This is a super interesting article. Here are some interesting bits.
- Miles driven per needed human intervention 2017, Waymo: ~5700; GM: ~1300; Nissan: ~250, everyone else sucks at around 100.
- Tesla is not talked about at all, surprising considering Elon is constantly saying it's around the corner.
- Waymo has an Uber / Lyft esque app that the customers testing it's pilot program are using.
- Waymo's showing (not charging) prices similar to Lyft and Uber ($1.70/mile). An analyst thinks without paid drivers they could go as low as 70¢/mile, and only 35¢/mile by 2020.
- Waymo is only testing is places with perfect weather.
- Waymo plans on launching their first location for a ride hailing service by the end of 2018.
Driving in an urban environment is almost nothing like driving in the suburbs.
These numbers not comparable for many reasons:
- GM Cruise drives in high density San Francisco (city roads), while Waymo drives in low density Mountain View / Phoenix (incl. highways). [1]
- GM Cruise is not optimizing to reduce driver interventions, as that can actually decrease safety (ie. drivers delaying the intervention)
I don't think Tesla is really considered a serious competitor in the self driving car industry by anyone besides Tesla.
Which is probably fortunate for all the other players since all of the Autopilot issues get attributed mainly to Tesla rather than to self driving cars.
As I understand it, the reason Tesla isn't in those stats is because they come from a California mandate for certain kinds of self driving car tests, and Tesla isn't doing those kinds of tests. (disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to any of this, just follow SDC stuff as a hobby)
I wonder how low these self driving cars have to go price per mile to compete with fully mature public transportation systems.
For example, since I live in the Bay Area, the cost of going from Berkeley to Walnut Creek via Bart is around $4 for 16 miles. This would correspond to $0.25 per mile to the $0.35 estimate in the article.
Maybe I’m doing the wrong comparison: cars like these won’t be competing with rail lines but with last mile types like public buses. That would make more sense as I pay around $3 to go 2 miles in my city.
Another thought: the city official, mentioned in the article, seemed enthusiastic in using cars for public transportation. It kind of reminds me of advent of cars when cities focused on building roads and highways instead of investing in public transportation systems. Perhaps the self driving aspect can be transferred to be used on busses? I don’t know whether cost of busses result mainly from labor, like cars, or some other factor.
Most of your bullet points are interesting and relevant. I have to take issue with the last one though.
In any discussion of self-driving cars I've learned to completely and totally ignore all statements of the kind "X plans to launch Y at Z point in the future"
So I've heard that weather was not compatible with driverless vehicles.
However I haven't seen what happens when they are in heavy snow or rain.
And, I'm sure I'm misunderstanding the problem but couldn't electric cars with a motor per wheel be able to detect a slipping or loss of traction in an individual tire and slow it down?
My sister, 29, just got approved for the Waymo program in Phoenix. She has epilepsy and hasn’t driven in 10 years since she had a seizure while driving on the freeway and crashed. Miraculously she had no serious injuries.
We sarcastically joke about how Silicon Valley is making the world a better place, oftentimes for privledged individuals but Waymo is completely changing her life.
One of the coolest jaw dropping examples of this I ran across not long ago, is Aira (https://aira.io/ - I have no affiliation with the company). First we had Google Glass, with the popularly derided "glassholes" (not a term I approve of using mind you, however it was persistently thrown about in media and on tech forums).
I've known a few people that lost their eyesight. What services like Aira could accomplish is nothing short of life changing for the blind. And it, in part, started out from a concept that was mocked as being representative of supposed obnoxious Silicon Valley priviliged types.
Well, Waymo is doing it right, and everybody else is nowhere.
The next big jump will be when the next-generation LIDARs come out. All solid state, and much cheaper. Industry analysts say 2020 for that.[1] They can be built now, but nobody is prepared to order enough of them yet. Continental, the big European auto parts company, is probably in the lead. (Quanergy keeps announcing, but try to order what they announced in 2016.)
Has anyone tried putting LIDAR in a human-driven car? It seems like a heads-up display with a 3D image of your surroundings would improve safety even for human drivers (plus it would look really cool).
Full disclosure: I work for one of Google's major competitors in this space.
