Hailing the Robo Cab

Uber's CEO plans to replace human drivers with robots. What would such a future look like, and what happens to all those drivers?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking Either and welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
that looks at the teacher and says they paid paradise
and put up a parking lot. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm
Lauren Vocal, and I'm Joe McCormick. And today, Yes, Joe,

(00:23):
we're going to start by reading out an email that
we got in reference to one of our most recent podcasts.
It was an email from our listener Frank in New York.
Or maybe it'd be better to stay Long Island, Long Island.
Oh goodness, Now, let's let's not do accents. It's too
early in the afternoon to do accents, you guys. Uh no, no,

(00:47):
so so Frank rotein and said, Hi, guys, just listen
to part two of Mega Cities. Joe made a comment
that compelled me to share my experience and possibly blow
his mind as well as garner a little sympathy for me.
His comment was and thing like, o MG, people actually
drive into New York City. Oh yes, Joe. Unfortunately a
lot of us are tortured on a daily basis. I

(01:09):
live on Long Island, about sixty miles from my job
in Lower Manhattan editorializing huh okay back. Although Jonathan only
lives three miles from his job, sixty miles is an
average commute around here, But the distance isn't really the issue.
The issue is time. It takes me three hours each
way every day. Talk about premature aging. It is literal torture.

(01:34):
Now many people would to spend their sympathy to make
the point that I must have or should have taken
the commuting time into consideration when I bought my house.
I did. I bought my house in two and considered
the commute into Manhattan acceptable because it only took an
hour and twenty minutes, despite expanding all of the major
highways and implementing new strategies to ease traffic, the population

(01:55):
of Long Island in New York City having increased so
quickly that my commute time is more than doubled in
the twenty three years I've been doing this. No real
point to make here, just my two cents. I enjoyed
the show. Thank you Frank, Well, thank you Frank. That
was enlightening and a true nightmare to imagine. It was
like one of the better Stephen King short stories. Yeah yeah,

(02:17):
and uh, it takes me an hour to get to work,
but that's because I walk. If I didn't walk, it
would take me like ten minutes to work, you know,
because he was saying, like, you know, three hours for
sixty miles, takes me an hour just to go three
but then I'm on foot. Well just sure, sure, but yeah,
I mean if you took, for example, a taxi, Yeah,
if I if I, if I decided to take a cab,

(02:39):
it would take me no time at all. Don't lie, Jonathan.
Sometimes you call Uber. I have done that on occasion,
usually when the weather is particularly awful. Yeah, normally I
will walk it. But if if I am one exhausted
and it's ninety eight degrees outside in seventy humidity, yeah
I'm gonna call Uber. Or if it's pouring down rain,
I'll call Uber. Otherwise I walk it. And I got

(03:00):
tell you. When I take Uber and I get in
an air conditioned vehicle and I am quickly whisked away
to my house in just ten or fifteen minutes, I
start to really reconsider my part priorities when it comes
to walking. Yeah. Yeah, all these car services are kind
of rad. Yeah, they totally are. I mean, it's and

(03:23):
it's one of those things that has developed quickly over
the past several years. And what led us to this
particular episode and the reason why Frank's message is so
is so pertinent, is we wanted to talk about this
concept of combining a couple of things we've talked about
in previous episodes. So, uh, we're talking mostly about autonomous vehicles,

(03:47):
which we've covered multiple times on this show, and we're
talking about ways to improve dense urban environments so that
they are more pleasant to to work, play and live
in travel around in. Yeah. Yeah, And we've done at
least three episodes about autonomous cars and how they work.
So if you want to hear a whole lot about that,

(04:08):
you can tune into Maximum over Clock and Lookamano Hands,
both of which are from March and Robot You Can
Drive My Car, which is by far my favorite episode
title to say out loud from November. Do we really
want to send people back to those March episodes? Yeah,
listen at your own risk. That was like the first

(04:29):
month we were doing the show, early early in the
in the whole deal. But that tells you how many
times we've talked about autonomous cars I mean those are
those are the ones that are expressly about autonomous cars.
We also seem to mention them at least once every
month or so. Well, we do because I think we're
all three on record, and please feel free to disagree
as being pretty pro autonomous car. You know, like there

(04:51):
are a lot of emerging technologies that have pros and
cons things we can point out say, I don't know,
you know that this could turn out bad. It's always
hard to tell what the full range of effects of
a new technology will be. With autonomous cars, I think
the motivation is there for adoption. I think they're going
to be overall beneficial in a pretty serious and noticeable way,

(05:12):
and I think I want one. Yeah, they're they're provably
at this current stage, safer than human drivers and also
uh more fuel efficient exactly. Yeah. So, so just a
quick rundown on the benefits of autonomous cars, we've we've
kind of mentioned them here. For an autonomous car, you

(05:33):
can put sensors in every location around that car so
that it can it can completely sense its environment with
no blind spots. So that's already an advantage over a
human driver. Right. Also, it can pay equal amounts of
attention to all of those at the same time processing
all of that information, whereas as a human driver, you
are focused on pretty much a single direction, with maybe

(05:54):
some peripheral awareness of some other stuff that's going on,
but it's not your full focus. It can't be can
and look everywhere and it does. You can't look everywhere
and you don't, right, uh, And if you try, then
often bad things can happen. Maybe this is why Sherlock
Holmes doesn't drive out anywhere. Yeah, ever, because he's too
much stuff all the time. Yeah, Yeah, it's very possible.

