Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

The All Electric trailer has arrived. I go over its features and qualities. It's pricey now but this is the way travel trailers will be going

Almost everything you know about EV charging is wrong once cars charge themselves, which happens soon. What can companies who hope to be in the charging business do?

Waymo might be able to import the Ojai cheaply from China into Canada, and other Canadian angles on the expansion of robotaxis to the North.

Self-driving cars are not "just more cars," but how will they mix with the urbanist dream of a more pleasant city?

Robotaxis have batteries and can drive to charging when the sun is up and the solar surplus electricity is cheap. That means they have the chance to be super-green

Handling heavy load can be a big challenge, but there are many solutions, including smart, detour-free pooling to save the day.

Tesla will control all aspects of operation and control all flow of money, so they have little motive to pay owners more than "barely enough" if even that. See the Math

Streets are for people, not robots. But what about the people the robots are serving? How to balance the conflicts about curb, charger and street use.

The 2 seat efficient design and other features give the Cybercab an edge, but its low cost won't be important until the next decade, so why is Tesla going cheap first?

The Airport will be a major Zoox destination for visitors, but today robotaxis need to improve how they do Airports. What's the ideal approach?

Waymo's Chinese-made Ojai is now available to the public and it's a comfy ride. Will it outcompete the others, and what will it be like when the prices drop?

In 2017, I forecast that robotaxis would be the path for Chinese cars into the USA. It's happened. What do the economics of Chinese robotaxis look like?

A Waymo was involved in a pedestrian fatality in Dallas. New details suggest they were not at fault, and could not have prevented events. But could superhuman robocars do more?

Soon, most EVs will be able to drive themselves slowly to nearby chargers. This will lead to the rise of "full serve" charging where a human or robot plugs the car in

To study robocar crashes, it becomes necessary to try to estimate who was at fault. Tesla's few crashes suggest they just aren't driving much. Waymo and Zoox fault counts are better.

BART is failing, but the plan to expand it involves extravagant cost to duplicate its almost 70 year old design. New technology might serve riders for far less

Self-driving cars are often depicted as "just more cars" and thus bad news for cities and transit. But what if self-driving could be the salvation of transit?

Requiring human drivers, 3 sensors, fat permit fees and per-mile taxes are the wrong sorts of regulations, and the companies should avoid endorsing them

More data for better comparisons are good. Now everybody has to do it, and regulators and the public have to learn to look at only the data, and not individual incidents

Several companies have tried to declare they met a major milestone by having "nobody behind the wheel" and moving supervision to the passenger seat. It's a bad idea