> Well, Waymo is doing it right, and everybody else is nowhere.
... has been said for >5 years and looks ever less true as time passes. Remember when Google was supposed to introduce a finished fully automated driving system in 2017? Google had a very impressive technology demonstrator back in 2012, but they have had endless trouble turning that into a viable product. Turns out "let's just throw ridiculous hardware at the problem" leads to issues when you have to build millions of the thing. Even if there system were perfect already, which it isn't, it is not fit for integration into production vehicles. That's why Google has had very little success trying to sell their system to car manufacturers.
Meanwhile, their competitors are progressing along the "bottom-up" path to full automation quite rapidly. Many basic driving tasks are essentially solved already and will filter down to production vehicles over the next few years. I can't know where exactly Google is right now and obviously I can't state where we are, but I fully expect that the different paths to full automation will converge in a few years. Several companies will have systems that are "good enough" for 90% of common driving use cases. Whether Google's system is at that stage already is unknowable, though their testing seems to indicate that it is not. But if it is, Google are still in a race to "miniaturize" it into a viable product before the competing (already viable) products reach the "good enough" level of performance.
This is why cities are gonna have to regulate the hell out of autonomous vehicles to reduce congestion.
The induced demand from affordable autonomous cars is going to be incredible, as the set of available drivers expands to include those below 16, the elderly currently unable to drive, and the unlicensed.
If everyone starts sending their kid to school via their own autonomous car its going to be a disaster.
A much better idea that doesn't run into issues of limited road space is of course is autonomous public transit.
Hopefully this regulation materializes as a regulation on personal transit, rather than a regulation on autonomous transit. There's no reason a self-driving car with one occupant is any less efficient than a manually-driven car with one occupant.
If everybody starts sending their kid to school in a private waymo it's going to be a disaster, but right now everybody drives themselves to work in a private car and it already is a disaster.
The Phoenix public transport director who hopes that waymo can bring people to the high-capacity bus lines and the lrt has the right idea. If the waymo (or Uber, or Lyft) app can integrate with public transit networks, that's the ideal solution. I look forward to a day where you open your ride-hailing app and you see options for "Uber all the way: $14, 18 minutes journey, pickup in 5 minutes" or "Uber+bus, $10, 20 minutes journey, pickup in 10 minutes" where the Uber+bus option syncs with the bus schedules and schedules your pickup with just enough time to catch a bus and schedules a pickup at the end of the bus segment of the journey.
If we leave it up to the free market to decide how they should be deployed and regulated it'll be a shitshow, no doubt about that. Of course, our roads are already a shitshow, because we let the car industry decide how we should design our cities, and then enshrined the resulting dysfunctions in law.
Waymo at least is signalling responsible deployment, they announced today a partnership with the Phoenix Valley transit authority to help encourage greater transit use.
One valid point they made was that while mass transit is great in high demand areas and along major transit corridors, out on the feeder routed the suburban sprawl it isn't so effective. Service is infrequent and off-peak busses run mostly empty. Robotaxis will be great for getting suburbanites from their homes to major transit hubs.
I'm not sure how much difference there will be between autonomous ride hailing and autonomous public transit.
Surely you'll have "Uber Pool" for these services, basically from the outset. Some may pay a premium to give their kids a safe ride alone, etc. etc., but pooling rides makes complete sense.
Also, in my experience, school busses are somewhat a thing of the past. Parents line up for blocks dropping kids off, acting as individual chauffeurs.
I agree it will increase trip demand, but it could also easily decrease demand for parking in busy areas.
Long-term, it's easy to imagine that autonomous vehicles could provide much higher passenger throughput for a given road-area. Without human drivers to worry about, they only need narrow lanes, could talk to each other and draft, etc.
It seems like such a service could fairly easily coordinate car and van pools during high-traffic times? Private and public transportation might not be all that different in the end.
look I always get downvoted for saying mandatory school busses for k-12. But seriously its summer now, and theres no traffic in my Bay Area town. you can go where ever you need to in the mornings.
> gonna have to regulate the hell out of autonomous vehicles to reduce congestion
They could just have some sort of road pricing - The cars send their movements to a government server and it sends a bill based on so much per mile or similar. You could do the same with Ubers - it just really needs an app to transmit the movements and the pricing could vary with time and congestion.
