How will self-driving cars affect society? Trying to wrap my head around the bigger picture.
Commutes are one of the only things that seem to limit urban sprawl.
I do wonder if there is some vehicle ownership path dependence that feeds into sprawl though. If vehicle access becomes less of a binary choice, people don't double down on choices related to ownership.
while many choose to live outside of cities many are forced to because of bad city planning, regulations, and other government practices, which only served to protect vested business and political interest.
still I say though, you should be free to live where ever you want and can afford to.
I find both just as bad. I had a 1 hour commute by train in Chicago. Was terribad. Cannot even imagine the 90 or 120 minute commute guys.
Not quite true - generating upstream is much more efficient, since the power plant doesn't have the weight restrictions that a car (which needs to haul itself around on four wheels efficiently) has. So even if power plants didn't ditch fossil fuels, electric cars are largely a step up.
That said, we are moving heavily towards renewables, and charging isn't time-critical so peaking power sources like Wind will be more than good enough.
People think the autonomous car is going to solve a lot of the current problems; Accidents, Parking, Congestion. It kind of makes me giggle a bit, as I ponder what may happen. That is, the conclusions drawn from "self-driving" vehicles are possibly way over cooked.
The certification process for these cars are going to be very, very expensive. Think about the software involved for the operation of aircraft and the review / testing process then apply it for the road. That is level of scrutiny that will be placed on "self-driving" vehicles.
Hacking, equipment failures, environmental surprises and more will be sure to keep a healthy portion of the public skeptical and possibly downright hostile to the idea for at least a decade, post certification, in my opinion. "Self-driving" will be contained and tightly regulated.
What people on the coasts forget about is, really, the rest of the country. The people that actually enjoy driving, where parking isn't a problem, and congestion takes place in the morning and after work, but only lasts about 5 minutes. Metro areas of > 2 million people don't have much problems with traffic in flyover country... at least not when compared to the coasts.
The counter arguments to the piece are plentiful for the foreseeable future.
Doesn't something like 80% of the US live in urban areas? And hasn't that number been continuously increasing for decades. People in the cities enjoy driving too, hell I love driving when their isn't any traffic. But I'd give it up in a heartbeat if it meant less needless traffic deaths and a far more streamlined lifestyle.
Technically speaking by US Census classifications but the definition of urban is very broad. You basically need a population of over 2500 to be in an urban cluster.
So where I live is "urban" and between myself and two neighbors, we're on about 70 acres of land.
Insurance companies will charge steep premiums to the risk takers who want to drive their own car. Alphabet etc. will have a well-oiled team of lobbyists in every state and country to pass laws to make driving safer for everybody (i.e. more optimized for Waymo cars).
There will be a lot of people who join the NRA (National Retrovehicle Association), who'll make a stink about things. And they'll fight a rearguard action and probably win some guarantees in the more rural states. But where 90% of Americans live, the economics and legalities will work out to push everyone to self-driving cars.
And then economies of scale will be lost, and even in the remaining areas human car driving will become a luxury for people who own their own private roads.
People make this claim. Why would there be a premium over what is paid today? Maybe there's a big premium relative to much lower premiums associated with new types of vehicles although there will still be insurance needed. But that's relative to a future state, not relative to today.
That sounds like a bold claim. I mean, the current standard of technology works to quite a good extent already, performing many aspects of driving with considerably greater acumen than humans and being able to operate for extended periods without human intervention. It's also fairly well documented that the number of situations in which the software would have caused an accident without human intervention is above the average accident rate for human drivers, despite being tested in favourable conditions with sensibly conservative rules around humans intervening for a wide range of reasons before a critical situation can develop.
So it already works whilst being substantially less safe than the average human driver (without human intervention). They're working on the making-it-safer part, but given the number of edge cases they've got to deal with for Level 5 driving capability I'm not sure we should be so sure it'll surpass human driving abilities in all road conditions.
Working, for me, is when a typical consumer can buy it and use it day-to-day, on typical routes.
This is one of the most scariest points to me. Are any entities working on lobbying Congress about this? I've seen nothing on it, yet we already have a handful of these technologies on the road. One can retort with what offerings there are are "safer" than humans, but that's missing the point entirely.
Also, basically drivers of all kinds will no longer have jobs.
For the record, I think this technology will make the prices for these vehicles prohibitively expensive for the mass market.
They make things safer because they don't drive drunk.
Can an hunter ride share the pacifica out to the forest with his/her hunting gear? How about bicyclists? People with kids know about activity shuffling... I am not sure that sharing will work for my families schedule.
Driving drunk isn't the bulk of the accidents I go to on a regular basis. If we could just eliminate texting while driving, we could see a significant drop in accidents.
Furthermore, a lot of people use their cars at the same time of day. It's also the case that a lot of auto depreciation is mileage-based rather than time-based (especially in non-snowy/salty environments).
The questions others raise about the maintenance/update requirements for these sorts of vehicles are interesting ones.
My guess is that, like Zipcar and Uber, they will make a difference at the margins but won't cause a wholesale shift. But who knows? Especially if, as I believe, this happens over a number of decades with demographic shifts happening in parallel.
Easy: many households now have two (or more cars), but self-driving cars will allow many of them to reduce to a single car. One people carrier for family outings, on-demand robot taxis for commutes and quick errands. Maybe not a total revolution, but a 50% reduction in household car ownership would be a pretty big deal (it'd make neighbourhood parking a lot easier for a start).
I mean, let's say I use it for a total of 12,000 miles per year. that's 10% of the time. If I rent it out for an additional 50% of the total time, that's going to hit 72k miles in a year! For the average person they are going to have to replace cars ridiculously fast, and increase, not lessen, the burden of car ownership.
Same reason robots in manufacturing are better than humans. They don't have bad mood, they don't have bad day, they don't need to speak on the phone while driving, they don't drink etc.
> how is this technology going to be make everything less expensive
Because in Europe/USA most part of the cost in low-weight vehicle transportation is salary of the driver. Also self driving cars will be less costly to maintain (less accidents, better monitoring), if big fleet operated by companies they also have benefit of large scale etc
processing power = cheap
software (marginal cost) = just gotta pay for updates and fixes
sensor package = expensive now because nobody is making 6 million of them a month. Once they do, it'll be a lot more affordable.
That doesn't mean it'll pay off for Google, uber, Telsa, Ford, etc., but if they build it, it'll move to all cars rather quickly.
Go talk to a pilot and ask them about Garmin products and the autopilot of their plane. Also ask them about update the software on these devices. Ask how much money they are asked to fork over for software...
Have a look at the self-driving tech of the John Deere tractors and how well that has gone for the farmers. I don't think the bulk of people here have really thought about this in a negative light.
According to http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/584144.html
AIUI, about 300,000. For the entire world. There's more than that number of cars in just about any city in the world. I'd expect tens or hundreds of millions of cars.
Aeroplanes aren't even close to the scale we're talking about.
Insurance is a small fraction of the cost of transport by car, so dropping the insurance cost by some fraction won't drop the total cost by that much.
1. http://www.commercialtruckinsurancehq.com/owner-operator-ins...
The average US driver files a collision claim once every 18 years. I'd like to know the distribution on that one, but anyway, it doesn't seem like there is a reason to believe this.