Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions
forbes.com
forbes.com
Safe to say I'm really, really excited about the future.
I think the net effect will be hugely positive, but like all paradigm shifts this is going to cause immense social upheaval and initially look like it only makes things worse.
The big effects will be on other aspects. No more drunk driving. Fractional ownership of cars.
Just because it doesn't have a driver doesn't mean it doesn't need to be manufactured. Car companies will do fine.
> Pizza delivery will not be an entrylevel job.
Nope. But pizza making still will be. Sebastian, are you listening?
> I think the net effect will be hugely positive
You got that right.
> but like all paradigm shifts this is going to cause immense social upheaval and initially look like it only makes things worse.
So, what? You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.
The key is to forbid the government from breaking eggs. Egg breaking should be strictly a private sector activity, judged solely by consumer demand.
No they won't; every > 1 car family will have 1 car only after this, because, when at work, you just send your car back on it's own for the wife and kids. Big reduction. If your neighbor has different hours than you have, you can combine that by sending the car back when you arrived. I think it'll have a huge impact on car sales; we just don't need many anymore as, unlike now, they are not useless without a driver.
We all share a fleet of cars like a taxi service. Need a car? Pull out your smartphone app and push the "call" button that sends a nearby car to your location. You could also schedule a pickup for the exact time you get off work.
No need to send an empty car back home to your family during the day. No need to let the car sit empty in between rides.
We have the tech right now for every workplace to have open seating and non-personalized computer workstations, and while some companies do this, most people still want their own desk space and personalized computer.
Note that in Europe car ownership amongst the younger demographics is plunging. The novelty has worn off, no one can be arsed with them anymore.
Needing personal mobile storage is not needing a car if you already get a car for free.
I think that's because of the feeling you have when you drive a large machine yourself. If you are not behind the wheel anymore, will it still be the same feeling?
And yes, SOME will have this; there will exist a need for cars, I'm saying it will just be far less than it is now.
I don't think there's anything inherent in a self-driving car that causes it to have a smooth ride with minimal sensation of movement like a train or plane, it's more a property of the road.
FWIW, neither my wife or I had ever owned a car, we managed just fine with public transport and car-sharing. But once the baby came along, we pretty much had to buy a car.
If driver-less cars become the norm, the practical need for toddler car seats will cease to exist.
All of that aside from that the system will be safe enough that you can trust your toddler to order and ride in vehicles by themselves if necessary.
That said, I'm totally in favor of self-driving vehicles and wish they'd hurry up so I can get one. Containing that two-year-old is way easier when you don't have to concentrate on traffic at the same time!
And I have to wait for my car to come back if I have any immediate need to use it during the day?
> If your neighbor has different hours than you have, you can combine that by sending the car back when you arrived.
I'm not sure people are that much into car pool. And then there is issue with whose property the car is, people don't always let other people use their property even if they don't need to use it right now.
Of course you don't have to; you can pay ten times as much for a dedicated vehicle if that's a feature you need. Everyone can do their own math.
Not so fast. Check out this gourmet hamburger making robot: http://singularityhub.com/2013/01/22/robot-serves-up-340-ham...
From TFA: "We can reduce the number of cars by 90%." So, you read that and disagree with it?
I haven't done the math though.
Why not? People are still going to want the pizza delivered to their door, not to their driveway or parking lot.
What's my point? "oh no, terrorists!" is about the silliest objection I can think of to self-driving car technology.
Well, you also have to consider that bus systems are built around driver scarcity. What if buses were half as large, and run twice as often? They can't now, because that would double driver labor costs.
If buses were the size of vans, capital costs might even decrease due to having access to van-market economies of scale (the market for vans presumably being significantly larger than the market for buses).
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_responsive_transport
The main difference in terms of capacity, I think, is that once we have majority- and fully-autonomous roads, the system will actually not allow the road to exceed capacity. Individual vehicles will respond to signs of lower throughput by getting off of the potentially congested road, while centralized signaling systems will help coordinate routes and departure times to optimize-- and due to the non-Newtonian nature of traffic, keeping throughput high actually increases road capacity.