> A much better idea that doesn't run into issues of limited road space is of course is autonomous public transit.
I suspect you could argue that for metros and trains it already is largely automated. Surely the scheduling is at the very least supported by computer algorithms, or perhaps even automatically planned and then only manually overridden by human elements as needed?
>Trucking: Waymo has outfitted several Peterbilt Class 8 semi trucks with autonomous packages. The hardware is exactly the same as what’s used on its Pacifica minivans, and Krafcik says the software is 95 percent similar
Is that 5% the 5% that lets them pick routes that don't include under-height structures , stupidly sharp turns, highly congested areas, or other places one generally prefers to not be driving something larger than a panel van?
If so I highly look forward to the eventual (and already severely overdue considering how trivial the problem is) release of this feature to their consumer facing maps product.
Yes, I'm kind of annoyed that it's 2018 and I can't just check a checkbox that says "avoid known under-height structures"
>The experience of riding in a Waymo is surprisingly mundane. The robotaxi drives like a very careful human
I would really like to know how careful they mean. There's a fine line between a good chauffeur for grandma and being so timid that anyone capable of driving themselves would be very frustrated with its performance and people would honk or make obscene gestures at you regularly
>While making a left turn in a large multi-lane intersection, the car signals and creeps forward before accelerating into the turn. Waymo drives conservatively, to be sure, but the robots aren’t cowards. Gone are the days where two self-driving cars facing each other in a parking lot might freeze up from an overabundance of politeness:
> I would really like to know how careful they mean.
Most of the Waymo vehicles i saw on the street around Mountain View were pretty timid. Not enough that I needed to honk, but they basically were sending out engraved invitations to pull in front of them. Most recent example, in rush hour, at ~ 5 - 10 mph, maintaining 3 car lengths following distance, signaling for an offramp maybe 10 car lengths before the painted exit lane opened, and then following the traffic until the painted lane started -- but the shoulder was wide and the exit lane was clear. Most human drivers in this situation would either not signal until they were just about to turn, and would probably have driven on the shoulder outside the lines for some of the way, given the wide shoulder and clear exit lane.
I would think that vehicle height is so rarely an issue that consumers face that they don't bother integrating it for the free product, because instead that data can be sold as part of a commercial maps offering to the trucking companies who need that information to do business.
How about a checkbox to avoid tunnels? Maybe that won't matter, hopefully there aren't too many autonomous Hazardous Materials trucks rolling around full of explosives.
> while a longer 11.3-mile trip lists a cost of $19.15. That’s similar to the cost of a ride from Uber Technologies Inc. or Lyft Inc., and cheaper than a local taxi.
I’m really curious to learn more about the economics of this price. My understanding is that the lyft/uber pricing is subsidized. If Waymo can do the same but at a profit, then that will make them hugely competitive.
This might be a dumb question, but are there any negative impacts of all these LiDAR components with our eyes? I feel like I see all the excitement (and I'm excited too) but has there been any studies on the effects of these laser sensors?
I have just read a little bit of information regarding the legal side of self-driving cars at https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accid.... I think the most important thing that car companies and lawmakers should think seriously is the regulation. We all know that we would never completely avoid accidents on the roads, so fixed regulation is the most important thing when there are many accidents with these robot cars involved.
The pricing is way too high. The price should be compared to a car sharing program, not with a taxi service.
The trip to school for my kid would cost, when using a car from a car sharing program around 4€. This is quite a difference to the mentioned $19. Even DriveNow, which is maybe the most expensive car sharing service in Germany, we are talking about maybe 9€.
The Jacksons, who Waymo made available for this story, have largely ditched their own cars and now use self-driving vehicles to go almost everywhere within the 100 square-mile operating area: track practice, grocery shopping, movies, the train station.
All rides are free for volunteers, but the Waymo app recently started to show hypothetical prices.
A Waymo spokesperson says the placeholder price is a way to solicit feedback from volunteers and “does not reflect the various pricing models under consideration.” It’s certainly got the Jackson family wondering how the service they’ve come to rely on will soon fit into their lives.
I am assuming no one promised them free rides for life. How easy it is to become dependent on something "free" and not think about what it might cost in the future when you can no longer live without it.