(06:17):
The automous cars can also react in a fraction of
the time it takes a human to react to the
same stimulus. So if there's an emergency situation where you
need to apply the break, a robotic car is going
to be able to do that more effectively and faster
than any human could. Um. And if the concentration of
autonomous cars is high enough on the road, it can
really help reduce traffic congestion. We've talked about that in

(06:39):
the past, where you don't even need to have every
car in the road be autonomous, you just need enough
of them to to create this, uh, this traffic flow
that's much more efficient and you have fewer traffic jams
as a result, at least according to simulations being run.
We haven't rolled out enough of them to really test
it out yet. Sure, well, well on a on a
small level and kind of anecdot totally. You can see

(07:00):
this if you use Apple Maps or Google Maps or
something like that to tell you how to get to
a place, it will automatically reroot you around bad traffic
areas these days. So technology. Yeah, and they also in
addition to all of this theoretical knowledge, they have a
practical proven record so far. They are doing very well
in the field. Yeah. The only accidents that the Google

(07:23):
cars have been in so far the last time that
we checked at any rate, Yeah, and I want to
say they were it was up to seven or eleven total,
But at any rate, none of them were caused by
the the autonomous by the computer. They were caused by
humans around the computer, you know. In fact, there was
an instance I can't remember exactly what it was. It
was like a month ago or so where the media

(07:43):
got all excited because there was a report that supposedly
some autonomous cars had almost gotten into a wreck with
each other. It was the biggest non story I know.
I ended up reading into that and saying, there's nothing
here that like, nobody got hurt, there was not a collision. Yeah,
the person from Google actually said. The person from Google said,

(08:04):
the headline here is autonomous cars do exactly what they
were supposed to do, because that's how it read the way.
The way it was being reported, at least in some
media outlets. Some of them were really good about it.
Some of them were very responsible, but a few of
them said, you know, near miss with autonomous cars. And
the story almost came across as a Google car had

(08:24):
um had cut off a Delphi car and that no,
it was it, Yeah, it was Delph. I think. Um,
so a Google car had cut off a Delphi car
and the Delphi car was able to react to prevent
an accident from happening. And then the person at Delphi
I said, that's not what I said at all. What
I said was our autonomous car had made a plan

(08:46):
to do a lane change, but then the Google car
did a lane change first, which meant that the space
the Delphi car was supposed to go into was currently occupied.
So the Delphi car switched its strategy, which is exactly
what he when drivers do all the time, and we
don't often fail to do and then hit each other
where you're like, no, I want that lane and it

(09:07):
is mine, whether your car isn't it or not. But
that's the that was the deal was that it was
not a car cutting off another one. It was a
car making a lane change in another car changing at
the last section second it's mind to change lanes. Yeah.
So I don't want to sound like a you know,
schill for the autonomous car vendors out there, but it

(09:28):
seems to me their track record is pretty good. The
human driving track record is not good at all. Right,
It's it's demonstrably worse, right, I mean, we have plenty
of of records on that. The one big drawback to
autonomous cars is that they're going to be really really
expensive when they come out, assuming that you know, at

(09:50):
least at first at least at first, and and probably
significantly expensive for quite some time afterward, because while manufacturing
can really help bring down costs, like as you improve
those processes, the amount of technology being packed into these
cars is such that even with improvements to those manufacturing processes,
you're never going to get uh an autonomous car down

(10:11):
to the price of like a mid priced car. It's
always going to be on the high end, um possibly
on the very high end, at least for the foreseeable future.
But that's not necessarily a deal breaker as far as
autonomous cars helping us out. No, Because I want to

(10:31):
form a little analogy here. I remember people saying this.
In fact, they're still saying it today, but they used
to say it like in the nineties, was, Uh, we'll
never have electric vehicles because they just cost too much
and they will never cost less. We will surely never
improve upon this technology. Right. And it's true that there
haven't been a whole lot of personal electric vehicles rolled out,

(10:53):
But one thing that I think we did get fairly
early on was certain areas, like some college campuses or
some downtown areas adopting electric buses and other forms of
electric public transportation. Right. And that's exactly why we want
to kind of segue into this discussion about the possibility
of using electric autonomous vehicles as a taxi fleet. In

(11:16):
other words, not looking at autonomous cars as something that you,
as a person go out and go to a car
dealership and purchase. And this is the vehicle you're going
to be using. But rather, what about a an environment
where there's a fleet of these autonomous cars and you
can hail one of these cars like a cab whenever

(11:37):
you need to get from point A to point B.
And so it's a it's a very different use case.
And when it comes to that use case, the story
is incredibly different. It is much different than from the
the huge barrier of entry of the cost for an
individual person, right, right, So so let's talk about some
solid numbers. Let's talk about New York City, which has

(11:59):
really had a lot of taxi cabs um and is
also where Frank is from. Yes, so New York City
is great example for multiple reasons. One the enormous fleet
of cabs that are there too, it's a very dense
urban environment, it's got a large population we mentioned in
our Mega Cities episode there there. It's a great candidate

(12:20):
to use as an example. So the data that I'm
going to be spouting off is from lots of different
sources over several different years. So keep in mind that
the numbers aren't all uh they don't all come from
one source, right, So, uh so there's gonna be some
your mileage may vary in this case. According to the

(12:42):
twenty ten census, uh less than half of the three
million households in New York City own a car. So
a fewer than half of the popular of the households,
not population, but the households in New York City own
a car. Um that's one point four million households on
a car coin to the twenty census. And the lowest

(13:03):
ownership rate is in Manhattan, where it's around twenty three
of households owning a car. But doesn't every household have
their own subway station. Yes, that's how New York works.
Uh well, no, I mean the point I'm making is
that you can definitely chalk that up to them having
very good public transit. Yeah, that's definitely. Well, that's part
of it. But the taxi cabs are also the yellow cabs.

