area will be virtually all driverless by 2033. Outlying areas, everywhere, will take much longer.
The average age of cars currently on the roads is 11.8 years. That’s average, not median. It’ll be a very long time before all cars are driverless.
Not if you ban everyone who The Fed doesn’t buy a driverless car for with money stolen from others, from driving at all……. That’s the only way to keep up the illusion that the nonsense makes sense, after all. No doubt with meaningless reference to endless streams of nonsensical “studies” and childish scientism bombastically claiming to “prove” that government (and the FIRE and legal idiots it enables) Knows What’s Best For You(tm). No different from the rest of progressivism.
“I never said “vast majority of trucks” – I get POed when brutally misquoted – I said
” the majority of truck on the interstates will be driverless” and they will
It’s not possible. For one, no technology has ever been adapted that quickly. But most importantly there is not any capacity to produce or retrofit over a million trucks in 2 or 3 years. You can’t just wave a magic wand and the truck is self driving. Lot’s of shit needs to be produced and installed. The first couple years will be measured in thousands.
Also, nobody will do a mass, network wide rollout, until they have a downright massive amount of safety data to back it up. Potential failure modes of 40 ton missiles flying in close proximity to half of humanity, are just too scary.
So you’ll see very incremental rollouts. A test here, a test there. Racking up miles and gathering data. First on very predictable routes. Then, slowly, sometimes (following unforseen problems) very so, expanding outwards.
Until, eventually, someone, most likely in Asia (or perhaps Norther Europe) these days, cuts the crap and recognizes it is infinitely simpler, and vastly preferable by virtually every possible metric, to simply build a grid powered, automated transport network for exclusive use by standardized robots instead.
The efficiency benefits of getting random humans out of the way of the machines, for tasks machines can perform, are just too great to ignore forever. Guaranteeing that will happen, one way or the other. Either by upfront design; or per current totalitarian progressive wet-dream trajectory, by way of ruthlessly banning, mandating, pricing and otherwise harassing people out of their cars and onto the back of the buses where the totalitarians prefer to keep them. Just so that the semi competents (I’m in an awfully generous mood today) who “inveeeeested” in the sci-fi hype, don’t have to face up to the facts that they are, tah-dah, (at very, very best) semi competents; who just pointlessly burned through yet another pile of capital The Fed stole from more competent people for them. Just like they always did and do.
Globally, there are ten Hiroshimas per year of dead from vehicle accidents. When the stats start showing a dramatic collapse in this kill rate with computers doing the driving grunt work, it will be the insurance companies that trigger the avalanche to driverless, starting with long haul trucking.
Automobiles will follow and for the same reason.
I agree that the projections in the article are
too optimistic. Not only for technical / regulatory reasons but also for a more practical reason: because rolling stock lifetime / turnaround time. The trucks purchased now will be in use for 10-ish years at least. But I agree that highway trucking is a better starting point than taxis. That problem is mostly solvable today – as opposed to urban driving which is many, many years away to be completely solved. And then a decade or two to globally penetrate the market.
We should also distinguish geofenced mobility services from full self-driving vehicles. First one is mainly a mapping problem and a simpler one too – we can expect a few demonstration programs to pop up the next 2-3 years in simpler locations like Chandler, AZ or closed communities like the way Voyage does it (I also see a lot of activities in airport and recreational area automation).
As someone who works on self-driving cars and attends several events on this topic, I can feel the frustration of the tech community about the false promises and lies some people said and the media’s way of hyping things up without fact cheking or looking into technical details.
We’re getting there but it’s also clear it’s not a single technology that will just “arrive”. It will be deployed incrementally the next decade or two.
Nobodyyyy cares
We are seeing driver-less cars increase over the last few months here in Michigan… in dealer’s lots.
Which models?
Shut up
I truly hope the navigation isn’t done by Google navigator. Some of the routes with this software are on the adventurous side.
Well the key term here is ‘georeferenced’ roads. The driverless revolution is not in the car or it’s software but in the roads and how they will be built. BTW, would you trust your life with a company that sells ads to keep aflot.
