My immediate thought is a dystopian version of this article:
If all cars were autonomous, society, the economy and the environment would all suffer. Here is how…
* You will be forced to watch non-stop ads in these automotive cars, similar to how some taxi services work today. You can turn these off for a fee of course.
* Hackers or bugs in softawe may easily cause global traffic jams
* Congress will pass laws controlling when, where and how you may travel
* You may be blacklisted from traveling in any autonomous by corporations, governments, police etc.
* The aggregate amount of automotive travel will increase exponentially, causing more carbon emissions and even worse traffic since more people will have access to travel
* Sprawl will get worse, as people move further away from urban areas since they can do other activities in cars.
* Investment in mass transit will diminish, since funds will move towards automatic cars.
Exactly. Don't forget the inevitable regulations on the software too, or even restricting/banning non-autonomous cars completely. I'm glad there are others out there who also see autonomous cars as a threat to freedom.
It is said that driving is one of the most dangerous activities we do, but I think it's no coincidence that it's also one of the most liberating. It's a very pleasurable feeling to be able to get into a car and drive, controlling it as if it were an extension of your body.
The phrase "If all cars were autonomous" has a similar feeling to others like "if there was no crime" --- sounds good on the surface, but also has deeply authoritarian and dystopian implications.
> You may be blacklisted from traveling in any autonomous by corporations, governments, police etc.
Well, I mean, you can already be blacklisted from travelling in regular cars: your driver’s license can be revoked.
Or are you referring more to capability than legality? Because even in a world with entirely autonomous cars, I would find it hard to believe that all such cars would be “non-rooted”, for the same reason we don’t live in a world where 100% of computers run iOS. Large companies (e.g. logistics companies) need total control and predictability over their vehicle fleet, just like large enterprises need total control and predictability over their servers. So there would likely always be a category of “dumb autonomous” vehicles like all-terrain pick-up trucks, sold to farmers and loggers and quarry workers et al, that you could buy; just like you can buy a regular PC today. You, as its “OEM” owner, would have complete control over what cloud traffic-control systems it submits to, if any. It might be illegal to configure it in certain ways and then drive it on the road, but that’s not the point here.
Cars are such an emotive topic because they are a powerful democratizing force. Any ordinary citizen can have at their disposal a machine that can transport them, their family/friends and their stuff, anywhere they want to go at any time, can be packed in advance and unpacked at leisure when you get back, can act as a base or a shelter at the destination, can extend a bubble of personal space on long or stressful journeys that no other means of transport can, and so on and so on. The self-driving car utopia breaks all of this. You can experience it right now, we have voice-activated self-driving on-demand cars right now, running on artificial-artificial-intelligence: they're called taxis. Taxis have not supplanted personal vehicle ownership by a long shot, therefore neither will self-driving cars, unless personal vehicles are banned by government edict - and a government would love to determine where and when you are allowed to go. Will it be worth it?
Hackers or bugs in software can already kill you - a modern car is a computer with an engine attached. You think that pedal is any more advanced than a scroll mouse?
Congress already passes laws controlling when, where and how you may travel and you may be effectively blacklisted today by insurance companies, courts or police officers for a range of reasons. Do you honestly think that you are entitled to roads wherever you want and your license can never be revoked and insurers can't charge what they want?
Half of the total lifetime emissions of a car are in the driving of it. Autonomous vehicles open up the opportunity for an Uber-esque experience where you're less likely to buy a car and just rent it for when you need it: most people actively need a car for less than 10% of the total time that they own one for. That means significant environmental gains will come from lower demand for car manufacturing. How is that a problem?
Sprawl "getting worse" is another way of saying housing becomes more affordable as it does not need to be so concentrated. City centres will become more comfortable, communities will become more connected.
And finally, if there is one area that will cause a boon for investment by autonomous cars, it's mass transit: driverless buses, trams and trains, will all allow for more money to be spent on more vehicles and the net price of using these services will drop as the cost of employing, training and managing driving staff is reduced.
We can go around and around on this: it's happening, come to peace with it, and try and make sure we maximise the positives and reduce the negatives.
