Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

1. Courts are finding Tesla partially liable for collisions, so they've already got some of the downsides of insurance (aka the payout) without the upside (the premium).

2. Waymo data shows a significant injury reduction rate. If it's true and not manipulated data, it's natural for the car companies to want to capture some of this upside.

3. It just seems like a much easier sell. I wouldn't pay $100/month for self-driving, but $150 a month for self-driving + insurance? That's more than I currently pay for insurance, but not a lot more. And I've got relatively cheap insurance: charging $250/month for insurance + self-driving will be cheaper than what some people pay for just insurance alone.

I don't think we need to hit 100% self-driving for the bundled insurance to be viable. 90% self-driving should still have a substantially lower accident rate if the Waymo data is accurate and extends.

If you can insure the car for less, the car company can charge more for the car. I don't want to pay a subscription (rent) for a car I buy.

Keyword: my own SUV. Not a rental. With the possibility for me to take over and drive it myself if service fails or if I want to do so.

The significant unlock is that I get to haul gear, packages, family. I don't need to keep it clean. The muddy dogs, the hiking trip, the week-long road trip.

If my car could drive me, I'd do way more road trips and skip flying. It's almost as romantic as a California Zephyr or Coast Starlight trip. And I can camp out of it.

No cramped airlines. No catching colds by being packed in a sardine can with a stressed out immune system.

No sharing space with people on public transit. I can work and watch movies and listen to music and hang out with my wife, my friends. People won't stare at me, and I can eat in peace or just be myself in my own space.

I might even work in a nomadic lifestyle if I don't have to drive all the time. Our country is so big and there's so much to see.

One day you might even be able to attach a trailer. Bikes, jet skis, ATVs. People might simply live on the road, traveling all the time.

Big cars seem preferable. Lots of space for internal creature comforts. Laying back, lounging. Watching, reading, eating. Changing clothes, camping, even cooking.

Some people might even buy autonomous RVs. I'm sure that'll be a big thing in its own right.

It's bidirectional too! People can come to you as you go to them. Meet in the middle. Same thing with packages, food, etc.

This would be the biggest thing in travel, transport, logistics, perhaps ever. It's a huge unlock. It feels downright revolutionary. Like a total change in how we might live our lives.

This might turn big suburbs from food/culture deserts into the default places people want to live as they have more space for cheaper - because the commute falls apart.

This honestly sounds better than a house, but if you can also own an affordable large home in the suburbs as your home base - that's incredible. You don't need a tiny expensive place in the city. You could fall asleep in your car and wake up for breakfast in the city. Spend some time at home, then make a trek to the mountains. All without wasting any time. No more driving, no more traffic. Commuting becomes leisure. It becomes you time.

This is also kind of a super power that big countries (in terms of area) with lots of roads and highways will enjoy the most. It doesn't do much in a dense city, but once you add mountains and forests and streams and deserts and oceans - that's magic.

Maybe our vast interstate highway infrastructure will suddenly grow ten times in value.

Roads might become more important than ever. We might even start building more.

If the insurance and autonomy come bundled as a subscription after you purchase or lease your vehicle, that's super easy for people to activate and spend money on.

This is such a romantic dream, and I'm so hyped for this.

I would pay an ungodly sum to unlock this. It can't come soon enough. Would subscribe in a heartbeat.

Might as well compare the prices of apples and oranges and vacuums and space stations.

These comments could be quoting liability only insurance or comprehensive/collision for a kia or comprehensive/collision with bodily injury for a rivian R1S. The insured amount would differ by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For reference, I have only ever paid for maximum liability only insurance including uninsured/underinsured coverage ($500k/$250k), but not bodily injury, and my premium for 10k miles per year is less than $50 per month. Used to be less than $40 per month before 2022.

You're taking about full coverage, right?

I think a fully autonomous car has to be designed around LiDAR and autonomy from the ground up. That's a hugely capital intensive task that integrates a lot of domains and data. And so much money and talent.

This is more in the ballpark of Google Waymo, Amazon Zoox, Tesla/xAI, Rivian, Apple, etc.

And as the other folks have mentioned, this becomes a really good prospect if one company can manage the autonomy, insurance, maintenance, updates, etc. A fully vertically integrated subscription offering on top of specially purposed hardware you either lease or purchase.

The medical portion of my insurance that covers me (unlimited PIP) is like $17 a month, I can't see driving much and not spending that, even with relatively limited expectations for how much easier it might make things.

