this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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Mildly Infuriating
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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.
If the goal is to steal the cars then all it takes is to order them to go somewhere while disabling (perhaps via DDoS) the logging and other telemetry servers that allow them to track the vehicles. Once they’re stopped where the criminals want them they can break in and disable the power supply to shut them down completely, then tow/push them into shipping containers to send overseas for modification and resale.
There already exist international criminal gangs who do this sort of thing (edit: for regular, not self driving cars). Think of the resources of an organization the size of the Gulf Cartel. They operate their own cell phone network in Mexico. They’ve got hundreds of engineers. They absolutely could do an operation like this.
Why would the onboard software ever allow (or even support the ability) to disable connectivity?
The tracking doesn't even need to happen on the vehicle itself, given that they're likely to use cellular connections the tracking from the cell company can locate it.
My point is that there's no benefit to stealing a self-driving car over a regular car, so why would these gangs switch? None of the self-driving features will work when it can't connect to the network, and none of the extra parts have any sort of resale value separate from their intended use. They may as well continue stealing regular cars.
Who said anything about software? Cut the wires to the battery! That will power down any car no matter what.
The benefit to stealing a self driving car is that it’s a self driving car! What’s the retail price of self driving cars? $100k? More? The whole premise of the self-driving taxi and delivery companies is that the cars are too expensive for the consumer market so they operate on a rental basis instead. If self-driving cars became a mass market commodity like regular cars then thieves would just steal them the old fashioned way.
Of course the self-driving features work without the network. GPS works without a cell network. It’s a receive-only protocol. The only thing that won’t work is the remote command and control dispatch. That would have to be hacked around.
Cutting the wires will work, but it's already recorded it's location and transmitted that data by the point you get to that point.
There's no way that the self-driving car companies won't require regular check ins on the network to function in self-driving mode. You can't even play many single player video games these days without an internet connection.
Essentially it won't be a self-driving car once you've stolen it, and it may not even be a regular car either because some of the proposed models don't even have steering wheels or pedals. Even if you did crack the software, it's not going to be loaded with any sort of relevant self-driving functionality for <insert 3rd world country where they don't check vehicle registration here>, it won't have maps, it won't be trained on the local signs, traffic lights, road markings, etc. it may not even operate on the correct side of the road.
It’s transmitted that data but the gang has blocked the server from receiving it. I mentioned that earlier. This whole operation doesn’t go down unless you take out the eyes and ears of the company.
All that other stuff can be replaced. It’s still a car with a $15,000 battery in it and drivetrain and all the sensors and electronics.
And if the hackers can break in and steal data, they can steal the source code. Then they have all the keys to the kingdom.
Then the gang is going to have to take out both the self-driving car company AND the cellphone company at the same time. It's not just one getting the data, and again it's going to get noticed immediately if cars start going missing and data is being blocked. They may get ahold of a few dozen cars if they try to do it quickly, but they won't get even hundreds.
The battery may worth something, but it's a lot of effort to steal a car just to get a $15k battery. Criminal gangs aren't stealing 5 year old Kia Niros for resale across the globe, they generally target vehicles worth 3-10x that much.
There's no "source code" for self driving cars in the sense that a video game has source code. The cars have some normal code yes, but the self-driving portion is a trained machine learning model that is essentially a black box. It takes millions of compute hours on high end graphics cards along with millions of hours of driving data to generate a new version of that model. Stealing the existing driving model still won't make it work in West Africa or the Middle East. Stealing the training data wouldn't help get it driving there either, they'd have to collect millions of hours of local training data for each destination.
It would be easier for these gangs to start their own self-driving company.
I mean who knows. Maybe they just steal whatever valuable parts they can carry and dump the rest.
The model has to be stored in the car for it to work. I mean can you imagine the car driving along and a network interruption causes the self-driving system to be unresponsive for a second? That could cause a crash immediately!
So then if the model is stored in the car itself it can be stolen and sold to a rival self-driving car company in Russia or what have you. And in that case they could definitely repurpose the entire stolen car itself. They just need to replace the client code with their own so that the car connects to their servers.
Besides, the model isn’t going to have maps or server connection stuff built into it. The maps are external and part of the GPS navigation, so those can be replaced. And all the command and control stuff is just conventionally programmed client software that can be redirected to another server or even a server hosted locally within the car itself for autonomous driving.
