Human behavior is somehow both complex and predictable. When the jackpot for a lottery goes up, more people buy tickets, which means the likelihood of splitting a pot reduces the overall expected value. In theory, then, you wouldn’t buy a ticket. But when the pot gets bigger, more people buy tickets.
Today’s Morning Dump is all about the way we bags o’ meat operate, or don’t. There’s a big piece out this week on the question of whether self-driving taxis are really safer and, even if they are, if human nature won’t end up making them more fatal. Affordability is a huge issue here in the United States, though in China, the issue is that cars are too affordable.
Designer Thomas Ingelnath designed some beautiful cars for Volvo, which helped them sell cars. So they made him head of the company’s EV brand. Did it work? It did not, so now Ingelnath is back at his old job.
Does the average person care about the World Endurance Championship? Unfortunately, I think the answer is “not so much.” Will that stop me from writing about the new Toyota? It will not.
Humans Always Want A Deus Ex Machina
As a break from economics books and old English lit, I’m reading The Expanse series. It’s easy, fun science fiction, and I recommend the books for anyone who suspects that living in space might not be easy or fun. There’s one little trick in the book to get over the distance problem in space, and it’s called an “Epstein Drive” which, in retrospect, they’d have probably named something else.
The rest of the books put the characters and, to some extent, the reader, through punishing and terrible efforts to achieve a goal without the benefit of a simple solution. If anyone gets lucky in these books, they end up paying a terrible price for that luck. The Latin name given to the originally Greek plot device wherein some bit of favorable chance or divine intervention solves a problem and neatly wraps up a story is deus ex machina, and there’s a way to look at self-driving cars as a solution to a big problem.
Maybe it’s better to say that self-driving cars are being used as a potential solution to a lot of problems, but the main one is that we’ve built most of our society around cars, and cars are kinda hard to drive, and people are not always great at driving them.
The most effective course would be to dramatically rework our transportation nodes and development in order to reduce reliance on automobiles. Plenty of countries have reduced road fatalities this way, although most of them are Nordic countries or, like, Liechtenstein.
This is going to be a lot harder in America. So, sure, robotaxis. Not everyone is great about sharing data, but Waymo does a ton of miles, and its own data (while not conclusive) shows that it’s probably doing better than humans in some situations. Robotaxis do weird things, but they have nothing on the strangeness humans can achieve behind the wheel.
There’s a long Bloomberg piece from David Zipper on this topic, and a lot of it is shrugging because, well, we don’t have enough good data yet, both because not everyone will release data, and because the data necessary to make complete conclusions is probably billions of miles. I think it’s correct to be skeptical that driverless cars are going to suddenly make our lives better, even if they’re better drivers, and some of it comes back to human behavior:
Robotaxis will also spend many miles deadheading, posing at least some risk to other road users even as they drive around empty (and potentially causing gridlock that slows everyone else on the street). If AVs become privately owned, they could be used on longer journeys that would have otherwise occurred on different modes — or not happen at all: Think daily multi-hour commutes to distant workplaces. (Or these cars might be empty, too, dispatched to perform ridehailing duty during their off hours.)
All this extra motion brings greater risks. If AVs are 20% safer than human drivers and expand total driving by 30%, total crashes would increase by 4%. (The effect would be higher still if people shift to AVs from transit, which is exceptionally safe.)
This is the standard that self-driven vehicles must meet to produce an overall reduction in crashes. Simply outperforming human-driven cars is not enough; they must do so to such an extent that they compensate for any added miles driven. But current AV safety analyses seldom take such network effects into account.
You know what’s safe? A train. Way fewer people die per trip in a train or subway car than in an automobile. I know there are some people afraid of taking public transit, but I usually feel much safer on public transit than I do dealing with other New York drivers.
If I lived in San Francisco, I’d get rid of my daily driver, get something fun, and just Waymo everywhere. Insurance, parking, fuel, and upkeep are all at nonsensical prices in SF, so my guess is that this would be the cheaper option. It might even encourage me to travel more, which is the last thing SF needs.
Waymos are great if you can access them, and it’s totally possible they’ll be a net benefit for society. I just don’t think we should take it for granted that this will be the case.
Western Carmakers Are Cutting Prices In China Even Though China’s Government Wishes They Wouldn’t
In the United States, our elected officials are concerned about car prices being too high. In China, appointed regulators are concerned about car prices going too low, and have asked automakers to stop slashing prices so much.
While it’s impressive how China has leapfrogged the rest of the world in EV development, it’s largely because the Chinese government at every level spent enormous resources to do so and created an overcapacity problem that means there are too many cars being made. The invisible hand of the market would have struggled to achieve what the very visible hand of the Chinese government did, but it comes at its own price.
Are Western automakers like BMW, GM, and Volkswagen going to stop cutting prices just because regulators asked them to? It doesn’t seem like it, and their reasoning, from Bloomberg via Automotive News China, is hilarious:
The price adjustments from BMW and some other brands are more about aligning recommended pricing to be closer to the final transaction price, which can be much lower after rounds of haggling at showrooms. The new prices aren’t lower than the actual transaction price at the dealer level last year, so that doesn’t count as a price war, said Yale Zhang, managing director of consultancy Automotive Foresight.
