Advent of ride sharing and self driving cars, what does it mean for motorcycles?

I have actually stopped 10 yards or so from the intersection to mess with assholes like that. I don't see self driving cars doing it any better. Should be the simplest part of navigation, yet it gets screwed up all day every day all over the place.

 

The self-driving car already knew the kid was going to pop out based on the live GPS coordinates from the kids phone and slowed safely with no accident.

-jim

 

As struck driver, I appreciate you stopping 10 yards back, so I have more room.

Are you from Pennsylvania?

 

His phone or his implant?

 

Yes.

-jim

 

Yeah. Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics.

 

My uncle has a country place, that no-one knows about
He says it used to be a farm, before the Motor Law
Sundays I elude the ‘Eyes’, and hop the Turbine Freight
To far outside the Wire, where my white-haired uncle waits

Jump to the ground
As the Turbo slows to cross the borderline
Run like the wind
As excitement shivers up and down my spine
Down in his barn
My uncle preserved for me an old machine –
For fifty-odd years
To keep it as new has been his dearest dream​

I strip away the old debris, that hides a shining car
A brilliant red Barchetta, from a better, vanished time
Fire up the willing engine, responding with a roar!
Tires spitting gravel, I commit my weekly crime…

Wind in my hair –
Shifting and drifting –
Mechanical music
Adrenalin surge –
Well-weathered leather
Hot metal and oil
The scented country air
Sunlight on chrome
The blur of the landscape
Every nerve aware​

Suddenly ahead of me, across the mountainside
A gleaming alloy air-car shoots towards me, two lanes wide
I spin around with shrieking tires, to run the deadly race
Go screaming through the valley as another joins the chase

Drive like the wind
Straining the limits of machine and man
Laughing out loud
With fear and hope, I’ve got a desperate plan
At the one-lane bridge
I leave the giants stranded
At the riverside
Race back to the farm
To dream with my uncle
At the fireside

- Neil Peart







​

 

The primary advantage of a self driving vehicle isn't that your car drives itself. It's that the self driving enables you to dispense with car ownership altogether. Sure, there are still areas of the country that are unpaved and relatively backwards, but I don't see how that's going to affect Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco or Chicago. Cars are essentially a stranded asset on which people spend a large portion of their disposable income. No individual will BUY a car. People (and very soon AIs) working for large corporations will be the only ones purchasing civilian vehicles. Self driving vehicles will allow on-demand access to a vehicle fleet. Self driving fleets will slowly build, and then eventually reach an inflection point at which the network density is high enough that ditching your personal vehicle is the overwhelmingly superior choice. I think we'll reach the inflection point in major cities in about 20 - 25 years tops. In extremely dense cities it might be even sooner.

Your timeline is only considering self driving cars in isolation. I believe neuromorphic computing and augmented reality will completely alter society in the same period, much more so than self driving vehicles. I think these trends will also significantly accelerate adoption of robocars.

I think the most likely model to emerge is that the company operating the vehicle fleet simply accepts all liability. It'd then be up to them to negotiate with the manufacturer or whoever else for renumeration. Price modeling would dynamically allocate the the cost of liability into your access fee, probably on a per trip basis.

Agreed on the transition and timeline. Motorcycles are toys in the US for sure. I wonder if increased access availability would lead to more riders? It'd economically be easier to ride than it is now, paying $12,000 for a Japanese superbike you ride once a week or so.

I wonder what it means for motorcycles in the third world? Motorcycles are used because they're cheap and small. I expect self driving vehicles to be even cheaper with sufficient network density.

No offense but this is a bit of a non sequitur if you really think about it. These things happen today. It'd be handled the same way we do today. The accident happens, someone is injured or killed, and someone accepts financial responsibility. Then the developers work to prevent future similar incidents.

 

Most of the infrastructure seems to be digital in nature. LIDAR maps, etc. I don't think a lot of fixed assets beyond multiuse communications and information infrastructure will really be needed. Data transmission, processing, and storage is very, very cheap these days. Keep in mind that as the density increases, the overall network and performance of individual networks will improve.

They'll be needed, for a certain period. Inter-city trips will lose much of the cost advantage of the network, so I don't see it as being a big demand for self-driving vehicles anyway. Rural areas will see self-driving vehicle adoption as bleed over once urban areas are already saturated.