This will certainly not happen. The reason these places are culture and food deserts is precisely because people drive everywhere and the driving infrastructure requires so much space that it is impossible to have density at the levels needed to support culture.

> No sharing space with people on public transit.

If people really want their own private suites they should be paying thru the nose and ears for it. Cars are a worse version of this and the car-centric lifestyle is heavily subsidized by everything from taxes to people's lives (air pollution from ICEs yes, but tire pollution is actually worse in many ways and is made worse with heavier EVs).

This will not fix food deserts, it will make them worse. If your car isn't packed to capacity on every single trip, it is less efficient and worse than public transit.

Roads are awful. We should be trying to minimize them, not expand them.

Whatever ungodly sum you are prepared to pay, I'm certain the actual cost is yet higher.

1. High-severity accidents might drop, but the industry bleeds money on high-frequency, low-speed incidents (parking lots, neighborhood scrapes). Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments.

2. Insurance is a capital management game. We’ll likely see a tech company try this, fail to cover a catastrophic liability due to lack of reserves, and trigger a massive backlash.

It reminds me of early internet optimism: we thought connectivity would make truth impossible to hide. Instead, we got the opposite. Tech rarely solves complex markets linearly.

This is terrible. In Germany (major city) I pay 166 Eur a month for two cars, one normal (premium brand) family car and second being V8 coupe. I make about 25000km a year in total and have 6 years no claims. No accidents in my driving history (over 15 years). Price is for full coverage with low excess.

And of course there's the fact that you can turn monthly FSD off if you feel the value isn't there. The commitment is much lower, so it's easier to convince people to give it a trial run.

I don't pay for it, though. I still haven't been that impressed with it (we've gotten a couple free months to play around with it). I think in some areas it works pretty well, but in my neighborhood it makes regular attempts to scratch the car.

My guess, if this actually plays out, is that existing insurers will create a special autonomy product that will modify rates to reflect differences in risk from standard driving, and autonomy subscriptions will offer those in a bundle.

[1] https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/fta-transit-ridership-p...

I tend to expect better from HN commenters. I don't have an interest in having a discussion with such a callous and dismissive comment. I hope your day gets better.

Tire pollution is worse than tailpipe emissions and the full effects aren't known. You're dismissive of other people's and the environment's health and you're wrong.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...

This seems like it can be solved with a deductible.

If you have cheap, abundant land it makes no sense to build densely.

Look at Houston with ~zero zoning laws and ~infinite sprawl.

"A neighborhood" in a high-sprawl suburb wouldn't be able to support local mixed use amenities because even singular "neighborhoods" are gigantic enough to warrant driving across them. Once you're in the car, why would you go to the place 2min down the road instead of the far superior place 8min down the road.

*In the United States. For reasons we have avoided in much of the rest of the world...

They stop at that place and become familiar with it?

Google, AFAIK the only company with cars that are actually autonomous, has US$98 Billion in cash.

It'd have to be a hell of an accident to put a dent in that.

First, if the insurance applies to fully autonomous driving only, then I suspect they’ll reach a point where the cost of insurance+automation ends up being less than just insurance through third parties.

Second, cutting into the traditional insurance market share is likely to increase costs for those who remain on traditional insurance, assuming there’s a significant enough number of people jumping ship. Combined, this creates a huge incentive for more users to jump on the self-driving bandwagon.

Then I'll never buy an autonomous vehicle.

I get that most people just want short trips around a major city, but given we, I'm sure it's shocking, don't all live in places like that, or want to spend our time in places like that, it might behoove y'all to solve for other use cases if you want widespread adoption (or at least accept that it's ok to solve for those use cases).

Or, I guess, you can hope that everyone will suddenly decide that all they want is to live in modern Kowloon City because "roads are awful" or whatever memetic nonsense is trending on TikTok.

https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/share-of-bu...

Tire pollution is now as large or larger than tailpipe particulate pollution, but it’s not a complete apples-to-apples comparison.

Tail pipe pollution includes CO₂, NOx, SO₂, CO, and fine particulates (PM2.5 + PM10) and is strongly linked to asthma, heart disease, climate change.

Tire pollution on the other hand is microplastics, synthetic rubber particles, zinc, and volatile organic compounds. Toxic to aquatic life; long-term human health effects still being studied.

How? There would be a huge increase in demand on the roads. You said it yourself, you’d have to build more roads.

Unless you meant, no more [suffering] traffic, since you could just take a nap.

