Guys, some of you who are criticizing the precise "assumptions" are missing the point! He's not saying that utilization will go up to 96% precisely, or that there will be 20x fewer cars. He is challenging us to imagine the possibilities ourselves, seeding it with some immediate (potential) implications. On first sight his assumptions seem reasonable, and it's up to us individually to determine what the ramifications are.
Indeed the potential is enormous for freeing up a lot of human time/etc. We will need less parking certainly, cars will be running newer models (since they're used more, they'll likely last less time) with better technologies, and potentially there will be more efficient routing algorithms to save energy, time, etc.
I like how HN is often first to criticize, but sometimes you're just missing the point. The point is to imagine for yourself the possibilities. For me, it's enormous.
And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold
Actually, no it wouldn't. If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now. That means cars will have to be replaced much more frequently. There would be fewer cars sold than there are now, but it wouldn't be 20x fewer.
The operating percent of a car will go from 4% to that 96%
This seems wildly optimistic to me. The driverless cars may be capable of driving around 96% of the time, but that doesn't mean they can be carrying people 96% of the time. No matter how efficient the system, if there are enough cars to handle peak traffic during the day, then a lot of those cars will be sitting around doing nothing at night.
If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now.
Existing cars, if driven 20 times as much, would wear out 20 times more quickly, like taxicabs do now.
But it's also possible that cars would simply be built with more reliable components and more durable materials, like current aircraft and public transit vehicles are.
It's not cost-effective to build an ultra-reliable car that's sitting idle 96% of the time, but the economics would surely change if the utilization rate is much higher.
If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now.
This is just a matter of the practical design choices. Any machinery that is in heavy use usually gets fitted, appropriately, with more robust set of parts which last many times longer before wearing out.
Current consumer cars have bearings, joints, and moving parts that are carefully optimized to match the expected usage pattern (which is mostly idle) for a designated period of time and nothing more. That's why older cars can sometimes run for ages. Decades ago we didn't know how to make extremely light-weight parts from least amount of steel with a calculable expiry time of, for example, 40 thousand miles so engineers had to fit cars with slightly heavier and more expensive parts to make sure they didn't break too easily. Think about fitting bearings and joints from a heavy van into a light Japanese small car. Or consider old 70's-80's Saabs and Volvos that can last nearly forever.
Likewise for fluids and lubrication, it's easier to clock high mileages with a car that is mostly in use throughout the day rather than with one that is used a couple of times a day for commuting. The engine wearout is at its peak during the first miles after a cold start.
Yes, cars may still sit around doing nothing at night, but the number of cars for peak traffic will drop significantly because of the gains in utilization. Imagine you want to ride share with your friends, one car will ferry people to and fro the highway which will be almost impeccably timed with your friends arrival at a waiting area just off the freeway. You'll get in the car and continue to work, after you arrive at work that car will go pickup someone in the city who works a bit later and grab a couple of their friends on the way.
When you combine this technology with social networks and mobile the improvements to efficiency, cost, and quality of life will be astounding. This isn't going to be an overnight thing but I see this kind of thing becoming prevalent probably 5 to 10 years after the first driverless cars become publicly available.
Driverless cars would be worth it simply for the reduction in drunk driving.
I was thinking along these lines on a similar thread recently. The particular thread implied that the cost would be much lower, because there was no driver involved. I agree that it would be lower, but not orders of magnitude lower, because the demand shape will be exactly the same - or even more pronounced.
My hypothesis is that the driver is probably about 10-20% of the cost of a fare, the rest is the capital cost of the vehicle + licensing fees + insurance, and the marginal cost of maintenance and fuel. Because inevitably cars sit around most of the time, then the price of 5-6 busy hours of the day has to make up for the rest of the time.
Further, with a disruptive business idea like this, I could easily see an auction-style interface for the vehicle booking, which would give a much better revenue curve (we are talking about Google). In that case, the peak-demand period would probably exceed the current (regulated) taxi fares. But the plus side of that is that a midnight ride would be very cheap due to lack of demand and simultaneous lack of a need to pay drivers more money to work nightshifts.
