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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Why wouldn't driverless cars be purchased by individuals?

I want one and I have money - when they're available, why wouldn't I be able to buy one?

Are you suggesting that I won't want to? I'm skeptical - the convenience of being able to use something whenever I want trumps cost. Or are you suggesting that I won't be able to?

He's suggesting that when you can open an app on your phone and (for the vast majority of the population in non rural areas) get a car to your door within 5 minutes, there won't be a connivence gap.

I believe the idea is that with time, it won't make fiscal sense. The first wave of these will be bought in small part by early adopting owners but more likely by small-time transit / freight companies looking to save a buck.

Once it's a proven small-scale model, larger transit and freight systems will start using them; I'd expect ZipCar and Uber and similar services to jump on it. At this time, more and more people would be buying their own driverless car.

Now picture 20 years down the road. You're a young person who can't afford a car. Do you get a job to pay to buy a car, or do you use a service like ZipCar? Fast forward 5 years, you've got a job and you could afford a car. Do you buy one to give you "added convenience"? That's what ZipCar will have to beat. If they can get a car to you by the time you're outside your house, they are actually beating personally owned vehicles, and the closer to that they get, the less likely it is people will purchase vehicles.

It's mostly because no-one will pay $5k extra for a car that they perceive to be a worse driver than themselves, but a better driver than a taxi driver.

Do people seriously consider themselves better drivers than the people who actually drive cars for a living?

There have been many studies that show that the large majority of people consider themselves "better than average" drivers. It is called Lake Woebegone effect or Illusory superiority - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_woebegone_effect

Yes, but professional drivers are not "average".

Certainly they do, but of course, they would think so. Still, I'd argue that this is not even that crazy. At least in San Francisco, I vastly prefer to ride with just about any colleague I've ever met than the local taxi drivers, based on these criteria:

- comfort while riding (lack of abrupt motions requiring me to brace myself)

- courtesy to other drivers and pedestrians

- actual number of traffic accidents (colleagues: 0, taxis: 2, although fortunately both accidents were mainly property damage rather than serious injury... but still)

I want one and I have money - when they're available, why wouldn't I be able to buy one?

I think you would, but the conventional wisdom around owning your own car would along the lines of the current CW surrounding owning your own aircraft: it would be something for wealthy enthusiasts, not the general public.

Planes are extra expensive because only coorporations buy them. There isn't infrastructure to sell them to individuals. That raises the price and difficulty of buying them, and also makes it a more sound political strategy to make stricter laws requiring airplane safety, which further makes it inconvenient to operate your own plane.

Some very rich people still own private jets, but it's rarer than it would be if more people were rich.

Consider all the downsides of owning a car:

1. You have to change oil, tires and make all the other repairs.

2. You have to pay for insurance.

3. You have to pay for parking. In SF parking alone can cost you $100/month (I mean if you don't own a house with a garage (which will take you back $1 million); I don't think most rental apartments come with parking spaces so you either have to stress out about finding a parking space for the night close to where you live or pay for parking spot).

4. Parking while driving in the city. If you need to drive somewhere and stay there, you have to find parking, which, in SF, is not easy to do. A rented car just drives you to where you need to go and then goes of to pick up the next customer. When you want to get back, you summon another car.

5. What if you want go skiing for the weekend and need snow tires? Would you rather put snow tires yourself or summon a car that has them?

I'm in SF and I already use my car so rarely that its battery died on me. I do ZipCar but it doesn't cover a lot of scenarios that, while not frequent, do happen and the requirement that you need to return the car to where you took it from makes it non starter for short trips within city.

If there was a service where I could just summon a car anytime, it would be cheap enough to work as a taxi replacement but also for longer trips, I wouldn't buy a car.

Cars are much more than solutions to a transport problem. They are status symbols, personal identities, an extension of ones castle. It will take a very long time, perhaps never, for most people to adopt a taxi/public transport route.

I'd very happily own a driverless car. Even better will be when I take it out of driverless mode in the rural roads. It would be able to take itself to get its oil/ires serviced,to be recharged and to park somewhere cheap and out of the way. Bring it on.

