For example - does the vehicle have to come to a full stop, as it can't safely proceed without an operator intervention? At busy periods, do they also have to wait for an operator to become available?
A busy junction could easily have 100 cars through it per minute. If two cars every minute stopped unexpectedly, that would hardly be scalable.
That 2% is not the person in the vehicle, it’s cruise employees. It doesn’t scale because it is paid employees intervening instead of the customer driving. It scales in comparison to ride sharing competition but not in terms of people owning the vehicles.
They could spend $75/hr on employees and the cost per car-hour would be just $1.50. That's nothing.
3.5M people work as truck drivers in the US, enough, in principle, to drive ~175M cars at the same time assuming 2% of cars need help at any given moment, ie ~60% of all the cars and trucks in the entire country being driven simultaneously.
Presumably though they'd be able to shave that down a few fold between where they are and dominating transportation nationwide (should they ever do so). So, it's pretty scalable in practical terms.
This is true, but the numbers inflated even. There's no way they'll pay these people more than $15 or $20 an hour once it scales, which probably further helps your point.
If you sell a ton of these cars, having employees controlling 2% of the time means your costs become enormous rather quickly. You would have to have a subscription business model for this to make any sense where the person buys the car and then has to keep paying monthly for self driving.
Cruise is aiming for a robotaxi market, not for consumer vehicles. In their business plan, they own and operate fleets. In that kind of model, it’s possible that they can get away with 4% human control. Another way to put that is that they would have one operator on duty for every 25 cars.
No-one credible is talking about selling self-driving cars to consumers for a long time. Taxi services make much more economic sense and are all-around more comfortable from a liability perspective as well.
For example - does the vehicle have to come to a full stop, as it can't safely proceed without an operator intervention? At busy periods, do they also have to wait for an operator to become available?
A busy junction could easily have 100 cars through it per minute. If two cars every minute stopped unexpectedly, that would hardly be scalable.