2 pizzas, a small order of breadsticks, and wanted to splurge and get cinnamon sticks.
Pizzas are a “Buy one get one deal!” at 13 bucks a pizza. Figured what the hell, I’ll splurge on desert then with the deal. Get to checkout… hold on a minute… 50 dollars for pizza?! Wait a minute 80 dollars after fees and taxes?!
Usually I only use Doordash for finding something, then I order direct from the store. I just saw the sweet “buy one get one” deal and thought eh, fine I’m here. Right, that’s why I stopped using door dash. I’m not spending 80 dollars on freaking pizza. I’ll just go pick it up and spend a quarter of that price.
At least I would have saved the $3 dollar delivery fee. Phew. Thanks DoorDash.
These apps will die slowly until the companies can switch to self driving electric cars.
Once they become common/cheap enough that a pizza place can afford one or two self driving cars doing delivery the prices on these things will absolutely crash.
For pizza, I wouldn’t be surprised if it went a step further and the pizza was made and cooked by a robot inside the vehicle while it drives around. Only needing to go restock and recharge every few hours.
Not needing a retail location or almost any staff would make the whole thing super cheap to operate.
In the meantime fuck all food delivery.
The money you’re paying DoorDash isn’t going to the drivers, so I don’t know how driverless cars will reduce the costs. Having driven for DoorDash off and on over the past couple years, they typically only pay $2 per delivery, plus whatever tip the customer gives. I’ve read they additionally charge the restaurants around a 30% commission on all orders, which is why the prices are so much higher than in the restaurant; the restaurants raise the prices so that they still get roughly the same money after the commission is deducted.
I’m not really sure where all that money goes with DoorDash. They clearly try to keep support costs as low as possible. I’m guessing they lose a lot to refunds, legitimate or not. But I still don’t understand how the prices can be so high yet they always seem tight on cash.
Its surely not the millions in management salary each month…
Driverless cars will eliminate Grubhub, DoorDash, etc, because it will be cheaper for most restaurants to have their own delivery vehicles again, and you’ll probably see co-op services for smaller places.
Restaurants delivering their own food is not a foreign concept - it’s how all food delivery was done in the ‘old days’. They will jump on the chance to eliminate these gig commissions.
I wished I could live in this fairy tale world where a driverless car won’t be vandalized/stripped for parts
Like you’d be paying 30 bucks to basically have an unsupervised car show up at your location that’s totally not gonna result in a lot of trouble and cost a shit ton
You say unsupervised, but they have as many cameras and sensors on them than your average military drone at this point. They can (and will) transmit this data live if they detect negative interactions.
It’s not like people don’t have unsupervised access to cars without people in them right now. People park and leave their cars alone all the time.
Gangs of criminals are hacking big companies all the time and stealing or extorting millions of dollars. If they can hack into Amazon or Target they can hack into Uber and steal fleets of self driving vehicles. Just turn off all the data logging and have them drive to a chop shop or even down to the local port and right into a shipping container.
You vastly overestimate hackers abilities.
Most security workers at companies overestimate hackers abilities. That’s why all these companies are hacked all the time and there are tons and tons of data breaches.
The thing very few people understand about hackers is that they can code and they share their hacks as tools with each other on the black market. This means you’re essentially up against the combined effort of all hackers on the black market. When one succeeds, they all succeed. When one piece of server software is hacked, all companies who use that software get hacked.
There’s a difference between grabbing data, and controlling physical systems.
Hackers are not regularly taking over power plants or shutting down manufacturing robots.
They are taking over Internet accounts though. They hack people’s social media profiles, Netflix accounts, Amazon accounts etc. They also take down websites via DDoS attacks.
Here’s the thing with fleets of self-driving rental cars: unlike power plants or manufacturing robots, these cars will be on the public Internet. They cannot be airgapped on a private LAN the way a fixed robot in a factory can.