(13:26):
They are they are almost almost exclusively concentrated in Lower Manhattan.
Uh so the other ones. Brooklyn is at forty percent ownership,
Bronx is at Queens is in Staten Island is at
Now if you want to compare that to the national average,
the average across the entire United States. In the US

(13:48):
of households own at least one car, so in New
York City it is much lower than average. Um. New
York City is therefore this great example of how are
people getting around if they're not? If not everyone owns
a vehicle. Uh. And so besides the buses and subways,

(14:08):
cabs and livery cars and other vehicles that are driver
for higher services, that's the answer. Besides walking, that's also
a big one. But how many taxis are they running
around in New York? So the most recent number I've
seen is thirty seven. However, the most recent site I
could find was from an actual from an actual source

(14:31):
from within New York City was the two thousand fourteen
Taxi Cab fact Book, a jolly good read, uh, published
by New York's Taxi and Limousine Commission. And at that
time when they published the fact book, it was thot seven.
So somewhere in the thirteen thousand, five hundred range is
what we're talking about. And it's such an exact number

(14:52):
because New York and New York's Taxi and Limousine Commission
specifically dispensed these uh, these medallions which are kind of
like a license to be a cabby or our license
for your car to be used as a cab. Right,
you're authorized to act as a cab driver within the
New York City area. And a medallion is a small

(15:15):
metal plate that actually attaches to the hood of a taxi.
That's what designates that car as being authorized and is
it is legally allowed to act as a cab. Because
we also have probably all have heard the stories of
people landing in New York and some yahoo with a
car just happens to be yellow driving on up and yeah, yeah,

(15:36):
they're they're they're what make sure you don't get kidnapped
by crazy person, right or or just fleeced like it
may be that you know, you get picked up by
somebody who's charging you ridiculous rates that I have nothing
to do with the um the actual authorized rates. Yeah,
because I thought you meant the Central Park in New Hampshire.

(15:57):
What I thought you wanted the scenic route. We're gonna
visit all the borough until we get to Manhattan. Uh. Yeah.
So the medallions are these plates that are on the cars.
That's how you recognize that it's a cab technically, that
you've got the yellow cabs in Lower Manhattan that's mainly
where you're going to find them. Um, there are actually
two different types of medallions. There's independent medallions and many

(16:17):
fleet medallions. But both of those mean that the driver
of that car is authorized to operate a cab. So
here's an interesting number. Yellow taxis provide an average of
four eight five thousand trips per day collectively, not per taxi. No, yeah,
it's all of them together, hundred seventy five million a year.

(16:38):
By the way, that's a lot of trips. Now, they're
also borrowed taxis, and I apologize if you guys in
New York pronounce it totally different. But it's b O
r O and it's a it's for the Burrows. I
would imagine brow you would think so, But it's b
O r oh, and I'm calling it borrow. It's borrow taxis.
You do what you want, Jonathan. At least twelve thousand

(17:01):
of their abbreviated boraxes, So if you get on a borax, uh, slippery. No,
the boro taxis there at least twelve thousand of them
as and they are green in color, they're not yellow.
They serve areas of New York not commonly covered by
yellow taxi service or really anything out of Lower Manhattan

(17:22):
UH and total, we're looking at around twenty five thousand
taxis of some sort, yellow or greens serving the streets
in New York City. Then you've got another twenty five
thousand falling under the category of liveries UH and you
cannot street hail one of those, So you can't be
on the corner and see a livery car and flag
it down. They're not allowed to stop. You can. You

(17:42):
must prearrange your trips with these services, so are a
little different from the taxis. Also, until recently, there was
no way to get a yellow cab without just flagging
it down. You couldn't pre arrange them. You had to
flag it down, and you flag it down these days
either the old fashioned way where you're waving at a
cab driver, or they're also apps now where you can

(18:04):
use that to UH to flag a cab, but it's
essentially the same thing. Then you've got the black car Services,
which has about another ten thousand vehicles, so you're looking
at what sixty thousand of these cars driving people around
New York City. Now, on top of that, those are
all the those are the ones that are overseen by

(18:25):
the Taxi and Limousine Commission, Yeah, what about Uber? So
Uber Uber and Lift and all those other similar digital
services we've popped up recently. Uber in particular has raised
some some some hell or in New York City, people
would say, because they've they come in and the Taxi

(18:46):
and Limousine Commission not really super happy about this other
group coming in that has nothing like they don't answer
to the commission at all. They set their own rates.
They you know, it's it's very different approach. And the
perception is that Uber is taking a lot of business
away from the registered drivers who also have to go

(19:08):
through like the a lot more regulation than Uber does.
So there there's some real concerns saying, hey, it's not
really fair. This other business is coming in and they're
not subject to the same restrictions that we are, So
why are we Why are we allowing them to steal business?
That's kind of the narrative. However, there's some things you
gotta keep in mind. First of all, there are more

(19:28):
Uber cars in the streets of New York City, then
there are yellow taxi cabs. Well, there are more Uber drivers.
That's really well, that's the fair thing to say. How
many are in operation at any given time. Isilar lower? Yeah? Yeah,
So Uber drivers number around nineteen thousand in New York
City across seven bases. Uh. Depending upon where you read this,