The only way I see self driving to be a true win if it is so efficient that you can remove all the roads and they become part of the mass transit system.

I would demand personal vehicles to pay a premium (cost plus) as they take up more space per person and add to infrastructure maintenance cost

We do have dense pockets. NYC, in particular, has a nice metro (it just needs to be cleaner and more modernized - but it's great otherwise).

Most countries are small. Their dense cities are well-served by public transit. America is just too spread out. Insanely spread out.

China is an exception in that, while a huge landmass, its large cities emerged as the country was wholesale industrializing. It was easy for them to allocate lots of points to infrastructure. And given their unmatched population size and density, it makes a lot of sense.

As much as I envy China's infrastructure (I've been on their metros - they're amazing!), it would be a supreme malinvestment here in the United States to try to follow in their footsteps. The situation we have here is optimal for our density and the preferences of our citizens. (As much as people love to complain about cars, even more people than those that complain really love their cars.)

Public transit in the US is probably going to wind down as autonomous driving picks up the slack. Our road infrastructure is the very best in the world - it's more expansive, comprehensive, and well-maintained than any nation on the planet. We'd be wise to double down. It can turn into a super power once the machines take over driving for us.

The fact that we have this extent of totally unmatched road infrastructure might actually turn out to be hugely advantageous over countries that opted for static, expensive heavy rail. Our system is flexible, last mile, to every address in the country. With multiple routes, re-routes, detours. Roads are America's central nervous system.

Our interstate system is flexible, and when cars turn into IP packets, we'll have the thickest and most flexible infrastructure in the world.

We've shit on cars for the last 15 years under the guise that "strong towns" are correct and that cars are bad. But as it may turn out, these sleeping pieces of infrastructure might actually be the best investment we've ever made.

Going to call this now: in 20 years' time, cars will make America OP.

Those things everything complains about - they'll be America's superpower.

The rest of the world with their heavy rail trains and public transit will be jealous. Our highways will turn into smart logistics corridors that get people and goods P2P at high speed and low cost to every inch of the country.

Roads are truly America's circulatory and nervous system.

I'm so stoked for this. I once fell for the "we need more trains meme" - that was a suboptima anachronism, and our peak will be 100x higher than expensive, inflexible heavy rail.

Will you enthusiastically support the taxes on you needed to entirely offset this negative externality?

It doesn't prevent chaos, but it does provide ubiquitous cameras. That will be used against people.

I'm ambivalent about that and mostly in a negative direction. On the one hand, I'd very much love to see people who cause accidents have their insurance go through the roof.

On the other hand, the insurance companies will force self-driving on everybody through massive insurance rate increases for manual driving. Given that we do not have protections against companies that can make you a Digital Non-Person with a click of a mouse, I have significant problems with that.

Ethnic food has thoroughly suburbanized, as has shopping.

Malinvestment into public transit in a way that serves only a limited few of the population and that costs 10x the already high initial estimates is a negative drain on the balance sheet worth 500 billion or more. And this infra is woefully inflexible and static.

California HSR alone is already suboptimal vs. flights, and once we have long distance autonomous self-driving, that'll meet the same demand with 1/100,0000,000th the cost (if you average out the costs and benefits of self driving over all other routes).

My car is my property. I own it. It does everything I want it to. It is an extension of me.

That question is like asking, "Why own a computer? Why not hire a mathematician to do all your computation for you?"

The problems a self-driving problem solves are 100x deeper than a human, and the second order effects to greater society are enormous. When everyone and everything is self-driving, the roads aren't roads any more - they're TCP/IP and logistics super highways. Anything can go anywhere for any reason at any time. This is a huge societal unlock.

Even thinking about how frictionful ordering an Uber is is exhausting when thinking about the idyllic future of simply jumping into my own car - my own space - and having it do exactly what I want.

This future is magical and I want it now.

Shopping for large items, or large quantities, definitely tends to use suburban land because it's cheaper, and a shopping center uses a lot of it. The cost for the customers is the time to drive there.

Ask well-paid people who keep renting apartments in Manhattan, or in downtown SF, to say nothing of Tokyo or Seoul.

Autonomous cars that move largely along the same route could form temporary "trains", or rather convoys, moving in a coordinated fashion. That would simplify navigation, reduce chances of accidents, reduce energy consumption, and definitely give the passengers more peace of mind during the commute.

