While I don't agree with the option of owning your own and renting it out "AirB&B -style where B&B = Mobility".  It is easier and more likely to begin by having a Professional entity managing a fleet of Tesla RoboTaxis that provide mobility to the everyone in the community.  This will be the the "Modern Public Transit".  An example being Trenton MOVES using a fleet of Tesla RoboTaxis. 

For these RoboTaxis to be attractive to a fleet operator, they will need to be styled differently than consumer versions that are sold to individuals.  The RoboTaxi will need to be easy to get in and out and interface well with wheelchairs.   They'll need to accommodate ride-sharing (personTrips are the source of the revenue, not vehicle sales).  They should have 4-wheel steering so they will never need to back up in stub-end operation.  He has re imagined the pickup truck.  Certainly, he can re-imagine a car focused on providing safe, equitable, affordable, sustainable high-quality mobility throughout a community. 

At the end of addressing the future of Robotasis he states ..." assuming we do all these things, I think, probably, Tesla will be the most valuable company in the world."

 GM's Cruise robotaxi unit drives deeper into the red

Reuters, July 26, "General Motors Co (GM.N) has lost nearly $5 billion since 2018 trying to build a robotaxi business in San Francisco, and now as the automaker's Cruise unit starts charging for rides, the losses are accelerating.

GM said on Tuesday it lost $500 million on Cruise during the second quarter - more than $5 million a day - as it began charging for rides in a limited area of San Francisco.  ... that may be the case for the last quarter, but the chart below from GM's 6/30/222 10-Q  Shows ($800M) for the last 6 months or $4.38/day when divided by 182.625   Whew!😅...

Cruise's costly effort to transform autonomous driving technology from a long-term research project to a profit-spinning business comes as investors are backing away from riskier bets on technology, and reassessing how soon robot vehicles of any kind will be deployed in large scale on public roads.

Shares of autonomous vehicle technology company Aurora Innovation Inc (AUR.O), for example, are down 80% for the year to date. Shares of robo-trucking company TuSimple Holdings Inc (TSP.O) have lost more than 70% of their value. Some automakers, including Ford Motor Co (F.N), have scaled back investments in automated vehicle units, or taken on partners to share the costs....

Cruise's losses for the first six months of the year deepened to $900 million from $600 million during the same period in 2021 - when Cruise was not charging for rides. Higher compensation costs to keep staff on board after putting aside plans for an IPO were one factor in the results, GM executives said.

Chief Executive Mary Barra said on Tuesday she is still bullish on Cruise, and reaffirmed a forecast that the unit could generate $50 billion a year in revenue from automated vehicle services and technology by 2030.  .” Read more Hmmmm... Nice optimism.  The source of the reality check above comes from GM's 6/30/222 10-Q.  Start reading from page 41.  then on page 43:

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Whoa!  The only nice thing that can be imagined is by assuming that they've had essentially zero revenue, the operating costs have "only" been $800M for the last 6 months.  That is non-small. 

I'd like to suggest that the strategy of trying to create a profitable driverless mobility service for folks that already have 2 or more cars in their garage, have excellent public transit service or travel on expense accounts when wanting to go to between the airport and "downtown" may not be the wisest way to launch such a mobility service.  There is little opportunity to be substantially better or even equivalent to what those potential customers already have.  Little opportunity to get loyal and repeat customers.  The focus to date has been too heavily weighted on getting the technology to work for folks who already have more mobility options than they know what to do with.  Great for click-bait;  challenging for the 10-Q.  What must Waymo's 10-Q Cash Flow chart look like? 

Capturing loyal and repeat customers is really tough when the competition is excellent and entrenched.  While pricing can be high, volume is almost non-existent even with nominal pricing.  Except for the novelty, the marketplace in the Chandlers and SFs is essentially non-existent.  To date those markets have been quiet, at best.  What must Waymo's 10-Q Cash Flow chart look like? 

It astonishes me that to date none of the leading driverless companies have spent any money trying to serve the needs of folks that don't own cars, aren't traveling using someone else's money, nor have access to a good public transit system focused on their mobility needs. 