(19:52):
this the statistic, because I've also seen it as low
as around fourteen thousand, four hundred and as high as
nineteen thousand. But that means that there are more Uber
drivers either way. Even on the low number, there are
more Uber drivers than there are yellow taxi medallions in
New York City. However, that does not mean that Uber
has taken out a huge chunk of that taxi business.
So remember I said four eight thousand trips per day

(20:17):
for the taxi cabs. For Uber, it's closer to thirty
four thousand, thirty four thousand, two hundred seventy one trips
per day. So a fraction, oh yeah, tiny tiny amount
compared that was That number comes from a report in
September two fourteen. We should really do a whole episode
on these these types of services, because the legal tangles
in the surrounding, like socio technological issues are are really

(20:41):
interesting um and the numbers are more serious than other cities.
Portland is in the middle of a four month taxi
deregulation experiment and according to their intern report, Uber and
Lift and and et cetera have handled forty three per
cent of taxi calls in May. Yeah, so very different
story depending upon where you are. Sure well, and that's

(21:03):
also partially I'm sure due to the de regulation that's
going on in that area right now. But you know what,
we'll see what happens at the end of that experiment
period and do lots more research and come back to
guys with another episode if if it warrant that. Yeah, yeah,
because it's it's definitely, I mean, the story of of
Uber in general is pretty amazing. This was an idea

(21:26):
that uh ended up being a multibillion dollar idea. It's phenomenal. Yeah.
So at any rate, we've got what's this like, seventy
to nine thousand cars cars that are in services in
New York City, not necessarily all at the same time,
but yes, yeah, ninety thousand cars in New York City

(21:51):
providing services for people to get from point A to
point b. Uh. So what if we did something really
crazy and we ended up take all of those cars
off the streets, fired all the drivers, and replace them
all with robo taxis Well, that is certainly not great
if you are a taxi or uber driver. Nope, but

(22:14):
it's it's also something that you absolutely should plan for
if you happen to be a taxi or uber driver, because, uh,
sooner or later this will happen. Whether whether it will happen,
you know, within the next five to ten years, largely
depends not so much on the technology as it does
on the legislation. That's really where it's going to to

(22:36):
be the battle ground, I think, But it will happen. Uh,
and don't just believe us. There was a study that
recently came out that says pretty much the same thing. Yeah.
The Earth Institute at Columbia University was one of these studies.
Are actually quite a few that are really interesting. This
one is available in full on the net. If you
want to go and read it, you you can find

(22:56):
the Earth Institute's Columbia University study was released in two
thousand their team, and it was looking for sustainable solutions
for personal mobility. In other words, what is the what
is the car of the future going to look like?
And is it going to be a privately owned vehicle
or will we have shifted to some other means of
mobility in the future, and they were actually looking at

(23:18):
what are the most economical and energy efficient methods of
getting around, especially if you are in an urban environment,
because the further out from an urban environment you get,
the more a private personal vehicle makes sense. But if
you are within an urban environment and your travel is

(23:39):
restricted to you know, a certain few thousand miles a year,
like six thousand miles a year because of the way
you work and live in that space, owning a personal
vehicle may not make sense. And so they looked at
several different factors. One was they were looking at the
way of using the internet to coordinate between a fleet

(24:00):
of cars and the people who need transportation. So like
the smartphone apps for Uber and Left and also for
some cab companies, so it takes advantage of like GPS data,
It takes advantage of the this intern interconnection where you
also have a system that can keep track of what
all the different cars are doing at any given time,
so it can route the most efficient vehicle to get

(24:23):
to the destination. Uh that destination being the person who's
hailing a car. And if you you have an app
for something like Uber, it probably already does something like this. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's very much like that. If you ever pull
up the Uber app and you just use it without
like you're not calling a car yet, you can actually
see all the cars that are in your area that
are driving around in different places. And then when you

(24:46):
you cannot control, please make pac Man. Google Maps did
for April, they turned They turn Google, But we're talking
about pac Man with the ghosts being real cars. Go
watch Pixel and come back to me and tell me
what a great idea that was. Okay, So the next

(25:07):
thing they looked at were autonomous vehicles. That's also part
of the what they were considering for the cars or
the personal transportation of the future shared vehicles. So this
would be the you know, abandoning the idea of owning
your own vehicle and doing something more along the lines
of taking cabs or Uber or these robotic cars. Uh.

(25:28):
And you wouldn't known the robotic car. You would just
you know, hire it for a ride and then you
would be done, and then you would do it again
whenever you need a ride the next time. How about
if the car didn't have to be the same size
for every trip? Huge, huge part of this, Yeah, because
let's say you're one person, you need a taxi ride

(25:49):
and there are three empty seats or two empty seats
that you're not occupying. Yeah, I've randomly, you know, had
nothing but minivans to choose from when I get often
an airport or something. Yeah. No, every time I go
to c e s. Whenever I'm in the line, the
taxi cab line, it almost always seems like I get
the mini van as my cab, and that's space going

(26:12):
to waste. There could be a group behind me that
could have really used that. But because the way the
system works where it's first come, first serve, it doesn't
you know, they're not they're not matching the size of
the vehicle with the needs of the writer. But if
you could do that, if you could write size, if
I'm one person for this trip, right, then you could

