Google’s Self-Driving Cars Are Going to Change Everything

1. robo-taxi companies will self-insure. Insurance is just spreading the risk. If you have a fleet of 10.000 cars, self-insurance will be cheaper

2. by "death" he means "significant decline", not "disappearance". A company that buys 10.000 cars has a purchasing power that a single customer doesn't. They can dictate the specs to a car company and they can pit several companies against each other to get the best deal. They can even co-design the cars for their own metrics (e.g. fuel efficiency, reliability, maintainability is super important for someone who has a large fleet).

Car companies will have no choice but to play ball, some of them will go bankrupt and the remaining will service a much smaller market.

3. You assume that self-driving cars need a lot of new regulations. They don't - they just need to be allowed on the road. The rules have already changed in Nevada in California. When the technology is proven, the states will have a hard time justifying not allowing technology that is proven to save a significant number of lives.

4. robo-taxi companies will bring repairs in-house or outsource to existing companies. Again, they'll have upper hand in negotiations due to providing a lot of business and the overall market for repairs will shrink dramatically. Google could bring all their statistics knowledge to predicting what and when will fail and use the past data to improve the parts that fail the most.

5. not sure what you're driving at

6. agreed, probably overstatement on the author's part

Google (or some other robo-taxi company) doesn't have to make their own cars, they'll have enough pricing power to pit multiple car manufacturers against each others to get the best deal, drive down the margins etc., just as Apple does with iPhone parts manufactuers (where Apple gets most of the profit from the phone).

They can self-insure - the liability never goes away but will be manageable from revenues.

As to people who insist on owning a car - most of them will change their mind because of price. If you leave college with $50k in student debt, are you going to spend $10k on a new car + monthly insurance + gas + cost of garage ($100/month in San Francisco if your apartment doesn't already come with it) + hassle of owning a car or will you pay $100/month for much more convenient car-as-a-service deal?

I've encountered the same reaction, and I believe it is widespread. But here's the thing: even the people who insist on owning and driving their own cars, and refuse to let it drive them, can still benefit greatly from owning a self-driving car.

Imagine never having to park - you just get out of your car in front of your destination and it goes and finds a parking spot.

Imagine never having to get someone to drop you off at the airport. Your car can just go home afterwards.

Imagine getting your oil changed or other maintenance. The car can do this on its own when you don't need it.

I believe that we'll see a lot of marketing geared towards the people who would never let a car drive them around. This will be a great stepping-stone to help convince these people that it's safe. They'll get it for the convenience, but then eventually one day they'll use it when they're drunk or tired. Eventually, they'll learn to trust it.

However, if premiums become low enough, car insurance policy might even be offered as an add-on to homeowner's or renter's insurance.

4) I think cars will evolve (or devolve) to require less maintenance, and more self-diagnosing.

5) If there are a lot of autonomous cars, owners can simply walk away from their cars, and the cars will coordinate amongst themselves to part in designated spots.

6) You know what bogs down city courts? People fighting traffic and parking tickets.

What I can see instead, is lots of truck drivers watching TV or just sleeping at the steering wheel, while their trucks do the job.

Out of curiosity, why would this be? I can see that commuters who despise driving may switch to cars from public transport, but at least from personal experience, I don't see this as a major reason for people using public transport in the first place.

Is there another reason I'm missing? I'd imagine it would be more likely that self driving vehicles end up improving public transport (both in quality of service and popular usage).

Also, other places to start would be Nevada (as Google is doing), Texas, and other large states where there is a benefit to having something automated do the driving for 3-6 hours across large stretches of highway.

You're never going to have a major metro just ban human-driven cars overnight; you win by attrition, small bites very quickly.

When cars started to take over from horse and cart, it still took 20+ years for them to become commonplace. It takes time for reliability to go up, and cost to come down. It takes time for the laws to catch up.

What seems like a blink in time to us now (1880s-1900) was 20 years for the people living it at the time. Cars were, at first, a freak sighting - then gradually, little by little, they caught on, and millions of horses were, ahem, retired.

A big step change isn't needed at all. Just gradual introduction and refinement until they are a compelling proposition.

As for the legal issue - the first generation of cars will require a human driver behind the wheel. They'll remain repsonsible for the foreseeable future. Likely the answer to long-term compensation for injured victims will be a shared insurance scheme - you pay the registration on your self-drive vehicle, and a portion of that goes into an insurance fund. If there is an accident and property/people are adversely affected, they get paid out from that fund according to a pre-determined formula ($x,000 for a limb on a 25 year old, $y,000,000 for a 45 paraplegic, etc). This isn't greatly different from schemes in place around the world today, where pinning fault on someone comes second to making sure those injured in traffic accidents are compensated + rehabilitated properly.