So if you get into your car at 9am and say, "Take me to work," it's not going to say, "Time with traffic: One hour," it's going to say, "We should depart in twenty-five minutes." Even better, if you are subscribed to a service like most Americans will be, you'll instead tell them the day or week or month before, "I need to be at work by 9am," and they'll say, "There will be a fifteen dollar capacity fee. Would you rather arrive at 8:30 or 10?" And let you and your work decide exactly how much of the economy's money it's worth for you to be there at exactly the same time as everyone else in the time zone.
For example, many cities already have lit signs that forbid turns from cross-streets onto oversubscribed roads, your nav system could allow you to pay the congestion fee and get authorization to disregard the sign and take the turn. Similarly, you could get out your smartphone and queue yourself to a destination and be told when you get to leave and take the fast route for free. As long as queuing at home got you to your destination faster than queuing in traffic, it would be the individual best strategy to do it and enough people would use it for it to work.
The hard part is probably doing traffic scheduling at an acceptable latency, for a city like LA you'd need to model the behavior of millions of cars however many iterations your optimization algorithm needs every few seconds. These kind of problems are really computationally expensive, it may not be economical with current systems and algorithms.
I disagree, I'd say scheduling is the smallest part of it. On most trips I take, there's a single major road that covers most of the distance, and I'm most likely to be delayed by traffic on that road slowing or halting completely. It's the moment-to-moment perverse behavior of other drivers when it comes to merging, changing lanes, accelerating and braking that causes that to happen, and having intelligent drivers on the same roads at the same times would make a much more significant impact.
In other words, you're saying we could do global scheduling with traffic lights, which is true. I'm saying that with sufficiently competent drivers we won't need the lights, and I think that will cause a qualitative shift in the nature of traffic.
Also, given that I live in France, I'm sure there won't be any Google car allowed anywhere before the French automakers are able to make one -- which is to say, probably never.
You know, it's easy to always blame the government when the real problem is that you start your thought process as if it was hopeless from the beginning ...
PS: Yes, I'm French.
Let's make it an issue and make government change.
I do imagine communities will see many of the same benefits as individuals; that is, lower transport costs will mean its possible to build affordable, self-contained communities farther away from urban centers without sacrificing quality of life (including the ability to go to the city if you want to). But that's behind the event horizon to me; hard to speculate.
Anyway, if you really want to enjoy a driving experience get a motorcycle!
However, at some point the safety factor may force you to stop driving. I wouldn't want you to be driving, when a machine could do it better.
We already have tracks, which like firing ranges allow people like us to indulge our hobby in both safety and company. Driving a car on public roads is a ludicrously dangerous and irresponsible thing to do just because it's fun.
What we didn't anticipate was truly personal, individual vehicles that could drive themselves even within within twenty years of 2001. I thought that the world would move toward more fixed-path public transportation solutions, like the monorails that always featured in 1960s visions of the future.
The comments below your comment on use cases are very interesting. This whole subthread is food for thought. My thought, as a married man with three children still at home, and one grown child in another state who might still join us on family trips from time to time, is that we will probably buy ONE more car that isn't self-driving, to replace the older of our two cars in the next few years, and then ONE self-driving car to be my wife's main commuting car, with her stuff stashed inside. For all other trips, we will subscribe to an on-call car service, which will surely be cheaper per use than full ownership of a second car. The car service cars can be parked all over town for instant availability. They will be intelligently dispatched by algorithms that balance speed of arrival with passenger preferences such as whether or not the car has child safety seats, whether or not the passenger prefers to work or to relax with a great sound system during the drive, and so on. I greatly look forward to this lifestyle. I substitute a lot of walking and bicycling for car driving already, and just knowing that eventually (not REAL soon) all the cars sharing the road and street with me will have competent robot drivers is a huge improvement.
