Once you go full retard at RH....you fall off the cliff.Was going to move off Robinhood due to their server crash. The app is so sweet I decided to stay. It's scary to have 7 figures in an app mainly used by wsb autists.
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Once you go full retard at RH....you fall off the cliff.Was going to move off Robinhood due to their server crash. The app is so sweet I decided to stay. It's scary to have 7 figures in an app mainly used by wsb autists.
Or at least more than one car per family. This assumes that five minutes from placing the request to seeing the car is about the normal maximum. Anything longer than ten minutes makes for a very hard sell.If a robotaxi EV service costs $0.25 per mile (which I think is easily achievable with 1m mile EVs), how many people are going to bother with owning a car? ....especially young people?
I expect a big jump when the software that is being rewritten now gets into widespread use and has a few months under it's belt. No idea if that will be this year though.I see lots of talk about robotaxis etc suggesting level 5 autonomy. I’m one of those who use FSD all the time, even in the city and find it both useful and even adding a layer of safety. But interventions are common and constant. Incremental improvements are regular though with each software update...most of the time anyway. But I’m curious if people are expecting some kind of big jump soon or before the end of 2020 (less than 5 months away). At the present rate of incremental improvements I would think even a level three experience is years away. I’m finding it hard to believe a level 5 robotaxi capability is anywhere close with the existing sensors and software platform. Is there some kind of new platform coming that I have missed the news on?
Sorry. Not up on this autonomy stuff.
This analysis shows a distinct misunderstanding of exactly how many miles a Robo-taxi is capable of racking up working a typical urban environment. They would be doing well to average 22 mph (average speed throughout the day). That means in a 12 hour shift they could rack up 264 miles. These are urban miles which typically get the rated range or a bit better thanks to regen braking and slow average speeds.
In other words, no, they would not typically need to hit Superchargers multiple times in a 12+ hour day, once would likely cover them all day.
Alternatively, they could spend their idle time at a central taxi zone with multiple 48 amp connections available and one attendant to keep the windows clean, check for debris in the cabins and plug them in until they had another call.
While you raise a lot of objections, none of them would prevent autonomous EV's from crushing the cost structure of traditional ride hailing services. And that is what will make it a real winner.
Regarding the "facts not in evidence" claims on the hardware side, what I quoted was an excerpt. There is more explanation on why Tesla is at least 1-2 years ahead in terms of Hardware chip. ARK usually says more years than that, but based on the research I did, it seemed more like 1-2 years to me.
I don't want to incorrectly assume your background, and I know very little about North Carolina, but is there a possibility that your opinion is influenced by how you've always experienced transportation over roads?
More importantly, a robotaxi will be much cheaper than personal vehicle ownership, safer, and nobody will have to drive. It's simply a better product, and I don't see any reason why people wouldn't completely switch to robotaxis in urban areas, except for perhaps being afraid of change.
If the numbers are correct the cost to run an electric robotaxi will be around 10%-20% of current people driven taxis due to a reduction in fuel costs, salaries and maintenance. Suddenly when an individual is making their next vehicle purchase decision they will have an alternative that works for them financially - leading to far more people wanting to travel by robotaxi. Additionally, there are people that would use their cars more but don't because of the cost of fuel and time. Cheaper robotaxis will driver overall demand for transport miles.
I think the true answer lies somewhere between the most bullish predictions and your answer..
Robo-taxis will displace some public transport use, and some private car use.
In theory each Robo-taxi takes up to 10 private cars off the road...but the number of trips take in Robo-taxis will be much higher.
A large fleet size is needed when we consider customer's likely expectations:-
- A Robo-taxi arrives with in 5-10 minutes of being ordered
- If ordered 15 minutes in advance a Robo-taxi always arrives on time...
- The is close to zero chance 1. & 2. are not met.. perhaps a late Robo-taxi means a free trip.
Spiegel is so obsessed with Elon/Tesla that someone in his vicinity should take action and seek counseling for him. This is not healthy anymore. I used to laugh at it and draw the comparison coyote/roadrunner like in the cartoon. But some of his investors or next of kin should take action..
I keep hearing this name and i see his twitter profile says he is a Space photographer. I follow a lot of people in twitter and youtube and read up a lot of articles, but I haven't heard this name. Who is he and what is the important work he has done?I'm pretty sure it's for real. Elon is following the NSF guy who first tweeted about it, and he's met Austin Barnard, who's done a lot of photographing and stuff of the Boca Chica site.
Knowing our luck, the S&P will announce inclusion as of next Friday, but then add that they gave the heads-up to the funds immediately after the earnings call and they all acquired what they needed already.
Imagine how annoying that would be...
To make the donations list I am pretty sure your credit card has accepted the charge. To be spoofing Elon or anyone for ten grand would be a pretty expensive joke.I'm pretty sure it's for real. Elon is following the NSF guy who first tweeted about it, and he's met Austin Barnard, who's done a lot of photographing and stuff of the Boca Chica site.