These folks definitely can't pay as much for a ride as those that are being chased by Cruise & Waymo, but there are more of them.  Moreover, its almost trivial to provide them with a mobility option that is substantially better than what they have today for many, if not most, of their daily personTrips. 

This is the market that we've found in New Jersey; in Trenton & Mercer County, Perth Amboy & Middlesex County and Patterson & Passaic County.  We haven't even begun looking in Newark, Camden, Atlantic City and the rest of New Jersey.

The excuse seems to have been that it would be too expensive to deal with NJ's bad weather, even though, we've made it clear that New jersey is not interested in a 365.25 days/yr.  mobility solution.  We'd be more than pleased with a 350 days/yr. operation.  New Jersey has more than 350 good days a year.  We aren't so entitled that we can't wait for the hurricane to blow through, the snow to be shoveled or the fog to lift before we go about our normal business.  We enjoy the "snow day" at home.  We are convinced that is actually easier and cheaper to capture recurring and loyal NJ customers.

The rule-of-thumb for a Trenton-MOVES style operation is: a vehicle needs to serve at least 100 personTrips/day.  With slightly better ride-sharing and time-of-day pricing, one might be able to get to 150 personTrips/day.  To cover a fleet of 100 vehicles, ridership needs to be about 10k to 15k personTrips/day.  This kind of utilization leads to per personTrip capitalization costs of less that $1/personTrip for vehicles costing upwards of $150k @ interest rates upward of 7.5%.  That is to say, $1/personTrip readily covers the vehicle capital costs even at moderate scales. 

Given that trips on-average are less than five miles, vehicle operating costs are less than $1/personTrip. 

Management costs are largely fixed. With volume the per personTrip burden decrease enormously, and can't be more than $0.50/personTrip. 

Break-even fare is thus roughly  $2.50/personTrip. 

An average market fare of $3.50/personTrip delivers a profit of >$1.00/personTrip, >$100/vehicle-day.

A fleet of 100 vehicles delivers a profit >$10k/day, >$3.0M/yr. in the Trenton ODD serving 10k personTrips/day.

From where do these 10k personTrips/day materialize?

Essentially all the riders of NJ Transit rail would love a simple reliable convenient way to get to & from the train.  By on-demand service within the community around the train station, loyalty upwards of 80% could be achieved for anyone wanting to go to NYC or within walking distance to any other NJ train station.  For Trenton that represents a marketplace of 8,000 personTrips/day that currently drive to & from the station every day and those that currently don't use the train that would if it was easy and reliable to them to get to AND from the station, when they wanted to get to and from there. Half of the 10k would easily come from serving the Trenton Train Station.

Trenton Central HS has 1,800 students.  More than 1,500 live more than a 10 minute walk to the TCHS.  Truancy is proportional to how far a student has to walk to school.  Trenton MOVES could readily serve 1,250 of these students every day.  That's 1/4 of the needed 10k.

We only need another 2.5k personTrips and we haven't even begun dealing with getting people to & from work in Trenton, doctors, shopping visiting friends, etc. needed by the 70% of Trenton households who have access to one or zero cars.  100 vehicles serving 10k personTrips/day making >3.0M/year @ an average fare of $3.50/personTrip is just the start of a profitable business.  Employing 200 vehicles costing at most $100k at interest rates of less than 7.5% serving 150 personTrips/day at fares of $3.00/personTrip makes way more than $5M per year. 

Expanding Trenton MOVES throughout Mercer County giving the opportunity to increase average fare (because of the longer personTrips) to maybe $5/personTrip keeping utilization @ 150 personTrips/vehicle-day of a fleet of 1,000 vehicles and doing a little better on interest rates and cap costs can lead to profits of >$10M/year for Trenton/Mercer MOVES.  There are at least 10 replications of Trenton/Mercer MOVES that could be done in NJ by 2030 utilizing a fleet of at least 10,000 vehicles leading to a profit of >$100M/year. 

This kind of success leads to having many more people leave their cars at home and frequenting NJ-MOVES as their mobility system.  This could lead to a NJ-Moves fleet of >100,000 vehicles is generating a profit of >$1B. 