In principle, BMW’s price cut helps alleviate pressure on dealers resorting to further negotiation at the retail level, said Li Yanwei, an advisor to the China Automobile Dealers Association.
But it’s unclear how persuasive that logic will be when car buyers seek to drive a hard bargain in showrooms and dealers are anxious to move vehicles off their lots.
If the problem is that Chinese consumers, who have immense power in a market that’s overwhelmed with supply, negotiate too hard, then I don’t see how lowering the price is going to help.
Volvo Designer-Turned CEO Turns Back Into Volvo Designer
Oh boy. I will one day own a Polestar 1, even if by the time I can afford one, it’ll be too expensive to keep running. I’m a sucker for the design, which was originally penned by then-Volvo designer Thomas Ingenlath.
That became the first stand-alone car for Polestar, the now all-EV automaker owned by Volvo parent company Geely. Also, Ingenlath became the CEO, which is rare for a designer. Did it work? It did not. Polestar is not a success, although I’m not 100% sure anyone could have made Polestar work given the timing.
Either way, Ingenlath is back at Volvo as “Chief Design Officer” effective February 1st.
“I am delighted to be returning to Volvo Cars. Design is fundamental to what Volvo stands for. I look forward to working closely with the teams across the company, developing cars that are distinct, relevant and true to the Volvo brand.” says Thomas Ingenlath.
Bring back wagons, Thomas, and I’ll forgive you just about anything.
Check Out The Toyota TR010 Hybrid
Toyota has finally updated the look of its World Endurance Championship hypercar, the new TR010 Hybrid. If it looks familiar, it’s because it now shares a face with the upcoming GR GT supercar.
This is the way a prototype should look, in my estimation, and the fact that there’s a somewhat similar streetable version is just icing on the choux bun. Also, the team is now just “Toyota Racing” as opposed to “Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe a subsidiary of Toyota Gazoo Racing.”
Neat.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
Did I mention I got to see Jeff Tweedy and his large adult sons sing with Yo La Tengo during their Hannukkah residency? I did, and it was great. No one asked, but “Via Chicago” is one of the best Wilco songs, and “Summerteeth” is the album for me.
The Big Question
Have you taken a robotaxi before? Would you?
Top photo: Waymo/Imagine Entertainment
No. And maybe. I work in San Francisco and see Waymo and Zoox vehicles all the time, often totally empty looking, they must have “nests” near where I work. Also used to see Cruse vehicles before they shut that down, their parking lot was on my way to work.
The most oddball look is the purpose built Zoox vehicles that have no provision for a driver. They look somewhat like giant toasters on wheels.
Based on my experience living in New York City, the things you can do in the subway that you can’t do in a car include:
Reading a book
Performing in a mariachi band
Pole dancing
Closing you eyes for minutes at a time
Moving a queen size bed that probably wouldn’t fit in a car.
See people on their way to go surfing and skiing in the same car! (NYC surfers are a hardy lot)
Lots of celebrities if you are into that sort of thing.
Kinda wild that Toyota are dropping the GR from the top spec race car just as they’re building out the GR spec model range. Still, I hope it works better for them in WEC, was a bit painful watching them be so thoroughly mid last year.
“Why Is Everyone So Sure Robotaxis Will Actually Make Roads Safer?”
Because it is not very hard to improve on the average driving skills of humans.What self-driving cars really need is an open protocol to for example determine right of way issues or to drive in trains of cars going the same direction at the same speed to also add efficiency and they will not only be safer, they will also be faster.
The biggest challenge for FSD cars is dealing with the unpredictability of human-operated cars.
All the examples of situations where FSD cars should have a problem or need to make life or death decisions seems little more than hypotheticals similar to the trolley problem.
There will always be collisions, but they will be less likely to occur and will be less threatening to life. The real issue there is liability, Does it fall on the owner or the manufacturer? I lean to the latter.
Self-driving cars are an inherently bad idea. Driving is a social, communicative, behavior-predicting activity involving people both in and outside of vehicles.
It only makes sense when you think like one of the Singularity-obsessed Silly-con Valley technocrats who couldn’t recognize or value a social system even if the makers of The Simulation programmed them to do so.
The sort of people who see social media and equate each user with “neurons in a brain”, because they reduce other people to data while elevating themselves in some solipsistic delusion.
We need public transportation infrastructure so people aren’t all required to drive even if they’re completely uncomfortable with it.
We need revisions to roads with high rates of “human error”.
We need cars designed for visibility and with features like amber turn signals that reduce the ambiguity of communication for those situations where seeing something just a second sooner would prevent a crash.
We need shorter working hours and better public services to reduce the rates at which people are driving with extreme stress and exhaustion.
Have you watched the TV adaptation?
You mean of The Expanse? I haven’t but heard that it’s quite good.
Yes, it’s the best sci-fi TV series I’ve ever seen. It only covers the first six books, but that’s understandable with the time jump in book seven.
The last episode is labeled a season finale; I think they’ll make the rest when when the actors age enough (they won’t recast, most of them are producers too) and it meets up with aging CGI technology.