Note though, I did not counter the advertising thing. Tesla's T&Cs on their cars already suggest the owner does not really own the car. I think that's a problem. RMS in one of his more popular talks says he doesn't want software inside his microwave to Free because he would never want to modify it: I think a good argument can be made that if I buy a car that drives itself, I should be able to see and modify the source code.
Agreed. There’s an article of a remote hijack of I think it was a Jeep using Ulink or whatever it’s remote interface was. Scarey with its limited capabilities.
To be fair, I won’t even blame the auto industry for having vulnerabilities in their software. At this point I’ve come to accept that any bit of technology has flaws and can be exploited. No matter how great their dev team is. Comical as it was and unrealistic for the time period, the latest fast and furious movie showed a potential scenario of a fully autonomous traffic.
It’s going to be the same reason there’s no flying cars. The tech has been around for easily 20 years. But if you watch enough Air Disasters, autopilot and other computer controlled airplane functions still fail catastrophically. To this day. The average person is not capable of flying an airplane. Shit, the average person still isn’t great at driving a car. Sure that brings to argument that then all cars should be self driving. But the added risks, I don’t think so. The current sample data of self driving cars is still small and there aren’t active hackers looking to truly exploit yet. It’s like when people said that Macs were immune from viruses back in the day. No, people made viruses for windows because they can cause more wide spread damage since they were more widespread. Few had macs thus, why bother?
But it doesn’t matter. Self driving cars will happen and something bad will happen in that time. There’s too much money to be made. This isn’t being done to save the world. It’s a control scheme as you pointed out. It’s funny how the older you get the more you realize that when someone starts to spout they’re trying to saving the world, they’re covering up some type of scheme to make money and make the world a shittier place.
Another interesting point that I don't think is brought up at all is how self-driving tech will impact children. The legal driving age requirements will likely become obsolete.
Can school children take a self-driving car to school every day? Will this increase traffic significantly? How long until a hacker takes control of a car and abducts the child inside? How safe do parents really feel letting their kids be in this machine on their own? etc.
While making it sound like they care about your, productivity or the world in general what matters to Volvo is their profits and the preceding brainwash to get the right traction and acceptance.
[Digress: Volvo's pitch to legitimize joining forces with Uber to fully automate driving.]
This is something I often thought about as a child. I didn't imagine self driving cars as they are being developed today. Rather, I thought about what it would be like if all cars were controlled by a common system. I would imagine cars all taking off together in unison from a stop at traffic lights, cars being merged together from two separate lanes without bringing everything to a crawl.
The beauty of a fully automated and coordinated system is that vehicles would only stop at the end of a journey. Intersections would be a graceful interleaving of vehicles in all directions. This would conserve a lot of energy that is currently wasted on braking and acceleration, and the passengers have less frustration of being stopped when it is their strong desire to be _going_ somewhere.
> I would imagine cars all taking off together in unison from a stop at traffic lights
Why do you even need traffic lights anymore? Autonomous cars can brake and stop for people who need to go through, and synchronise with one another to organise crossing.
If all cars are autonomous it is more efficient to have two cards approaching at the same time negotiate a speed at which they can safely pass through the intersection without stopping or colliding. Stopping would be a thing reserved for when you get to your destination or a pedestrian gets in the way. It's more efficient that way. The energy needed to accelerate is less than the energy needed to maintain speed.
Which of course bring sup the idea of hacking the negotiation so that you always have the favorable outcome. The same way some people try to hack the sensors that turn lights green for emergency vehicles.
What's more efficient? What's more resilient? An army all walking at the same pace taking their cues on orders or a crowd of autonomous individual, all adjusting pace etc... Based on their local condition (terrain, speed of who's in front...).
It probably depends on what you mean by a centralized system. Right now, autonomous vehicles are being developed with a focus on independent operation. Which makes sense, since early examples will find themselves having to integrate into roads lacking car-to-x (or similar) infrastructure[0] shared with vehicles that lack the ability to share anything. There'll be a transition, but older cars will pretty much always be around. Though I wonder if we'll see retrofit kits making use of OBD-II ports for older cars to give them at least some communications abilities at some point, or even some sort of GPS "box" for even older cars lacking OBD ports altogether.