Monday July 25, 2022

  Baidu unveils autonomous vehicle without steering wheel

Reuters, July 16, "China's search engine giant Baidu Inc on Thursday unveiled its new autonomous vehicle (AV) with a detachable steering wheel, with plans to put it to use for its robotaxi service in China next year.

Cost per unit will drop to 250,000 yuan ($37,031.55) for the new model, compared with 480,000 yuan for the previous generation, Baidu said in a statement.

“This massive cost reduction will enable us to deploy tens of thousands of AVs across China," Baidu's chief executive Robin Li said at the Baidu World conference. "We are moving towards a future where taking a robotaxi will be half the cost of taking a taxi today.” Read more Hmmmm... Really?? See video.  Where do I buy 10 for immediate delivery to New Jersey with option to buy 100 more by EoY'22 and 1st inline to buy 1,000 more by EoY'23.  eMail me!!!

While the design is certainly not ideal for "Trenton MOVES" or "Perth Amboy MOVES"  they would be good enough to get started with addressing the "Sociology Challenges" of MOVES-style deployments.  And the price is right if this isn't total click-bait.  But... that is a really big if . 🙁  Alain

Saturday July 16, 2022

  MAY MOBILITY CLOSES $111 MILLION SERIES C FUNDING, BEGINS PRELIMINARY DEVELOPMENT ON TOYOTA’S NEXT GENERATION MOBILITY PLATFORM

Saturday July 9, 2022

  U.S. agency probing self-driving Cruise car crash in California

Saturday June 11, 2022

THE DISPATCHER

  Princeton Fifth Annual SmartDrivingCars Summit

June 24, M. Sena "THE DISPATCHER, July 2022
IN THIS ISSUE
Princeton Fifth Annual SmartDrivingCars Summit ...........
Safe, Equitable, Affordable, Sustainable, High-quality
Mobility for Everyone .......................................................2
Dispatch Central................................................................9
Someone lit a fire under NHTSA .......................................9
The Economist: Right analysis, wrong solution ..............12
Musings of a Dispatcher: Eyes on the Back Story...........15
The evolution of digital maps and ADAS ........................15
Digital Maps for the Vehicle – 1970-2022 ......................24  ...

Saturday June 18, 2022

 NHTSA Releases Initial Data on Safety Performance of Advanced Vehicle Technologies

June 15, Press release, "Today, as part of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s efforts to increase roadway safety and encourage innovation, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published the initial round of data it has collected through its Standing General Order issued last year and initial accompanying reports summarizing this data.

The SAE Level 2 advanced driver assistance systems summary report is available here, while the SAE Levels 3-5 automated driving systems summary report is available here. Going forward, NHTSA will release data updates monthly..."   Read more Hmmmm... This is a good start; however, as NHTSA repeats many times, this is just a start and there are many "data limitations". The most severe may well be the possibility of substantial "sampling bias", the most severe of which is that each OEM sourced the reported data very differently.  That makes the data between OEMs incomparable.

Also un reported is any measure that would enable a "crash rate" for an OEM to be determined.  One only has a numerator value but no denominator value.

Finally, 392 crashes of "Level 2" cars were reported during the "10" month period of July 2021 and May 15, 2022.  About 12 million vehicles are involved in traffic crashes every year among the 283 million vehicles that operate in the US.  Assuming any one vehicle is unlikely to be involved in more than one crash per yer, it means that each vehicle, on average is involved in 12M/283M =  0.0424 crashes per year.  Thus, if these ADAS cars were involved in crashes at the average rate, and had their ADAS on all the time, the 500 vehicle crashes per year contained in these data would expect to be generated from a fleet of only about 11,800 vehicles (or 0.0042% of the vehicles ("everything being equal", ADAS on all the time.). 

Consequently, either, ...

Anyway.  It is a start and at least to me the numbers are not startling.

