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Comment by autophil | Hacker News Reader

Self driving cars is such a dumb, short-sighted idea. We don't need more cars on the road, and we don't need more roads either. It's not sustainable.

Let's think beyond cars and envision better ways of living that don't punish the Earth and the atmosphere.

The emperor is in the buck on this one.

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Speaking of dumb and short-sighted, how do you fail to see that robotic drivers can make vastly more efficient use of existing infrastructure than humans? How do you not see that reducing traffic jams lowers the amount of gasoline burnt idling, and carbon emitted to no effect? How do you not see that the same technology can be the basis for a very different transportation system? Can you not imagine a world where few people own cars (which are parked most of the the time) and, instead, rely on fleets of robotic taxis simply pick people up and drop them off where and when they're called? If crashes were a thing of the past, do you see how dramatically engineering would change? How much smaller and lighter cars could become? How much less fuel they'd use?

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?

autophil probably goes too far, but he isn't entirely wrong--even perfectly efficient robotic cars powered by pixie dust are inefficient and not a panacea for the problems of traffic and pollution that car-centric infrastructure has caused.

True but assuming the future is that of mostly robo-taxi companies (and not individually owned self-driving cars), there will tremendous business pressure on robo-taxi companies to make their cars as efficient as possible, as the cost of gas (or other energy) will be part of their cost of providing the service.

Today car companies sell cars based on many criteria. Fuel efficiency is one of them but when gas prices aren't too high, individual customers don't care about that very much.

Someone who operates a fleet of 10.000 cars will make fuel efficiency their top-most priority because that will drive down the cost of their service and the cost will be a major reason why customers will pick one provider over another, not how stylish the car is or how fast it goes from 0 to 60.

E.g. if they realize that by putting solar panel on the roof of the car they can save money in the long term, they'll immediately put solar panel in every car. The progress in making cars more efficient will be much faster.

Anything like a car is always going to be space and weight inefficient. A Smart car has an order of magnitude more weight than a person, and occupies two orders of magnitude more space on the ground--you're not going to get significantly below that, so propelling those cars and fitting them all on the street already adds a bunch of overhead on top of the original problem of people-moving. That's before tackling engine efficiency or energy sources.

This isn't to say self-driving cars are useless. They might be just the kick needed to get people out of car ownership, which will enable the fundamental land use and infrastructure changes necessary to make more sustainable improvements. But they aren't the endgame for sustainability.

> Self driving cars is such a dumb, short-sighted idea. We don't need more cars on the road, and we don't need more roads either. It's not sustainable.

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.

Everybody wins? No, the Earth loses, and then we lose. It's happening faster than you think.

Look, I'm an environmentalist (I fund projects that help pay for inholdings in state parks so they transition to what we'd consider the public domain), but I'm a realist as well. People need mobility. Its not going away, ever. Self driving cars + electric vehicles + intelligent energy management between a large electric grid and all those vehicles is the holy grail. It's going to happen much sooner than you think.

That's a really pathetic version of a "holy grail". Real progress would mean people living in compact communities where most trips are undertaken on foot or by bicycle. Your "holy grail" is just a new coat of paint on the same deteriorating sprawl.

> Real progress would mean people living in compact communities where most trips are undertaken on foot or by bicycle.

That sounds like an unbearably miserable existence. I don't live in a compact community will millions of other people for a reason.

Compact communities don't have to involve large populations. There are already small and medium-sized villages in Europe that have successfully converted to 100% car-free walkable spaces, and it isn't inconceivable for many existing US suburbs. You just have to move away from this design philosophy focused on strictly separating residential and commercial zones.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong about the idea of a car. It is what powers the car (currently gasoline) that is the problem. But the self-driving technology is applicable to electric cars, cars that run on fuel cells, what ever other modern and sustainable methods for powering a car exist.

> There is nothing intrinsically wrong about the idea of a car.

For a single commuter, it increases their weight footprint by an order of magnitude and their space footprint by over two orders of magnitude, which increases total energy consumption and traffic congestion compared to simply transporting the commuter themselves.

> We don't need more cars on the road, and we don't need more roads either. It's not sustainable.

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 suspect after the technology becomes wide-spread, new laws will be made to minimise people buying (human-driven) vehicles. Cars will probably require some expensive licence to drive, older cars will not be allowed on the road unless an exemption is made etc. Sort of how Singapore does it.

If cars are self-driving, there'll be less of them. And they can better utilise existing road space (faster reaction times means they can tail-gate with comparative safety.)

What annoys me about posts like this in general is that they only see cars (and motorised transport in general) as a cost, but don't take into account any benefits.

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.

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