My First Robo-Car Ride !

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Thanks Jim!!

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Uh-oh! Everyone best keep your eyes open for antics as the use of these Tesla Robo Taxi's spreads...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tesla-rob...202133112.html

[Ryan Gallagher]

Austin now has a 2nd operating company, Zoox, which appears to be Amazon’s effort in this space.

Although unsure what app to hail one in, might still be street testing.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Well that’s dumb. Unlike in SF, in Austin you can only get Waymo rides via the uber app, and it’s a crapshoot if you get one, there is a preference to tick saying you’d like more driverless vehicles, but you can’t force it. That and they use the same rates as the driver vehicles!!!

Just more money in Uber’s pockets, I think I’ll continue to support human divers until there is real savings involved.

Only discovered this when I installed Waymo one app and it directed me to the Austin partner Uber app instead.

[Lyle Romer]

Autonomous cars are definitely the future but all of them will definitely have to go through growing pains (hopefully without fatalities) and further training. Highway driving is relatively simple but once you get to suburban and city driving there are hundreds of variables to account for.

It will be decades before we get to an autonomous utopia with all vehicles communicating with each other. When that time arrives, almost all accidents can be eliminated. There will still be a few when there is some kind of a mechanical failure like a loss of breaking or something like that.

Whether Tesla's 100% camera based approach will work out is unknown at this time. Theoretically, if the AI driver is advanced enough it should work. Humans can drive with only 2 eyes and we can differentiate objects from shadows. Powerful AI should be able to replicate that ability eventually but the technology might not be ready yet.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Personally I'm of the camp that motor vehicles only transporting 1 person is part of the original problem. No amount of automation is going to solve the fundamental congestion and quality of life problem that Amercan car-centric cities suffer from. The answer is less cars, not just less drivers. But I digress...

Once they start letting driverless ride hailing vehicles start picking up more than fair at a time because of route similarities, I'll give them a bit of a pass. But that would be a "sky is falling" moment for their current customer base.

Most rideshare services lean into a "wait and save" model for the cheaper tiers... they need a "share and save" tier below that too. Airport runs would be a great place to beta-test it... more predictable opportunity to stack fares in a single ride.

[Frank Cox]

Everyone looks at transportation issues from an urban perspective. Rural areas have entirely different circumstances but they get little attention.