For my next job I plan on going full Uber + public transit for transport. Uber to the bus terminal and take a nice relaxed bus ride to downtown Seattle dropping me off directly next to my job. I did the math and at 8$ per ride my monthly expense should be 8$ * twice per day * 20 days per months = $320, well below the cost of ownership for a vehicle.
Maybe they thought about it and came to the conclusion it's worth it. In my case it's surplus, not a cost.
>> ... to convince this 17-year-old to put off an American rite of passage: getting her driver’s license. As Kyla puts it, “What’s the point?”
Get the license. Driverless tech or not, a driver's has use for all sorts of things. A 17yo looking for a job?
Get it and don't use it. Don't wait until you are in your 20s and you loose out on an opportunity for or at work because you don't have a valid DL. Same too for passports.
The pricing quoted in the article seems way too high. Comparable price to an Uber or Lyft ride? People on the fench about autonomous vehicles are going to pick human drivers unless the price per mile drops considerably.
[+] [-] pnloyd|7 years ago|reply
- Miles driven per needed human intervention 2017, Waymo: ~5700; GM: ~1300; Nissan: ~250, everyone else sucks at around 100.
- Tesla is not talked about at all, surprising considering Elon is constantly saying it's around the corner.
- Waymo has an Uber / Lyft esque app that the customers testing it's pilot program are using.
- Waymo's showing (not charging) prices similar to Lyft and Uber ($1.70/mile). An analyst thinks without paid drivers they could go as low as 70¢/mile, and only 35¢/mile by 2020.
- Waymo is only testing is places with perfect weather.
- Waymo plans on launching their first location for a ride hailing service by the end of 2018.
[+] [-] tintor|7 years ago|reply
Driving in an urban environment is almost nothing like driving in the suburbs.
These numbers not comparable for many reasons: - GM Cruise drives in high density San Francisco (city roads), while Waymo drives in low density Mountain View / Phoenix (incl. highways). [1] - GM Cruise is not optimizing to reduce driver interventions, as that can actually decrease safety (ie. drivers delaying the intervention)
I work at GM Cruise.
[1] https://medium.com/kylevogt/why-testing-self-driving-cars-in...
[+] [-] pythonaut_16|7 years ago|reply
Which is probably fortunate for all the other players since all of the Autopilot issues get attributed mainly to Tesla rather than to self driving cars.
[+] [-] rictic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QML|7 years ago|reply
For example, since I live in the Bay Area, the cost of going from Berkeley to Walnut Creek via Bart is around $4 for 16 miles. This would correspond to $0.25 per mile to the $0.35 estimate in the article.
Maybe I’m doing the wrong comparison: cars like these won’t be competing with rail lines but with last mile types like public buses. That would make more sense as I pay around $3 to go 2 miles in my city.
Another thought: the city official, mentioned in the article, seemed enthusiastic in using cars for public transportation. It kind of reminds me of advent of cars when cities focused on building roads and highways instead of investing in public transportation systems. Perhaps the self driving aspect can be transferred to be used on busses? I don’t know whether cost of busses result mainly from labor, like cars, or some other factor.
[+] [-] tim333|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CPLX|7 years ago|reply
In any discussion of self-driving cars I've learned to completely and totally ignore all statements of the kind "X plans to launch Y at Z point in the future"
[+] [-] googlemyfomato|7 years ago|reply
However I haven't seen what happens when they are in heavy snow or rain.
And, I'm sure I'm misunderstanding the problem but couldn't electric cars with a motor per wheel be able to detect a slipping or loss of traction in an individual tire and slow it down?
[+] [-] seancoleman|7 years ago|reply
We sarcastically joke about how Silicon Valley is making the world a better place, oftentimes for privledged individuals but Waymo is completely changing her life.
[+] [-] adventured|7 years ago|reply
I've known a few people that lost their eyesight. What services like Aira could accomplish is nothing short of life changing for the blind. And it, in part, started out from a concept that was mocked as being representative of supposed obnoxious Silicon Valley priviliged types.