The Wall Street Journal article "Why Driverless Cars Are Inevitable--and That's a Good Thing"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044352490457765...
from a few months ago has more about the economy-changing dynamics of driverless cars. I can't wait--but I'll observe the speed limit while I'm driving as I attempt to wait.
AFTER EDIT: Responding to comments elsewhere in this interesting thread, why I think Google Maps will probably be licensed into most self-driving car packages, even if the hardware is built mostly by other companies, is that Google Maps is relentless in adding data to its geographic database.
SEP 6 2012, Alexis Madrigal's column in The Atlantic, shared previously to HN, "How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything"
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go...
September 27, 2012, David Pogue's column in the New York Times: "What Makes Google’s Maps So Good"
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/what-makes-googles...
The Google Street View photography of my former neighborhood in Panchiao, Taiwan is PHENOMENAL, and data like that are being gathered all over the world. If I like, I can take a photo in 3-D view with my Nexus 4 phone, GPS geolocation turned on, and add data to the database any time. Generally, any time anyone is on a drive with a Google device turned on, Google gets some of the data that helps it predict current driving times for differing routes to the destination--an enormously helpful feature of Google Maps for drives during rush hour in the Twin Cities.
They have essentially created remote realtime monitoring systems for society. Human traffic, weather, parking, etc. As well as solving the biggest optimization problem that exists today.
Truck shipments can now be done overnight without worrying about driver fatigue. Emergency vehicles can take the most efficient route, as well as efficient avoidance of other vehicles. And traffic lights can be optimized as well.
There are about three paragraphs of text, and then I have to pony up another ad impression by clicking through to the next page in order to keep reading. All the while, two enormous fixed nav bars follow my every move at both the top and the bottom of the page. Meanwhile a veritable flotilla of fixed-position "social icons" on the left beg me to help Forbes advertise their content. And to the right of the article? Adverts as far as the eye can see. Even within that center column, the content is occasionally interrupted with links to other unrelated content. And below the article text itself are a bunched of "Sponsored Content You Might Like" links doing their very best to look similar to "Related Stories".
What's going on here? Is this what it takes for Forbes to turn a profit?
However, the Forbes print link uses a reasonable font and a reasonable column width, and has at the bottom a link to the non-print page. (It does invoke a print dialog, which is a bit annoying).
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2013/01/22/fasten-your...
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/the-future-is-in-the-past/...
Google almost specialise at crunching massive data into useful products, and building reliable supersystems from millions of unreliable subsystems.
Car companies might have some software knowledge these days but they really are a long way from the capabilities Google has. They solve car problems, but it might turn out that this is an information system problem.
But with self-driving cars, it's different. A car landing on a highway, when it's not supposed to be there, and then getting into an accident, is not good news. So that's why I think accurate map data will be very important for this.
So, let's say you are driving a vehicle that isn't allowed on the highway but incorrectly takes one. How do you think maps will help with the "and then getting into an accident" part?
Of what relevance is Google's map data (which they buy from vendors)? Google's map data doesn't tell the car if a pedestrian or another car or a fire hydrant is where it is about to go. The car has to figure that out all by itself and in real time.
Map data is neither necessary nor sufficient to drive a car.
At the scale where a driver-less car operates, the map data is only relevant as to whether it's managed to get its owner where he wants to go. If that question is still relevant, then it has succeeded.
Street View is YEARS out of date in most major international cities and doesn't exist in the majority of smaller cities. It would be dangerous borderline criminal for a self-driving car to be relying on it for anything important.
Google's cars start with an extremely detailed map of the road, including where the lanes are and where everything should be. And, every time a Google car drives the road, that map can be updated.
This obviously isn't ready to deploy nation-wide right now, but there's a pretty obvious growth path here. If you were to buy a Google car for your commute, you might have to manually drive it for several days in order for it to learn everything it needs to know. Eventually, the other self-driving cars on the road will also be helping build a map for you, and you for them.