> if there are enough cars to handle peak traffic during the day
I got the image of cars migrating across the Eurasia, taking Chinese to work, then Indians, then Middle-easterns, etc.
As the efficiency with which a resource is used increases, the tendency is to use more of it rather than less.
Concretely, if I don't have to drive the car myself, I wouldn't hesitate to drive anywhere. I'd go to the city every day if I could read on the way, and sleep on the way home.
With shared resources, this might not be the case.
Today, car owners have already spent $x on their cars -- so they have an incentive to use their investment to the fullest.
Compare that with a shared-car system like ZipCar. ZipCar is generally much more efficient than owning a vehicle (if you don't use it to commute) -- however, since you pay per hour, you have an incentive to skip the car when it's not necessary.
By removing the sunk-costs of ownership, you could incentivize conservation rather than consumption.
There's another unintended effect I haven't seen talked about anywhere: when cars no longer require human drivers, the cost of driving in human terms (time, frustration, danger) will be drastically reduced, but the energy cost will only be reduced by a small amount. The logical consequence of this is that cars will be doing a lot more driving and as a society we will spend a lot more energy on transportation overall.
My assumption here is that when we have driverless cars, they wont be purchased by individuals but a few global providers will emerge that will provide those cars as a service (similar to how we only have few rental car companies, or how ZipCar is a leader in its field or how Uber is becoming a single provider of taxi-like service).
In that scenario, both the cost of cars and cost of energy (gas or electric) will have direct negative impact on their revenues so they will have a very strong economic incentive to drive down that cost.
A single buyer isn't well informed and isn't very rational, so a nice shape of the car might be more important than mpg mileage. Our hypothetical provider would, however, consider it one of the most important characteristics.
Combine that with a great purchasing power of such provider. If they buy 10000 cars and they want high mpg, you can be sure that car companies will spend most of their effort on increasing mpg.
Actually the energy used would be reduced by quite a bit. They can drive in formation. This reduces energy expended by reducing drag. It also reduces congestion. It is estimated that congestion wastes 2.4B gallons of gasoline in the US [1]. They can take alternate routes. And if we get smart traffic signals, then they wont have to stop as often by coordinating speed with the flow system. Not to mention eliminating people flooring it out of frustration.
While this concept sounds amazing to me, lets not forget that we are not the majority. I just got off the phone with a relative who hates taking a plane, they would rather drive 24 hours to their destination. I consider this concept to be pure insanity, but i don't think this is limited to a small portion of the populous. There is much more at play in the mind of the 'average American(in this case)' than efficiency and 'the car will drive for me'. The lack of a feeling of person control is not among the lesser of these issues.
While I suspect you're right in that the # of miles driven would increase, I suspect that automated hypermiling would more than compensate for it, leading to a net decrease in energy usage.
Given the current (and undoubtedly soon aggravating) energy crisis, on the contrary energy cost will probably be the limiting factor in most human activities in the coming decades, therefore shared cars will be making even more sense.
According to the wikipedia article, if we decide that the decide that increased energy (or road space etc.) use is a bad thing we can fix Jevon's paradox with taxation on car use.
This is why I hope Google will license their technology only to all-electric cars. Both technologies are disruptive, and they might as well hit 2 birds with one stone.
I'm not sure if anyone else has realized it yet, but driverless cars will have to be taxed on a time-on-road basis, rather than at a flat rate.
The reason? The economics of electric cars and parking.
Initially it seems that they will fix the parking problem - driverless cars can be sent to park outside the CBD, reducing traffic and freeing up space.
But the problem is that people/software will optimize for price, and for electric cars the cheapest scenario is for them to be stuck in a traffic jam on a public road.
Instead of going to a parking bay, the software will route them to the nearest traffic jam, where the car can sit with the electric motors off for a large amount of time. Inevitably, some software will misjudge how long their charge will last, their batteries will run flat and the traffic jam will get worse.
As far as I can see the only way around this is to increase the cost of being on the road.
