[batmansmk]

Having to be remotely operated every 2.5 to 5 miles seem to defeat most of the economics of self driving cars.

Back of the napkin math, cars drive at an average of 18mph in cities, so every 10-20min. Let’s assume it takes over for 1min, and that you need remote drivers not too far for ping purposes, so at the same hourly rate. To guarantee you’ll be able to take over all demands immediately, due to the birthday paradox, you end up needing like 30 drivers for 100 vehicles? It’s not that incredible of a tech…

[joshjob42]

Where do you get 30 drivers per 100 vehicles from?

Let's model it as every takeover is 1 min, and vehicles need help 5% of minutes. Then you'd model the # of vehicles needing help in any given minute as a binomial distribution with p=0.05 and N=100, and you find you get 99.99% of the time you need less than 15 drivers per 100 vehicles. By 20 drivers, you cover all but 2e-8 of the time (or once per century).

But that's a bit misleading. It's a small-size effect. With 10k cars, you get cover all but 4e-6 of all minute periods with just 600 drivers (0.06 per car).

By 100k cars, you have 44 9s of reliability with 0.06 drivers per car.

There's some more complicated things that arise since probably the distribution of how long vehicles need help will be Poisson distributed (with an average of 1min) most likley, etc. But the point will stand, for large fleets you only need a modest margin over the average rate to get effectively complete coverage under normal conditions. It would only be in really extreme situations, like a hurricane messing up badly a lot of the Eastern seaboard or something, that you'd maybe run into issues (which, admittedly, is a real potential problem).

[cheriot]

Wages can fall off a cliff within modest distances. To use unemployment rate as a proxy for driver pay, Bakersfield, CA 7.5% and San Francisco, CA 3.5%. Go a little farther to Los Vegas 5.7% and one can avoid California's minimum wage.

[batmansmk]

The current taxi market is already structured that way: drivers in SF aren’t from SF. So no competitive advantage there, or not significant enough to change the game yet.

[pj_mukh]

Just FYI, Most autonomous car companies have backup drivers.

Its the disengagement rate that drives the number of operators you need per driver and therefore the economics. Theoretically, this rate should be improving steadily at all these companies.

Cruise seems to have a bad disengagement rate right now (<5miles seems really low), but methinks nytimes might be partaking in some obfuscation here.

Waymo's should be much better already. Curious by how much though.

[SkyPuncher]

> you end up needing like 30 drivers for 100 vehicles?

What? That's literally insane compared to the current standard of 100 drivers for 100 vehicles. They're literally reducing 70% of the labor cost compared to uber/lyft/etc.

It's pretty reasonable to expect that this will improve over time as well. This is exactly how you want a startup to roll out a new technology.

* Build a pretty good base implementation

* Do things that don't scale for the edge cases

* Reduce the things that don't scale over time

Even if they can only improve this to 10 for 100, that's still a massive improvement.

In my area, a small, rural city, this would literally be a game changer. Right now, there's a single Uber within 15 minutes - if I'm lucky. Meanwhile, cruise could drop a handful of car in town, let them idle (at no cost), then pay a driver for a few minutes of intervention every now and then.

This also enables intercity transit. Most of that is highway miles. Outside of the start and end, those are easy and predictable. You could have dozens/hundreds of miles where Cruise can compete with the cost of privately owned vehicles.

Lastly, this makes it feasible for Cruise to reposition cars between cities without huge costs. Currently, that's basically impossible. Any human driven car needs to offer the driver a ride in the opposite direction.

[spondylosaurus]

Yeah, the driver-to-passenger ratio is still way less efficient than a train or even a bus.

[code_runner]

Infrastructure cost could be considered as well. Like it or not but not every part of the world has the same desire nor infrastructure for mass public transport.

Not saying it’s right or wrong, just stating the other half of the equation