[1] http://www.dn.se/ekonomi/rena-elbilar-tror-vi-inte-pa/ (translated, https://translate.google.se/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=...)
Here in Europe, we moved from Diesel is king to the specialist press running article on why you can still consider buying a Diesel car in 2017 in some condition. That triggered countries like Germany to announce plan to ban gas car sales in a decade.
Regardless what Volvo CEO thought 3 years ago, the market has shifted in a clear direction and it is his job to adapt.
In a similar fashion Porsche CEO said he did not believe in automated car. You don't buy a 150K Porsche sport car to let it drive itself. That's probably true, but I expect him to change his mind less than a second after it is clear that some countries will forbid non-automated car to access some public road in the near future.
Wide-scale fully automated cars will change everything. First, I think fewer people will personally own cars, perhaps a small fraction. Vehicles will need to be less “general purpose,” if they’re not personally owned. One or two seaters, low speed electrics are better/cheaper if you’re getting around a congested city on your own. If we don’t own our own, we don’t always need cars that can fit a family, handle highways…
When level 5 self-driving is available, it won't be too difficult to add a wheel back and have modes where the self-driving capability maintains safety for other drivers on the road, but allows the driver to assume some risk for their own car and personal safety.
Different modes could allow the driver to accept different levels of risk to themselves and of their car, while still providing automatic protection and avoidance of other drivers on the road. Probably some more... extreme... modes could require posting a bond with the insurance company or government to cover personal injury.
If someone doesn't mind risking their car (collision insurance would no longer apply in these modes), and can pay for any injuries they sustain, as long as they aren't risking other people's health and safety, the computer could let them drive how they want, within certain risk limits.
I'm not so sure people will bother, though. Once car-to-car transponders are mandatory, creating an intelligent grid of vehicle awareness, what fun is it to zoom around other cars as if they're stationary if they know you're coming?
I don't believe people want the actual risk associated with aggressive driving. They just want to beat other drivers. Computer games should take up most of the slack. Even really simple games like Race The Sun offer plenty of adrenaline and reflex development with no actual risk. If you want actual (substantial) risk, go rock climb above your ability, or skydive without a reserve chute.
Having said all that, even if we're talking only about "manual modes" in l5 rather then "manual cars", there are still reasons why they might be banned or at least massively restricted in general, and that's due to infrastructure economics, not crashes. Well developed L5 cars will be capable of operating with a level of precision (in terms of actual road lines and such) and reliability that is beyond the general population, so once all cars reach that level it significantly changes how roads and support infrastructure themselves can be designed. Purely self-driving vehicles simply won't need the lanes to be as wide for example, which directly translates into newly available free space on exisitng roads. That could be used to make them purely thinner (less paving = massive cost savings), gain an extra mechanized vehicle lane for free (higher capacity for the same price), maintain existing numbers of lanes but gain new lanes for walkers/bikers, or some combination. There will be a lot of minor to radical optimizations available with significant economic and quality of life benefits, so long as you don't have to worry about having human drivers at all. That's probably going to tempt a lot of jurisdictions sooner or later.
Volvo Trucks has partnered with Oberon Fuels and converted several trucks to run on DME.
http://www.volvotrucks.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/VTC/Corpo...
Also Mack Trucks is looking into DME as an alternative truck fuel.
https://www.macktrucks.com/community/mack-news/2013/dme-truc...
Petrol engines can also be ran on an 70/30 LPG/DME mix.
I am sorry, but I don't believe that will happen in anything that could be described as near future. I don't see any actual bans to be introduced any sooner than 30-50 years from now, and even then only if:
1) the technology gets really good, not just "kind of good but only when the conditions are optimal"
2) the technology gets cheap enough that you can put it on a kind of car that nowadays is sold new without A/C and electric windows and don't impact the price of the car too much.
3 years ago you could probably have done exactly the same reasoning with electric cars (eg: London 0-emission goal are for 2050). And I mean, if my country decided to go full electric in 10 years, I have no idea how I could own a car, unless charging speed, or street infrastructure, or millage vastly improved. Nothing of that has a clear 10 years roadmap. Yet here we are.
- Well over a million deaths a year worldwide, if we're talking America then 30k-40k+ here alone. Tens of millions disabled/injured, at ruinous expense. Even more accidents that "merely" cause significant damage, again at major expense.
- The huge insurance and societal costs necessary to sustain the above.