If you made it a flat fee, then it's kind of like runs-batted-in. The car has to get more people delivered to make money, so once it gets you to where you need to go as efficiently and quickly as possible, you get out and it speeds off to complete another fare.
Increasing road-cost would have the opposite effect, I think. If the cars make money just by being on the road and not by completing tasks, they lose the incentive to finish and jam-sitting becomes optimal.
Fuel taxes already do this, while providing a strong incentive to run smaller and / or more efficient cars.
Roughly, 50% of my fuel bill is on direct taxation. That's it's primary tax cost, not the fixed annual license cost, and gives me a tax bill that's elastic by usage in exactly that way while also promoting efficiency.
Of course, best wishes to anyone trying persuade the average man in the street that this is A Good Thing....
Why are there going to be traffic jams? Computers are driving the cars. There's not going to be accidents anymore. There's not going to be that weird bottleneck effect where one sheepish person slows down to much and eventually everyone behind them stops.
Unfortunately there are a few assumptions being made here that don't really jive with car usage in practice. 96% usage? People's schedules aren't that flexible, my spouse and I commute at the same time to different places, and a large chunk of the people in my apartment do as well. This is known as rush hour.
Not to mention that driving places, without actually driving people places (ie, back home to drive the wife) effectively doubles the mileage, and thus my gas (or the energy source du jour's) consumption.
edit: Also, to build on the above comment, the benefit of having a car is having the freedom to use it when you want, it's always there. Driverless cars always in motion are basically public transit. Just take the bus/taxi/subway already.
Assuming usage does not go from 4% to 96% and he is only partially right, will there still be no interesting societal transformations along his outline due to an increase to, say, 50%?
Driverless cars are a great idea and I really want to see them succeed.
But I can see more than a few problems. As they say, there are entrenched interests that won't like that. For example, if you can rent cars that way, I don't see the people with those very expensive taxi medallions being any too happy about that. Yes, getting rid of that would be a good thing, but the people who own them won't be any too happy about the value of their investment vanishing.
Also, there's what happens with accidents. For example, look at that story we have right now about the autopilot flaking out for what? A minute? Only to have the pilots get confused and crash the plane. People underrate intentional risks because they feel that they have control. Conversely, they overrate risks where they do not have that feeling. Driverless cars are firmly in the "don't have control" pile. Sure, the computer is likely to be a much safer driver than most people, but that also means being a nicer driver (which will really piss off some people, passengers and other drivers alike), and people with low skill overrate their abilities. Throw in any actual programming errors into the mix and I just have to hope you have good insurance and a good PR department.
My first thought about driverless cars is that stock in alcohol companies would skyrocket. I know a good many people who would go to the bar on a more regular basis and now that they have a driver for the ride home. Also on a week day after work, why not have another beer? No risk of hurting someone or a DUI, right?
America needs to get back to its roots as the premier boozing nation. We were long known for this. Hell, there was practically a civil war over the whole whiskey rebellion thing.
When I was young and naive I used to dream about how a Personal Rapid Transit system that would whisk people around in private little pods along elevated monorail tracks could work. Clearly the answer is "it couldn't", not so much technically but economically and politically.
But it turns out we already have a really comprehensive network of ground-level "tracks" that lead up to nearly every residence and business on the planet. The missing ingredient thus far has been the ability for a vehicle to stay on this "track" without a driver, but it looks like Google and friends might have cracked that nut.
A second impediment might be powering these cars in an efficient manner, but batteries have vastly improved over the last decade, and as they are standardized, battery swapping and even third-rail-type power (at least on limited-access roads) become possible.
The land use implications alone are going to be huge, but I'm not entirely sure which way they'll flip.
On the one hand, we will no longer need vast parking lots adjacent to activity centers like malls, stadiums, office complexes, big-box stores, and airports. That means that stuff could be built in those parking lots, which could potentially greatly increase the density of current cities and suburbs.
On the other hand (h/t Karl Smith at Modeled Behavior) driverless cars would dramatically lower the cost of living in exurban areas, so people interested in peace and quiet would no longer have to compromise as much as they do now.
