Pretty bad news for the space as a whole. A decade and a half ago there were a dozen+ companies and tens of billions of VC dollars in the space. People were proudly proclaiming the end of driving. Now all but one of them have folded.
My thoughts today are the same as they were back then. Self driving will only be solved city by city and street by street. Local governments will need to create dedicated closed-off autonomous lanes with sensors. Auto manufacturers will need to abide by a common standard to talk to local infrastructure and to each other.
Instead we chose to solve the problem in the most complex and inefficient way possible, and are now seeing the results.
If you're going to block off lanes and install sensors why not just lay track and use streetcars? Rail is way more efficient. This has been a solved problem for the better part of two centuries.
That's like asking why do cars and roads exist at all when everyone can just use public transit.
The answer is that people want cars. They want to drive. They want to be taken directly from point A to point B without needing to walk to transit stops and switch buses/trains and face unpredictable schedules and delays.
Autonomous road infrastructure is a sensible, incremental improvement. And in fact city buses will tend to benefit from it the most.
Ok so your problem with fixed infrastructure is that it is fixed, and your solution is to create a slightly different fixed infrastructe that has many of the same problems, but instead its more expensive, less tested, less safe and less efficent?
> The answer is that people want cars.
Actually in many cities in the world, only a minor % of people own a car. And even those that do own a car don't use if for that many trips.
> They want to drive.
Driving in cities is almost universally hated and is proven to cause lots of stress.
> and face unpredictable schedules and delays.
Because in cars its impossible to have unpredictable delays, roads are always completely open and there is never any concention?
In most cities in the world, public transport has less unpredictable delays compared to driving.
> Autonomous road infrastructure is a sensible, incremental improvement. And in fact city buses will tend to benefit from it the most.
A sensible incredmental improvment are regular bus lanes with regular trolley buses.
I almost agree. I'd say people want the most convenient thing. We can see people do not want to drive by the fact people who owns cars take public transit, or take the high speed train when driving is an option.
How are you going to keep me in my non-autonomous car out of your special "autonomous only and also maybe busses" lane?
EDIT: and yes, it's a completely reasonable question to ask why invest in special new kinds of roads when more people would be better served by public transit.
Those things are easy to detect. It's much less easy to prevent a simple lane change. Some cities have "bus only" lanes, which cars use anyway, but it's easy to detect them since they don't look like busses. How are you going to detect that my car isn't autonomous?
These are pointless concerns. It is a technically trivial problem. We are literally in a thread about self driving cars. If there is a will to enforce it then it will be enforced.
That's what I'm trying to get at--why would there be any will? Why should we all decide to give up a lane to people who are rich (or stupid) enough to buy a brand new car?
As much as I love urban rail, its usefulness scales in direct proportion to population density. Europe has >2x the population density of the US. Japan has 10x the population density of the US. Rail for transit just doesn't make as much sense for the US. It works in a few of our densest cities, but nowhere else. Buses are cheaper, simpler, and easier than rail, but also are useful in proportion to density.
This has always been a bullshit claim. The US HAD good urban rail infrastructure back when we were less dense and had half as many people total.
Even if the claim (you need Europe density) wasn't trivially false, several parts of the US DO meet that level of density and could easily support good public infrastructure.
Or do you not know that in the early 1900s nearly every city had copious public transportation that was relied on by literally everyone in the city?
Japan has pretty good rail in the parts of the country that aren't dense. The way you get it is (among other things) transit-oriented development, which the US has the exact opposite of when they surround suburban train stations with giant parking lots.
Streetcar rails are terrible for bikes and pedestrians. Dedicated bus lanes are a lot more flexible. A rail car is probably more efficient than a bus, but a bus is a lot less expensive.
I've seen people wreck super hard trying to cross the streetcar rails at too shallow an angle in pdx multiple times. But that's an optional behavior. Just the other day I saw a moose crossing the road over in Twin Mountain, and I chose to slow down and not hit it. If I'd made another choice that resulted in a collision, and I'd survived, I wouldn't expect to get some settlement from the town of Twin Mountain, NH. Similarly if you ride your bike into a train track that one's pretty much on you lol.. being aware of one's surroundings is one of those basic life skills.
Installing a huge hazard in the road is optional too, though. If [insert city here] had saved money and used a bus instead of a street car, all of the problems that come from having a rail in the road would have been avoided.
For heavy rail, they don't often run in the road, parallel with the road, in the lane of travel. And when they do, it's usually in an industrial area that people aren't walking and cycling through.
Earlier than that, and IIRC what actually happened was cities decided the streetcars were greedy, put price caps on the fares, and they went out of business.
That could also mean that one company just won, right? Ten companies try to do a really hard thing, nine fail, one succeeds, the nine failures close down.
When was this peak, which cities and how many cars? Waymo has a few hundred cars, and is serving the public in Phoenix, LA and San Francisco, as far as I can tell Cruise had a kinda shaky San Francisco service, with restricted hours, now discontinued, and they have a tourist zone Dubai service and... some test areas.
So I must be missing a lot of cars and a lot of extra cities with service. Or you've confused ambitions (Cruise wanted to have thousands of vehicles and wanted to be in dozens of US cities by 2027) with reality (Neither of those things happened)
With world models like Genie 2 and other advances in LMMs (large multimodal models), the aspiration of human-level autonomous vehicles might be realized relatively soon.
My thoughts today are the same as they were back then. Self driving will only be solved city by city and street by street. Local governments will need to create dedicated closed-off autonomous lanes with sensors. Auto manufacturers will need to abide by a common standard to talk to local infrastructure and to each other.
Instead we chose to solve the problem in the most complex and inefficient way possible, and are now seeing the results.