(26:33):
have a vehicle of the appropriate size, a small vehicle
come pick you up. Whereas a family a four that
are on vacation and have luggage, they could have a
larger vehicle pick them up. And of course that's not
just about space, that's about energy. If the car only
needs to fit one person, it will weigh less and
it needs less and less energy, and also it takes
up less space for storage, it takes up less space

(26:55):
for parking. There are a lot of reasons why you
would want to maximize the efficiency of the size of
the various cars in your taxi fleet, because it may
be that you're you know, especially if you look at
the statistics in New York City, most of the rides
tend to be one or two people. So if your
fleet is mostly of vehicles that can carry one or
two people, then you can, uh, you know, you you

(27:19):
can have a much smaller storage space for your fleet
of vehicles since only a small portion of them would
be larger, right for the for those times where there
are three or four more people who need to get
from point A to point B. Now I see another
thing that you said they take into considerations advanced propulsion.
Now we're talking about nuclear pulse propulsion. I wish, yeah,

(27:40):
in the in the actual study, they call it advanced
propulsion systems, and I thought plasma. What's going on? It's like, yeah,
sadly there's there's specifically talking about electric vehicles and whether
it's pure electric as in a battery powered vehicle or
fuel cell. They also mentioned fuel cell vehicles, which are

(28:00):
you know, they're also electric cars. It's just they're using
hydrogen as a fuel to create this chemical reaction that
generates electricity, and then the output is electricity, heat, and water. Uh,
whether it's fuel cell or electric battery there. That's really
what they were looking at for advanced propulsion. So they
wanted to see what could we do if we really

(28:22):
concentrate on these five things and combine them in some way.
The ideal future personal transportation system would be a combination
of all five of these things in one form factor.
So they're creating like their fantasy football team version of
the New York transportation system. Yeah. Yeah, And they said
that if you combine all of these you could save

(28:44):
a huge amount of time, money, energy, I mean pretty
much across the board. You would be making a better
choice for getting people around an urban environment. That seems intuitive,
but I guess the question is how much better? Okay,
so we talked about that seventy nine thousand cars around
New York City. Uh, specifically they were looking at the

(29:06):
yellow taxi cabs, which, let's be fair, let's eliminate everything
else but the yellow taxi cabs. So that's back to
the thirteen thousand, four hundred or so. This study said
that you could replace all of those yellow taxi cabs
with nine thousand electric autonomous vehicles. So you have already
wiped out a ton of those. Now. The other thing
to keep in mind is that those yellow taxi cabs,

(29:27):
while they represent only a fraction of the overall driver
service cars out in New York City, they have the
vast majority of the fairs. They are by far providing
the most trips out of all the different cab services
and liveries in New York City. So you could just
boost that nine thousand number up a little bit and

(29:47):
presumably you would have enough to cover all of those
drivers services in New York, which is pretty phenomenal. And
the way you do it is through being incredibly efficient
and having next to no downtime. So and if you're
a driver of a cab, a yellow cab, and the
only way you get fares is when you see someone

(30:08):
flag you down or you have to drive around with
an empty cab, yeah, tons of downtime where you don't
have someone or at least enough downtime so that it
is a problem, it's wasted potential. But when you have
this master system that is scheduling things out and keeping
things as efficient as possible. There's very little downtime involved.

(30:28):
As soon as a car is dropping off, it's on
its way to go pick someone else up, and uh,
it's you know, I'm really curious to be able to
dive deeper into their research because some of it sounds
almost magical. They were talking about nine thousand cars doing this,
and your weight time would be less than a minute

(30:49):
from when you hailed the cab. So you open up
your smartphone, you say I need a ride. Less than
a minute later and autonomous electric vehicle pulls up and
you get in. Now, if you're talking about your average
yellow taxi cab weight time, if you are actively looking
for a cab and trying to flag one down, the
average weight time is closer to five minutes, So you've

(31:10):
already saved time just with that. And you're using fewer cars,
so there are fewer cars on the streets of New
York City as well. That also means that there's less traffic,
so you've also sped up the amount of time is
anyone on the road to get anywhere exactly. Yeah, So
there those are huge benefits there so yeah, a slightly

(31:31):
larger fleet would probably do that for all those So
the imagine that you now can remove seventy thousand cars
from the New York City area and those are replaced
by let's be I'm gonna double it, just for the
heck of it, eighteen thousand electric vehicles, less than twenty
thousand vehicles can replace seventy thousand that exists right now.

(31:52):
And that's again just the driver's services. You could also
eventually see people say, well, I don't need a personal
vehicle now I can get to where I need to
go by taking one of these cars. So you get
rid of the personal vehicles. Because when you think about it,
personal vehicles, of the time they're parked, you're not using them.
And in New York City you're paying for that. Most

(32:15):
people are paying more for a parking space than you
would find for an average house. Here in Atlanta, it's
kind of crazy. Um, it might be a slight exaggeration,
but not by a whole lot. So also, because we're
talking about electric vehicles and not gasoline powered vehicles, there
is the environmental factor to consider. According to another study

(32:36):
done by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the per mile
greenhouse gas emissions of an autonomous electric vehicle would be
lower than that of a two thousand, fourteen gasoline powered vehicle.
That was even taking into consideration how the electricity is
being produced simply by the reduction in the amount of
travel and the right sizing that being a huge part it,

(33:00):
because if you're right sizing, meaning that you're sending out
only the vehicle necessary to carry the passenger and there
you know, to meet the passengers needs, then you're not
using the same bulk vehicle that's going to be drawing
the same amount of electricity as every other bulk vehicle
out there. You're gonna be using a lot of smaller
ones that are just gonna be sipping at electricity instead