I expect that at peak use (rush hour), the total number of cars needed would not be so substantially lower than the current number of cars owned. Perhaps a factor of 2 or 3.
Of course, with driverless cars, people may begin to stagger the starting / ending hours of the work day to allow for owning fewer cars.
That's true but consider that most of those people go to/from the same place.
If entity that provides those cars is big enough, they can match up the destination and optimize the traffic so that people going to the (roughly) same place share a car. When I was commuting from SF to MV for work, I had to use the whole car. There were plenty of other people who were commuting at the same time from/to very similar destination and used the whole car. It's not hard to algorithmically put several such people into the same car.
Today cars are 4/5 seaters so you get at 3x reduction compared to current levels (taking into account that not everyone drives by himself today) but you could easily redesign the cars to not be much larger and taking 8-10 people. Or make them straight up buses. Google already does that with their shuttles where they pick e.g. people from SF and drive them in big buses to MV, except it would be much more efficient because the potential pool of people transfered would not be just "people who work at Google and live in SF" but "every person who lives in SF and works somewhere in MV", which is a much bigger number.
But again, the consequence of a driverless car is that the steering wheel could be removed and fitting 4 strangers comfortably in a car becomes much easier. I would argue that carpooling/ridesharing would increase and ultimately decrease the number of cars needed.
I don't think the article's argument justifies the idea that fewer cars will be sold.
Cars wear out primarily through driving. If you simply switched to automatic driving, what you would have is fewer cars being driven more often and so being worn more quickly. If car-mile consumption stays the same, new-car production would stay the same.
On the other hand, if the auto-drive cars increased carpooling, then you'd see a decrease in car-miles consumed and so a decrease in production. But if auto-drive cars drove around empty more, you might have even more car-miles being consumed.
Moreover, you'd have a "big bang" where people decide to mostly stop driving the old, non-automatically-driving cars and so there'd a huge spike in consumption at that point.
The space saved by avoiding parking could be really large, still.
A nice thing would be that at the start, a person might be able to finance their self-driving car by renting in out when they didn't need it. Those economies might make the phenomena spread really quickly.
What this seems to ignore for me is the car-as-status / car-as-identity case. Speaking personally when I had to trade from a rather nice executive saloon to an MPV / minivan, much as I knew it was sensible I hated it because of the self-image connotations. Which is possibly why I've now got a 350Z ;-)
Why does anyone buy a BMW or a Mercedes when a Ford is substantially cheaper for the same space and performance? Image. That's a sector which is always going to buy their own cars rather than leasing one from a pool, because even a shared 'prestige' car (a rather meaningless tag given current BMW sales figures, but I digress...) starts rapidly losing its lustre.
Which then may well mean that we gain a new social stratification - prestige car, own car, driverless pool car. Which could well see older used cars and taxis dropping out of the market, but I doubt it'd have an effect on the general car market on quite the same scale that the writer envisages.
One unintended effect is that accidents are going to be quite different. Although driverless cars are bound to be safer, I wonder what people's reaction will be to computer error causing death. The style of computer error is not likely to correspond to reasonable human factors (like bad conditions, icy roads etc - all that can be programmed in), but bugs / bad radar echo zones / new roads not yet mapped etc - there are going to be deaths caused by circumstances that a human would have easily, safely dealt with.
The post is misleading, people do not have multiple cars because they cannot drive, it is because they have to use it for multiple things at the same time. Morning going to work, dropping kids etc. will happen all at the same time. Peak car usage will not be affected by self driving cars.
I think I've missed an important part of this discussion -- if driverless cars would be revolutionary, what do they provide that an existing taxi service doesn't?
A taxi has many of the listed benefits;
- you don't need to buy the car
- you don't need to drive the car
- it's available on demand through your phone
- the utilisation of cars is very high
So what is the functional difference between a shared-ownership, driverless car, and a standard human-driven taxi?
How has no one mentioned EC2 in this whole thread?
Automation, centralization, capacity planning, many of the problems are the same.
