No, the car sharing aspect of robocars isn't as exciting as people hope

Frequently, in reporting on robocars, it is often cited that one of their key benefits will be the way they enable car sharing, greatly reducing the number of cars that need to exist to serve the population. It is sometimes predicted that we’ll need to make fewer cars, which is good for the environment.

It is indeed true — robotaxi service, with cars that deliver themselves and drop you off, does greatly enable car sharing. But from the standpoint of modern car sharing, it may enable it too well, and we may end up having to manufacture more cars, not fewer.

Today’s car sharing companies report statistics that they replace around 13 privately owned cars for every car in the carsharing fleet. Some suggest it’s even as high as 20.

This number is impossible for average drivers, however. The average car is driven 12,000 miles/year. To replace 13 average cars would require a vehicle that was actively driving, not just signed out, 11 hours/day and each vehicle would wear out in 1-2 years.

Three things are happening.

  • Carsharing is replacing the more marginal, less used vehicles. A household replaces a 2nd or 3rd car. Carsharing is almost always used by people who do not commute by car.
  • Carsharing is often considerably less convenient than a private car. It discourages driving, pushing its users into other modes of transport, or selecting for customers who can do that.
  • Related to that, carsharing shows the true cost of car ownership and makes it incremental. That cost is around $20/hour, and people rethink trips when they see the full cost laid out per mile or per hour. With private cars, they ignore most of the cost and focus only on the gasoline, if that.

The “problem” with robocars is that they’re not going to be worse than having a private car. In many ways they will be better. So they will do very little of the discouragement of car use caused by present day carshare models. The “dark secret” of carsharing is that it succeeds so well at replacing cars because of its flaws, not just its virtues.

Robotic taxis can be priced incrementally, with per-mile or per-hour costs, and these costs will initially be similar to the mostly unperceived per-mile or per-hour costs of private car ownership, though they will get cheaper in the future. This revelation of the price will discourage some driving, though robotaxi companies, hoping to encourage more business, will likely create pricing models which match the way people pay for cars (such as monthly lease fees with only gasoline costs during use) to get people to use more of the product.

There is an even stronger factor when it comes to robotaxis. A hard-working robotaxi will indeed serve many people, and as such it will put on a lot of miles every year. It will thus wear out much faster, and be taken out of service within 4-5 years. This is the case with today’s human driven taxicabs, which travel about 60,000 miles/year in places like New York.

The lifetime of a robotaxi will be measured almost exclusively in miles or engine-hours, not years. The more miles people travel, the more vehicles will need to be built. It doesn’t matter how much people are sharing them.

The core formula is simple.

Cars made = Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT) / Car lifetime in miles

The amount of sharing of vehicles is not a factor in this equation, other than when it affects VMT.

Today the average car lasts 200,000 miles in California. To be clear, if you have 8,000 customers and they will travel two billion miles in 20 years (that’s the average) then they are going to need 8,000 cars over those years. It almost doesn’t matter if you serve them with their own private car, and it lasts all 20 years, or if you get 2,000 cars and they serve 4 people each on average and wear out after 5 years.  read more »

Augmented Reality as documentation and the "context" button










  • At a tourist attraction, info on it.




Self-driving cars, autonomous vehicles, driverless cars and robocars

Our technology is having trouble with settling on a name. That’s OK before it’s mainstream but will eventually present a problem. When people in the field are polled on what name they like, there is no clear winner. Let’s look at some of the commonly used candidates:

Driverless Cars

Recently, this has become the most common term used in the press. There is a “Driverless Car Summit” and the Wikipedia page has used that name for some time.

In spite of this popularity, the term is very rarely used by people actually building the vehicles. Attendees at the “Driverless Car Summit” when polled all said they dislike it. Until recently, the most common news story about a driverless car would say, “then the driverless car rolled down the hill and careened into the other lane, hitting a tree.”

My personal view is that this term is like “horseless carriage.” Long ago the most remarkable thing about the automobile was that it had no horse. Here it’s the lack of driver (or at least lack of action by the driver.) Of course, these cars have something driving them, but it’s a computer system. While this term is most popular, I am confident it will fade away and seem quaint, like horseless carriage did.

Self-driving cars

This term is popular among developers of the cars. Its main problem is that it’s too long to be a popular term. The acronym SDC is a reasonable one. In web hits, this is tied with Driverless Cars, but falls behind that name in searches and news mentions.

Autonomous Vehicles

This term was most popular in the early years, though it is most commonly found in research environments and in the military sphere. In the military they also use “unmanned ground vehicle” — another term too unwieldy for the public —though they usually refer to remote controlled vehicles, not self-driving ones.