Even when car-to-x and vehicle-to-vehicle communications are standardized with widespread use (and they'll both be usable even with non-autonomous vehicles), I doubt we'll see the sort of centralization with hyper-optimized traffic patterning in the animation linked by philrw. Cars will still be able to share information, and make use of it to change their behavior for minimal disruption of traffic flows. They'll talk to infrastructure, and probably even make use of relays well ahead of key infrastructure elements (ramps, bridges, construction zones, etc.). But I wouldn't consider it "centralized" in that situation.
For example, a car is entering an on-ramp. Local infrastructure could communicate that fact, as well as other information about the car to traffic approaching the on-ramp. Is it a heavily-loaded truck, with slower acceleration? Or is the vehicle 'dumb' (maybe it's an older car with no communication abilities)? Approaching cars would leave a greater gap ahead of them, switch lanes, etc. Even without giving control over to a central traffic system, we'd see significant improvements in traffic flow.
The other challenge for highly-centralized control is the sheer amount of data that's collected by autonomous cars. They apparently generate upwards of 25Gb/data an hour[1] from their various sensors. Figuring out what part of that data needs to be kept, normalized, and then sent to a centralized system is going to be tough. And it'll be hell on the wireless spectrum. Of course, that's assuming V2V spectrum isn't carved up and used for internet access.[2] In which case, things will get...trickier.
Last week, I got an e-mail from Subaru telling me my windshield washer fluid was low (it was). The e-mail provided information on how to refill it, and, a link to make an appointment for service if I felt something else needed attention.
If, instead, my brake pads were worn and the car were fully autonomous, I could have scheduled it for service while I am at work and it could have driven itself in, got new brakes and driven itself back to my office. No loaner car, no time off from work, no hassle waiting in line for a service adviser, ....
File under the 'productivity' column, and I expect cars will be better maintained than now, since we procrastinators will be able to simply click a link and forget about it.
They miss the point of not owning a car (partially mentioned in both "economy" and "environment"): the car is usually the #1 or #2 (after house, if you own one) household expense; it's a depreciating asset with a terrible utilization rate (typically less than 5%). Bought by individuals, who typically have much worse credit than corporations.
If you pay by the drive for a car service operated by a large company that borrows at the prime rate, your cost per mile is liable to be much lower. Given the huge costs of car ownership, it's hard to believe any residual emotional bond of owning a car could trump the economic benefits.
And as for electric: knowing aggregate demand means you never have "range anxiety", and the charging infrastructure can be much less obtrusive.
Social consequences? Well, when you take that Google-operated car to Manresa it will likely detour past MacDonalds and offer you a 2-for-one discount on Big Macs if you go there instead. And there will be no ad blockers...
Oh, and you want to take that car to where there will be an alt-right rally? Oops, no cars allowed to drive there (either by government edict or because the car owners don't want to risk their cars being destroyed).
The self-driving fleets can't arrive soon enough for me, but I am aware of some of the malign risks as well...
No, they're assuming you still own your car - it's just that your car would be autonomous. Only the last section ("More flexible ownership") acknowledges the possibility that you might not own the autonomous car.
Self-driving cars and subscription-ownership cars are two circles on a Venn diagram that don't have to exactly overlap. I'm a great example - I want a self-driving car of my own, but I don't want to share it with anybody else. (I've played the Zipcar game in Chicago and I'm over that.)
You miss the point of owning a car: it's space that's yours. You only use your bed 1/3 of the time, and your toilet for less than 5%. Why not hot-sheet it and use a shared toilet down the street? Because you're willing to pay more for personal space, where you can leave your stuff and maintain your preferred level of hygiene.
I stumbled upon this when searching for "what if all cars were self driving". I really feel that a great deal of the problems with making self driving cars more prevalent are related to the human-driven cars that are on the road along side these autonomous vehicles. Having only autonomous vehicles on the roads seems to have some powerful advantages, including lighter vehicles. I would love to see a region or city go totally driverless to empirically test whether autonomous vehicles really can provide the added benefits mentioned in the article.