Now IF that analogy is correct I propose:
1. A few large entities will dominate the automated car business while enthusiasts and finicky users will happily continue to buy their own.
2. Manufacturers will see demand explode for a small set of highly efficient commodity vehicles.
3. Excess capacity will be resold for new businesses.
- Package delivery
- Mobile Advertising
- Portable infrastructure. (Need wifi coverage at an outdoor event? I'll send over a half dozen networked cars)
- Portable storage (Think of those delivered storage pods, but that only were there when you called)
- Entertainment (Rent a dozen cars and have them do some sweet driving)
Also, though this doesn't fit into the Amazon analogy, talk about a captive audience! Imagine, you're puttering along on a family trip to Yellowstone in your rental, it's around lunchtime, and the car suggests stopping at Burger King .. out loud ... with your kids listening. Can you imagine what BK would pay for that privilege?
While this is a fascinating thought experiment are there really so many people who think there will be mass adoption of driverless cars in the near to mid term?
The technical, political, socialogical, and psychological barriers to the OP vision seem huge. Just to mention one that I haven't seen mentioned: winter driving. In snowy climates the driving conditions are very unpredict able. Cars get stuck and require all sorts of creative driving techniques. If the sort of seamless automatic driving doesn't work in such an environment then human driven vehicles will still be on the road in large numbers. Being on the road means they can be driven to the dense, warm urban areas where automated driving might work better.
You could outlaw human driven vehicles in certain places, but it highlights the need for the creation of parallel infrastructure to be created in areas where land is scarce. The transition period would be stretched out and chicken vs egg type problems could be insurmountable for the foreseeable future.
I can't believe this has so many upvotes! This is based on a silly assumption; aircraft are relatively more expensive than cars to buy, maintain, and use. So it is cheaper and affordable for more people if we time share them.
Cars are much cheaper, so we don't - the value of having a personal car ready right now is worth more to people than taking public transport. If aircraft were as cheap/convenient as cars to use/maintain/store/etc, then I'd have an aircraft parked up outside my house!
Driverless cars will have an enormous effect on society in lots of ways, but I highly doubt reducing the number of cars on the road will be one of them. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there are more cars on the roads, given that people who currently can't drive (because they're elderly/too young/disabled) will be enabled to.
[+] [-] orijing|14 years ago|reply
Indeed the potential is enormous for freeing up a lot of human time/etc. We will need less parking certainly, cars will be running newer models (since they're used more, they'll likely last less time) with better technologies, and potentially there will be more efficient routing algorithms to save energy, time, etc.
I like how HN is often first to criticize, but sometimes you're just missing the point. The point is to imagine for yourself the possibilities. For me, it's enormous.
[+] [-] ccc3|14 years ago|reply
And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold
Actually, no it wouldn't. If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now. That means cars will have to be replaced much more frequently. There would be fewer cars sold than there are now, but it wouldn't be 20x fewer.
The operating percent of a car will go from 4% to that 96%
This seems wildly optimistic to me. The driverless cars may be capable of driving around 96% of the time, but that doesn't mean they can be carrying people 96% of the time. No matter how efficient the system, if there are enough cars to handle peak traffic during the day, then a lot of those cars will be sitting around doing nothing at night.
[+] [-] frankus|14 years ago|reply
Existing cars, if driven 20 times as much, would wear out 20 times more quickly, like taxicabs do now.
But it's also possible that cars would simply be built with more reliable components and more durable materials, like current aircraft and public transit vehicles are.
It's not cost-effective to build an ultra-reliable car that's sitting idle 96% of the time, but the economics would surely change if the utilization rate is much higher.
[+] [-] yason|14 years ago|reply
This is just a matter of the practical design choices. Any machinery that is in heavy use usually gets fitted, appropriately, with more robust set of parts which last many times longer before wearing out.