Add they will be able to add 1M Robo-taxi capable cars to the fleet each year.
The operating cost of a million-mile robotaxi will literally be more than an order of magnitude lower than a human-driven ICE vehicle.
I was pointing out the idea that just a few hundred thousand taxis is not comparable to the potential for Robotaxi's.
My expectation is that the ten private cars that Robo-taxis will replace are mainly going to be older ICE cars with questionable maintenance. This will be a good thing.
I’m finding it hard to believe a level 5 robotaxi capability is anywhere close with the existing sensors and software platform. Is there some kind of new platform coming that I have missed the news on?
If as expected the cost of a ride drops to a dollar per mile or less then urban and even suburbanites will own fewer cars.
If the 2nd car is used for shopping, dr appointments, taking children to school etc. And instead of paying a monthly car payment and insurance payment they would spend less. $300 a month in car/insurance payments would equate to 300 miles a month. With no additional depreciation costs.
Talking about how many Uber/Lyft and taxi drivers is meaningless. As prices drop usage will increase.
Where will we find land for robo taxies wait? We will have empty parking lots because it is cheaper to take the robo taxi than drive.
I am wondering about the effect on commercial real estate as this additional land becomes empty and available for development.
Do you have a source for the 22 mph being typical? I'd imagine it's even slower in say NYC, but it's be a LOT higher here in NC where I live (and pretty much the entire country outside dense urban cities if we're gonna pretend robotaxis will replace lots of "normal" cars too not just in dense cities).
He lives in Brownsville and has taken a lot of photos of the SpaceX facilities and rockets. I dunno if it's that important, but he's pretty well-known in SpaceX fan-circles.I keep hearing this name and i see his twitter profile says he is a Space photographer. I follow a lot of people in twitter and youtube and read up a lot of articles, but I haven't heard this name. Who is he and what is the important work he has done?
In The ARK analyst who models robo-taxi revenues uses an average of 22 mph over the duration of the day - it's actually a very optimistic assumption if you have ever used the "Avg. Speed" function of a GPS while doing any kind of intermittent driving in an urban area. To achieve 22 mph you need to spend a significant amount of time above 50 mph to make up for all the stopping. In Mid-town Manhattan you can only expect 4.7 mph average (and this doesn't include any time spent parked at the curb).
I'm not sure why you doubt this
- the actual number for a robo-taxi in actual service will probably be a lot lower than 22 mph average in urban areas
And a robo-taxi will not be equally busy throughout the day, there will be peak periods and slack periods. These slack periods must be averaged in to get an average that represents the total miles travelled during a "shift". Which is what the point of this "average speed" exercise was about.
A few years ago Uber released Uber Movement, a traffic app designed to track traffic speeds around the world. It utilizes a dataset (called "Speed") to derive all kinds of traffic movement metrics at all hours of the day in a number of cities around the world. The average speeds returned are very low and this doesn't even include the amount of time the vehicle is parked waiting for the busy periods.
Uber Movement: Let's find smarter ways forward, together.
When I used 22 mph as the average speed over 12 hours, I was being extremely generous - to question that is to show that you really have no idea about robo-taxis
. I'm sure there will be some atypical robo-taxi usage that will exceed this number but we are talking averages.
I think 22 mph may eventually be an achievable average if autonomy and transportation as a service significant reduces congestion and more people in out-lying areas adopt transportation as a service but in the first 5 years that won't be achievable as a fleet average.
One tool you can play with to get a better feel for this is the Avg. Speed on your car's trip meter.
Nobody ever gained anything by dreaming small.Robo Taxis - my foot. I am sorry I am not drinking that cool aid
Good question. All those upcoming major break through software that we keep hearing, will end up being another small improvement to an existing feature. I am sure we will get lot better in city driving than where we are today in the next few years, but automated driving without any driver presence? give me a break..
Lot's and lot's of anecdotal evidence there.Tried to consolidate all replies to 1 post since the thread is already crazy big
Do you have a source for the 22 mph being typical? I'd imagine it's even slower in say NYC, but it's be a LOT higher here in NC where I live (and pretty much the entire country outside dense urban cities if we're gonna pretend robotaxis will replace lots of "normal" cars too not just in dense cities).
It also appears to ignore that a good portion of the country, especially some of the larger denser cities in the US, are in the north where it's very cold a lot of the year- and efficiency to keep the cabin warm for riders causes a significant range hit (I suppose the Y will do better here than the 3 at least)
It also appears to assume all the RTs will be long-range vehicles... an SR+ already can't make it 264 miles.
Sure, as soon as someone invests the money to build those things.
Which I specifically mentioned as an option in my post.
In fact the option that probably makes the most sense (well, SOME charging stations with an attendent, be it SCs, urban SCs, or just regular 240 service of some kind).