Much lighter. All the people driving alone could be in cars one-quarter the size if they didn't have to worry about being crushed by Canyoneros. Aside from the cost savings, half-width cars can offer a traffic volume / speed improvement by sharing a lane. (Ultimately though lane markings can go away along with traffic lights and signs.)
There is a small portent here of something I think we should be cautious of:
> The space that is currently used for car parks could be used for something else.
We should be careful that this space does not uniformly end up being used for yet more skyscrapers and office buildings, but open space and parks instead. I feel like this is a major decision moment for ending up with beautiful cities or dark cyberpunk monstrosities.
Even if we still need car parks, cars parking themselves can park really close together (no need to open doors), and block each other in (they'll move autonomously to let another car out). If you go multi-story, you could have some floors with a really low ceiling where regular (non-SUV) cars could park at a lower price. I'd bet you'd need a lot less space for the same number of cars.
Everyone is waiting for autonomous cars to be near-perfectly safe before accepting them.
The thing is, let's say that autonomous cars are only 0.25% safer than the average human driver. That means switching to them will reduce accidents by 0.25%. That's a significant amount considering how many traffic accidents there are.
Considering that traffic accidents result in the actual death of human beings, it is morally imperative that we require as much autonomous driving and reduce as much human driving as possible. Even the far-from-perfect autonomous cars we have now are safer than continuing to let humans drive.
Something you're neglecting to account for is that there's more to driving than simply moral hazards and safety. There's also the matter of liability and financial risk.
While it may be arguable that it's morally preferable and safer to adopt self-driving cars if they can be shown to reduce the incidence of accidents by any amount compared to human drivers, it isn't desirable for the corporate entities producing vehicles capable of fully autonomous operation to make them a mass market product until it is remarkably safer to ride in an autonomous vehicle compared to a human-operated vehicle.
One of the biggest boons for automakers in the status quo is that the liabilities associated with operating their products is mostly distributed to the users. From a financial risk perspective this is a massively preferable operating model (and not dissimilar from what you see with 'disruptors' in the consumer space like Uber, Air BnB, etc). When we remove the primary cause of faults while driving from the picture (the human agent operating the vehicle), the distribution of risk that has generally protected automakers in the past disappears. When an autonomous vehicle crashes, the automaker now must fend off claims about vehicle features (sensors, software, etc.) that will in some way be directly responsible for causing traffic accidents.
Cars dropping you off autonomously reduces the demand for parking, however it will also double traffic. This leads to worse traffic flow and more congestion, contrary to the claimed positive benefit.
A lot of things on the list are also almost completely orthogonal to autonomous driving, like electric cars and flexible ownership models
If autonomous cars are operated by centralized services (Uber/Lyft/...), then they can offer cheaper rides if you are willing to share a car with different people. Especially when congestion is at its worst, chances of matching people with the same destinations are also the best - the daily morning jam on highways is mostly caused by people driving alone in their cars. Why not share 90% of the way with X other people, if it lasts only 2 minutes more for changing from/into a small first/last-mile vehicle. And why not deploy lots of small buses which carry 10+ people through the congested areas? This could even be encouraged by lawmakers; but I think this group rides would be so much cheaper that many people would use them whenever possible. Just like you don’t use your car if you live next to a subway and your destination is also right next to a station.
My Volvo (XC90) is the same way. It's not as advanced as the Tesla but it has a traffic jam assist feature. If the traffic goes from almost full stop to moving along I often have to override it and accelerate manually to avoid someone cutting me off or honking at me.
My issue with mass transit is destination granularity. I can imagine having individual cars that can "clump" together to form a mass transit system, and then break off as and when required to arrive at specific destinations.
Isn't Volvo planning on using Chinese self-driving software? As with the vast majority of Chinese software, I wonder if it will also contain a backdoor for the government.
If all cars were autonomous you could change how roads are built. They could become more like sewer pipes, sunk at least partly into the ground. Car designs would change and become more cylindrical and without windows. The car interior would be covered with displays. Travel videos will become a thing.
You can see why you might want to start practicing with boring machines and hyperloops. These things aren't just for Mars.