Current consumer cars have bearings, joints, and moving parts that are carefully optimized to match the expected usage pattern (which is mostly idle) for a designated period of time and nothing more. That's why older cars can sometimes run for ages. Decades ago we didn't know how to make extremely light-weight parts from least amount of steel with a calculable expiry time of, for example, 40 thousand miles so engineers had to fit cars with slightly heavier and more expensive parts to make sure they didn't break too easily. Think about fitting bearings and joints from a heavy van into a light Japanese small car. Or consider old 70's-80's Saabs and Volvos that can last nearly forever.
Likewise for fluids and lubrication, it's easier to clock high mileages with a car that is mostly in use throughout the day rather than with one that is used a couple of times a day for commuting. The engine wearout is at its peak during the first miles after a cold start.
[+] [-] fleitz|14 years ago|reply
When you combine this technology with social networks and mobile the improvements to efficiency, cost, and quality of life will be astounding. This isn't going to be an overnight thing but I see this kind of thing becoming prevalent probably 5 to 10 years after the first driverless cars become publicly available.
Driverless cars would be worth it simply for the reduction in drunk driving.
[+] [-] brc|14 years ago|reply
My hypothesis is that the driver is probably about 10-20% of the cost of a fare, the rest is the capital cost of the vehicle + licensing fees + insurance, and the marginal cost of maintenance and fuel. Because inevitably cars sit around most of the time, then the price of 5-6 busy hours of the day has to make up for the rest of the time.
Further, with a disruptive business idea like this, I could easily see an auction-style interface for the vehicle booking, which would give a much better revenue curve (we are talking about Google). In that case, the peak-demand period would probably exceed the current (regulated) taxi fares. But the plus side of that is that a midnight ride would be very cheap due to lack of demand and simultaneous lack of a need to pay drivers more money to work nightshifts.
[+] [-] shasta|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anabis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nt_mark|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moultano|14 years ago|reply
As the efficiency with which a resource is used increases, the tendency is to use more of it rather than less.
Concretely, if I don't have to drive the car myself, I wouldn't hesitate to drive anywhere. I'd go to the city every day if I could read on the way, and sleep on the way home.
[+] [-] nostromo|14 years ago|reply
Today, car owners have already spent $x on their cars -- so they have an incentive to use their investment to the fullest.
Compare that with a shared-car system like ZipCar. ZipCar is generally much more efficient than owning a vehicle (if you don't use it to commute) -- however, since you pay per hour, you have an incentive to skip the car when it's not necessary.
By removing the sunk-costs of ownership, you could incentivize conservation rather than consumption.
[+] [-] rythie|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] modeless|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kkowalczyk|14 years ago|reply
In that scenario, both the cost of cars and cost of energy (gas or electric) will have direct negative impact on their revenues so they will have a very strong economic incentive to drive down that cost.
A single buyer isn't well informed and isn't very rational, so a nice shape of the car might be more important than mpg mileage. Our hypothetical provider would, however, consider it one of the most important characteristics.
Combine that with a great purchasing power of such provider. If they buy 10000 cars and they want high mpg, you can be sure that car companies will spend most of their effort on increasing mpg.
[+] [-] buff-a|14 years ago|reply
[1] http://dsc.discovery.com/cars-bikes/do-driverless-cars-offer...
[+] [-] jacques_chester|14 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
[+] [-] mbell|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] invalidOrTaken|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loboman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wazoox|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artsrc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nextparadigms|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nl|14 years ago|reply
The reason? The economics of electric cars and parking.
Initially it seems that they will fix the parking problem - driverless cars can be sent to park outside the CBD, reducing traffic and freeing up space.
But the problem is that people/software will optimize for price, and for electric cars the cheapest scenario is for them to be stuck in a traffic jam on a public road.
Instead of going to a parking bay, the software will route them to the nearest traffic jam, where the car can sit with the electric motors off for a large amount of time. Inevitably, some software will misjudge how long their charge will last, their batteries will run flat and the traffic jam will get worse.
As far as I can see the only way around this is to increase the cost of being on the road.
[+] [-] wcarss|14 years ago|reply
If you made it a flat fee, then it's kind of like runs-batted-in. The car has to get more people delivered to make money, so once it gets you to where you need to go as efficiently and quickly as possible, you get out and it speeds off to complete another fare.