No they don't.
Google licenses the majority of its data from third parties. Or have you never seen a sat-nav system before ?
The best Audi could show at CES was self-parking, and even that needed infrastructure put in place in the parking lot for it to work, so it's not even in the same class as Google's self-driving tech.
Also as others have said, Google might have the most accurate data in the future for such technology, which means cars using Google's self-driving tech will be the safest out there.
I read a claim[2] a while back that the coming S-Class could drive itself, but they chose to not sell it because of concerns about lawsuits, etc.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#History
[2]: http://www.businessinsider.com/mercedes-benz-2014-s-class-se...
They partnered with Stanford AI Lab , won the Darpa Grand Challenge, climbed Pikes Peak, etc.
The key issue being overlooked in these discussions of 'Autonomous vehicles at scale' is that all of these projects revolve around Lidar - and I'm unsure how well that scales with multiple laser sources throwing off 'point cloud' data. :shrug:
[1] Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) http://www.vwerl.com/
Basically Google has recorded all the driver's reactions to whatever is happening on the road, and this allows them to teach the bot to drive. Using this data the bot can virtually drive the roads again and again, until it doesn't make mistakes. There's no way car companies can compete with them.
Blind people, disabled people, people unable to drive in any way will be more independent.
No need for expensive parking in a city. Car can go somewhere else cheaper. Expensive land used for parking can be better utilised.
You can rent your car out to others while you’re not using it. No real need for personal car ownership. Why pay to own when you can rent whenever you need from car manufacturers or rental companies? Get the car that best suits your needs for a particular day at your door when you need it.
Cars spend a lot if their life doing nothing. The car will be fully utilised and always in service making the most of the valuable resources used to build it.
A car no longer needs to be car shaped. You can have cars for specific needs. A bar car if you want!
Traffic efficiency when everyone has them. The road network can be utilised more effectively as the cars will be able to share data and calculate the best route.
You can spend more time doing other things like looking at their adverts.
They will be safer. Computers won’t make the mistakes caused by humans doing stupid things like sending text messages while driving. Drink driving. The won’t break the speed limit etc.
While it's true that most people don't drive their car most of the time, when they do drive, most of them are driving within a relatively small time window.
I could imagine a 25-50% reduction in the number of cars, but I just don't see 90% happening unless it's accompanied by a huge increase in people working from home or working non-standard hours.
It's going to reshape cities and entire industries. We'll get most of the best of cars (flexible mobility and independence) and get rid of most of the worst of them (cost, insurance, waste of public space, car-centric architecture, deaths, drunk driving, etc.).
I cannot wait.
Additionally you are no longer to blame for your commute since the driverless system would be responsible for timing, in much the same way trains are to blame for timing now. I'd also expect the driverless system to have variable pricing - need to get to work by 9am instead 9.15am and it is $5 more out of your pocket. Ultimately your employer is paying that and they have an incentive to only do so if it is valuable.
Being able to just call a car to drive you to work, while an automatic system figures out the car sharing arrangements in real time, could remove a lot of the barriers.
Driverless cars have many possible solutions. A simple one is pricing - it costs $5 more if you refuse to share. (And another $5 more if you want massage seats.) It is possible to completely partition the seats from each other so each one is effectively its own cocoon where you can play your own music as loud as you want and are completely isolated from the other passengers.
Heck it is even possible like many current electrics to have a base chassis that includes the motors and batteries in the floor, and have pods that mount on top. You could have your own personalized pod you keep at home.
In economics, the Jevons paradox [..] is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.
$15T GDP, ten percent of which is transportation. I think that a truly self-driving car and truck could eat 20% of that, easily. So $300b a year...
Not for general public driving, of course, but for fleets of trucks and excavators that operate globally 24/7.
At various sites they are already operating driverless equipment using tech developed in house.