Annoyingly, the acronym “AV” has another popular meaning today. Most of the terms here are too long to become common use terms, and so will be turned into acronyms or shortened, but this one has an acronym problem.

Automated Road Vehicle

This term has minor traction, almost entirely due to the efforts of Steve Shladover of UC Berkeley. In his view, the word autonomous is entirely misused here and the correct term is automated. Roboticists tend to differ — they have been using “autonomous” to mean “not remote controlled” for many years. There are two meanings of autonomous in common use. One is to be independent of direct control (which these cars are) and the other one, “self-governing” is the one Steve has the issue with. As a member of the program committee for TRB’s conference on the area, he has pushed the “automated” name and given it some traction.

Unfortunately, to roboticists, “automated” is how you describe a dishwasher or a pick-and-place robot; it’s a lower level of capability. I don’t expect this terminology to gain traction among them.


I selected this term for these pages for a variety of reasons. It was already in modest use thanks to a Science Channel documentary on the DARPA challenge called “robocars.”

  • Talking to teams, they usually just called their vehicle “the robot” or “the car.”
  • It is short, easy to say, and clear about what it means
  • It is distinct and thus can easily be found in online searches
  • It had some amount of existing use, notably as the title of a documentary on the Science Channel about the DARPA challenges

However, it is doing poorly in popularity and only has about 21,000 web pages using it, so I may need to switch away from it as well if a better term appears. Today it reminds people too much of robotics, and the trend is to move away from that association.

On the other hand, no other term satisfies the criteria above, which I think are very good criteria.  read more »

The numbers say let Robocars exceed the speed limit




Robocars and the Speed Limit

Southwest gets it (mostly) right for in-flight entertainment










Vislab does successful test on real streets





RAID, backyard backup and the future of backup












Report from TRB's workshop on automated road vehicles -- down with the NHTSA levels

This week I attended the Transportation Research Board Workshop on Automated Road Vehicles which has an academic focus but still has lots of industry-related topics. TRB’s main goal is to figure out what various academics should be researching or getting grants for, but this has become the “other” conference on robocars. Here are my notes from it.

Bryant Walker Smith told of an interesting court case in Ontario, where a truck driver sued over the speed limiter put in his truck and the court ruled that the enforced speed limiter was a violation of fundamental rights of choice. One wonders if a similar ruling would occur in the USA. I have an article pending on what the speed limit should be for robocars with some interesting math.

Cliff Nass expressed skepticism over the ability to have easy handover from self-driving to human driving. This transfer is a “valence transfer” and if the person is watching a movie in a tense scene that makes her sad or angry, she will begin driving with that emotional state. More than one legal scholar felt that quickly passing control to a human in an urgent situation would not absolve the system of any liability under the law, and it could be a dangerous thing. Nass is still optimistic — he notes that in spite of often expressed fears, no whole field has been destroyed because it caused a single fatality.

There were reports on efforts in Europe and Japan. In both cases, government involvement is quite high, with large budgets. On the other hand, this seems to have led in most cases to more impractical research that suggests vehicles are 1-2 decades away.

Volkswagen described a couple of interesting projects. One was the eT! — a small van that would follow a postman around as he did his rounds. The van had the mail, and the postman did not drive it but rather had it follow him so he could go and get new stacks of mail to deliver. I want one of those in the airport to have my luggage follow me around.

VW has plans for a “traffic jam pilot” which is more than the traffic jam assist products we’ve seen. This product would truly self-drive at low speeds in highway traffic jams, allowing the user to not pay attention to the road, and thus get work done. In this case, the car would give 10 seconds warning that the driver must take control again. VW eventually wants to have a full vehicle which gives you a 10 minute warning but that’s some distance away.  read more »

Vislab to move to urban streets






Rideshare in a transit strike













Kayak sailing "san juan islands"

Yahoo announced that in a few days they will shut down the altavista web site. This has prompted a few posts on the history of internet search, to which I will add an anecdote.

The first internet search engine predated the “web” and was called Archie search engine. Archie (an archive search) was basic by today’s standards. The main protocol for getting files on the internet in those days was FTP. Many sites ran an open FTP server, which you could connect to and download files from. If you had files or software to share with people, you put it up on an FTP server, in particular one that allowed anonymous login to get public files. The Archie team (from Montreal) built a tool to go to all the open servers, read their indexes and generate a database. You could then search, and get a pointer to all the places you could get a file. It was hugely popular for the day.