Such convoys would split when needed, join together when needed, notify other convoys and drivers about their route and timing. This would alleviate traffic jams considerably even under heavy load.

At the same time, they would consist of cars and trucks that would be capable of moving completely separately outside highways.

This, of course, will require some kind of centralized control over entire convoys, and a way to coordinate them. Railways and airways definitely can offer examples of how to handle that.

Life is hard and people make mistakes. Let the actuaries do their job, but causing an accident is not a moral failure, except in cases like drunk driving, where we have actual criminal liability already.

> the insurance companies will force self-driving on everybody through massive insurance rate increases for manual driving.

Why would manual driving be more expensive to insure in the future? The same risks exist today, at today's rates, but with the benefit that over time the other cars will get harder to hit, reducing the rate of accidents even for humans (kinda like herd immunity).

> Given that we do not have protections against companies that can make you a Digital Non-Person with a click of a mouse, I have significant problems with that.

I absolutely think this is going to be one of the greater social issues of the next generation.

Airlines with their credit cards are basically banks that happen to fly planes. Starbucks' mobile app is a bank that happens to sell coffee. Auto companies have long had financing arms; if anything, providing insurance on top of a lease is the natural extension of that.

I'm not saying we should disregard the issue of tire pollution. But if it was as serious as you suggest, it would be making more headlines than it is.

You have this narrative precisely backwards.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious: the great sprawl that made us dependent on cars happened after cars got popularized.

Yes, the cities were already spread out relative to each other, but that distance can be covered with trains well enough. What made us need cars, and what cars encouraged, was a huge amount of spread within a city or metro area. If you sprawl out over a city such that population density is constantly low, then public transit and walking can't work effectively anymore, and everyone needs to own a car.

US cities that were already large and well populated before the advent of cars tend to be densely built. Their cores, at least, are walkable as a result. This is true even for non-major cities -- just google "streetcar suburbs" as an example.

I have in fact heard it said that VW group is a financing company with a automobile arm. From some points of view, that seems correct.

Cost is a great proxy for costs versus benefits. People choose cars because they are efficient for them.

In theory public transit is efficient. In practice, only if you live in a very high density area, or you value your time at $0.

This changes with self-driving. Push a buggy update and potentially all the same model cars could crash on the same day.

This is not a threat model regular car insurers need to deal with since it'll never happen that all of their customers decide to drive drunk the same day, but that's effectively what a buggy software update would be like.

Completely irrelevant. I'm not interested in public transport across vast areas from city to city, I can drive or fly for those (very rare) occasions.

Public transport is most useful for the hyper-local day-to-day movement. I'd just want good reliable public transport within my town and neighboring areas.

(Actually I'd prefer to just bike, which requires secure bike parking in all destinations. I can already bike anywhere in town, but my bike will get stolen if I stop anywhere to shop or eat, so I can't do that.)

In most places it is not, which is a big drawback. Every week I hear on the news how the train shut down some stations or got massively delayed for random reasons. I couldn't possibly rely on that if I need to be at work at a specific time.

Apparently when our child reaches driving age we should expect to be paying about $1000/month for insurace. We'll see when the time comes.

https://scpr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/a553905/2147483...

All unlimited liability insurance companies (e.g. motor insurers in the UK) have reinsurance to take the hit on claims over a certain level - e.g. 100k, 1m etc.

For extreme black swan risks, this is how you prevent the insurance company just going bankrupt.

Reinsurers themselves then also have their own reinsurance, and so on. The interesting thing is that you then have to keep track of the chain of reinsurers to make sure they don't turn out to be insuring themselves in a big loop. A "retrocession spiral" could take out many of the companies involved at the same time, e.g. the LMX spiral.

You actually believe that?!

What if the difference between human and computer is basically nil (for the next ten years or so) and turns out to cost as much as glass coverage?

Furthermore, it's not like you can slap this stuff on a 2000 Ford Tarus. You're inherently incurring the insurance burden of a fancy modern car with obscenely expensive everything to even get into the kind of vehicle that could/would be equipped with autonomy.

I think it will get cheaper because people who want to do risky things that detract from driving will self select to drive autonomous vehicles.

Thanks to massive lobbying by car manufacturers that did their best to destroy all traces of public transit infrastructure that existed in the US before the country moved to car dependency.

Much easier to do with self driving cars though. Remember the promise? “Take a nap in your car and arrive at your destination” or “be productive on your commute”.

I have a crossover/wagon 330 horsepower V6 engine.