[+] [-] ageek123|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
The next big jump will be when the next-generation LIDARs come out. All solid state, and much cheaper. Industry analysts say 2020 for that.[1] They can be built now, but nobody is prepared to order enough of them yet. Continental, the big European auto parts company, is probably in the lead. (Quanergy keeps announcing, but try to order what they announced in 2016.)
[1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-and-china-in...
[+] [-] dev_dull|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skgoa|7 years ago|reply
> Well, Waymo is doing it right, and everybody else is nowhere.
... has been said for >5 years and looks ever less true as time passes. Remember when Google was supposed to introduce a finished fully automated driving system in 2017? Google had a very impressive technology demonstrator back in 2012, but they have had endless trouble turning that into a viable product. Turns out "let's just throw ridiculous hardware at the problem" leads to issues when you have to build millions of the thing. Even if there system were perfect already, which it isn't, it is not fit for integration into production vehicles. That's why Google has had very little success trying to sell their system to car manufacturers.
Meanwhile, their competitors are progressing along the "bottom-up" path to full automation quite rapidly. Many basic driving tasks are essentially solved already and will filter down to production vehicles over the next few years. I can't know where exactly Google is right now and obviously I can't state where we are, but I fully expect that the different paths to full automation will converge in a few years. Several companies will have systems that are "good enough" for 90% of common driving use cases. Whether Google's system is at that stage already is unknowable, though their testing seems to indicate that it is not. But if it is, Google are still in a race to "miniaturize" it into a viable product before the competing (already viable) products reach the "good enough" level of performance.
[+] [-] gok|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|7 years ago|reply
The induced demand from affordable autonomous cars is going to be incredible, as the set of available drivers expands to include those below 16, the elderly currently unable to drive, and the unlicensed.
If everyone starts sending their kid to school via their own autonomous car its going to be a disaster.
A much better idea that doesn't run into issues of limited road space is of course is autonomous public transit.
[+] [-] notatoad|7 years ago|reply
If everybody starts sending their kid to school in a private waymo it's going to be a disaster, but right now everybody drives themselves to work in a private car and it already is a disaster.
The Phoenix public transport director who hopes that waymo can bring people to the high-capacity bus lines and the lrt has the right idea. If the waymo (or Uber, or Lyft) app can integrate with public transit networks, that's the ideal solution. I look forward to a day where you open your ride-hailing app and you see options for "Uber all the way: $14, 18 minutes journey, pickup in 5 minutes" or "Uber+bus, $10, 20 minutes journey, pickup in 10 minutes" where the Uber+bus option syncs with the bus schedules and schedules your pickup with just enough time to catch a bus and schedules a pickup at the end of the bus segment of the journey.
[+] [-] Fricken|7 years ago|reply
Waymo at least is signalling responsible deployment, they announced today a partnership with the Phoenix Valley transit authority to help encourage greater transit use.
One valid point they made was that while mass transit is great in high demand areas and along major transit corridors, out on the feeder routed the suburban sprawl it isn't so effective. Service is infrequent and off-peak busses run mostly empty. Robotaxis will be great for getting suburbanites from their homes to major transit hubs.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/07/waymo-pilot-program-sho...
[+] [-] Obi_Juan_Kenobi|7 years ago|reply
Surely you'll have "Uber Pool" for these services, basically from the outset. Some may pay a premium to give their kids a safe ride alone, etc. etc., but pooling rides makes complete sense.
Also, in my experience, school busses are somewhat a thing of the past. Parents line up for blocks dropping kids off, acting as individual chauffeurs.
I agree it will increase trip demand, but it could also easily decrease demand for parking in busy areas.
Long-term, it's easy to imagine that autonomous vehicles could provide much higher passenger throughput for a given road-area. Without human drivers to worry about, they only need narrow lanes, could talk to each other and draft, etc.
[+] [-] skybrian|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roflchoppa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|7 years ago|reply
The solution to congestion is entirely independent of who's driving though: Road Pricing!
[+] [-] tim333|7 years ago|reply
They could just have some sort of road pricing - The cars send their movements to a government server and it sends a bill based on so much per mile or similar. You could do the same with Ubers - it just really needs an app to transmit the movements and the pricing could vary with time and congestion.
