Russell Vickers

It would be, you know, why would you buy a vehicle that sits on your driveway 23 hours a day and depreciates by thousands of euros per year?

It just would be a no-brainer.

You would just subscribe to a service and it's going to be...

You've got to think about it from this point of view.

My kids, for example, they might not want to take their driving test or they might not need to do that because these services will be ubiquitous.

Now, I could see that happening in somewhere like Dublin, but then in rural Ireland, for example, it's a trickier situation.

The road network isn't as good, isn't as developed.

And then how can these vehicles cope with those conditions?

So

Again, it mightn't be this panacea straight away, but for a lot of people, they will just simply subscribe to a service and that will be it.

Yeah, in California, look, nothing to that extent has happened.

But from a city planner point of view, you can really think about, well, I don't need parking spaces so I can open those up for more for cycleways.

And, you know, the roads can be narrower just because of these vehicles are going to be there.

But then you have another effect and you do see this in California where you have these robo taxis kind of loitering around the place because they're just basically waiting to be called

and for business so on the when on the down times or in the lower demand times then those vehicles have to they either just keep driving around occupying street you know the creating traffic or do they go to some sort of depot and they they park there and then they wait to be called so that's still getting worked out and of course then the other problem with them being truly autonomous is then there's a whole element around keeping those vehicles clean

all of those types of pieces and how did the vehicle, you know, if someone got that vehicle on a Saturday night and maybe they weren't feeling too well and then how do you maybe have to clean up that vehicle after they've been in that and how does that, you know, for the next customer.

So there's a whole element about that that hasn't really, is just starting to be tackled now.

Yeah, so that's the number one concern for people.

It's the same way, you know, no one was comfortable with the idea of getting into, well, not many people are comfortable with the idea of getting into a fully automated airplane, for example.

So safety is a big concern, but out of the, you know, nearly millions of miles that Waymo have driven at this point, there's been, like, statistically, it's way less accidents than would be when human drivers are involved.