(33:21):
of gulping at it. Sure, and here's the part where
we do have to say, as always that the way
that you generate that electricity through the grid matters. It
does matter. Like in California, this would make way more
sinse than New York. And the reason I say that
is that California has a lot more green power plant
technology incorporated in it than New York does. So in

(33:43):
New York City, most of the power plants, in fact
I think all the power plants in New York City
are gas fired power plants. That means they're using natural gas,
and some are using a combination of natural gas and coal.
So you are using fossil fuels to generate electricity. So
while the cars themselves are lean, the electricity may not be,
and in the case of New York it isn't. So

(34:04):
that is something to consider that. Yes, the individual cars
are not going to be generating greenhouse gases, but the
system that provides the energy that lets the cars move does,
So there's a larger picture that you have to look at.
In that case, According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
it still makes sense. They go into a great deal

(34:27):
of detail, and part of it is that they assert
that more and more regions are looking into greener means
of producing electricity, so part of it, part of it
is rest on the assertion that things are going to change,
which might be a little let's let's be fair, let's
say it's optimistic. Well, well, I mean the commercial urge
of having, you know, hypothetically a bunch of electric vehicles

(34:50):
on the road that all need to be charged would
give people more of an incentive to start creating these
these greener ways of power. Yeah, and they're tons of
incentives to do it. And that's just one of them obviously,
I mean, just just wanting to clean up the environment
being another one. Wanting to screw the penguins or too cute,

(35:10):
or or for for ones that are petroleum based, wanting
to to uh free yourself from the burdens of having
to import some of your petroleum and thus the national
security angle of energy comes into play. Uh. But yeah,
it's all of these things are are they look like
they're positives. In fact, both the Columbia study and the

(35:31):
Berkeley study, the Lawrence Berkeley study, both of them came
to the same conclusion, which is that, in an unusual
turn of events, the greenest approach, also in the long run,
is the most economical. It will save you more because
the key they're being in the long and the long run,
and and not for personal ownership. You have to take

(35:53):
that shared vehicle into account. That's what makes it uh
an attractive economical coach. Not for the person who wants
to have their own car. This is for the person
who lives in a city and wants to be able
to get around and maybe doesn't want their own car
because they don't want to make car payments, they don't
want to make insurance payments, they don't want to be

(36:14):
taxed every year on the vehicle that they used to
get around. So if they are using a system like this,
then they're paying on a per trip basis, and even
if you factor in all the trips, it may be
that your your cost per year is lower than that
of owning a car, unless you're one of those people
who can buy a car and make it last for

(36:35):
twenty years, in which case you could argue, hey, no,
I'm in my case it doesn't make sense. But but
most of us are not like that, right, most of
us can't have a car and have it in good
working condition for a really long time. That's getting less
and less common these days. So again, because of all

(36:55):
that technology and how expensive it is, the average estimation
of how much that would add to the cost of
a vehicle, adding on top of the already you know,
whatever the price tag is is another one thousand dollars.
So take a thirty thousand dollar car, toss a hundred
fifty thousand on top of it thousand dollars for your

(37:16):
autonomous car. Yeah, I don't have that sitting around. I
don't either. I thought I did. Turns out it's more
like about a buck seventy three and change, what is
it with the true code sealant exactly? Like what if
I want that undercoat treatment thing? Um? Yeah, no. So

(37:40):
if we do look at it from that personal ownership,
it's prohibitively expensive and would be for quite some time
because again, even bringing those costs down, you would have
to bring them down an incredible amount to get close
to what the cars of today cost, right, so this
would be decades or at least a decade to get
to that level. How Ever, if you look at it

(38:01):
as you are an organization that wishes to provide driver
services in a dense urban environment, and you compare it
to the cost of maintaining a fleet of uh gasoline
powered vehicles operated by humans, it suddenly starts to make
sense because you're not paying those drivers. Robots don't get paid,

(38:26):
so they might take our jobs, but at least we
know they're not making a living. You know, there's a
little silvery silver lining, and then there they're just as
miserable as I am. And I want to point out
that these organizations that are providing cab services have some
money because it's not a cheap thing to run a

(38:47):
taxi service in New York. You have to purchase that
medallion that that license to run your cab, and the
prices of them vary with the market, but they run
in the in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to
the millions of dollars. For for Examp, well, they sold
for an average of eight hundred thousand dollars each during
the first quarter, and that's way down from like the

(39:07):
two million that they were going for a couple of
years ago. So on top of that, you've got insurance
and industry fees, And what I'm saying is that overall
it's a very expensive business to be in. And whether
or not this would make it less expensive is very complicated,
but even but I can imagine that like it would
lower your insurance premiums, it would if you're using electric,

(39:30):
then you don't have the fuel costs associated with fueling
a fleet of taxis. Uh. If you're doing the right sizing,
then you are also very intelligently storing those vehicles whenever
they're not in use. Usually they're just be coming into
charge normally, what you would do is you would have
a certain number of vehicles in reserve fully charged, and
then have those go out onto the streets while the

(39:52):
ones that have to have to recharge come in. Um
and you know, even that that high upfront co us,
it's not it's not that high when you're looking at
the medallion cost. And uh, the long term maintenance may
be much lower depending upon what breaks. Because they're also