[+] [-] vanderZwan|7 years ago|reply
I suspect you could argue that for metros and trains it already is largely automated. Surely the scheduling is at the very least supported by computer algorithms, or perhaps even automatically planned and then only manually overridden by human elements as needed?
[+] [-] abecedarius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdhess|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oska|7 years ago|reply
> “Kids walk and it halts,” she says. “It’s so polite. It's like, ‘Oh sorry.’ It’s not rude enough.”
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|7 years ago|reply
Is that 5% the 5% that lets them pick routes that don't include under-height structures , stupidly sharp turns, highly congested areas, or other places one generally prefers to not be driving something larger than a panel van?
If so I highly look forward to the eventual (and already severely overdue considering how trivial the problem is) release of this feature to their consumer facing maps product.
Yes, I'm kind of annoyed that it's 2018 and I can't just check a checkbox that says "avoid known under-height structures"
>The experience of riding in a Waymo is surprisingly mundane. The robotaxi drives like a very careful human
I would really like to know how careful they mean. There's a fine line between a good chauffeur for grandma and being so timid that anyone capable of driving themselves would be very frustrated with its performance and people would honk or make obscene gestures at you regularly
[+] [-] pnloyd|7 years ago|reply
>While making a left turn in a large multi-lane intersection, the car signals and creeps forward before accelerating into the turn. Waymo drives conservatively, to be sure, but the robots aren’t cowards. Gone are the days where two self-driving cars facing each other in a parking lot might freeze up from an overabundance of politeness:
[+] [-] oh_sigh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toast0|7 years ago|reply
Most of the Waymo vehicles i saw on the street around Mountain View were pretty timid. Not enough that I needed to honk, but they basically were sending out engraved invitations to pull in front of them. Most recent example, in rush hour, at ~ 5 - 10 mph, maintaining 3 car lengths following distance, signaling for an offramp maybe 10 car lengths before the painted exit lane opened, and then following the traffic until the painted lane started -- but the shoulder was wide and the exit lane was clear. Most human drivers in this situation would either not signal until they were just about to turn, and would probably have driven on the shoulder outside the lines for some of the way, given the wide shoulder and clear exit lane.
[+] [-] kingbirdy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twothamendment|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dev_dull|7 years ago|reply
I’m really curious to learn more about the economics of this price. My understanding is that the lyft/uber pricing is subsidized. If Waymo can do the same but at a profit, then that will make them hugely competitive.
[+] [-] CaliforniaKarl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analogmemory|7 years ago|reply
What happens when they are ubiquitous?
[+] [-] donclark|7 years ago|reply
Has anyone seen a roadmap that includes how other industries are affected(disrupted)?
Should we think hard about selling our cars now before they are de-valued or become more costly to drive?
Clean Disruption - Why Energy & Transportation will be Obsolete by 2030 - Oslo, March 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxryv2XrnqM&t=639smost
[+] [-] tonyquart|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CptMauli|7 years ago|reply
The trip to school for my kid would cost, when using a car from a car sharing program around 4€. This is quite a difference to the mentioned $19. Even DriveNow, which is maybe the most expensive car sharing service in Germany, we are talking about maybe 9€.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|7 years ago|reply
All rides are free for volunteers, but the Waymo app recently started to show hypothetical prices.
A Waymo spokesperson says the placeholder price is a way to solicit feedback from volunteers and “does not reflect the various pricing models under consideration.” It’s certainly got the Jackson family wondering how the service they’ve come to rely on will soon fit into their lives.
I am assuming no one promised them free rides for life. How easy it is to become dependent on something "free" and not think about what it might cost in the future when you can no longer live without it.
[+] [-] pnloyd|7 years ago|reply
Maybe they thought about it and came to the conclusion it's worth it. In my case it's surplus, not a cost.
[+] [-] yaseer|7 years ago|reply
Does anybody know if there is legislation around software testing when human life is at stake?
[+] [-] lawrenceyan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|7 years ago|reply
Get the license. Driverless tech or not, a driver's has use for all sorts of things. A 17yo looking for a job? Get it and don't use it. Don't wait until you are in your 20s and you loose out on an opportunity for or at work because you don't have a valid DL. Same too for passports.
[+] [-] puranjay|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cliffy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draw_down|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mrweasel|7 years ago|reply