I don't think that this is obviously true, especially in cities. When the cost of taking an autonomous car from door to door is comparable to the cost of public transport, there would likely be more traffic on the road, not less. We've already started to see this to some extend with Uber in big cities
[+] [-] tarr11|8 years ago|reply
If all cars were autonomous, society, the economy and the environment would all suffer. Here is how…
* You will be forced to watch non-stop ads in these automotive cars, similar to how some taxi services work today. You can turn these off for a fee of course.
* Hackers or bugs in softawe may easily cause global traffic jams
* Congress will pass laws controlling when, where and how you may travel
* You may be blacklisted from traveling in any autonomous by corporations, governments, police etc.
* The aggregate amount of automotive travel will increase exponentially, causing more carbon emissions and even worse traffic since more people will have access to travel
* Sprawl will get worse, as people move further away from urban areas since they can do other activities in cars.
* Investment in mass transit will diminish, since funds will move towards automatic cars.
[+] [-] userbinator|8 years ago|reply
It is said that driving is one of the most dangerous activities we do, but I think it's no coincidence that it's also one of the most liberating. It's a very pleasurable feeling to be able to get into a car and drive, controlling it as if it were an extension of your body.
The phrase "If all cars were autonomous" has a similar feeling to others like "if there was no crime" --- sounds good on the surface, but also has deeply authoritarian and dystopian implications.
Edit: there's also this, which is basically like Stallman's "Right to Read" but for self-driving cars: http://this.deakin.edu.au/lifestyle/car-wars
[+] [-] derefr|8 years ago|reply
Well, I mean, you can already be blacklisted from travelling in regular cars: your driver’s license can be revoked.
Or are you referring more to capability than legality? Because even in a world with entirely autonomous cars, I would find it hard to believe that all such cars would be “non-rooted”, for the same reason we don’t live in a world where 100% of computers run iOS. Large companies (e.g. logistics companies) need total control and predictability over their vehicle fleet, just like large enterprises need total control and predictability over their servers. So there would likely always be a category of “dumb autonomous” vehicles like all-terrain pick-up trucks, sold to farmers and loggers and quarry workers et al, that you could buy; just like you can buy a regular PC today. You, as its “OEM” owner, would have complete control over what cloud traffic-control systems it submits to, if any. It might be illegal to configure it in certain ways and then drive it on the road, but that’s not the point here.
[+] [-] gaius|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulRobinson|8 years ago|reply
Congress already passes laws controlling when, where and how you may travel and you may be effectively blacklisted today by insurance companies, courts or police officers for a range of reasons. Do you honestly think that you are entitled to roads wherever you want and your license can never be revoked and insurers can't charge what they want?
Half of the total lifetime emissions of a car are in the driving of it. Autonomous vehicles open up the opportunity for an Uber-esque experience where you're less likely to buy a car and just rent it for when you need it: most people actively need a car for less than 10% of the total time that they own one for. That means significant environmental gains will come from lower demand for car manufacturing. How is that a problem?
Sprawl "getting worse" is another way of saying housing becomes more affordable as it does not need to be so concentrated. City centres will become more comfortable, communities will become more connected.
And finally, if there is one area that will cause a boon for investment by autonomous cars, it's mass transit: driverless buses, trams and trains, will all allow for more money to be spent on more vehicles and the net price of using these services will drop as the cost of employing, training and managing driving staff is reduced.
We can go around and around on this: it's happening, come to peace with it, and try and make sure we maximise the positives and reduce the negatives.
Note though, I did not counter the advertising thing. Tesla's T&Cs on their cars already suggest the owner does not really own the car. I think that's a problem. RMS in one of his more popular talks says he doesn't want software inside his microwave to Free because he would never want to modify it: I think a good argument can be made that if I buy a car that drives itself, I should be able to see and modify the source code.