(40:13):
very sophisticated machines. Right, So if you have something that's
beyond a mechanical failure where you know you've got a
mechanic coming in there, if it's a computational problem, that
actually could end up being a bigger issue. Mechanical cars,
most cars are mechanical. You guys, did you know electric
cars I've heard can be more expensive to up keep. Yeah. Yeah,
so that is one of those things where when something

(40:34):
when it's something is a problem, it probably is more expensive.
The argument I have seen is that problems would be
more infrequent assuming that you have a reliably built vehicle. Uh,
of course that's a that's a big assumption. Obviously. If
that's wrong, then that's a problem. But getting back to Uber,
where we talked about all those uh that nineteen thousand

(40:55):
Uber drivers that are also in New York City of
fifteen thousand and nineteen thousand, depending upon the of what
you're looking at. Uber CEO Travis Kalnik said in two
thousand fourteen, and here's a way to motivate your employees.
That long term plan for Uber it was that the
company would replace human drivers with autonomous vehicles, so essentially saying, hey,

(41:17):
all you guys who drive for us, your days are numbers.
You're super replaceable. Don't forget it by a car. As
it turns out, you're replaceable via machine. Uh. Now, we're
not there yet. Obviously, we don't have autonomous cars that
are that are allowed on the streets to do this
kind of business, and it maybe sometime before we are.
But that is Uber's plan um and for Uber it

(41:44):
makes perfect sense because even though it's that huge upfront
cost of purchasing a vehicle that's going to have a
hundred fifty thousand dollar hike on its price tacking which
they don't have to purchase any vehicles right now because
they use the driver's vehicles, right. I mean, this is
a big expense, but Uber drivers take home you know,
the majority of their fairs they are earned, which makes sense.

(42:06):
They're doing the work right there. Uber is the facilitator,
but they're the person doing the work. And in fact,
I remember seeing when they the the rate went down
to like they take home the fairs. When that happened
in San Francisco, that was huge news because they used
to tell how more than that. But from Uber standpoint,
they'd be saying, Hey, look, we'd take home the entire fair.

(42:30):
The car doesn't get any of it. We might really
we have to reinvest in the vehicles, but the car
itself is a machine, a tool. The money goes to
the company. So from the company's perspective, it makes perfect
sense to make this investment because they'd be making way
more money. Oh yeah, even even taxi services. Taxi drivers
perceive about fifty seven percent of their fares or did

(42:51):
as of two thousand five, which is the last number
that I could find on it. But but that would
still make complete sense for taxi companies as well. Yeah,
so callen x gun even further than this. Recently, in
July of that's when we're recording this. Early July, he
said he would be willing to purchase five hundred thousand
electric cars from Tesla by if those cars were autonomous.

(43:16):
So Tesla has been experimenting with autonomous cars. I think
they've got like twelve prototypes on the road, and Ellen
Musk has said that he's very interested in pushing autonomous cars.
He says that's the future of cars, and it's not
going to be in private car ownership. Now that is amazing.
Here a guy who is the CEO of a car
company saying personal car ownership is limited, it's not the future.

(43:41):
In fact, he sees a future where humans will not
be allowed behind the wheel of a car, that only
robots will be able to will be allowed to drive
vehicles because they are so much safer than humans are
that even once you get past that initial you know,
experience of I don't really I want to be in control,

(44:02):
once you get past that and you realize, well, this
machine that is in control is way better at doing
it than I am. And all the other crazy people
on the road are in the same boat. All of
their cars are in control. So I don't have to
worry about the crazy person who is not really paying
attention to driving, but is paying attention to something completely
different and would be a danger. Otherwise, well, they're not

(44:24):
controlling their car anymore. The robots are. So I think
people have convincingly made the case, Yeah, in the future,
that we're going to look back on the era of
people being allowed to drive their own cars, kind of
in the way we we now look back on the
era of doctors not needing licenses. Yeah, it's just kind

(44:45):
of like what were So the interesting thing here is
that if Kalanick and Musk had struck a deal then,
and and if Tesla in fact only made autonomous cars
in the five thousand cars that call Nick said he
would purchase, that would represent the entire run of that

(45:06):
year's Tesla model, because that's how many cars they make
in a year's five thousand. So essentially call Nic saying
I'll buy every car you make in its autonomous and remember,
nine thousand cars, according to that Columbia study, would be
enough to satisfy the needs of New York City. So
with five thousand, you could potentially have tons of markets

(45:28):
covered by these driverless cars, assuming it were legal for
you to do so. And that again is where we
run into the first major roadblock. It's not the technology,
which is I wouldn't say it's mature, but it's really close.
Like it's much closer than than what you would expect,
considering it's not something that's readily available for consumers. It's

(45:53):
gonna be the legal barriers of how do you create
legislation that covers a world where both manually operated vehicles
and robotic vehicles are sharing the road, Because there's gonna
be years of transition before we reach this point where
the majority or perhaps even all of the vehicles on

(46:13):
the street are operated robotically. And until we get there,
there's gonna be some growing pains. There's gonna be some
tough decisions, unprecedented in some cases, and we honestly don't
know where that's gonna go because humans are far less
predictable than machines, and when it comes to legislation and

(46:33):
powerful lobbies as well, it's hard to say how that's
gonna go. I mean, I would imagine if I were
a politician in New York City, the Taxi and Limousine
Commission probably and and perhaps in you know, organizations representing
the drivers would probably want to really have some serious
conversations with me about any decisions I might make that

(46:55):
would be in favor of autonomous cars and perhaps against
human drivers, I would imagine. So, so one of the
things we do have to think about, like if you
are one of those those politicians having to make those decisions.
An element that comes into into the conversation that is
hard to dismiss is what about the jobs of all

