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Will autonomous vehicles really make taxi drivers obsolete?
Posted 6 years, 9 months ago
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Maurice Boscorelli (mboscorelli)
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Comments
Nope, not that quick.
For one, the efficiency improvement will not be as great as everyone thinks. Drivers often get paid less than minimum wage. Removing them will only save $100 a day, while there are certainly overhead costs for running AV cars.
Second point, drivers provide more than just driving cars. They provide customer service, they monitor the customers, and assist customers from unforeseen circumstances and people with special needs. Soe of these can be mitigated through cameras and such, but there will be cost associated with it and it won't be able to cover everything.
Without drivers, people will do horrible terrible no good very bad things to autonomous cars. There will be cost to fix damages, resolve situations, clean, repair, and avoid these things. ALWAYS. What about passengers who need special help? Would there havet o be specialized AVs for that?
Drivers cost $80 a day in some cities. Eliminating drivers may not save as much as you'd think.
Yeah, but there can be measures in place to discourage people from doing bad things. A video camera is a must. Being charged for damages is a must.
There probably will be a need to monitor the car after each ride. but I am sure that'll be cheaper centrally.
Wow, you are right. People will do horrible things. I bet that'll cost a lot of money to monitor and repair. If someone has to monitor the vehicle at all times, why bother firing the driver? We are just putting the resource elsewhere. and the repairs! That can cost more than $80 a day for sure.
Telas has been planning to increase their production capacity to 5000 a week. That's 280,000 potentially automous vehicles (taxi-capable cars) a year.
How many taxi drivers are there in the United States? 200K? And they can only work 33% or at the most 50% of the day where AVs can 100. Get 80,000 taxi-capable vehicles, and the drivers will never be needed again.
It'll take a year to replace them once they arrive.
Isn't that like asking if a gas-powered automobiles will replace horse-draw carriages?
How do you have any doubts? These are car that never collide, only be used when needed, can work 24x7, and costs 25% of the car ownership currently.
Taxi drivers are expensive, error prone, and can only work certain times. They also need to eat, poop, sleep, etc.
There is going to have to be so much infrastructure change though! Think about it, in NYC when a taxi cab wants to make a right hand turn they just keep pulling out, stopping pedestrians from walking forward. With a self driving car, the car will continually see the stream of people walking in front of it as a blocking point and will not "aggressively" pull out to make the pedestrians stop.
That is the plan whether you like it or not. The governments and city planners are already working on it.
Intel is one of the companies leading the effort. Here's an essay on the "Emerging Passenger Economy." They claim $7 trillion self-driving economy within our life time.
Eventually, but it will take a while.