[+] [-] corodra|8 years ago|reply
To be fair, I won’t even blame the auto industry for having vulnerabilities in their software. At this point I’ve come to accept that any bit of technology has flaws and can be exploited. No matter how great their dev team is. Comical as it was and unrealistic for the time period, the latest fast and furious movie showed a potential scenario of a fully autonomous traffic. It’s going to be the same reason there’s no flying cars. The tech has been around for easily 20 years. But if you watch enough Air Disasters, autopilot and other computer controlled airplane functions still fail catastrophically. To this day. The average person is not capable of flying an airplane. Shit, the average person still isn’t great at driving a car. Sure that brings to argument that then all cars should be self driving. But the added risks, I don’t think so. The current sample data of self driving cars is still small and there aren’t active hackers looking to truly exploit yet. It’s like when people said that Macs were immune from viruses back in the day. No, people made viruses for windows because they can cause more wide spread damage since they were more widespread. Few had macs thus, why bother? But it doesn’t matter. Self driving cars will happen and something bad will happen in that time. There’s too much money to be made. This isn’t being done to save the world. It’s a control scheme as you pointed out. It’s funny how the older you get the more you realize that when someone starts to spout they’re trying to saving the world, they’re covering up some type of scheme to make money and make the world a shittier place.
[+] [-] chiefofgxbxl|8 years ago|reply
Can school children take a self-driving car to school every day? Will this increase traffic significantly? How long until a hacker takes control of a car and abducts the child inside? How safe do parents really feel letting their kids be in this machine on their own? etc.
[+] [-] sigzero|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masklinn|8 years ago|reply
Or the other way around, you can move "transit" underground and contract cities as there's no need for non-pedestrian surface streets.
[+] [-] glogla|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xunxi|8 years ago|reply
[Digress: Volvo's pitch to legitimize joining forces with Uber to fully automate driving.]
[+] [-] CoryG89|8 years ago|reply
Maybe we'll get there one day.
[+] [-] blunte|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masklinn|8 years ago|reply
Why do you even need traffic lights anymore? Autonomous cars can brake and stop for people who need to go through, and synchronise with one another to organise crossing.
[+] [-] throwaway2016a|8 years ago|reply
Which of course bring sup the idea of hacking the negotiation so that you always have the favorable outcome. The same way some people try to hack the sensors that turn lights green for emergency vehicles.
[+] [-] dorfsmay|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bluestrike2|8 years ago|reply
Even when car-to-x and vehicle-to-vehicle communications are standardized with widespread use (and they'll both be usable even with non-autonomous vehicles), I doubt we'll see the sort of centralization with hyper-optimized traffic patterning in the animation linked by philrw. Cars will still be able to share information, and make use of it to change their behavior for minimal disruption of traffic flows. They'll talk to infrastructure, and probably even make use of relays well ahead of key infrastructure elements (ramps, bridges, construction zones, etc.). But I wouldn't consider it "centralized" in that situation.
For example, a car is entering an on-ramp. Local infrastructure could communicate that fact, as well as other information about the car to traffic approaching the on-ramp. Is it a heavily-loaded truck, with slower acceleration? Or is the vehicle 'dumb' (maybe it's an older car with no communication abilities)? Approaching cars would leave a greater gap ahead of them, switch lanes, etc. Even without giving control over to a central traffic system, we'd see significant improvements in traffic flow.
The other challenge for highly-centralized control is the sheer amount of data that's collected by autonomous cars. They apparently generate upwards of 25Gb/data an hour[1] from their various sensors. Figuring out what part of that data needs to be kept, normalized, and then sent to a centralized system is going to be tough. And it'll be hell on the wireless spectrum. Of course, that's assuming V2V spectrum isn't carved up and used for internet access.[2] In which case, things will get...trickier.
0. https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/ca...
1. https://hackernoon.com/automated-cars-and-data-786dfb1e3eb4
2. http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-talking-cars-...
[+] [-] 11thEarlOfMar|8 years ago|reply
If, instead, my brake pads were worn and the car were fully autonomous, I could have scheduled it for service while I am at work and it could have driven itself in, got new brakes and driven itself back to my office. No loaner car, no time off from work, no hassle waiting in line for a service adviser, ....
File under the 'productivity' column, and I expect cars will be better maintained than now, since we procrastinators will be able to simply click a link and forget about it.
[+] [-] gumby|8 years ago|reply
If you pay by the drive for a car service operated by a large company that borrows at the prime rate, your cost per mile is liable to be much lower. Given the huge costs of car ownership, it's hard to believe any residual emotional bond of owning a car could trump the economic benefits.