Fundamentally, the reason self-driving cars are a bigger target than regular cars is that they leave no witnesses if you can disable the surveillance/logging. You don’t have to disable the cell towers for that, just the real time surveillance (just the company servers). Once the car goes dark it can no longer be tracked.
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.
Steve Balmer isn’t the most sound minded individual and it’s almost expected that Microsoft is going to play down Apple.
I don’t know too much about Clifford Stall but doesn’t seem like an expert in technology and so a poor assessment is to be expected.
3D TVs. We could find people who said 3D TVs were a fad. Almost like people say both things and they can’t all be correct.
To be clear. I think self driving cars might be a think in the distant future but not in mine or my children’s lives. Tesla has an insane amount of data and even they struggle in different sunlights and you couldn’t apply to that to the uk as the roads are so different that you would need an amount of data filmed in the UK. Then do that for all countries.
Are any other manufacturers even attempting this problem because Tesla is losing market share by the day and it won’t be long before their investors will want them to stop spending money on FSD to allow them to turn a profit. What with Elon turning most people away from his companies for being a cunt.
You've cast double on my links, but you're clearly too young to actually remember these things happening. I'm not. I do remember lots of people laughing and dismissing all three as never going to be for normal consumers (I'm not old enough to remember them laughing at cars)
You're also clearly not paying attention to this industry if you think Tesla is a leader. You've only caught what made the news in the UK.
Waymo is far and away the leader, having hundreds of cars driving around daily with nobody behind the steering wheel.
Mobileye(NA and Europe) and Baidu(China) are also actively driving around without drivers in certain places.
The only place Tesla has them fully autonomous is in the factory as far as I know.
I am in my 40’s and been in the internet pretty much since its inception.
I see Waymo are quite active in US cities so thanks for that.
Let’s come back in a few decades and we can look back on this and see whose guess, cause that’s all we are doing, is closest to the truth.
Just like many people could see the future of Netflix, there will always be a Blockbuster laughing them out of the room.
Your example about Netflix proved my point. Naysayers said it wouldn't work, but they are now the leader.
I'm happy to wait and see, I fully expect them to arrive in my city in the next decade.
But you missed the point in that had Netflix failed you could be here saying “see Blockbuster were correct”.
I’m not trying to be confrontational here and I’m saying this as I feel I might be coming across that way. What I’m trying to say is for every naysayer you can find someone who was the opposite and vice versa for all your examples. If that makes sense.
The benefit to self-driving cars is self-evident though. There's no argument that they wouldn't be better than human drivers in theory. Not only for safety, but for traffic, parking, cost, etc.
The only thing holding them back a this point is refinement. They have already proven that in at least three cities, they are mile for mile safer than human driven vehicles.
Waymo has gone from 1 city, to 3, to now pushing out to 11 in a few years. I wouldn't be surprised if it doubled 5 times again in the next 10 years. That would put it in just under 200 cities by 2035.
The first iPhone only sold a million units in the first year, but two years later there were 25 million iPhones and they hit the 200 million mark by year 5.
I can see the benefits but I can also see the downsides. Where do all the people who have driving jobs go? Do they just stop working as many might be too old to train for something new.
Where does liability fall for accidents?
What about cyberattacks? These are all things that need to be considered.
The first argument is a non-starter, professions have come and gone for all of human history. Where did all the people who raised and trained horses go when cars came out? Where did all the people go who made buggies and coaches? What about people who lost their jobs to construction equipment like excavators? What about switchboard operators at telephone companies?
The economy will re-organize itself to adapt to the newly available labour. Don't get me wrong, individuals are going to be absolutely devastated by this, but not replacing someone who's doing a job that can be automated is no different than having them dig a ditch and fill it back in. It's never a good idea to hold back technology just to keep jobs around. This path leads to the Amish.
Liability for accidents has already been sorted out for 100% autonomous cars, it's the vehicle manufacturer's fault. For most of the current ones on the road, they are modified existing vehicles, so the manufacturer would be said to be the self-driving company (like Waymo) though once the software is built in from the factory it will be on Ford or Nissan or whatever likely in partnership with a software vendor. They may insure themselves, but likely only against catastrophic situations rather than day-to-day accidents.
They are definitely considering cyberattacks.
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.