What needs improvement is sourcing of the incidents.  Maybe OtA should be mandated.  At minimum, the VIN should specify the existence of theses capabilities.  Then normal police reportings can begin to "automatically" access the "black box event recorders" (see also Accident data recorder and NHTSA) that are in most cars today.  Unfortunately, privacy concerns makes this not-easy.  So here we are.  It wont be easy to do much better, but we should continue to try. 

What the data do point out is that a substantial number of the crashes involved the rear ending of a stationary object.  I have pointed out repeatedly that the source code of these systems explicitly disregard stationary objects in the lane ahead. Justifying this explicit process is that current sensors  incur unacceptable false positives when trying to determine if sufficient headroom exists under detected stationary object in the lane ahead.  Thus, to avoid braking in response to these rare false positives, stationary objects in the lane ahead are all assumed to be "pass under-able". 

As one drives, one encounters many stationary objects in the lane ahead.  These are readily sensed and precisely located ahead.  Readily sensed are overpasses, signs, tree canopies, traffic lights, ...  all of which can usually be readily passed under.  (As can vehicles ahead that come to rest in vehicle-follower mode.  These are not disregarded because one is in vehicle-follower mode.)

But when one is in vehicle-leader mode and one encounters a stationary object ahead, I believe, most, if not all "Level 2" systems disregard that object and assume the car can pass underneath.  So if you are in vehicle leader mode and come over the crest of a hill to be confronted with a stopped object ahead, your system will disregard that object.  Similarly, if the vehicle that you are following changes lanes forcing you to become a leader, any stationary object ahead will be disregarded.    Alain

Saturday June 11, 2022

The 5th Summit: https://www.cartsmobility.com/summit

Summit Preview Tour

  Dr. Steve Still's Tribute to Heywood Patterson

Saturday May 28, 2022

The Evolving Business of Powering Our Vehicles

Sunday May 15, 2022

  From pricing carbon to fighting opioid abuse, ORFE showcased top senior projects

A. Nathans, May 11, "When Serena Ren presented her senior thesis on using machine learning for art appraisals last month, she hoped to see her friend, Joyce Luo, present her thesis on fighting opioid addiction. But since all students in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering present their theses in parallel sessions, this was impossible.

But on May 4, Ren and Luo finally got to see each other’s presentations in a classroom in Sherrerd Hall, thanks to the department’s first-ever event in which selected students present their thesis work to the whole department.... "  Read more  Hmmmm...  I'm so proud!  Hopefully we'll be able to release the video so you can enjoy. Keep trying the link:

  Princeton ORFE Class of 2022 Senior Thesis Symposium "Best 8"

Saturday May 7, 2022

  PAVE VIRTUAL PANEL “AVS AND PUBLIC GOOD: TRENTON MOVES”

PAVE, May 4, "Autonomous vehicle technologies offer incredible potential: they could make our highways safer, they could offer new mobility options for people who can’t drive, and they could help create a more equitable transportation system for those who are not well-served by our current system.

During the month of May, we are highlighting places where AVs are in use — today — being deployed, tested, and used for public good. We want to look at examples of the technology being used to serve food deserts, to expand access to rural communities, to offer new accessibility options, and more.

We are starting with the Trenton MOVES initiative, which is the first large-scale urban transit system in America based entirely on self-driving shuttles. The shuttles, which carry four to eight passengers, serve traditionally underserved Trenton neighborhoods, where 70% of households have limited access to a single automobile, or no access at all. Our panelists will detail the program, describing how it works, the results it has achieved, and their vision for the future......"  Read more  Hmmmm...   Very nice.  Be sure to watch video 😁 and see ZoomCast 267 Alain

Friday, April 30, 2022

  NJDOT Commissioner Gutierrez-Scaccetti and the Trenton NJ MOVES Program

P. Keller, April 29, "New Jersey recently announced a $5 million grant for the Trenton Mobility & Opportunity: Vehicles Equity System or MOVES Project. The grant to the City of Trenton will support the planned start up and eventual deployment of 100 Autonomous Vehicles that will provide an on-demand automated transit system to serve the 90,000 residents of Trenton....."  Read more  Hmmmm...   Very nice.  😁 AlainSaturday, April 23, 2022

  Knight Foundation 

Thursday, April 15, 2022