For the record, I think this technology will make the prices for these vehicles prohibitively expensive for the mass market.
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
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.
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.