(47:17):
those drivers, not just drivers, but also mechanics, you know,
folks who would be out of work. I saw one
study that talked about how you would see a loss
of jobs in auto mechanics because there will be fewer accidents. So,
because there'll be fewer accidents, there will be less called
for body work. And then you think, well, fewer accidents

(47:38):
is good because you decrease the risk to human health, right,
I mean, you're you're not going to have as many
incidents where someone is going to be injured as a
result of an accident. But then, yes, it does have
this other effect of eliminating the need for the job.
No one has to repair the cars, no one has
to repair the humans get hurt. I mean, yeah, this

(48:01):
has kind of fire reaching effects. There's a domino effect definitely, right,
it spreads out or ripple effect even and domino is
probably not even accurate. Ripple is probably more accurate. So
these are questions that we don't necessarily have answers to,
and and it's it's something that you do have to
think about. If you're thinking, well, the benefits are clear,
and it would benefit a ton of people, so it

(48:24):
makes sense to make this move from that perspective. However,
there are folks that are going to be negatively impacted
by this, at least in the short term, if not
longer than that. So what do we do about that?
We you know, some people I'm sure would argue, hey,
we can't let this stop us from making progress, but
we can't just ignore it either. Well, certainly, I mean,

(48:47):
I think it's yet another chapter that's pretty similar to
previous chapters in in the story of automating work. I mean,
you could say the same thing about farmers in the
nineteen and twentieth century, or manufacturing, yeah, I mean, or
anyone who worked for Amazon. Lots of the jobs that
used to exist just don't anymore. And I mean we

(49:09):
would probably all now say that we're better off because
that we've got machines doing those jobs instead of people. Um,
but I'm sure at the time it was hard for
the people who had invested time and money into training
for those skis really yeah. Yeah. So one of the
things I think is important is that we have to

(49:32):
keep in mind that this this era of automation is
going to it's going to continue. It is coming. It's
not it's not like this is something that is is.
Maybe this is a it will happen. We're not going
to stop it. We could delay it, but the question
is is it a good idea to delay it? Well,
and it's a question of when whether we purposefully attempt

(49:54):
to delay it or not. Because you know, just because
Uber says that they want to buy five tho ours
from Tesla, doesn't mean that Tesla is going to sell
those to them, or that they're going to have an
autonomous car ready to go. Musk thinks it's closer to
and get ready twenty to forty years exactly what Lauren

(50:29):
was saying that we don't you know, would be that
that's Calinic's dream to have that, and and for obvious readings,
and it would be a big benefit to us as
well as you know, it's a huge benefit to Uber.
That would be an enormous benefit for people to for
the reasons we've already stated. Um, but that does mean

(50:50):
that we do need to start thinking about what do
we do with the people who are these drivers, Like,
what other jobs could they be doing? How could we
transition them from that role to something else? Because it
is coming, it's gonna happen, just as automation is going
to take over more and more jobs and lots of
different disciplines. I just think that the driver's one is
a particularly visible uh job that is in danger of

(51:14):
being replaced through automation in the foreseeable feature what however
long that may be from now. But I think twenty
years is actually being really super like pessimistic. I think
it's gonna be it's going to be less than two one.
Well when you have you know Henrik Christensen saying that

(51:35):
kids born today will never drive a car like well
in order for that to be true, So uh and
I side more with his assessment than I do with Musks.
But uh, and it's mostly because there are other players
on the field besides Tesla. I mean, that's one company,

(51:56):
but Google has been very bullish about this, uh and
companies as well. Yeah, I mean that that's another way
of looking at it is that since it's not really
a technology problem but more of just like a social
and political acceptance or maybe say legal acceptance problem, what
will it take to make this transition. Well, it'll basically

(52:16):
take some powerful people with money being behind it, right yeah,
and it'll and you know, having the these and if
we have that, I mean it sounds kind of like
we do well, especially if if they're able to pitch
it in such a way where it gets public support
where you say, hey, uh, this approach is going to
mean less traffic. It's going to mean you spend less

(52:37):
time getting from point A to point B and more
time doing what you want to do. You're spending less
money because you're not paying for car payments or insurance
or yeah, yeah, you don't have to worry about being
hit by a car by someone who's who's distracted because
the cars are never distracted that sort of stuff. That's
if they can, if they can sell that to the

(52:57):
public and the public gets support for it, then I
see the change happening more rapidly. But if they don't
get that support, it's going to artificially increase the amount
of time it takes for this transition to happen. You know,
I think there are a lot of parents of some
day soon to be fifteen to sixteen year olds who
are probably going to be on the on the bandwagon

(53:19):
with this too. And I, of course, you guys know me,
I'm totally on this bandwagon. Yeah, I would love and
imagine the streets of Atlanta if they're if they weren't
clogged with traffic all the time. I can't, I can't.
I don't have that with mechanical spiders that we rode

(53:40):
the backs of. Yeah. Oh, and actually, what if your
car does get distracted? What if it's dreaming? You know what,
We'll talk about machines dreaming in our next episode. How
about that, Lauren, We'll do that. So, since we're all
you determined what our next episode is going to be,
as in the one will be recording immediately after we
stopped this one, I want to invite our listeners to

(54:01):
suggest future topics for forward thinking. You know, let us know.
It'll be like Frank, write us tell us what you think,
because that launched into this episode, which was a lot
of fun to talk about. Uh. So you can send
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(54:51):
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