For what it's worth, oil & gas & mineral exploration work drove a large part of the civilian development of tools like Google Earth / Google Maps in the decades prior to the first public offerings by Google (who acquired their tech from others (the chaps from Sydney for Maps, Keyhole for Earth)).
The point is the capabilities I'm talking about have nothing to do with cars and everything to do with computing. Pointing to another company doing autonomous vehicles as a counterexample is kinda-sorta missing my point.
Not a (single) system, rather one such system per car - standard protocols for inter system comms are yet to arrive and each vehicle needs to react to local changes such as pedestrians w/out reference to an external global computing infrastructure.
It's not a big data, massively interconnected problem at all - the elegance comes from local smart behaviour - even for broader problems like optimal pooling.
Others can enter the driverless vehicle market and there are companies like Akamai Technologies that could provide any required interconnect. Google is a player, but by no means the only player.
Oh, Really?
Ants seem to do okay.
Following your, umm,, solution of critical external hyper networked global oversight it seems there'd be the mother of all traffic accidents if the servers went out.
Biologically emergent local behaviour seems wonderfully adept at converging on globally optimal solutions via local agent actions. Perhaps you're right, maybe Google is the only company capable of replicating the efficiencies of termite mounds.
I had heard that funding levels in California, as ranked against other states, had fallen in recent years, and that is surely embarrassing to Californians, who historically have taken pride in generous state funding for schools up to and including universities. But of course even more embarrassing to California in the years that I have been an adult have been the poor results in California schools, even compared to funding levels there that were higher than in some other states. I wish the school administrators in California well in learning how to spend their resources better. I note that the Gates Foundation studies of effective schooling practices often include schools in California in the study samples, and I hope actionable data lead to better results.
For me, this would actually be a solid reason to move to the country they have it first. I find driving an absolute waste of time, but busses and metros and trains are just not a good substitute unless almost empty and comfortable (which most are not).
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9231707/Self_driving_...
That is an ambitious prediction, and I wonder what that suggests about the cost of the self-driving system, as fewer and fewer cars look affordable to many "ordinary people" these days. I think Brin, being a billionaire for several years now, may have a warped sense of what "ordinary people" can really afford, so I give it ten years till I'm likely to be able to buy a car with self-driving features. But that means I can buy at most just one more car without self-driving features (to replace a car that threatens to fail at any moment, after almost 170,000 miles of driving since 1999), and then the next car I buy will be a self-driving car. Cool.
I've bought two new cars (and 1 used) in the last 15 years. The oldest lasted 11 years and 256000 miles. The used was a truck when I bought my house. The newest is a diesel wagon getting 40+ miles to the gallon, I don't plan on selling it anytime soon.
I will be loath to add GPS for purposes of tax calculation (sure it can be done based off registration or other means -- at least the GPS data isn't there). And, I don't predict any incentive to move people from driving their own cars to self-driving cars.
The above is in addition to the "independence" baked into the American culture about the open road and the automobile.
Do you think there is something inherently wrong with the feeling of independence and happiness attained from the car culture in the US?
I am still dubious that self-driving and non-self-driving cars will be able to share a road in the future. If this doesn't happen, I doubt Americans will freely give up their 'right' to drive the way they want.
Not at all. Note, I had a car that in 12 years, I put 256000 miles on, while I had a second vehicle during that time that had many miles put on it as well. I personally love road trips. One area where modern vehicles (hybrids and eventually self-driving) have no place (for now) is off roaring. Every year or two, I do road trips that include up to (and sometimes exceeding) 1000 miles off road -- not just dirt, but jeep trails, high clearance, having one person act as a spotter kind of stuff.
Where my comment was directed is that all the technology in the world isn't going to do away with the car culture you point out anytime soon (probably not in my lifetime).
How exactly do you figure? You don't think regular drivers can handle a road with computer cars? Or you don't think computer cars can handle a road with people?
