Spent last week in Phoenix, rode Waymo a dozen times. Autonomous taxis are the future. Don't have to tip, don't have to worry about pissing off the driver if I'm only going a few blocks. Price is reasonable, seems less than Uber or a standard taxi.
Question is how many humans will forgo owning a car altogether once autonomous vehicles are ubiquitous.
I don't like the wait time though. I don't want to wait 5 minutes for my Waymo to arrive for a 10 minute trip down to the grocery store when I can wait 0 minutes and hop in my own car and just drive there myself.
I do like autonomous cars though, but they won't completely remove car ownership.
It costs something like $10k-$12k per year to own a car in the US. That's a lot of robotaxi rides. But I can't imagine self-driven cars disappearing either, though I can imagine them being banned in city centers within a decade.
It doesn't cost anywhere close to that unless you are driving an absolutely insane amount of miles or have some ridiculous supercar where the insurance rates are insane.
I guess we were thinking of different numbers. That's including depreciation, interest and sales tax, which I would consider purchase cost, not part of the cost to own. But
By self-driven cars you mean, a human self? By context I think you do but self-driven is maybe a strange phrase to use to differentiate from self-driving.
Wow, that FTC case gets worse and worse the farther into it you read. What a scumbag company. It's like they opened the "Dark Patterns Unleashed" book and followed every example.
It isn't when it is cultural. There is nothing forcing people to tip, except not wanting to feel shame or be shamed by others. For example, while out on a date.
A lot of bus routes suck and people don't like to plan ahead for how they'll get someplace, so they often default to the most general transportation available (personal vehicles) if the transit network isn't good enough for everyday tasks.
As an example, my wife's 15m car commute would take 45m by bus transfer to the nearest stop, which is a couple miles from the destination on a freeway onramp. The transit system is fixing it, but that date is 3 years away. That's still better than the routes some people have.
And lest you think the local transit agency sucks (by American standards), they don't. They just prioritize office workers heading to/from downtown instead of people moving radially through the metro area.
I know a lot of people who live by like 10 min frequency routes or better and usually its me revealing their existence to them when I use it to show up to their house. Could it work for all trips? Of course not. But plenty could be done on busses as it is. People are blind to them though. No one bothers to look at transit system maps. They see the couple rail lines listed on google maps and assume there is no other transit offering.
I had to carry a couple of gallons of dairy for a trade show. Too heavy for the 15 minute walk. First world problem, I suppose, but Waymo was a convenient point-to-piont option.
in some towns (like SF) folks have used Waymo thousands of times - its everywhere, for a good reason - while its not always faster, it's more consistent, pleasant and safe.
> The prices will be set as high as the supply and demand curve allows. Considering that they're the only autonomous car provider in operation, that curve will not be consumer-friendly.
Or go from being an N car household to an N-1 car household.
Question is how many humans will forgo owning a car altogether once autonomous vehicles are ubiquitous.