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I work in vehicle testing, specifically on ADAS and autonomous driving features. One thing that gets overlooked with Waymo is the fact that that fucker has a 6-figure price tag on the sensing equipment on it. You'll never see that on a production level vehicle
The real point of self driving cars is not to have to buy one. They should be ubiquitous fleets of taxis that never sleep, not personal possessions that sit in the driveway 90% of the time.
Delamain Cabs!
"Welcome to Johnny Cab!"
From where I'm sitting that's very far from reality for a whole lot of reasons. I'd be happy to be wrong (because cars are unacceptably unsafe as-is) but there's a long way to go
Okay, feel free to tell me all the reasons.
I'm not going to write you an essay
There are good video essays on the subject by Benn Jordan, Not Just Bikes, and Adam Something that (mostly) are a good overview of the problem and their videos explain things better than I'm ever going to write
Also the eternal taxi idea just seems like a shit excuse for not building other transit options. Like why not build trains and bike lanes instead of that
Well I wasn’t asking for an essay. Benjamin Faraday’s well known video about the effectiveness of automated taxi trials in St. Germaine and the Transportation Policy Institute numerous published case studies, which you can go Google, show how self driving taxis take net cars OFF the roads AND free up parking spaces for OH I DONT KNOW bike lanes and bus stops so perhaps these ideas aren’t so mutually exclusive as you suggest.
Even if it was a quarter million bucks, it would quickly pay itself off. Keeping a taxi car available and operating 24/7 is a big deal for operational costs. $25/hour on a $250k device is a recovered in just over a year. It's all profit after that.
"Never" is a long time. Technology is always getting cheaper, I see no reason why that sensing equipment won't end up on a production vehicle at some point.
In the auto industry pennies matter. Inevitably some higher-up will convince himself that they can accomplish the same thing with just a camera and some software. Margins tend to be more important than quality. I'm not saying that's right, its just what tends to happen
Isn't that already happening with Tesla?
Happened awhile ago. It was and is still a bad idea IMO
That sensor array is fuckin sweet. If I'm going to trust a car to drive me, I want it to have laser beam eyes that see through pitch blackness and blizzard conditions.
You're the engineer, I'm just a pickup truck driving comedian, so I'm assuming that I've just accurately described a commercial-grade LiDAR array.
The LiDAR arrays are dropping very quickly in price - they're now low six figures. I anticipate they'll eventually make production, probably with fewer sensors, but sensors of equal quality. Probably sooner than most folks realize.
Next week at your local big box for the price of a DJI drone