Why Is Everyone So Sure Robotaxis Will Actually Make Roads Safer?

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