The value of that airplane would be astronomical. I would split it up into dozens of flights just to reduce risk if one of them had a mechanical problem.
I’m looking forward to the day when the cost of taking one of these falls to somewhere 20% above the cost of fuel and wear and tear on the vehicle, making it incredibly cheap to take a ride anywhere you’d reasonably want to be driven to.
Uber estimated that it costs Waymo $2/mile to operate.
Google says they charge $1.60 to $2.60 a mile, depending on location and demand, so Waymo is already almost certainly at the price you claim you'd be taking it.
I think you dramatically underestimate how much it actually costs to operate a car. Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business. Likewise, very few people depreciate their car over just 5 years. Or clean it inside and out every single day.
Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car. Also notice the comments talking about how the per vehicle price is high, how that flows into higher insurance, and all kinds of other things.
Maybe someday there will be a discount AV taxi company using 10 year old beat up Honda Civics that only get cleaned once a month and provide extremely barebones support to pull the costs down to $1/mile. That's a 50% drop in costs from today, so hard to see it coming very quickly. But that's still pretty expensive to be using as a daily commuter!
And note that the IRS per mile rate is $0.70/mile. It's not perfect but it is a decent third party estimate of the true cost of operating a car. Hard to see any taxi company charging anything less than that. So a 10 mile commute every day is still going to cost you $280/month in an AV taxi for the foreseeable future.
You get completely different numbers if you go by overall cost / distance vs taxi pricing models. In the latter, you separate out the flag drop fee (~$10 for Waymo) from the mileage and time process. Here's an experimental Waymo price tracker trying to estimate these numbers:
$2 is a good target for the AV mileage rate. It's actually somewhat high if I put my industry hat on for a second. It's not a good estimate for the number you'll get from doing total_price/distance.
> Uber estimated that it costs Waymo $2/mile to operate.
Waymo costs are immaterial right now. Their cars are not production cars, and they have spent billions on R&D that they can't even hope to recoup with the current fleet.
That being said, $2 is super-low. The IRS rate for car depreciation write-off is 71 cents per mile.
> But that's still pretty expensive to be using as a daily commuter!
The true cost of a transit ride in NYC or Seattle is around $20-$30 per ride. People don't actually pay that much because it's heavily subsidized.
Once self-driving matures, it'll also be subsidized and it will completely kill off transit. Maaaaaybe excluding subways in some areas.
> Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business.
And on the other hand, each Waymo parking spot is probably a lot cheaper per unit time than 250 square feet inside a house in a residential area. And presumably they need a lot less than 1 parking spot per car.
> Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car.
Doesn't that sound cheap? If a car can average 10 rides per day, that's $16 per ride.
And especially importantly, on per capita GDP. Immigration would almost certainly cause GDP to go up, but the per capita effects are important, especially on the original population. (Qualifier added because if the original population experienced an increase in per capita median GDP they might consider it net positive even if the recent arrivals had a lower than median per capita income, who might also be satisfied if that’s still 3x what they were earning elsewhere.)
I agree, directionally. To be even more precise we probably want an even better metric, but that’s closer yeah.
By a better metric I mean something that would even more accurately capture quality of life, healthcare outcomes, social ties, productivity within the home or family that isn’t tied to an income from an employer, etc.
I think many Americans have the impression that this violates the terms of their lease, and without other-country kinship connections and networks, they’re not aware of how to find people who would lease under high occupancy conditions. It may even be illegal. So we may need to explicitly make these legal again so Americans will rent in this way.
There is a ridiculous perception that privately run high occupancy housing is abusive. I don't understand that at all. They are running a business that is compassionate enough to offer, at the bare minimum, shelter from the elements. If there is competition in that market, as there used to be, then the bad actors go out of business.
Like many things I think the answer is less regulation to prevent possible bad things from happening. Accept that bad things might happen and punish the people that do bad things.
I agree, this kind of renting needs to be allowed. If I rent a bed to somebody for 10 bucks a night in my home nobody is harmed and somebody had a warm place to sleep.
>If I rent a bed to somebody for 10 bucks a night in my home nobody is harmed and somebody had a warm place to sleep.
Disagree, you can have impact on your neighbors. We had SFH doing that near me, they had 9 people in 4 BDRM SFH. That was 9 cars so all street parking was occupied. Trash Company sent notice to our HOA wanting price increase since they were generating a ton of trash (some of it commercial I believe) It was much noisier than average home since they would do more outside bringing noise like listening to music inside, outside with noise problems that develop.
County finally shut it down and most of neighbors were thrilled.
There is a reason for zoning laws and it's not 100% NIMBY but yes, your actions can have impact on your neighbors.
What different worlds we live in. If I had a problem with my neighbors making too much noise during "quite hours" I would go talk to them. But, my neighbors are only blasting music for occasional personal parties, 4th of July and New Years. Everybody likes to celebrate, I'm not going to begrudge them for having some fun.
On the trash I'm a bit confused. The HOA should have paid more if the neighborhood was generating more trash than the trash company had negotiated to take away. If everybody didn't like this house why didn't the HOA make rules to restrict it. Isn't that the point of an HOA?
A random idea I had a few years ago was, what if someone started a “recent modern Amish” community, where they just intentionally keep the community’s tech usage either fixed at 1960s or 1990s, or maybe a fixed number of years in the past like 30 or 50 (meaning, the time target moves forward by a year each year).
So the kids growing up now might be playing the original Nintendo NES, or maybe an N64, they’d have phones and even computers, etc.
It could even be a little more nuanced like, the community could vote in certain classes of more modern goods.
It was more useful before when browsers didn't support array.map and fromEntries. That's the origin of all these libraries, but browsers caught up. Things like keyBy, groupBy, debounce, uniqueId, and some others, are still useful.
This describes the majority of my career in tech, I think.
Maybe not that exact situation every time, but similar goals of manager or team that are not “accomplish the mission”.
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