I think eventually they’ll just make a car (like Zooks is) without all the messy crud (steering wheel etc) and with fixed, waterproof seats and such. It will be designed for automatic cleaned by driving into a depot and being hosed down.
This is going to be so awesome when I can't drive my car because I just used hand sanitizer. Or won't let me drive because i just cleaned the windows with window cleaner.
That’s a good idea, and I wonder if you could automate cleaning the cars? Not a full shampoo and detailing, but maybe a robot arm with brush and suction and ML vision?
Austin has a service called car2go where there are cars parked all over the city, and you can pick one up and drive it anywhere in the city. They have you indicate whether or not the car is clean when you get in.
Self driving cars would be even better at this - if the car is dirty, you could press a button, which would send it back to the repair place, and send you a new car.
Car2go and ReachNow cars are always clean, at least in Seattle (I think once I saw a wrapper in a side door). When you're paying by the minute there's not much time to make a mess.
This won't be a problem for self-driving cars because they're purely vaporware.
I think we'll see such self-driving taxi interiors optimized for staying clean and then ease of cleaning. At the limit, think like a stainless steel kitchen that can just be sprayed down. Or these sort of self-cleaning public bathrooms: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z81KtV9w5fo?feature=share
Self-cleaning public restrooms and sanitary units for hotel rooms have been around for decades. Why shouldn't the same technology be applicable to cars or why shouldn't a self-driving car be able to drive itself to the next car wash?
I imagine the cars all head to some centralized location for cleaning and whatever other maintenance. That probably makes cleaning a very economic, factory-like procedure. Beats something like Uber where drivers have to bring their cars to a car wash or whatever (although presumably the Uber drivers aren't being paid to wash the cars because they aren't employees, so that gives Uber a slight advantage).
Yeah. They would probably have to be cleaned pretty regularly.
It's terrible to think that people invent cars, then make them driverless, then make them come pick you up from anywhere when you whistle (or press a button on your phone) but the bottleneck that we can't solve is inconsiderate assholes leaving fish and chip rubbish in the back seat.
There's an aspect of this that I haven't seen mentioned. It seems trivial but I think it's got to be solved before pooled vehicles like this can work: cleaning the vehicles.
There's no incentive for the individual user to keep a shared vehicle clean. So what happens: squalor, or perhaps a new service industry of grooming self-driving vehicles?
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