Cars are status symbols in large part because they are advertised as such. If people buy fewer cars you will see a lot less car advertising which will directly reduce the status symbol effect.

See: Pocket watches > wrist watches > cell phones.

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.

[1] http://dsc.discovery.com/cars-bikes/do-driverless-cars-offer...

This sounds to me like the Jevons Paradox.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

interesting link, do you think this increased use could go hand in hand with increased efficiency? think about it. if every car drove optimally, they would meet their planned MPG. Now no one gets the listed MPG as they all drive like, well humans.

The point here is that very efficient driverless cars may encourage more travel than driver cars do. The increase in total miles travelled may more than offset the savings for any given passenger mile.

The key to the Jevons paradox is that first order estimates of the effects of efficiency are misleading. You must also give regard to how the increased efficiency will change buyer preferences.

Computers that communicate could draft really well at highway speeds, and get awesome MPG. They also would rarely need to brake.

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.

i don't think this is limited to a small portion of the populous.

I do that.

But it's not because I hate planes but I've got three kids. Airfare for five to visit grandma in Virginia is prohibitive compared to the cost of driving.

I'm not a nut about it: if it's just my wife and I, we fly.

But on those long drives especially, I'd love a car to do the driving.

I like driving and make no apology for it. I love to set off and drive for a 1000 miles or more. I enjoy driving to no particular destination in particular. It's no more or less rational than liking golf or playing computer games.

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.

I doubt it. How much more efficient do you think automated cars would be? Now think about all the people who will decide to live farther from work because they can work (or play!) on their commute, all the people who will take long overnight road trips while sleeping in the car, all the cars that will drive empty from place to place for various reasons, and most of all the businesses that will all have free automated delivery. I could easily see all that resulting in a 5-10x increase in car-miles driven.

This. A 3 hour commute would not be a big deal if you could sleep/get online/watch tv/do most of the stuff you would do at home. Commutes would also be shorter, all else being equal, since near-optimal automated driving would mean fewer traffic jams.

You'd find automated commuters living way out of town in areas that are currently nearly uninhabited. There probably aren't many places in the lower 48 that are too far from a medium-to-large city to commute with automated driving.

Road trips would also be easier - you'd have to be in a pretty big hurry to pay for an airline ticket when you can go 1500 miles or so in 24 hours with no effort, and without the need to pay for a hotel.

>you'd have to be in a pretty big hurry to pay for an airline ticket

That probably wouldn't result in a large net increase in total fuel consumption.

According to wikipedia the average commercial jet gets 49 passenger miles per gallon. It wouldn't be to hard to get that out of a driverless vehicle, add a second passenger and you're twice as fuel efficient as an airplane.

Even if you get more passenger miles, there might still be an increase due to more total trips taken. Imagine if you could get off work on Friday, head out at 7 PM and make 600 miles by dawn while still getting a good night's sleep. You have the weekend to do what you want, and then Sunday night you sleep through the drive home, and are ready to go back to work Monday morning. I'd probably take a road trip twice a month. As it is, I wouldn't consider going 600 miles unless I had at least 5 days off, which essentially means once a year.

That is a possibility. But I imagine that when driverless cars become ubiquitous, most people won't own them.

If you did want to pay for a car to swing by your house to pick you up, it probably wouldn't be a car, but something more like a small bus with sleeping compartments that could pick up and drop off people along the way.

If you could fit 10 people along most of the route (and you could assuming it was between 2 moderately populated areas and road trips were as common as they probably would be), your passenger miles per gallon would be incredibly high.

Given that this doesn't happen today and that subtracting the cost of the driver isn't going to reduce the overall cost of such a trip significantly, I really don't see that happening. The biggest benefit for bus-like operations is not needing to have driver rest time, but lack of flexibility is still going to push people to their own private transport.

Combine driverless cars with maglev trains that can combine multiple cars into one long train with individual cars coming and going, and you may have something. I'm not holding my breath that I'll see anything like that in my lifetime. Transportation infrastructure in the US has gone nowhere in my nearly 40 years; I don't expect a great deal of change (to the infrastructure) in the next.