(You will probably note that this is almost exactly the way Napster worked, the only difference being that Napster was a bit more sophisticated and people used it to share files that were copyrighted. FTP servers had copyrighted material, but mostly they had open source software and documents.)

Around the same time, a lot of folks were building full-text search engines for use on large collections of documents. You could find these on private databases around the world, and the WAIS protocol was developed by Brewster Kahle to make a standardized interface to text search and his own text search tools.

Not long after the web started to grow, Fuzzy Mauldin at CMU made Lycos which was a full-text search engine applied to documents gathered from the web. The ability to search the web generated much attention, and a few other competing spiders and search engines appeared. Everybody had a favourite. (To add to my long list of missed opportunities, in April of 95 I wrote a few notes to Fuzzy looking to get his spider index so we could sort web pages based on how many incoming links they had. Nothing ever came of that but as you may know that concept later had some value. :-) And I also turned down a $4M offer from Lycos to buy ClariNet (which would have turned into $40M when their stock shot up in the bubble. Sigh.)

In 1995, for many people that favourite changed to Alta Vista, a new search engine from Digital Equipment Corp. DEC was a huge name at the time, the biggest name in minicomputers, and it was just losing the Unix crown to Sun. The team at DEC put a lot of computing power into Alta Vista, and so it had two useful attributes. First, they spidered a lot more pages, and thus were more likely to find stuff. They were also fast compared to most of the other engines. In a precursor to other rapid turnarounds in the internet business, you could switch your favourite search engine in a heartbeat and many did. It was big and fast due to DEC putting a lot of fancy computer hardware on it, and DEC eventually justified the money they were spending on it (there was no revenue for search in those days) by saying it showed off just how powerful DEC’s computers with big address spaces were. Indeed the limits of Alta Vista were the limits of the architecture, using the 64-bit Alpha to address 130gb of RAM and 500gb of disk — huge for the day.

On Alta Vista’s home page, they gave you a sample query to type in the search box, to show you how to use it. That query was:

kayak sailing “san juan islands”

Indeed, if you typed that, you got a nice array of pages which talked about kayaking up in the San Juan islands, tour operators, etc. — just what you wanted to get from a query.

My devious mind wondered, “what if I put up a page on my own web site with this as the title?” I created the Kayak Sailing “San Juan Islands” home page on the rec.humor.funny site, which was already a very popular site in those days. (Indeed it’s around 1995 that RHF fell behind Yahoo as the most widely read thing on the internet, but that refers to the USENET group, not the page.)

You will note as you look at the page that it contains the words in the title and headers, and repeated many times in invisible comments. In those days the search engines were ranking higher simply based on where words were, and if they were repeated many times. So I gave it a whirl. This was an early attempt at what is now called “black hat search engine optimization” though I was doing it for fun, rather than nefarious gain.

The results didn’t change though. Alta Vista relied on huge computer power, but it only rebuilt the index by hand. It would be a month or more before Alta Vista recalculated its index. One day I went to type in the query and bingo — there was my page on the first page of search results. Along with a dozen other people who had tried the same thing, and a few pages that were articles writing about Alta Vista and giving the example query, or which were copying its search page which of course had that string.

More to the point, not a single item on the results page was about actual Kayaking! The sample query was ruined, though the results were quite amusing. Not long after, Alta Vista changed the example to Pizza “deep dish” Chicago and of course I added it to my page as well. So not much longer after that AV switched to showing different examples from a rotating and changing collection so people could not play this game any more.

While Alta Vista ruled Search, in spite of efforts from Infoseek, Inktomi/Hotbot and others, we all know that a few years later, Google was born at Stanford, and it proved again how quickly people could switch to a new favourite search engine, and lives under that fear (but with great success) to this day. And Google’s dominance turned SEO into a giant industry.

Cats against surveillance

I always feel strange when I see blog and social network posts about the death of a pet or even a relative. I know the author but didn’t know anything about the pet other than that the author cared.




It’s also a good thing we didn’t run the washing machine. But I really wish I had been recording the video. Worthy of Kittywood studios.


RIP Bijou T. Cat, 199? - 2013

AUVSI Driverless Car Summit Part 2



Level 2 issues




  • You must touch the wheel every few seconds or it disengages



RIP Martin Lowson, creator of ULTra PRT







Driverless Car Summit 2013 Part 1 - Fear of Google
















Affordable robocars -- will it be cameras or LIDAR?






Cameras or Lasers in the robocar


NHTSA published plan on how they want to regulate robocars





The laptop in the tablet world








  • The tablet, running your favourite tablet OS





Large battery pack


Battery swap










More vehicles and ordinary L2 charging



Plug in hybrids?


Very light vehicles
