Perhaps, if you let your personal vehicle join the taxi fleet.
But I suspect (dedicated) self-driving taxis will become the most intimately surveilled space on earth, and anyone littering etc will be fined for it, certainly to the point of covering cleaning costs, and most likely as an additional revenue stream.
Additonally I suspect, far from ushering in an era of care-free, and almost cost-free travel, the self-driving fleet will be metered like cell-phones (ridiculously complex price plans), and part of the 'price' will be that your travel data is sold on.
True freedom will be a bicycle - assuming viable routes between "bicycle friendly areas" remain open - a danger is that inter-city/town/village roads become robot-only, and you can only actually travel 'manually' within bounded living areas, eg a city precinct, village, etc.
I expect cities full of robotic cars to be great bike cities. The reason why I don't bike every day is because with human drivers, I have to fear for my life. A robotic car, however, will not turn into me, will not speed, will not run the red light.
That's the hope, yes.
It depends if robot cars can deal well with cyclists or not. If not, the two may not be allowed to mix, and guess which will get priority.
Airplane interiors experience havoc within the first hour of a flight as the worst of us begin defecating into the seats, too lazy and weak to control ourselves
Wait, what? The author seems to have problems with more than just self-driving cars...
Anyway, the problem seems pretty trivial to solve: have a button so riders can report disgusting cars, send the bill to the previous occupant. This works pretty well with people who smoke in non-smoking hotel rooms.
The author has a very bizarre pessimistic view of humanity. I imagine the overwhelming majority of people would utilize a service just to get from point A to point B. I would also note that given the technology, self-driving vehicles will be a very controlled environment where users will be fined or banned for foul play. Also, the greater utilization of the car will have them depreciate much more quickly, which would mean that the cars would tend to be newer and designed for heavy use, much like bikes on cities bike share programs.
> Anyway, the problem seems pretty trivial to solve: have a button so riders can report disgusting cars, send the bill to the previous occupant.
The workaround seems to be: do whatever you want to make the cab disgusting, then press the button. (If the button has to be pressed at the beginning of the ride, then press it at the beginning, then do what you want.)
1. culture
2. surveillance and consequence
3. maintenance.
some cultures are cleaner than others (Japan vs US, or India). if you record activities (remotely stored) and you can impose consequences plus you maintain the fleet properly (routinely and specially when people intentionally or accidentally soil interiors, that will go a long way.
I know I'd want vehicles which get routinely cleaned (BART vs JR subways and trains)
Adding a "reject for maintenance" button to an app that summons an automated car is the obvious solution to a problem that was brought up years ago. To avoid abuse, you use a consensus pattern (2 or 3 rejects in a row).
This whole article is based on the presumption that the interiors of driverless taxis won't be recorded... and yet security cameras in Ubers already exist[0] (and aren't dissuaded by the company)
Right and the other part is how do you know when the footage needs to be reviewed?
Just add two buttons to the app "minor cleanliness issue" and "major cleanliness issue". Then someone remotely checks the footage. If it is confirmed then the previous passenger gets charged a cleaning fee. Majors cost more or could result in ban. Cleaning can be done by carwashes.
Eventually you develop some clever covers and devices/stations that enable rapid cleaning.
> how do you know when the footage needs to be reviewed?
With all the computing power and vision AI available in such a vehicle, it seems like it would be possible to perform an automated interior scan of the cabin after each ride. Detecting cleanliness issues(and forgotten baggage).
Might be difficult to detect if someone peed though unless you can make the interior highlight it somehow. Maybe a moisture detector could be added but could be difficult to calibrate that for rainy days.
Interior of the local metro trains is recorded from every possible angle you can think of, yet almost every night they turn into garbage cans on wheels. The problem is always reviewing the footage, finding the culprit and making them pay. If an automated taxi comes back to the depot after 12 hours of driving and you find it in a messy state, are you just going to pay someone $50 to clean it, or are you going to spend time reviewing 12 hours of footage to find out who made the mess and then spend weeks trying to get the money back?
Which of course creates a self-perpetuating problem, because if the behaviour is not punished, it will never be corrected and it will become "ok" to make a mess in an auto taxi(not vomit, but just leaving your rubbish behind).
You're anonymous in a metro train. You're not in a self-driving car.
As others have mentioned, the app can have a button to report a cleanliness issue. Working back from the first report means you don't have to review 12 hours of footage. As a side note (since this is HN), you don't have to review 12 hours linearly, you can use a binary search, which means you can probably find the culprit in minutes at most.
or are you going to spend time reviewing 12 hours of footage to find out who made the mess and then spend weeks trying to get the money back?
Fortunately, I can get that done for me at a cost of much, much less than 12 hours of my own time. I can farm it out overseas to somewhere with a large supply of very cheap labour. I wouldn't be surprised if sitting in front of a bank of a half-dozen taxi-interior replays running backwards at triple-speed (with the empty periods already taken out by some relatively simple processing) from a point at which the uncleanliness is visible was seen as a good job, compared to some other options available.
Wouldn't be surprised if I could have that done for me at a cost of a few dollars a time; if I then charge the culprit a hundred bucks on their already registered credit card or taxi account for cleaning (fifty sounds too low), it becomes very economical for me.
You know exactly what time your customers entered and left the vehicle. All you have to do is pull out a set of freeze frames from before and after each customer and compare the two.
Ok, then the customer does a chargeback on their credit card insisting they didn't do the mess, and you have to sit down and actually watch the footage because you can't be certain if your $5/hour overseas firm did a good job or if they just selected a random passenger to get it done quicker. Inconveniently, they also did the chargeback at the last possible moment(say a month after) so you don't have the recording anymore. Or maybe the video is not that clear what happened.
