[bad_haircut72]

If you can get the inside of a van to be basically small hotel room you are competing with the airline and hotel combined on price, so taking a way-motel (I demand royalties for that now Google) can work out much better. Plus a better experience than flying

[AlotOfReading]

Vehicle regs require passenger restraints for safety reasons. That's only analogous to a very specific kind of hotel room. The bus exemption kicks in for vehicles designed to carry more than 10 people.

Also, hotel rooms tend to offer privacy. If you do that in a vehicle people get motion sickness.

To be clear, I do think there's interesting stuff in this general area. I'm just not sure it's as a sleeper bus. The big OEMs have loads of interesting concept designs buried in their basements about similar vehicles that I wish could see the light of day.

[hnaccount_rng]

Why wouldn't a few-occupancy sleeper bus work? I'd agree that this is a bit beyond "normal cars are autonomous". But I don't think the driving part will be particularly special to this application. It's just the form factor that changes.

Whether it will be possible to be cheap enough operationally is an interesting question though. The price of an (autonomous) taxi is (probably?) largely lower bounded by cost to build the system divided by the number of times it's used. And that means the denominator largely scales inversely with trip length. So it might still be too expensive to offer hotel-price level fares for night-long drives

[bad_haircut72]

Many people would be tempted to buy a vehicle where this is a possibility though so its not just the economics of waymo