I grew up around cars, driving cars (heck, my college job was the stereotypical pizza delivery guy). I live in a metropolitan area where I can go just about anywhere I need to with the swipe of a card and waiting a few minutes on a train platform. The feeling of independence that I didn't need to worry about the CV boots on my axles screwing up and costing me hundreds in a replacement axle. The feeling of independence that I'm not contributing significantly to pollution. The feeling of independence that _getting out and walking somewhere_ gives me. The feeling of independence that I get to read a book on my commute instead of staring at the ass-end of an SUV jettisoning metric tons of fumes while in stop-and-go-traffic.
Do I wish I had a car for getting out of the city and into the countryside sometimes? Well, sure.
That's what zipcar is for.
I _do_ admit that the feeling of driving is exhilarating. Pushing the pedal down, feeling the engine rev, connecting with the road through the tires.
For the majority of uses, I can see driverless cars completely taking over. And for those who want to drive endless country roads? Well, driverless cars will probably be built to drive with the expectation that every other car on the road is being driven by a drunken teenager on a methamphetamine binge. For liability purposes.
And in certain parts of the country, you can still see horse-drawn carriages clopping along the shoulder.
So you'll [the quintessential driver, who just wants to drive because of some ass-backwards ideal of freedom which is actually more crippling than freeing] will be just fine.
If not? Well, we have four-wheeler specific mudding "roads" out there right now, don't we? I could see the blue ridge parkway, for example, being a driver-only road (it is incredibly fun to drive).
A lot of people aren't so lucky.
The freedom a vehicle provides those people is quite real.
Suburbs would have been built differently if not for private car ownership. LA would not exist in its current form.
But that freedom would not be infringed by a driverless car, would it?
On the other hand, a "Cash for Clunkers" on a big scale could accelerate the transition.
Also there are some situations when driving a car is not an enjoyment but a chore - almost any place where traffic is heavy.
1) reducing the risk of accident and increasing safety in case of accident (you could, for example, sit in the back seat)
2) no need to find nearby parking (let the car drop you off and later pick you up)
3) ability to apply the time you would have used driving to do something useful
4) improved gas mileage from caravaning, ability to predict light timing, etc.
"I drove last time, it's your turn to drive." "But they'll be serving just beer. You don't even like beer." etc etc
I also look forward to the day when you will be able to go to the pub, get absolutely wankered, and still be able to get home safely without waiting for cabs.
As a side note, I think the resistance to driverless cars will be a big psychological stumbling block. I can't ride in the passenger seat of a car without hitting the "brakes" and pressing my foot into the floor. It will be tough to break habits and to trust that the software is safe.
But mark my words in 2100 we will, at last, have flying autonomous cars (or something that can be described that way.)
Um, are you listening Ford, Hyundai, Honda, GM? Can't wait until they legislate their way back to competitiveness with google.
Might want to pay attention.
Cars aren't like search. It's not a winner-takes-all market.
It's not far off.
Sure, if you're pushing a new powertrain you can do okay making one or two of your own cars (which will take years) and you can shortcut the time to build up a brandname to a degree by being exclusive, but none of that effort is warranted because this technology does not require that sort of vertical integration.
If your competency is not making cars but rather automated cars, why would you want to get into the business of making cars?
This still means that they aren't going to be making the "triiiillions of dollars!"
[Dr Evil pinkie finger here]
I mean sure, they can make a lot of money further down the value chain. But so do Motorola whenever someone installs a few dozen PowerPC chips into a new BMW.
It's just lazy link-baiting conflation of the Biggest Number Available with what might actually happen, and that annoyed me.
Audi, BMW, Ford, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Porsche, Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen, Volvo
If "never trust the client" is a truism in software, I'd assume it'd be doubly so for P2P communication, and add another doubling for a situation involving humans + relatively high masses and speeds.
Amazing! He studied and compared all other driver-less cars to Google's and came to this conclusion.
