Google Cars Self-Drive To Walmart Supermarket in Trial (bbc.com)

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."

Comments

additional project goals

[nimbius]

Walmart is all well and good, but the full simulation and execution of the experience is also well within the scope of this project. Including:
1. Driving to a walmart at 4 AM and buying 10lbs of bubba burgers because thats just what dinner counts as now that you're married.
2. careening through 40 acres of empty parking lot at twice the posted speed limit because this is private property and any lane marking is merely a suggestion
3. Furiously trying to work a full size trampoline, basket ball hoop, or swing set into your car on a scorching august day because we cant do Disney this year and this will shut the goddamn kids up for a few weeks.
4. Swinging around the back of a walmart at 5 PM at four times the speed limit, dodging loading bays and trucks, to pick up a little caesar hot and ready because walmarts frozen pizzas take too long.
5. Mindlessly idling a large SUV in the fire lane over a period of hours because your wife had to get some last minute bullshit for the pasta salad tomorrow and you didnt want to get dressed.
6. Trying to avoid rolling over some weird noodle-chicken-cream whats-it in the parking spot you picked thats easily been there for 3 days, but inevitably just slowly rolling through it, grinding it into your tires where the smell will linger for a month.

Re:More rental economy stuff

[dgatwood]

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, in practice, owning is always less expensive than renting. Anyone who says otherwise is kidding him/herself. And that's why you should always buy, rather than rent or lease. The only possible exception is if there is some compelling reason to always have a car that is less than a certain number of years old, such as carpool lane stickers that can only be renewed for a certain number of years. Even then, in practice, it will still cost you considerably more money to lease than to buy it outright and sell it in three years, but it is less hassle, and for some people, that might be worth the extra few thousand dollars.

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. This is, however, a fairly unusual situation, as it does not apply very far south of Michigan.

Also, cars that you own have a significant advantage over pay-per-use cars, in that you can keep things in the car. Whether it is minor stuff like hand sanitizer and sunglasses or major stuff like your laptop bag, cars have a lot of stuff in them that belongs to the owner. In a pay-per-use car service, you would either have to carry all of that with you or you won't have it with you. This makes pay-per-use cars okay for people who rarely use cars, but completely unsuitable for people who practically live out of their cars. And obviously, there's a broad spectrum of people between those two extremes for whom it might or might not work.

So yes, there are good reasons to own something. Whether those reasons matter to you is entirely dependent on how you use your car.

I see a use case for certain demographics

[morethanapapercert]

I can see a couple of valid use cases that can help drive early adoption of this sort of thing. And of course, like any new technology or process, there are pros and cons.

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.