Will small scooters be cheaper than calling a ride from my smartphone? I bet they will be for a while, but eventually as the cost for access comes down it'll drastically change the value proposition. One thing you should remember about the third world, they don't have the need to leverage existing infrastructure like we do. This is one reason why cell phone and broadband penetration was higher in less developed economies for a long while vs. the US.

For sure there is a huge amount of risk in building infrastructure in developing countries. However, a power plant is a large fixed asset without other applications than generating power. The infrastructure for vehicles will come largely from cloud computing and high bandwidth communications that are already being created for other purposes. Pretty interesting about that plant. I wonder why the hell they even bothered?

I believe the net effect on jobs will be mostly negative. The car insurance business will mostly go away, so will many car manufacturers. The ones who survive will have to pivot away from consumer facing products and work on a business to business level. Neuromorphic computing and AI will kill most jobs today anyway, self driving cars will just be a drop in the bucket.

 

I think it will have an impact on motorcycling. The overall transportation system will be so drastically changed, it's hard to see how one component will be static.

However, I think the effect can either be tremendously bad or beneficial for motorcycling.

IMO, if manufacturers and the industry play their cards right we could see a HUGE boon in motorcycling.

1. If motorcycles themselves become self riding, economic access to a motorcycle becomes much easier for most people.
2. Accidents will be virtually if not completely eliminated. The vastly improved safety vis a vis other road users could result in a large attitude shift toward the dangers of riding.
3. In the long term, most of the population won't know how to operate a vehicle. Owning a car or riding a motorcycle might become the new way of displaying wealth or rebelling against an overly technological society.

 

I don't think anyone thinks that the vehicle-borne sensors alone are enough (imagine the biggest traffic jams ever....). LIDAR/radio telemetry from fixed ground points will still need transport. I'm in the business of selling optical transport gear (Optical-layer): I agree, three years into it, boxes and pluggable lasers will be near-cost commodities, but the investment overall will still be massive - rivaling the concrete industry (a ubiquitous commodity).

(Edit: in the industry, we talk about the next technology by one feature of it. This evolution is the one past the current last-mile distribution technology "25G-PON" (25 Gigabit/second passive optical network) and on the order of x00 (meaning 100, 200, 400...) G-PON, affectionately called 'NG-PON' for "Next-Generation Passive Optical Network")

My wife works for State Farm, and she reports the thinking is claims/adjustment still exist, but move into a realm of autonomous fleet ownership, software upgrade status, and non-autonomous vehicle or property claim. Underwriting, marketing, other parts of the business change, and I would not be surprised to see 'Financial Activities' grow in the 10k.

 

Can you imagine how nasty publicly owned vehicles would be? They will have to be made of nothing but hard plastic and metal inside to keep idiots from trashing them.

 

Just install cameras. At the first sign of damage, the car can lock the doors and deliver them to security.

 

So once all the cars are self driving with all the gee whiz safety built in....does that mean I can ride bike at 120 mph and they all will see me for what I am and get the f*ck outta my way? I could live my Mad Max fantasy?

 

No, it means you won't be allowed on public highways.

 

But Saturn went out of business...

And so did Pontiac, so no more Aztek

 

Fuck self driving cars. I'll just go in front of them because I know they'll stop

 

Yup. They'll just charge people's accounts $ 500 for cleaning. Probably be an AI in there that monitors the car for vandalism and charges people accordingly, or if they're totally out of control delivers them to the authorities.

This is probably the biggest danger to motorcycles with the advent of self driving cars. The industry will have to figure out a way to head this off.

Why would we need significant fixed infrastructure, though? Data from vehicle borne sensors can and will be shared with every other vehicle in the area. Data synthesized from millions of individual sensors can be much more powerful than any single device. I don't see that there's a huge need for physical infrastructure beyond telecommunications and computing. I'm not an expert, so that's just conjecture, but from your knowledge what type of fixed infrastructure do people think will be needed? I can definitely see in the transition period between early adoption and the inflection point, it might be more cost effective to deploy fixed sensors, but once the market is saturated I don't see why it'd be needed.