It was originally on SyFy but when it was cancelled during the third season, Amazon picked it up; apparently it was Bezos’s favorite show.
Dude, pretty cool that you were at that YLT show!
Maybe because most drivers are on their phones. It would be a great public service if we could get all of those people in a robotaxi, or public transportation. But no, because rights and all that good stuff.
Most of the people who think robotaxis will be safer heard the headlines about autonomous driving being x times safer than human driven cars and just took it at face value. They ignored or simply denied that those autonomous miles were almost exclusively in good weather conditions, limited to highways with clear markings, etc and were being compared to all human driven miles in all weather and road conditions.
“Have you taken a robotaxi before?”
No.
” Would you?”
Maybe… if I needed a taxicab… which isn’t often. I will usually drive myself, take public transit, ride my bicycle or walk before taking a taxi/robotaxi.
I predict the whole ‘robotaxi’ thing will NOT replace privately owned cars. It will just augment taxicabs and will also be useful in commercial applications.
But I don’t believe it will lead to the massive change in society that guys like Elon Musk claim.
What I’ve never really bought about the AV safety issues is WHY can’t they be as safe as a bus. They don’t need to better than the average driver. They need to drive like a unionized city bus driver or fuel delivery driver. Safe from the start.
Unfortunately I think once the tech is finalized we will go through a period where some driving agents are aggressive or will have that as an option. That’s going to suck. The Grok style driverless car is not a good outcome.
But overall I’m pretty hopeful we solve it. I think the driverless for higher part will have cost holding it back from dramatically increasing mileage.
And it would be pretty simple to mandate that driverless cars in personal service must have a passenger in the vehicle for any trips over a certain distance etc
I watched a driver try to go clockwise in a rotary cause the exit was closer. Hilarious. Fortunately it was a shopping center, so they just got honked and fingered at.
I recently had the joy of a Tesla slamming the brakes in entering a “merge” where that lane was the second of two.
They all suck. I am an equal opportunity critic
The deadheading and additional trip problem is super interesting and policies will need to be implemented to mitigate the additional congestion.
“Or worse, congestion-wise, have it circle around town until I’m ready?”
I can see something like that becoming a big enough problem that pisses enough people off that people/cars who do that will get vandalized.
I ride my bike around downtown LA all the time. Waymos give me more space than the average meatbag driver. I am pretty sure the computer driving is not drunk or texting or drunk texting. I have also never seen one almost kill me by going the wrong way on a one-way street, that has happened a few times with human drivers. They do stink pretty bad when they catch on fire, though.
Because they have seen far too many videos like these:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/
Your headline was a more interesting question: “Why Is Everyone So Sure Robotaxis Will Actually Make Roads Safer?”
Answer: Because about 80-90% of people are stupid sheep who will believe whatever they’re told to believe, and who don’t understand the need nor concept of empirical evidence, nor of science in general. They specifically believe in our billionaire overlords. I mean, they’re rich, so they must be smart about every area of technology, society, medicine, and generally everything, right?
/I might be a little cynical today.
There’s a razor-thin line between cynical and realistic these days.
All of what you said and robotaxis being safer can all be true
True.
Believing robotaxis make roads safer and Robotaxis actually making roads safer are two different things. I was commenting only on the former.
The rich are telling us they are fixing everything. Clearly they are smarter. /s
No, and no. I like ssimple answers for simple questions.
Thank you for that WEC news! I never got a chance to contribute anything to the earlier Big Q asking what we’d like to see more of on The Autopian this year. That was my only request – more WEC and IMSA updates. Seven days in and wish granted, very cool!
As to today’s Big Q, I haven’t been in a Waymo, Cybersack, robo-cage, Johnny Cab, or whatever the hell they’re calling vehicles transporting meat-sacks without one actually in command these days.
That said, I’d like to try one sometime in the near future. It seems like now might be the time to enjoy the experience before these things become ubiquitous little captive advertising boxes where the riders have to pay extra to let the sun shine in vs. having to watch yet another add for “Wraith Babes”.
Several years ago I had a demo ride in an early Waymo. It was from the San Jose convention centre to the university campus. It must have done that route hundreds of times already and knew it well. There was also barely any other traffic and an obligatory meatbag in the driver’s seat for safety.
It got me there safely and without incident, but honestly, I could have walked that distance in ten minutes easily. In fact I walked back. It was a nice day.
I’m surprised it even took you 10 minutes. The convention center is very close to SJSU.
We took one in SF a few months ago to go somewhere around a mile and a half. It was night time and there was a pretty decent amount of traffic. It picked us up at our hotel, slotting into the area reserved for those picking up/dropping off guests, got us to our destination, and picked out a good spot to let us off. It handled the traffic quite well, although nothing weirder than normal SF traffic occurred. I’d definitely take one again.
Bonus: We were with friends from the UK who got a huge kick out of watching the steering wheel move around by itself as we drove through the traffic (and so did I).
I live in Las Vegas, and it seems like every brand of AV are testing here. It’s not uncommon for me to see dozens of ’em every day. We have consistent weather, the roads are pretty good, and the “geofence” is pretty small. The local drivers of regular cars seem pretty good about interacting with them as well.