You seem to be ignoring the important point: "The Pointing and Naming System".
While this protocol is not oriented toward maintaining equipment like tracks and wheels -- it does seem to be a good indicator that the Japanese deal with these systems and the safety concerns around them differently.
And their track record (pun intended) shows the result of this focus.
> Railways in Japan use a safety system called “pointing and calling.” This method of physically pointing toward an item to be checked while vocalizing its name was invented in Japan about 100 years ago. The combination of looking, acting, speaking and hearing reduces errors by as much as about 85%.
If they can figure out how to really take advantage of economies of scale, and drive the costs down quite a lot -- the desirability of car ownership will drop dramatically.
Everyone I know under 40yo already professes to hate driving and hate car ownership.
Owning a car and living somewhere you have to use it for day to day everything is tedious. But the option of one for the weekend, trips out of town, into nature is ultra valuable, enough so that it's worth it to have a car sitting doing nothing during the week for us, even in a well connected large city, in a walkable area.
At present or I suspect future costs, any kind of taxi for an out of town trip (without any rail option) of 50-100 miles is way too expensive to consider, we'd sooner hire a car, if it was slicker and more convenient. But hiring a car anywhere but an airport terminal needs a trip to the hire place, and needs to start and finish when they're open to avoid spending an extra day or two of hire. Plus time taken on paperwork and insurance faff could easily be an hour.
I strongly believe that if you extrapolate 5-10 years then at that point the really big revenue stream(s) that self-driving cars will be funneling to themselves will revenue poached from the legacy auto manufacturers and adjacent industries.
With Waymo usually double the price of taxis this, to put it mildly, won't happen. Taxis, obviously, do not compare favorably to just owning a car. It's just not realistic unless you barely do any driving at all.
Not for me. Right now, Thursday, ~7pm. The given Waymo ride I'm looking at is going to cost me $30. Uber black is $42, UberX is $20, UberXL is $25. Uber wait & save is $17. Lyft priority is $23, Standard is $19, Wait and save is $17, Extra comfort is $26, Lyft Black is $46.
The taxi ride I took from the airport yesterday was $60 with tip but Uber would have been $40. Waymo doesn't go to the airport yet tho.
At work we've moved from several AAA-class products and services to Microsoft ones. The Microsoft ones were cheaper and more integrated but always less capable, like a minimum viable product design. It's just good enough to not pay for a separate third party product but just put up with the included product in the bundle.
And the deeper you get in the ecosystem the harder it is to ever get out. And of course the more you get dependent on them the more leverage they have in the next contract negotiation.
I don't consider them a trusted partner either because they often overpromise, downplay design limitations to our leadership.
A previous post asked: "Is it OK to 'grok' out simulated undressings of small children because the image technically no longer depict them and instead are fantasy?"
And then YOU answered with the following:
> Why would it not be OK? There is nobody being harmed.
While this protocol is not oriented toward maintaining equipment like tracks and wheels -- it does seem to be a good indicator that the Japanese deal with these systems and the safety concerns around them differently.
And their track record (pun intended) shows the result of this focus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling
> Railways in Japan use a safety system called “pointing and calling.” This method of physically pointing toward an item to be checked while vocalizing its name was invented in Japan about 100 years ago. The combination of looking, acting, speaking and hearing reduces errors by as much as about 85%.
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