I'd actually be somewhat surprised if this were the case. Self-driving cars will gather an enormous amount of sensor data and I bet they'll store that and decision tree logs in a "black box" of sorts. If this isn't being done now, I guarantee it'll be done after the first few lawsuits.

With that info in hand, it should be rather clear – at least in the majority of cases – who's at fault. The human driver can claim they swerved over the double line to avoid an obstacle, but the sensor information can probably confirm whether that's actually the case.

This isn't to say there won't be lawsuits, or that self-driving cars will never be at fault. I just expect there will be a rash of initial lawsuits. Then, as it becomes clear that the data recorded by self-driving cars makes them a difficult target to exploit (and assuming self-driving cars are in fact less error prone than human drivers), I expect lawsuits to taper off.

Meh. I can solve this with one line of code. Every programming language has a random function =)

As a native, I can tell you that this is the solution employed by most human driven taxis already.

I imagine we'll still have recreational tracks and courses for driving, but "the joy of driving" doesn't justify the megadeaths caused by automobile accidents.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter what you will do, but what majority of people will do and his article is about those big-picture changes. Cars replaced horses as mode of transportation, with many consequences to society. Very rich people can still ride horses as a hobby, but that doesn't nullify the magnitude of changes brought by replacing horses by cars.

The interesting part to me is that the pervasiveness of this general sentiment in America is the reason I think self-driving cars will win out in the near-to-medium term over other options that are probably more efficient and cost effective. America is married to the car, and that's what makes the self-driving car the most likely to succeed new form of transport in my opinion.

You'll always be able to drive. But I would guess most 'fun' driving cars will be a hobby, like a boat or a horse. Not something you use every day.

But a change like that is 20+ years away.

Which leaves me with one question for you: do people still drive the Ford Model T on the road? My point should be obvious. Time changes things drastically. Either adopt the future or become obsolete. I can't stand people who can't stand change.

How does it feel to be considered old?

There are cameras on the autonomous cars, I'm sure they'd do the trick just fine.

> Second, I still have no idea how on Earth would AC riding on a highway know that it is a black cat, not a black bag laying on the street.

LIDAR. A black bag laying on the street is virtually invisible to it.

> The bottom line: sooner or later AC will make a mistake.

True, but they'll have to make a lot of mistakes to be worse than humans.

> Last, who is liable when the system makes a mistake?

That's a good question, and not one that can be answered categorically for all classes of motor vehicle accident. I'd imagine that the driver of an autonomous car would be liable for their actions in the same sense that a pilot is when they place their plane on autopilot (or a skipper when the use an autotiller to steer their ship). If it can be proven to be poor engineering on the manufacturer's part, then likely the manufacturer will be held responsible. Otherwise it will probably be the driver getting sent to jail. Or maybe a mixture of both if both parties can be proven to have acted negligently.

> ...but I can throw myself under riding AC.

Yet you're incapable of throwing yourself under a normal car? Doesn't this contradict your previous point about sabotage?

Though admittedly sabotage is a very common concern with automatic cars - what if somebody papers over a street sign or throws rocks at the car whilst it is on a sharp corner? In reality, malicious third parties are of concern, but not any more than if the vehicle was not autonomous. Human drivers can still be distracted by noisy passengers, intoxicated by alcohol and blinded by lasers; all you're doing by putting a robot in control is swapping the weaknesses of one system for the weaknesses of another. Ideally, there would be a mechanical backup system which could be controlled by the driver in the case of an emergency, which would effectively make autonomous cars more reliable than normal ones.

In the medium to long term, that's a benefit.

The auto industry profitability depends on passenger miles - less miles, less cars + parts, less revenue.

Google isn't going to get into the car assembly business. One or more of the innovative car firms will just licence the self drive technology into an existing platform as a first step.

Car makers themselves have been experimenting with this stuff for decades. If you google around you'll find BMWs doing high speed laps of race circuits with no drivers.

A modern S-Class Benz can literally drive itself already - it has brake assist, lane assist, steering assist, parking assist and radar guided cruise control. It knows where it is going and how long it will take to get there. The driver really is only a small part of the driving equation in a car like this.

http://jalopnik.com/5934213/autonomous-google-cars-will-kill...

Doing heroin is a bad idea; it's harmful to the body and the community. But while fighting heroin is a good thing, it's also good to give addicts clean needles so they aren't harmed even more.

Cars aren't going anywhere, but if you can reduce the harm while promoting better alternatives, everyone wins.

If anything, autonomous cars is a great way to go to reducing the number. The car can drop you off at office and come back home by itself, so your significant other could use it in the meanwhile without really having to buy two cars.

I mean, I'm all for envisioning better ways of living. I'm even more in favor of the guys who are not only envisioning it, they're actually building the means.

What are you building?

It's a silly position to only talk about costs, completely disregard any benefits. It comes across like a petulant brainwashed teenager, and people should try and argue their point better.