I mean, we have to deal with shitty customers all the time. 99% of the time it's just not worth pursing someone who broke something or just left a mess, even if theoretically I could hunt down proof that they did it. It almost always escalates to some multi-month situation that is not worth the effort.
I'm extremely curious how "computer vision makes this really easy". Is there a system which can already do that, or are you talking about a hypothetical system where all cars are identical, the camera always has perfect lighting and which can tell vomit apart from a crisp bag on the seat. Having the customer's credit card works only until they do a chargeback, and then you have to go through a long and unpleasant process of proving that yes, it was absolutely, definitely them who made the mess.
If this really becomes an issue, (and assuming companies manage to coordinate) you could simply require a one-time security deposit around $50–100 to be sent from a bank account. Voilà, no chargebacks.
Hotels cost orders of magnitude per night than renting an apartment, largely because of the cost of cleaning them. The ones that are cheaper are the ones that tend to suffer problems with cleanliness.
Taxis currently cost orders of magnitude more than owning a car. One of the main goals of a self-driving taxi service would be to radically reduce this cost, but it would probably be too expensive to do a manual clean between trips.
Maybe we just need to design cars that are self-cleaning as well.
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?
Maybe there is some opportunity to embrace the trash.
What if we replace the dashboard with a selection of recycling bins and expect people to be unpacking their shopping, eating food on the way and creating waste, putting facilities in place?
Perhaps we even expect people to just bring their wastebin contents with them because it is easier than putting it in street collection bins. Time in transit can be spent 'doing the recycling'.
Well filtered fresh waste may even be preferable for recycling and perhaps the autonomous car driving company has a nice sideline in collecting raw materials for recycling.
Tesla are leading the way with a minimal aesthetic, where the fiddly knobs and switches are all gone and there is just one massive touchscreen instead. There is also no central tunnel to disguise or carpet over. Soon all cars will adopt this look and it may even be possible to offer a selection of power-wash friendly trim levels.
Given the choice of a regular car, e.g. my dad's or one of my workmates, or a power-washed autonomous car, I would imagine the latter to be cleaner even if it had seen multiple vomit stains in the last month.
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.
a car not having a driver isn't at all the same thing as a car not having an owner. The owner will care about cleanliness to precisely the same extent as its customers do.
I love this article because it reveals just how terrible many of us are at truly understanding the impact that new technologies can have in the world. The author takes the possibility of self-driving cars and then basically predicts what the world would be like if we did EVERYTHING EXACTLY THE SAME except for the fact that there is no human driver.
Except that's not how this works. No driver means many of the costs of operating the vehicle change -- including the cleaning cost. It will become far, far cheaper to clean the vehicles, not less. Fleets will be able to intelligently organize themselves to drive to cleaning stations in the most efficient manner. With dedicated self-driving cars, it will be trivial to install a ceiling mounted camera in the car. You could simply take a picture of the car before the customer enters and after he leaves, and simply diffing it could give you some estimate of how "messy" it is -- and it could even be used to alert customers if they left something in the car. Accountability for what the customer does in in the car will be higher than ever.
Self-driving cars will make taxis cheaper AND cleaner.
It amuses me to think somewhere there is a team of engineers developing barf detection systems for driverless vehicles. Perhaps using a combination of camera, sound (imagine collecting the training data for barf sound machine learning!) and scent detection.
Isn't this the same for all types of public transportation? I sometimes find BART very disgusting. If you ride it 11PM on a Friday night, the whole section reeks of drunken people smell. Not to mention, you sometimes see throw ups that never gets cleaned.
It also has a lot to do with competition and the self driving taxi market. If self driving taxi company A is consistently giving riders bad experience with dirtiness, then there's going to be a company B that will come out with cleaner solution.
If you think about it, there are far more places that's more disgusting than self driving taxis..
Not all types, no. I'm currently sitting on a 3-coach (UK) train halfway through its daily diagram and though it's not 100% spotless, it's pretty good. It'll get a light clean in the depot at the end of the day and be back in service first thing tomorrow.
Automatically snap a picture of the backseat and have some remote operator decide if it needs to be returned for cleaning. A couple operators and cleaners are a lot cheaper than a fleet of drivers.
There are few things more effective in controlling people's behaviour than shame and humiliation. Of course you need to be a part of a strong community for that to be effective as well. Shame and humiliation, I suspect has less of an effect in societies based on transactional relationships.
In either case, I feel we'll see a return to older type of punishments, like public flogging or being tied down in a post to enforce shame. That's if, companies come to this realisation in order to protect their bottom line.
Or, I don't know, maybe the companies will sign cleaning contracts with car wash companies, and send their cars to the wash once a week?
Even well behaved humans make goo. This is why even the most obsessive person has to take a bath and clean their house.
If a company can't keep their cars clean, the well heeled consumer will change their habits to prefer the company's cars that are cleaned out from time to time.
I predict a reputation system that impacts the cost of the ride. Nowadays the reputation system is unidirectional from rider to driver, but in the future perhaps it is unidirectional from the car to the passenger. Bad behavior dings your reputation, a dinged reputation costs you money.
But I suspect (dedicated) self-driving taxis will become the most intimately surveilled space on earth, and anyone littering etc will be fined for it, certainly to the point of covering cleaning costs, and most likely as an additional revenue stream.
Additonally I suspect, far from ushering in an era of care-free, and almost cost-free travel, the self-driving fleet will be metered like cell-phones (ridiculously complex price plans), and part of the 'price' will be that your travel data is sold on.
True freedom will be a bicycle - assuming viable routes between "bicycle friendly areas" remain open - a danger is that inter-city/town/village roads become robot-only, and you can only actually travel 'manually' within bounded living areas, eg a city precinct, village, etc.