Increasing road-cost would have the opposite effect, I think. If the cars make money just by being on the road and not by completing tasks, they lose the incentive to finish and jam-sitting becomes optimal.
[+] [-] rottencupcakes|14 years ago|reply
Even if groups of hackers installed this on their cars, I can't imagine this movement gaining enough critical mass to honestly be a concern.
[+] [-] eftpotrm|14 years ago|reply
Roughly, 50% of my fuel bill is on direct taxation. That's it's primary tax cost, not the fixed annual license cost, and gives me a tax bill that's elastic by usage in exactly that way while also promoting efficiency.
Of course, best wishes to anyone trying persuade the average man in the street that this is A Good Thing....
[+] [-] prophetjohn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zasz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 9999|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ImprovedSilence|14 years ago|reply
edit: Also, to build on the above comment, the benefit of having a car is having the freedom to use it when you want, it's always there. Driverless cars always in motion are basically public transit. Just take the bus/taxi/subway already.
[+] [-] gwern|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Natsu|14 years ago|reply
But I can see more than a few problems. As they say, there are entrenched interests that won't like that. For example, if you can rent cars that way, I don't see the people with those very expensive taxi medallions being any too happy about that. Yes, getting rid of that would be a good thing, but the people who own them won't be any too happy about the value of their investment vanishing.
Also, there's what happens with accidents. For example, look at that story we have right now about the autopilot flaking out for what? A minute? Only to have the pilots get confused and crash the plane. People underrate intentional risks because they feel that they have control. Conversely, they overrate risks where they do not have that feeling. Driverless cars are firmly in the "don't have control" pile. Sure, the computer is likely to be a much safer driver than most people, but that also means being a nicer driver (which will really piss off some people, passengers and other drivers alike), and people with low skill overrate their abilities. Throw in any actual programming errors into the mix and I just have to hope you have good insurance and a good PR department.
[+] [-] skizm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rubashov|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frankus|14 years ago|reply
But it turns out we already have a really comprehensive network of ground-level "tracks" that lead up to nearly every residence and business on the planet. The missing ingredient thus far has been the ability for a vehicle to stay on this "track" without a driver, but it looks like Google and friends might have cracked that nut.
A second impediment might be powering these cars in an efficient manner, but batteries have vastly improved over the last decade, and as they are standardized, battery swapping and even third-rail-type power (at least on limited-access roads) become possible.
The land use implications alone are going to be huge, but I'm not entirely sure which way they'll flip.
On the one hand, we will no longer need vast parking lots adjacent to activity centers like malls, stadiums, office complexes, big-box stores, and airports. That means that stuff could be built in those parking lots, which could potentially greatly increase the density of current cities and suburbs.
On the other hand (h/t Karl Smith at Modeled Behavior) driverless cars would dramatically lower the cost of living in exurban areas, so people interested in peace and quiet would no longer have to compromise as much as they do now.
[+] [-] piinbinary|14 years ago|reply
Of course, with driverless cars, people may begin to stagger the starting / ending hours of the work day to allow for owning fewer cars.
[+] [-] kkowalczyk|14 years ago|reply
If entity that provides those cars is big enough, they can match up the destination and optimize the traffic so that people going to the (roughly) same place share a car. When I was commuting from SF to MV for work, I had to use the whole car. There were plenty of other people who were commuting at the same time from/to very similar destination and used the whole car. It's not hard to algorithmically put several such people into the same car.
Today cars are 4/5 seaters so you get at 3x reduction compared to current levels (taking into account that not everyone drives by himself today) but you could easily redesign the cars to not be much larger and taking 8-10 people. Or make them straight up buses. Google already does that with their shuttles where they pick e.g. people from SF and drive them in big buses to MV, except it would be much more efficient because the potential pool of people transfered would not be just "people who work at Google and live in SF" but "every person who lives in SF and works somewhere in MV", which is a much bigger number.