I know a writer getting paid for clicks wouldn't forget that virtually every major car company is working on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car#History
How big would computers be today without the GUI, with a different system.
Sometimes you need a outsider to show you how powerful your own work can be.
There's clearly going to be a huge market for commodity solutions, and the economies of scale and the network effects suggest that it should narrow down to a few main ones.
Is Google's going to be one of those successful ones? Impossible to say for sure, but they do have a couple of huge advantages. They already have the geodata (all car manufacturers would still need to pay either Google or Nokia for that, even if they wrote their own software). And if I were a car manufacturer, I'd rather not license software from a direct competitor, but from an outsider. It certainly seems worth a bet.
Wrong answer. The car companies that currently have their own projects:
Audi / BMW / Ford / GM / Honda / Hyundai / Lexus / Mercedes-Benz / Nissan / Porsche / Tesla / Toyota / Volkswagen / Volvo
And remind me again who would want to license technology from a company who has zero experience in delivering mission critical solutions.
Plus cars are 10-20 year commitments, is Google going to be there and still interested in this? I am not even mentioning the strings Google might attach, like using Google Tires to be "compliant and be able to use the {brand}" (see Android)
There are almost more car brands than car designs.
I think the idea is extremely shortsighted. It's a technological feat but not a creative one. It just produces more cars, more fuel-burning and more roads. It's more cars and that will produce more pollution.
Ultimately, it solves nothing. You want to stop deadly car crashes? Help save wildlife from excessive roads and urban sprawl? Stop driving. Live and work locally. But that would take real change.
Nope. Less. Cars-per-person will nosedive from almost 1:1 in the US right now to maybe 1:5 - that means the embodied energy wasted on cars will go down. Per-mile energy costs will go down too, if cars are driven efficiently.
It also enables the large-scale conversion of the US car fleet to electric propulsion. Cars can recharge themselves and aren't range limited because you can swap cars rather than waiting.
It's huge. It's as big as the invention of the car was. All the human hours wasted on moving things from A to B will gradually go away.
Fresh food every day delivered from the farm? Not a problem any more.
Also, regarding pollution - traveling salesman algorithm optimizations would reduce the distance travelled and CO2 emitted for the same outcome.
For God sakes, please snap out of your delusion.
If you want to throw around platitudes, why not address the real problem: uncontrolled population. Or does that make you uncomfortable?
I don't drive, you do, therefore you are uncomfortable with the reality that you are destroying the environment and the air and shifting the responsibility elsewhere.
Cars don't have to be internal-combustion.
You have no moral authority, just shrill accusations.
Your lack of driving is a lame dodge for your destructive, hypocritical, blind consumerism; which is doing far more damage than a car ever could. Feel free to defend your lifestyle here and pretend you don't shit all over the third world as much as the average American. You're fooling yourself though. Either you work for a company that does a ton of environmental damage, or your parents do, and they pay your bills (more likely). You pay taxes to a government with a massive military machine that destroys the environment and subsidizes the worst companies. But maybe your lack of car makes you special.
Somehow, I feel there is still no alterative to real world communication. Until that is fixed, this is still amazing.
Self driving cars will have a metro train like experience with very good reach thanks to the existing infrastructure (roads).
You probably can't build a robot or waltz with your partner on Skype.
Technology isn't the answer to problems of air quality and the preservation of wildlife. Making significant changes to our lifestyle is, but we need to snap out of this delusional wishful thinking and make changes based on reality.
You can keep trying to get 7 billion people to behave the way you want. Good luck with that. Or, instead you can give them something they want that also solves the problems you want solved. Renewable Energy, Recyclable products, less polluting products that are also more desirable (think Tesla Model s)
Making new tech that solves those issues and at the same time provides something more desirable than current products is the only realistic way forward.
KPMG's report comes to the same conclusion as mine:
http://vancouverdata.blogspot.ca/2012/08/googles-self-drivin...