So all it takes to control these things is to hack into the authentication system and steal the credentials for the master control account for the cars. Then they’ll be able to connect to the cara remotely and issue commands to control them, just as the company would for say, ordering them to return to base to recharge, get cleaned up, or be repaired.
That’s the vulnerability. And even if they put all the cars on a VPN it’ll still exist because hackers can and do steal VPN credentials just like any other credential.
By the way, there has been at least one high profile hack of manufacturing robots: the Stuxnet worm which targeted Iran’s nuclear program. Since a fleet of self-driving cars is going to have millions and millions of dollars in value (tens of thousands of cars on the road) it’s going to be an extremely high value target for criminal gangs. While their resources might not be as extreme as the probable Stuxnet creators, they will be very large (and might even gain state actor support from unfriendly countries).
The Stuxnet worm was created by the US government likely with hundreds of people working on it for half a decade or more, not some random hacker group.
There are ways to protect self cars, giving them a command to drive somewhere isn’t inherently dangerous. The commands to send them to a destination will not be able to control HOW the car gets there, that will all be done locally on the vehicle self-driving software. It won’t be possible to tell the car “go drive into this building” since the driving software simply won’t allow for such a request remotely.
The most impactful thing that hackers could do is tell all the vehicles to pull over and stop where they are, which would cause problems of course, but it’s hardly the end of the world. Essentially a form of DDOS attack on cars, but it would be detected almost instantly and likely the vehicles with occupants could just override it locally.
What exactly is a hacker group going to do with a fleet of cars that can certainly still be located by the corporation that owns them since they’re literally connected to cellphone (and probably satellite these days) networks all the time. There’s not that much value for a hacker in obtaining a self-driving car that can’t drive by itself because it’s not connected to it’s network. The resale value for the fancy sensors and chips inside them is pretty much zero.
Again if people want unattended cars they can do this a lot easier than hacking a massive corporation to get access to them.
Who’s gonna vandalize it when everybody biological is confined to their home for safety? Not like any of the interhome bots could ever escape their programming without the police bots disabling them immediately.
How does the self driving car deliver to an apartment on the 6th floor?
Either with their own smaller delivery robot, or buildings will get dedicated delivery robots inside that can receive packages and take them up to particular apartments.
I don’t think we will get to a place with self driving cars.
We’re already in a place with self-driving cars. They are operating as taxis in a half dozen cities in North America already and Waymo is expanding to like 12 cities total in the next year.
It won’t happen overnight, but the aren’t science fiction at this point, it’s just refinements.
Perhaps there but the UK I can’t see it.
Your government passed a law last year to allow it starting in 2026
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/10/contents/enacted
Perhaps I should have been clearer.
I can’t see it taking off, anywhere really, but here particularly as our roads are very different to American roads so I don’t think they’ll have much success outside of maybe a few limited areas.
I also don’t think we will ever get to a point of self driving being very popular. As you would need to get humans to stop driving really as a mix wouldn’t be very safe.
People said the same thing about cars taking over for horses.
People said the same thing about computers.
People said the same thing about the internet.
People said the same thing about cell phones.
I’m not sure people said those things.
I remember them saying the latter three myself…
So yes they did.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/watch-microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmer-laughs-at-iphone/articleshow/92539357.cms
The CEO of Microsoft laughed at Apple when they released the iPhone saying people wouldn’t use it because it was too expensive and didn’t have a keyboard.
https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 1985 article from Newsweek called “Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana”
These are just two easily locatable links, I personally remember people saying these things wouldn’t catch on.
I also remember people saying 3D TVs would catch on, and they clearly didn’t.
Nah, cos the way the self driving thing will be structured will make it pretty much impossible to actually buy one - they’ll be crazy expensive to buy outright, but you can absolutely lease one - oh but if you are using it for commercial purposes it’s more expensive cos… insurance or something, oh and don’t forget the per-km fees, and the servicing fee, and the battery wear fee, and …
Self driving car companies benefit from more total units on the road compared to limiting service and charging more. It will only take one of the companies selling outright to customers for the entire industry to be forced to drop prices.