You are saying that the cost to develop successful self-driving cars is 1-50 quadrillion dollars using an optimistic estimate of rail costs. That does not seem reasonable. Perhaps 200 billion across all companies have been invested in self-driving cars so far (I.e., Waymo is just a fraction of that.)
Self-driving cars are going to produce >$100B/year in value (probably at least $1T/year worldwide). They are going to cost a lot more than $5B to develop. Google has >$80B of cash on hand and Apple has >$230B. Those companies would spend $5B to develop self-driving cars in a heartbeat if they could, but they can't.
As individuals we are never going to own self-driving cars.
If buying the hardware is even an option to begin with, there's going to be a hefty fee to subscribe to the required 'cloud based' self-driving service.
(And there's certainly no way individuals/small businesses will be able to buy such a car and run a self-driving taxi service profitably when a megacorporation could have all the income from all the cars)
The difference is that we can look at other R+D of technologies (which cost less than that), the rate of autonomous piloting in drones and cars, and have reasonable idea that $100B-$1T over a decade will allow us to reach the level of freeway driving for trucks.
You’re not counting the true cost here. It’s impossible to count.
The true cost would have to entail proportions of the human, social, monetary, and environmental investments in self-driving technology. Manufacturing labor abuse in China and other low-wage hardware sources, the labor issues at Tesla, the abuse scandals, including side effects and aftermath at Uber, techsploitation at large, raising rents in tech hub cities like Bay Area, SF, NYC, associated family separations, including homelessness and related social program ceilings, taxes not paid by these giant corporations fueling the “innovation”, privacy invasions by Google, of which the extents will never be known.
It’s amazing how limited tech workers tend to be when it comes to performing systemic analysis at the societal level.
At the end of the day, millions of people would have more security and stability and happiness in their lives without this pace of technological discovery. At the end of the day, there are some things that should take a higher priority. I’ll assert mutual dignity is one of them.
Successful roll-out of self-driving cars ought to pay for one or two. Even if they gave away the software, they could probably make billions per year from licensing content like maps and streetviews or the patent portfolio. Or license the software for a few bucks or a few hundred bucks per car. At $100 per car that would be on the order of $10B. And think of all that ad revenue from commuters who dont have to watch the road.
There is no way you can justify the expense of development unless it is the plan. You can't make that much money selling self-driving as a very expensive (and finicky) option. Ride-sharing puts cars on the road, rolls them out regionally, and maximizes the utilization.
Initial investment is incredible. Just look at how much money and time has already been spent on trying to implement self-driving capabilities and we aren't close yet.
But once the technology is developed and available the cost will probably be pretty low. A couple of sensors and processing. I feel like maintenance cost will likely be smaller since a self driving car in theory at least can detect any issue much quicker then a human.
This is all speculation of course but human drivers are very expensive. Quick googling says about 20k to 45k per year for a truck driver. Even if initial investment in self driving technology costs 50k per unit more it's still incredibly advantageous to do so.
One guess: the hardware costs for self driving is tiny relatively, and will go towards zero.
But in the ideal case, owning the self-driving transportation network in most major cities, having a strong network effects(assuming shared rides+brand+other stuff) and selling rides, is worth hundreds of billions or more.
And not sharing tech, especially possibly superior tech is a good strategic move.
People with expensive cars don't drunk drive? Seriously?
Even if that were true, I have a hard time imagining that the cost of self driving packages won't continue to decrease until it's included in literally every new car. Just a matter of time (assuming someone is able to make a fully working version).
I think you're grossly underestimating the cost of doing that to a fleet of vehicles sold with the promise of being self driving capable with the hardware package on board.
What are the incentives, though? There’s not actually that much money to be made here, despite dreams of self driving taxis (something that could never be possible). Maybe in the trucking industry, but the tech doesn’t exist and is nowhere close to being reliable enough consistently enough.
Self driving is a safety feature that will save lives. Charging a subscription fee or a fee per hour will cost lives and isn't worth whatever profits they might make.
reply