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Comment by ssmoot | Hacker News Reader

I think it's crazy unrealistic that autonomous cars will be the majority in anything short of 20 to 30 years. The tech doesn't even exist yet.

It's taken that long just to see ABS become standard equipment across 90% of vehicles.

And this just completely ignores the ~5 to 7 year product cycle. There's no way that in just one or two generations of the Taurus we have a completely self-driving car capable of operating in all normal driving conditions, and that it's displaced the 4 or 5 previous generations of vehicles commonly on the road without the tech.

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I'm curious if this will be another generation-gap thing. Like right now, the stereotype is "only old people still have cable-tv". Will it end up being "only old people still own cars"?

Maybe it will be 90% for <30 year-olds?

I disagree completely, on two grounds:

1 - I think the tech will be there.

2 - Once the tech is there, there will be incredibly fast adoption for a simple reason: price.

First, insurance rates. Right now, you get discounts for eg the sensors in your volvo that warn about vehicles next to you if you turn your blinkers on. Autonomous driving will be like that but on steroids. Insurers will rapidly price in cost falls from autonomous driving.

A second huge cost increase to non-autonomous driving will come from juries. Right now, as a society, we accept car accidents as part of the cost of a modern society because there is no alternative to heavy use of vehicles. Humans driving cars means you will inevitably have accidents. Even if you kill someone in an accident, as long as there isn't negligence on your part, you generally will have nothing happen to you besides increased insurance costs. The second there is an alternative to a human driving, I expect civil juries to start returning large awards and laws to change to include jail sentences. Not to mention coming down hard on things like drunk or impaired driving. eg in WI you can basically get a couple DUIs before the state gets serious about penalties. That will change in a hurry.

I don't see why we couldn't just add more intelligence to the roads to make it easier for cars to navigate.

Before we didn't have tar roads with road signs and traffic lights, etc. It would be infinitely more feasible to make roads more clever than trying to cram human-like driving intelligence into car AI.

Certainly we can, and we will. It will probably roll out in some Michigan cities (and has), San Francisco, Austin, and a few cities.

Then... we wait. How long until Idaho has instrumented cities?

What about construction areas? What about parades? Even with Vehicle to infrastructure communication you will still need AI.

I'm with you. I'd love for us to get there, but the predictions are highly highly optimistic imho. 15+ years for limited scenarios at best.

We went from fliphone to total smartphone domination in 5 years.

ABS is a sideshow, not a revolution. As soon as self-driven vehicles are market-ready, we'll see a massive car park upgrade within one car-generation, which I guess is 7 years. Droves of people will ditch their old cars just for the purpose of upgrading.

> We went from fliphone to total smartphone domination in 5 years.

That's glossing over the Nokia video phone, the Treo, and all the Windows handsets.

> ABS is a sideshow, not a revolution.

I have no idea what you're trying to say.

> Droves of people will ditch their old cars just for the purpose of upgrading.

That seems like something that would require evidence. Or at least a theory to back it up. My 10 mile round-trip is definitely not so onerous that I'd look to replace my vehicle for something that isn't going to make it any shorter or more pleasant.

Here's some context: Nissan has been working on the Titan XD for longer than that. That's just a pretty basic 3/4-ton truck without a lot of bells and whistles with an outsourced engine.

Tesla's Model 3 will have been in development almost that long by the time it's released, and as far as anyone knows, has no new tech.

You're talking about tech that doesn't even exist yet.

Antilock brakes are a sideshow because nobody cares. Yes, it makes cars safer, but few people bought specific cars because ABS was available. It was just another side feature. It was not something that people actively sought out like they'd seek out self-driving cars.

Not with anyone I know. But I guess we're just talking anecdata now.

But yeah, as someone who grew up driving old boats without it, I would never buy a car without ABS.

>We went from fliphone to total smartphone domination in 5 years.

Smartphones cannot kill multiple people on a highway if the software malfunctions. What happens if I am going 75mph and my self driving car crashes and has to restart? What if one the sensors malfunctions and thinks it needs to swerve to avoid someone merging into my lane?

With smartphones you arent putting the lives of whole families in your hand.

40,000 people a year die on American roadways right now. We are horrible drivers and get into hundreds of thousands of accidents per year. No software is perfect, but the bar is pretty low for computers to be better drivers than humans.

The bar might be higher than you think. There are a lot of fatalities true. But the number (which is closer to 30,000) represents about 1 fatality per 100 million miles driven. And a lot of those miles are at night, in snowstorms, etc.

> We went from fliphone to total smartphone domination in 5 years.

How can you even compare those things?!?

A car easily costs 100 times what a phone does, and is literally being trusted with your life and the life of people around you.

> Droves of people will ditch their old cars just for the purpose of upgrading.

Back in the real world, a car is a major purchase and the majority of people couldn't afford to drop their current car and upgrade even if they wanted to.

I think if anything, the change will come in the form of new generations not buying their first car, rather than people with cars ditching them immediately for autonomous riding. For the generation that grew with cars as a symbol of status and adulthood and even national identity, the change might never come or take a long time. Kinda like how I watch Netflix and Amazon and Youtube, and read my news online, but most in my parents' generation watch tv and read paper newspapers. It's not just about the tech, is also the culture.

Also, if anything, it might be more important to incentivize people to switch to electric cars more so than self-driving ones, given the ecological impact. Anyone up for a 500% tax on gas by 2025? ;)

A smartphone doesn't cost more than the average American annual salary.

You don't buy a 747 to fly across the country do you? No, you buy a ticket from Southwest or another carrier.

Kids will one day laugh at how we used to buy vehicles instead of rent them by the miles. "Auto loans?!?" The horror!

Companies that need to use planes a lot do sometimes buy their own (e.g. FedEx does not simply buy tickets from Southwest). Ordinary folks don't own planes because they don't fly around everywhere — they mostly drive.

We already have taxis, Uber and rental cars. People still seem to be buying cars even at their high price. Why do you think that is?

Because there is no self-driving option. If there is, and the price of rides plummets (no driver = cheap, all electric = even cheaper), it no longer behooves you to tie up so much capital in a vehicle you own.

Think how much consumer excess would occur from 300 million people not having to buy a vehicle outright.

And anyone driving their own car needs to pay for parking, plus for full insurance, registration and so on. Free street parking will gradually disappear and off-street parking is not going to get any cheaper.

> And anyone driving their own car needs to pay for parking, plus for full insurance, registration and so on.

Those costs don't go away just because you're renting. In the same way property taxes don't disappear just because you aren't paying them directly in a leased apartment.

> Free street parking will gradually disappear and off-street parking is not going to get any cheaper.

This applies to maybe 10% of the population. And I feel like that's pretty generous. You probably haven't seen much of the US outside of the North East if you think that's even remotely plausible.

If I had a self-driving car and some time on my hands, I'd get rid of my home and be in that thing practically 24/7, seeing the land and enjoying having it drive me around. No way I would rent in that situation. I'd definitely buy. There will be a whole class of similar nomads who will spring up once it becomes truly viable.

The future is not one-size-fits-all. Just because Uber execs and investors are blathering about how personal car ownership will go away (meaning they will own everything, how convenient) doesn't mean it actually will happen that way.

This is something I never thought about. What an interesting shift it would be if remote workers became much more nomadic than most are now.

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