> subtracting the cost of the driver isn't going to reduce the overall cost of such a trip significantly

I'll calculate the costs 10 passenger van, if you could work it out so that it gets an average of 40 mph for say 20 hours out of the day. That's about 300,000 miles per year divided by 20 miles per gallon that's 15,000 gallons of fuel. At $4 dollars per gallon thats $60,000 per year in fuel costs.

I'll assume another $60,000 per year in maintenance and depreciation (this is probably high b/c you can buy a new large passenger van for under $30,000)

We're at $110,000 in variable costs so far.

Now at $30,000 per year per driver in total costs (could be less, could be more depending on area)

Driver works 40 hours per week with sick time and vacation time. You'll need around 5 drivers in order to keep the van operational 24 hours per day.

That's $150,000--more than half of the total costs.

There are also other factors to consider. Drivers, don't want to operate that far from home, so you have to pay more.

You have to set up a logistical solution so that you can refresh the driver every 6-8 hours. That means depots where you can exchange them.

I'd say there would be significant cost savings.

This is already possible, until recently, my commute was 1.5 hours (each way) in which I would normally sleep or read, and occasionally watch TV. It wasn't a big deal, but I wouldn't have wanted to go much further, and there's no way I'd have gone twice that far.

It's still rare for people to commute that far on a daily basis. Everyone I know who travels more than about 2 hours from home to work tends to take weekday lodgings within walking distance of work.

A 3 hour commute will always be a big deal, because even if you work a strict 8 hour day, never staying late, that means that 14 hours out of 24 are spent away from home. If 8 of those remaining 10 are spent sleeping, you now have 2 hours left in which to indulge in any kind of leisure or childcare activity. Not everything can be done on the move - I can't imagine it being very likely that you'll be able to go for a swim or play rugby or cricket whilst travelling to and from work.

The cars could easily be routed to pick up multiple people, you could even put up partitions so they didn't have to interact with each other.

Also there's no reason why we need to keep the concept of a 4-5 passenger sedan. 10 passenger vans could be viable.

>free automated delivery

could be routed so that it's delivered to you by the car that's coming to pick you up in the morning to take you to work.

There's also no reason non-passenger vehicles couldn't be ultra efficient 35mph crawlers.

By taking the driver out of the equation we can drastically our definition of a car.

I assure you that people will pay extra not to ride in 10-passenger vans, and, in fact, not to share their car with anyone.

Why, with no need to maintain driver visibility, you could easily divide the seating into private compartments.

How much more efficient do you think automated cars would be?

Potentially a lot. In a 100% automated environment you don't need stop lights and traffic jams are substantially reduced. But yeah, I agree that the increased use resulting from greater convenience would outweigh that.

But if less people have cars (say every 10 people share a single car), then the energy used to build cars diminishes.

The energy used to make a car is dwarfed by the energy it uses on the road over its lifetime.

That's one car. What about the 10 cars this car is representing, if it's right that 10 people share the same car? (a la zipcar).

It would be good to get the data about energy consumption for car building, to answer this.

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.

Road space shouldn't be a problem, from studies I've read with increased speed and traffic density that come from driverless cars you could fit several times more traffic on the current roads.

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.

Electric cars might not become the norm for another decade. The technology is still nascent and it will improve significantly over the next decade.

Also, why would you want to restrict an improvement that could benefit gas powered cars too? A self-driving car would probably be more efficient than a human driver. Fewer traffic jams would be less wasted fuel.

If every car is driven sutomatically, cars can be driven much more efficiently, since there won't be any need for stop signs or traffic lights in the current form. Cars can just coordinate that one car slows down a little and one car speeds up a little. The only reasonfor card to stop will be pedestrians. Of course I assume that there will be only driverless cars. I am fairly sure that human driven cars will be illegal in less than 20 years. Most accidents will be caused by human driven cats which will lead to a ban. I also predict that the US will be one of the last western countries to ban human driven cars

     human driven cars will be illegal in less than 20 years

I think this is very unlikely. Maybe 20 years from the commercial introduction of driverless cars, or 10 years from when they are the default?

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