Google Cars Self-Drive To Walmart Supermarket in Trial (bbc.com) 65
Google's sister-company Waymo has announced a trial in which its self-driving cars will ferry shoppers to and from a nearby Walmart store to pick up their groceries. From a report: For now, the pilot is being restricted to 400-plus members of its early rider programme in Phoenix, Arizona. However, it indicates how the tech giant thinks the autonomous vehicles could be deployed if and when they exit the experimental stage. One expert said cost would be key. The only word on pricing so far is a promise to offer participants discounts when they order goods via Walmart's Online Grocery Pickup service as part of the deal. "If this is rolled out properly you would expect there to be a reasonably high threshold in terms of the price and spend commitment to justify the service," commented Julie Palmer, a retail expert at the consultancy Begbies Traynor. "You'd expect it to be limited to shoppers buying higher value items."
More rental economy stuff (Score:2)
Every company is offering this more and more to us. Don't buy a car, call one for temporary use or lease it monthly. Don't own a phone, lease it. Leasing is coming back, and it allows companies to keep paying less since you don't need as much money to lease versus own. I will just keep buying used cars, I owned a new one once. Not worth it.
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Every company is offering this more and more to us. Don't buy a car, call one for temporary use or lease it monthly. Don't own a phone, lease it. Leasing is coming back, and it allows companies to keep paying less since you don't need as much money to lease versus own. I will just keep buying used cars, I owned a new one once. Not worth it.
Why is it so important to your brain to need to "own" something? "owning" is a pure fantasy that exists only in human heads, it literally does not mean anything.
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If it appreciates, buy it. If it depreciates, rent it.
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That's the sort of terrible advice that keeps poor people poor. In the real world, depreciation is always built into the cost of renting or leasing something. If that new car loses half its value over the three-year lease, you can bet your backside that the lease more than covers the loss of value plus the interest that the actual owner loses on the cost of building the car and the opportunity cost from not selling the car outright, and that the actual owner (the car company) still comes out ahead.
Thus,
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And the same will be true of self-driving taxi services. The taxi fleet companies will have to pay for the cost of upkeep and make a profit. Because of that profit margin, the only way such a service could possibly be cheaper than owning a car would be if you live in an environment where unused cars decay significantly over time, e.g. road salt territory. In those areas, driving a car all day long until it drops might save enough money over driving a car less frequently to make a pay-per-use fleet cheaper than owning
I can get a monthly pass for the local transit system for $95. I could pay that for 10 years and it would be just over $11k, which isn't enough to buy a Nissan Versa, the current cheapest new car you can buy in the U.S. I could rent a lot of vehicles for weekend trips and vacations for what I'm saving.
This is where someone points out that a transit pass isn't the same as taking a taxi. If it goes where I want, when I want, yes it is. And no, that's not true for me,
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You're missing the reason that the transit pass is cheap: each trip of a bus or subway carries double-digit numbers of people. The math doesn't work when you're talking about a taxi-like vehicle that carries
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You're missing the reason that the transit pass is cheap: each trip of a bus or subway carries double-digit numbers of people. The math doesn't work when you're talking about a taxi-like vehicle that carries just you
I'm not missing that at all. My point is that I don't care about the per-mile cost of owning a car vs. using a taxi-like vehicle. What I care about is the total cost of transportation.
For two years I lived around the corner from a train station that dropped off across the street from my office. My next job, the bus stop was even closer to my house and that also dropped me across the street from my (new) office. I put less than a thousand miles on my car. The only reason I kept it was it was already paid off
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I'm not saying that there isn't a cost savings from that amortization; I'm saying that I would expect it to be smaller than the profit margin that anyone operating a vehicle fleet would expect as their ROI. Most of a car's costs are per-mile, not per-year, because a well-built car will still be running in three decades, assuming you still want to drive it.
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There's a lot of people who do nothing, except rent what they own out to people. It's possible to buy homes by getting financing and having renters pay off your mortgage. These people suck 1/3rd the paychecks of working renters, it's iffy.
That does not apply here because cars don't maintain value, and the efficiency of sharing them should lead to low prices. For someone living the basic life needing work commute and outings in urban areas, self driving cars are a no brainier. If you don't see this you haven
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Liver cirrhosis is on the rise with millennials so you might not be far off.
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Owning something actually means you hold the RIGHT to the thing Free and Clear with freedom from anyone else's claims. Pay for the car in cash, and it lasts 13+ years. A leased or new car bought instead --- it would have been 10x the cumulative expenses and designed to fail and become obsolete much sooner due to the more complicated key systems and cheaper less-durable parts manufacturers have been lately using in key vehicle systems.
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Many people think of cars as transportation fashion accessories. Can't have one that's out of style!
Okay, I'll buy that explanation, even though the mindset is foreign and frivolous to me.
These people are the market for "Cars as a service."
But, as I do somewhat understand the concept of 'status symbols' even to the point of 'conspicuous consumption', it's only really valid if you own something; just 'renting' or 'borrowing' it is cheating and identifies you as a poseur; stet?
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Neo-Feudalism (Score:2, Interesting)
US laws are based on property rights and as we have seen with recent Supreme Court decisions corporate persons are superior to natural individuals in their eyes.
Cloud based services like music and video game services ensure content control is centrally retained and subscribers have no ownership rights. Pay the subscription fee or lose access. If the Cloud provider goes out of business all assets are lost.