This will be even more needed as you start trying to replace things like trucks, where someone calls an RT to transport a truck full of dirt or gravel or something for them... suddenly someone needs to clean the bed out.
I guess you also missed where I specifically mentioned none of these problems were show stoppers, they'd just require some $ outlay to fix because the infrastructure as Tesla built it for long-range road trips is vastly different from that needed for lots of short-range taxi trips, and even WITH that spend would still easily be a cash cow for the company.
Not really though.
Because a robotaxi can run 24/7. I know uber drivers that only drive a few hours a day. So One RT likely replaces like 3-5 rideshare hail drivers at least.
So cut that number down quite a bit for how many RTs are actually "needed" instead of uber/lyft cars.
(note too your source uses "probably" a lot in citing number of drivers- a quick search shows a pretty wide array of guesses at the real #)
FWIW I don't disagree at all Tesla is well ahead of anyone else trying the vision-only approach (and that that is the ideal approach)- I just disagree with the idea the current HW is sufficient to reach L5. (the fact they've already changed it multiple times since originally claiming it was sufficient seems pretty good evidence they don't actually know how much is sufficient until they get there.... see also Elon himself saying you shouldn't trust any prediction he makes about a thing he hasn't ever done before- and how many such predictions he's gotten wrong before)
Nope.
I grew up in NY.
I'm very very very familiar with dense urban situations and taxis in those environments.
The fact I'm in NC now gives me the other side of that perspective. (and I've lived in both "cities" in NC, and now "out in the country"). I've also spent time in quite a lot of major cities elsewhere in the US (and western Europe).
There's very very very little in the way of taxis here- because they don't make nearly the same economic sense.
There's SOME uber/lyft presence, not so much close to my house but maybe 15-20 minutes away you can reasonably find one within 10 minutes.... but again massively less than in dense cities. Mostly you need to own a car here.... whereas I think anyone owning a car in NYC is insane.
That said- there's still like 2 million NYC residents who own private cars.
Despite MASSIVE availability of taxis, uber, subways, buses, etc.
That's why I think the idea everyone dumps their cars when robotaxis get here doesn't hold up to the facts.
People like owning cars. Even in places it makes NO SENSE for them to do so.
See above. Owning a car in NYC is crazy expensive. Parking alone can be more than a car payment in lots of parts of the city.
Yet a couple million people still do it. Despite easy public transit and a very walkable city on top.
So the idea they'll all stop owning those cars once their taxi doesn't have a driver appears just wishful/magical thinking.
Even moreso the folks in less urban areas.
Again- if someone only wants to get from A to B and doesn't care about owning the vehicle or it being a specific vehicle- we'd see most cars being sold being $15,000 econoboxes.... instead of an average new car price in the US of around $35,000, and pickup trucks and SUVs being wildly popular.
See also all the private car owners in dense urban cities with excellent, cheap, public transit- why do they still own cars?
Why would RTs change their mind?
I agree RTs would likely replace SOME private vehicles. There's some % especially where when their existing car is on its way out, going full RT might be a reasonable replacement.
I just think some estimates of how many are wildly, wildly, optimistic. See again how many folks in places like NYC where owning a car makes 0 sense still own a car. Millions.
And increasingly so as you get outside dense urban cities.
So I agree with your points 1-3.... the question is- where I live for example I'm roughly 15-20 minutes from any retail other than a gas station type store.... I'm ~30 minutes to a couple of decent sized cities... and 45-60 minutes from several other major cities.
But the population density is so sparse there's no high speed internet available. (HURRY THE HELL UP STARLINK!)
I wouldn't ever consider replacing my car with a robotaxi unless 1-3 were all true.... not just at my house, but anywhere I'd be likely to travel TO so I can get back easily... but I don't see the economic model where someone buys a $40,000 robotaxi and then has it sit within 5 minutes of my house for the maybe couple of trips a day they'd ever get from me and my very sparse neighbors sitting there.
The fact it's CHEAP only works for the guy who paid for the RT if it's also making trips often.
Easy in LA, Chicago, Atlanta, etc downtown.
Less easy in the burbs.
Pretty hard in the "country"
I think we will know when competitors are getting close to L5, when they begin investing more in reducing their hardware costs. Tesla’s design incentives focused on cost efficiency from day 1, while the others assumed their hardware costs were not relevant in the long term.IMO Tesla will be first or 2nd.
But more importantly they will probably have the cheapest fleet cost, the largest fleet, and the most rapid ramp up.
Add they will be able to add 1M Robo-taxi capable cars to the fleet each year.
For competitor the following questions are relevant:-
1) Where are they getting the fleet?
2) How quickly can they scale?
3) How will the fleet be financed?
4) What are they doing about charging, insurance and cleaning.
For Tesla there is one simple question:-
1) What are you doing about cleaning?