Google is VERY profitable. Far better than “keep afloat”.
“With that change, the owner’s business model morphed into taking a percentage of the fare for scheduling rides rather than owning any vehicles and hiring drivers.
Within five years or less, those jobs will be gone.”
Dude, you’re an ex programmer. Which task do you reckon is most eligible for automation: 1) Driving to and from an airport where everyone is desperate, running late, and erratically breaking every rule in the traffic book; or 2) “scheduling rides……….” Whose jobs are in trouble, again…
Does the camera in the car check the rider against outstanding warrants and drive to the police station if there is a hit on the database?
Only if they’re not an illegal alien in a sanctuary city.
Good point. You know the surveillance state is going to be full-on loving the eventual ubiquity of driverless taxis. And remember: the fact that you got dropped off at the Delta terminal at 18:03:16.340 PST is just “metadata.”
An attorney friend of mine pointed out the massive revenue loss to cities and municipalities if driverless cars that don’t speed or break traffic laws in any way are the norm. He thinks they will be an impediment to adoption. I think by the time they wake up it will be too late…
Good point. When you get a disruptive technology such as this, all sorts of things change that you hadnt first thought of.
Someone today was talking about the difficulty of doing charitable collections now everyone is going contactless. There was talk of beggars needing a card paying machine in order to accept a payment. Needs must.
With driverless taxis I wonder about what happens when someone turns up drunk and throws up in the back seat. I guess at least that throwing up all over the driver wont matter quite so much.
How about filling up with petrol? Or is this limited to battery powered cars? My guess is that driverless only really makes sense with battery powered cars, as in theory they can drive to a charging point, and it would be easier to devise some method where they can start charging without human intervention.
Will people still learn to drive? Will you be able to drive like a maniac Will Smith style through the streets with all those robot machines veering out of your way? Could someone control the system to crash a lot of cars if they felt a Skynetty need to reduce the population?
And of course, there will be many things happen that none of us can yet imagine.
I don’t think having the car drive home for a refill of petrol will be any different than having it drive home for a refill of electricity.
i was mostly thinking about lost revenue from no speeding tickets
They’ll make it up in other ways. Like a power consumption tax. You know the old saying about taxes and death.
New issues require new solutions, like in Illinois where the fee to register an electric vehicle is more than a gas or diesel vehicle, because the electric is not paying fuel taxes. Promote electric vehicles – NOT!
Parking revenue. That’s going to disappear. If and when all driverless taxis/ubers/ehartever become the norm, those cars will be running constantly. They’re not going to stop and park in one spot all day.
We also have to recognize the massive generational change/attitude toward driving. My eldest daughter (17) is off to get her driver’s liscence on Thursday. She’s going it, but doesn’t care to. She has no plans to buy a vehicle, nor do any of her friends. They Uber (and it makes financial sense to do so). My 16 year old is the same. She doesn’t care about having a car either. Perhaps that will change out of necessity, but certainly not like my generation where we all went to get out learner’s permit the day we turned 16. They will be perfectly happy to sit in a driverless car, staring at their phones, untill it deposits them at their destination before heading off to pick someone else up.
Ride sharing, and public transit, combined with the coming massive shift from office work to home work, is going to radically change revenue streams for cities in the future.
Wow. That is cold.
What’s to stop the now private contractor drivers from giving you (and all their arranged customers) their business card after their first drive with you, giving you a discount of half of what the now “schedule only” owners take and cutting out the limo business altogether?
Awfully small moat for a local limo business to defend.
“The drivers are now contractors and must own their own vehicles. Those who refused were fired.
With that change, the owner’s business model morphed into taking a percentage of the fare for scheduling rides rather than owning any vehicles and hiring drivers.”
the vast majority of commercial trucks will not be driverless in 2-3 years. Maybe in 10-15 years. As a society, we are simply not ready.
Also, trucks are expensive and have long lifetimes. We only produce so many a year. No matter what, it will take a while to replace them.
They can be retrofitted. Not that I agree with the 2-3 year time frame. Unless Federal regulation takes 10+ years.
Driverless tech doesn’t care what you think Tony.