The repeal of Net Neutrality means corporations can censor or discriminate communications at their whim
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That ship sailed looooooooong ago when they decided software is licensed, not sold. Honestly, anything that looks like a one-time payment for indefinite and unlimited use of a software product should have been considered a sale, if it walks and talks like a duck it's a duck. That was the wedge that let them redefine everything digital as licensed. It wouldn't stop the rental model like you had Blockbuster and GameStop with physical products but then owning something would mean something. If buying a car was
Old People (Score:2)
Loss leader (Score:2)
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From an efficiency perspective, it would make more sense to partition the car with cloth dividers into five areas, then load up the groceries for up to five customers, then self-drive the car to each of their houses, open up the door where that customer's stuff is stored, and let the customer unload before driving to the next customer's house, and so on, until all of the groceries are delivered.
(Discussions of the shortest path problem are, of course, expected, along with discussions of whether frozen food
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Yeah, there isn't much actual point in driving someone to the store so they can watch their groceries be loaded into the trunk and then be driven home again. Seems like an odd combination. "Whee, let's go for a pointless car ride instead of replacing an actually needed ride!"
The car should just be picking up the groceries for them and notifying them when it's time to walk to the curb outside their house and pull them out of the car.
Google and Walmart? Epic confluence of evil! (Score:1)
I'm surprised Satan himself wasn't there to witness his spawn.
Reading between the lines (Score:2)
You'd expect it to be limited to shoppers buying higher value items
I know what this means folks...
Forced purchase of organic produce for the elderly.
Not bunch different that IRS jail scams in my book.
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Maybe you're confusing Waymo/Wal-Mart with Amazon/Whole Foods? :-D
I think you misunderstand what Organic means... (Score:2)
Maybe you're confusing Waymo/Wal-Mart with Amazon/Whole Foods? :-D
Why would Walmart of all companies give up the huge margin boost for substandard products that the word "Organic" brings [walmart.com]?
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I'm not saying they would, just that they aren't really known for having lots of organic food. :-)
Next up (Score:2)
Next, they'll make the car be able to scream at the kids in the back seat and possibly even beat them.
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Don't make me put you in a time out!
The seat flips backwards and the kid slides into the trunk.
When my kids where young and we went on long trips the kids would argue constantly. My wife would make me drive since I was much better at ignoring them and so she could have a hand free.
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To *Walmart*? (Score:2)
I guess that's what happens when you take "Don't be evil" out of your code of conduct.
Old People (Score:2)
Where I live, they could ferry the geezers from the senior center to Costco. Where they can wander the aisles for a few hours and eat from the free sample carts. It cheaper then actually having to feed them at the nursing home.
I see a use case for certain demographics (Score:3)
The first use case is senior citizens. Lets not forget that we're dealing with a major demographic shift here as the baby boomers are now edging into retirement age. Agnes lives in a retirement community and is now old enough to feel insecure behind the wheel (dear old Arthur always drove when he was alive anyway so...). Plus, being on a fixed income, being able to call for a ride when she needs to go shopping instead of owning and maintaining a car seems a lot safer and cheaper. (among other things, Agnes is likely to feel uneasy about car maintenance since Arthur always handled that as well and she fears being ripped off or sudden unexpected and expensive repair bills) While a self driving car is likely to be cheaper than a taxi, the downside is that while she might have a bag boy help load the car at the store, she won't have a cabbie to help her unload back home.
The second use case I can foresee is people living in dense urban areas, especially areas where the market value of the parking spot associated with your house, apartment or condo approaches the value of the residence itself. As with Agnes; for Betty self driving car services offer a way to avoid the headaches of car ownership while offering more flexibility than public transit. The cost difference between human driven taxis and ride hailing services vs an autonomous vehicle will matter to her as well, but the need for human assistance at either end won't be as important.
The last use case I can see would be for shuttling kids around. (not car seat sized mind you). In my area, there are a handful of families who send their kids to school by cab because either they are not on a school bus route or they are deemed to be too close to the school to be entitled to bus service yet feel they are too far for their kids to walk unaccompanied. Autonomous cars would be cheaper and possibly more responsive to the surge demand loads of that practice. But for this use case to succeed, there would need to be some mechanism whereby parents can be assured the kids will end up at that school and not change the destination once they are onboard. A cabbie knows to disallow any changes to the destination and can be expected to remind Junior to not forget his or her backpack in the car.
The biggest downside I can see is my cynical expectation that early players in this market are going to subsidize their costs by allying with major retailers and marketing companies. e.g. I can see Wal-mart being pleased to offer free or dirt cheap autonomous transport to seniors via a partnership with Waymo. The catch of course being that you can only go to Walmart and back. And/Or an autonomous ride provider harvesting all the details of their passengers itinerary along with the credit card data the passengers have to provide and selling access to this data to the already too invasive marketing industry. I think it is patently obvious that marketing data definitively tied to a credit card is more valuable than marketing data associated with an IP or email address.
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The last use case I can see would be for shuttling kids around.
Yes, but don't think school, think karate class, soccer practice, clarinet lessons, dance class, going to friends houses, trips to the mall, etc., etc.
Parents spend a huge amount of time shuttling their kids to various activities. Giving the kid a Waymo app instead will be a big win for them, and the kids will appreciate their new mobility as well. Though I expect kids to stop caring about getting a driver's license.
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One aspect I thought of after posting my original post was the perceived safety of the kids in an autonomous vehicle. Right or wrong, there is a perception of putting kids at risk of encountering nefarious individuals (primarily sex offenders) when using any form of publi