And as for electric: knowing aggregate demand means you never have "range anxiety", and the charging infrastructure can be much less obtrusive.
Social consequences? Well, when you take that Google-operated car to Manresa it will likely detour past MacDonalds and offer you a 2-for-one discount on Big Macs if you go there instead. And there will be no ad blockers...
Oh, and you want to take that car to where there will be an alt-right rally? Oops, no cars allowed to drive there (either by government edict or because the car owners don't want to risk their cars being destroyed).
The self-driving fleets can't arrive soon enough for me, but I am aware of some of the malign risks as well...
[+] [-] BrentOzar|8 years ago|reply
No, they're assuming you still own your car - it's just that your car would be autonomous. Only the last section ("More flexible ownership") acknowledges the possibility that you might not own the autonomous car.
Self-driving cars and subscription-ownership cars are two circles on a Venn diagram that don't have to exactly overlap. I'm a great example - I want a self-driving car of my own, but I don't want to share it with anybody else. (I've played the Zipcar game in Chicago and I'm over that.)
[+] [-] username223|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] osrec|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kps|8 years ago|reply
Much lighter. All the people driving alone could be in cars one-quarter the size if they didn't have to worry about being crushed by Canyoneros. Aside from the cost savings, half-width cars can offer a traffic volume / speed improvement by sharing a lane. (Ultimately though lane markings can go away along with traffic lights and signs.)
[+] [-] aerovistae|8 years ago|reply
> The space that is currently used for car parks could be used for something else.
We should be careful that this space does not uniformly end up being used for yet more skyscrapers and office buildings, but open space and parks instead. I feel like this is a major decision moment for ending up with beautiful cities or dark cyberpunk monstrosities.
[+] [-] mhandley|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwmj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apreche|8 years ago|reply
The thing is, let's say that autonomous cars are only 0.25% safer than the average human driver. That means switching to them will reduce accidents by 0.25%. That's a significant amount considering how many traffic accidents there are.
Considering that traffic accidents result in the actual death of human beings, it is morally imperative that we require as much autonomous driving and reduce as much human driving as possible. Even the far-from-perfect autonomous cars we have now are safer than continuing to let humans drive.
[+] [-] sithadmin|8 years ago|reply
While it may be arguable that it's morally preferable and safer to adopt self-driving cars if they can be shown to reduce the incidence of accidents by any amount compared to human drivers, it isn't desirable for the corporate entities producing vehicles capable of fully autonomous operation to make them a mass market product until it is remarkably safer to ride in an autonomous vehicle compared to a human-operated vehicle.
One of the biggest boons for automakers in the status quo is that the liabilities associated with operating their products is mostly distributed to the users. From a financial risk perspective this is a massively preferable operating model (and not dissimilar from what you see with 'disruptors' in the consumer space like Uber, Air BnB, etc). When we remove the primary cause of faults while driving from the picture (the human agent operating the vehicle), the distribution of risk that has generally protected automakers in the past disappears. When an autonomous vehicle crashes, the automaker now must fend off claims about vehicle features (sensors, software, etc.) that will in some way be directly responsible for causing traffic accidents.
[+] [-] legulere|8 years ago|reply
A lot of things on the list are also almost completely orthogonal to autonomous driving, like electric cars and flexible ownership models
[+] [-] manmal|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naskwo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TwoBit|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2016a|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] osrec|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hennsen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praveenster|8 years ago|reply
https://www.ted.com/talks/wanis_kabbaj_what_a_driverless_wor...
[+] [-] bluedino|8 years ago|reply
Wouldn't it be far easier for companies to embrace telecommuting than to have a worldwide network of autonomous vehicles?
[+] [-] BurningFrog|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rustoo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] osrec|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beefman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jotm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shiftpgdn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nealabq|8 years ago|reply
You can see why you might want to start practicing with boring machines and hyperloops. These things aren't just for Mars.
[+] [-] rwmj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rthornton|8 years ago|reply
I don't think that this is obviously true, especially in cities. When the cost of taking an autonomous car from door to door is comparable to the cost of public transport, there would likely be more traffic on the road, not less. We've already started to see this to some extend with Uber in big cities