[+] [-] askedrelic|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|14 years ago|reply
Cars wear out primarily through driving. If you simply switched to automatic driving, what you would have is fewer cars being driven more often and so being worn more quickly. If car-mile consumption stays the same, new-car production would stay the same. On the other hand, if the auto-drive cars increased carpooling, then you'd see a decrease in car-miles consumed and so a decrease in production. But if auto-drive cars drove around empty more, you might have even more car-miles being consumed.
Moreover, you'd have a "big bang" where people decide to mostly stop driving the old, non-automatically-driving cars and so there'd a huge spike in consumption at that point.
The space saved by avoiding parking could be really large, still.
A nice thing would be that at the start, a person might be able to finance their self-driving car by renting in out when they didn't need it. Those economies might make the phenomena spread really quickly.
[+] [-] eftpotrm|14 years ago|reply
Why does anyone buy a BMW or a Mercedes when a Ford is substantially cheaper for the same space and performance? Image. That's a sector which is always going to buy their own cars rather than leasing one from a pool, because even a shared 'prestige' car (a rather meaningless tag given current BMW sales figures, but I digress...) starts rapidly losing its lustre.
Which then may well mean that we gain a new social stratification - prestige car, own car, driverless pool car. Which could well see older used cars and taxis dropping out of the market, but I doubt it'd have an effect on the general car market on quite the same scale that the writer envisages.
[+] [-] Aissen|14 years ago|reply
Apparently it's already done with appspot.com, wordpress.com and others, so it shouldn't be too hard.
[+] [-] jsvaughan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codelion|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshsharp|14 years ago|reply
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/10/future-of-driving...
[+] [-] stevecooperorg|14 years ago|reply
A taxi has many of the listed benefits;
- you don't need to buy the car - you don't need to drive the car - it's available on demand through your phone - the utilisation of cars is very high
So what is the functional difference between a shared-ownership, driverless car, and a standard human-driven taxi?
[+] [-] iandanforth|14 years ago|reply
Automation, centralization, capacity planning, many of the problems are the same.
Now IF that analogy is correct I propose:
1. A few large entities will dominate the automated car business while enthusiasts and finicky users will happily continue to buy their own.
2. Manufacturers will see demand explode for a small set of highly efficient commodity vehicles.
3. Excess capacity will be resold for new businesses.
- Package delivery - Mobile Advertising - Portable infrastructure. (Need wifi coverage at an outdoor event? I'll send over a half dozen networked cars) - Portable storage (Think of those delivered storage pods, but that only were there when you called) - Entertainment (Rent a dozen cars and have them do some sweet driving)
Also, though this doesn't fit into the Amazon analogy, talk about a captive audience! Imagine, you're puttering along on a family trip to Yellowstone in your rental, it's around lunchtime, and the car suggests stopping at Burger King .. out loud ... with your kids listening. Can you imagine what BK would pay for that privilege?
[+] [-] b1daly|14 years ago|reply
The technical, political, socialogical, and psychological barriers to the OP vision seem huge. Just to mention one that I haven't seen mentioned: winter driving. In snowy climates the driving conditions are very unpredict able. Cars get stuck and require all sorts of creative driving techniques. If the sort of seamless automatic driving doesn't work in such an environment then human driven vehicles will still be on the road in large numbers. Being on the road means they can be driven to the dense, warm urban areas where automated driving might work better.
You could outlaw human driven vehicles in certain places, but it highlights the need for the creation of parallel infrastructure to be created in areas where land is scarce. The transition period would be stretched out and chicken vs egg type problems could be insurmountable for the foreseeable future.
[+] [-] nickthorn|14 years ago|reply
Cars are much cheaper, so we don't - the value of having a personal car ready right now is worth more to people than taking public transport. If aircraft were as cheap/convenient as cars to use/maintain/store/etc, then I'd have an aircraft parked up outside my house!
Driverless cars will have an enormous effect on society in lots of ways, but I highly doubt reducing the number of cars on the road will be one of them. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there are more cars on the roads, given that people who currently can't drive (because they're elderly/too young/disabled) will be enabled to.