Brad Templeton, a self-driving car expert and technology commentator, writes about robocars, regulation, accidents, and other tech topics.
Commenters cite him as an expert on self-driving cars, quoting his critiques of regulation and his analysis of the Uber fatality and road wear.
"The idea that sharing rides is good has become almost axiomatic in transportation discussions. At conferences I have seen people declare that robocars are pointless if they are not shared -- ie. people who are not travelling together ride together in them. The positive of sharing is so axiomatic that public transit is seen almost as a good in and of itself, rather than a means towards real goals like energy efficiency, low cost, and higher road utilization.
It has has attained this status as revealed truth because it is indeed roughly true -- more people together in a vehicle done right will indeed use less energy per person and less road space. But the "done right" is very important as it is commonly done quite wrong.
As I have studied robocars, this has led me to the discovery that some of our old assumptions are wrong. In particular, more sharing is not always good, and the styles of sharing (including the vehicle sizes) of current public transportation are almost certainly not the optimum sizes, and that smaller vehicles are likely more optimal once we eliminate the need for drivers and move to a highly communicating world.
I believe there are strong arguments that while shared travel is beneficial, we actually have too much of it in most transit systems, and not enough in private cars. That the 'shared' future is one of van-sized group vehicles with a mixed fleet of more personal cars with 1-4…
Robot cars.
Car accidents cost over a million lives worldwide every year - 45,000 in the USA - and injure about 40 times that number. They are the leading cause of death for people aged 18-34. In the USA, the total cost of accidents is about $230 billion (1.7% of American GDP according to my calculations).
Robot cars will reduce car accidents, probably by a lot (human errors make up 93% of the causes of car accidents; 80% of accidents are due to human inattention). They'll make parking vastly more efficient (the car can drop you off and go and park in some optimal place). 50 billion person-hours are spent driving every year. In productive hours, that's worth a trillion dollars. Even if the hours aren't productive (watching TV or whatever), it's still worth a lot. Congestion would be reduced because robot cars don't need the follow space between cars that human reflexes require. It's like quadrupling the capacity of existing roads for free. Since the crash rate might be so low, cars might be ultralight rather than made of armor, so they'll use less energy and less metal.
I first became excited about robot cars from reading this essay:
http://ideas.4brad.com/robocars-are-future
See the following analysis by Brad Templeton, a SDC expert:
Road wear
There is strong potential to reduce the damage to roads (and thus the cost of maintaining them, which is immense and seriously in arrears) thanks to the robotruck. That's because heavy trucks and big buses cause almost all the road wear today. A surprising rule of thumb is that road damage goes up with the 4th power of the weight per axle. As such an 80,000lb truck with 34,000lb on two sets of 2 axles and 6,000lb on the front axle does around 2,000 times the road damage of a typical car! An interesting solution is now possible. With fully self-driving trucks (or platoons with nobody in the rear vehicle) you can have two half-weight trucks, which would do 1/8th the damage. 4 1/4 weight trucks would do roughly 1/16th the damage. This is a bit more expensive in fuel and truck wear, though you can get back some of it with platooning. The platoon can space out further on bridges to avoid stressing them.
https://ideas.4brad.com/otto-and-self-driving-trucks-what-do-they-mean
Self-driving car security is going to need a lot more than just following the latest buzzword in the security community and thinking that's enough.
But if the Cruise team is keen on buzzwords that they can then brag to the media about then maybe they should start using the "disconnected self-driving car" buzzword instead, and then implement about a dozen more of Brad Templeton's security recommendations for self-driving cars:
https://ideas.4brad.com/disconnected-car-right-security-plan-robocars
Then I might just start believing that GM (or any other self-driving) cars may end up with reasonable but still not bulletproof security in about a decade.
Great points regarding aligning precision/recall of AI systems with actual human supervision capabilities. One quibble: I hate seeing articles uncritically repeat Uber's line that a human driver could not have reacted in the same scenario. The dashboard cam footage they released does not accurately represent either human or car perceptual capabilities [1], and folks recreating the scene have shown that it doesn't even look like a good (or unaltered) example of what a dashcam should have perceived [2].
[1] https://ideas.4brad.com/it-certainly-looks-bad-uber
[2] https://dgit.com/residents-recreate-crash-uber-car-case-56161/
Why do you believe that? Which is to say, is this something you've worked out with numbers or is it a reflexive intuitive judgement? Because if it's the later you should recognize that your intuition is based on prices that include the labor of the person driving you which won't be included in a self driving car.
Brad Templeton did some math and thinks that self driving cars will be cheaper on a per-mile basis if you sometimes take smaller cars when you need to.
https://ideas.4brad.com/robotaxi-economics