- People who cannot drive in a society where that's immensely limiting. This sandwiches both sides of demographics. Particularly in the First World, demographic trends are resulting in an ever increasing number of elderly who cannot drive any longer. And it's always been a hassle and disruption for parents to need to shuttle around children, or arrange for the same, or just do without.
- A fear, justified or not, that terrorists will make increasing use of the fact that cars are an excellent way to deliver a tremendous amount of energy into a set of targets even without any sort of purpose-made weapons onboard and are not something that can be done without.
- The immense waste in incredibly valuable land resources needed for overbuilding parking, wide lanes, and other support infrastructure needed for human driven vehicles.
- The immense waste in human time and stress due to traffic and other conditions that could be ameliorated or even eliminated by automatic control.
Etc etc etc. The principle problem with both your arguments 1 & 2 is that you make them in a vacuum outside of the massive negatives that we live with right now. As with many disruptive new technologies, self-driving cars don't have to live up to any particular ideal, they merely need to be better then what we've got. And frankly that's just not a very high bar. It's not just economics it's politics, if you look through the above list you should be able to easily identify some of the most powerful interest groups and societal motivators in existence, touching almost all of society in general. Once the avalanche gets going feedbacks are going to reinforce pretty rapidly.
Seeing the current state of the best-of-the-best from Tesla and Deimler, autonomous driving is decent, but it seems full of the same issues as image recognition - and that was predicted to take at most few years to perfect 50 years ago. Today in 2017 you can fool the best image recognition algorithm with a sofa in a zebra print - it comes with 90% confidence match for a zebra because the pattern is right. I firmly stand by my feeling that getting to anything approaching L5 autonomy will take half a century, and that's not near future in my mind.
[1] Wish I had a better reference (http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Peak-hour-...)
"Today’s announcement shows how quickly the market is shifting as Volvo prepares to replace gasoline- and diesel-only models with a mix of full-electric, plug-in hybrid and 48-volt mild hybrid variants starting in two years."
Translation: Sometime in the forever-three-years-from-now future we will offer our existing cars in half-assed hybrid form (loud, high vibration 3 and 4 cylinder ICE with 16-18 mile electric only range and no center of gravity benefits since there won't be a "skateboard" design) and we will begin to offer one or two cutesy little electric only vehicles, on a new platform that won't be sold in the US.
We've seen this same press release over and over from BMW/Merc/Audi/etc. - always the same 3 year horizon, always the same mild-hybrid flavors of existing models, and always the same oddball electric model (i3, Merc B series).
Volvo had over ten years to respond to Prius and the market and consumer signals it was clearly showing. Volvo has had five years to respond to Tesla (who erode their highest margin vehicles and represents a big chunk of their consumer base in the US). What did they do with all of that time ? They released a brand new fleet of vehicles with beautiful exterior styling and laughable little ICEs inside (and some token mild hybrid models).
I wonder how many EV drivers end up in the dealership only once a year.
In any case, there are always going to be advantages and disadvantages, and the market will tell where people's priorities lie. After all, there already is the $100k Model S, with its abysmal range when driving at 100 mph -- and some say that it even has too big a battery for an affordable EV! A hybrid suffers none of that with its more complicated ICE. (They're not that bad, but I'm not going to start arguing about that. I don't even know if you own one to maintain.)
Yes - absolutely. If you are a legacy car maker. You get all the benefits of the halo of "modern" technology and "green" initiative but you still get to hang on to your very lucrative ICE maintenance business (oil changes, fluids, complicated mechanicals, etc.).
As a consumer ? You get none of the technological benefits (dramatically lowered center of gravity from "skateboard" designs and all wheel drive coming from multiple motors, to name just two ...) but you get all of the logistical and aesthetic penalties that come from running a shitty little lawnmower engine inside your fancy new car.
I think the BMW i8 is a perfect emblem for this kind of flawed thinking. A beautiful, modern (looking) "luxury" car that has a 3 cylinder ICE hidden inside.
If I could say one thing to all of the legacy car manufacturers pinning their strategy on hybrids: Don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining gold.
The complicated mechanical are a negative for the most part. They have to spend massive sums of money to keep meeting the latest emissions standards, along with more money on efficiency. The only silver lining in this is the side effect that it costs so much you won't see more competition as only a few companies can afford to design an engine.
The typically model is you take the car to the dealer while it is under warranty and then go to a cheaper shop afterwards. Which means that the dealer gets some maintenance revenue (enough that as you say they are sales floors subsidized by the maintenance shop).