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Comment by jellicle | Hacker News Reader

Yay, the weekly driverless car puff piece.

> Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports.

What location is that? The magic one? Just "some" location that apparently will magically appear when the magic cars come.

Actually, your driverless car takes up the same room on the road or in the parking lot as everyone else's. YOU don't drive in loops, but your car still does.

Imagine a theatre at 10PM. The show is letting out. Traffic is snarled for five miles in all directions because a theatre's-worth of empty cars have been circling the block for an hour, making sure they are ready to pick up their ever-so-important passengers.

In effect, adding traffic to roads no longer imposes a personal cost on your time - it's only a financial cost on your bank account, which is highly affordable to some people. The same people who currently have 14 cars in the garage of their mansion can now take all 14 cars with them to the Hamptons for the weekend, in case they want to drive one. Just order them to circle the block near your beach house - well, not your block of course, the neighbors would complain, but someone else's block. Maybe the traffic on the Long Island Expressway is terrible, but your 14 empty cars don't care, they'll make it out to the beach house eventually.

Cost of housing getting you down? Just buy a van and a sleeping bag, and order it to drive around randomly all night and arrive at your work at 9AM. Now you've effectively perma-rented a 9'x14' spot on the nation's roads, without paying a cent.

The push for carpooling is a way to use our limited road space more efficiently, by increasing the number of persons per car up from the current average of 1.59. Driverless cars are the anti-carpool - cars driving with zero humans going anywhere, pushing that average down.

Driverless cars are a net negative for the way the world is going, not a net positive.

View on HN

I have to say, this is one of the most cynical and unimaginative posts I've ever read on HN. I think you should save it somewhere so you can laugh at yourself if someday driverless cars become prevalent.

The positive economic effects and the transformative effect driverless cars will have on society is pretty hard to overstate. You seem to falling into the trap of thinking that infrastructure will not be updated around the assumption that cars are autonomous, and clever people will not exploit this new reality in ways that benefit the world. To attack your specific example, why do you assume the cars will drive around passenger-less, and not merely continually make productive uses of themselves, such as by servicing other passengers or acting as deliverymen for physical goods? Why do you assume people will own cars in general, when a service which provides on-demand autonomous transportation in clean, well-maintained, up-to-date vehicles will be more convenient, less work, safer, and will be cheaper? Why does the car that drops you off need to be the car that picks you up? Why do you think highways will not become wildly more efficient and safe even if the average passenger per car (one of several metrics of efficiency) goes up? Why do you think parking garages and cars themselves will not be able to be packed in more efficiently and quickly when they can autonomously coordinate their insertion and removal from a fixed area? Why do you even think that centralized parking garages will be as necessary when autonomously controlled vehicles can coordinate to efficiently fill any designated parking space that is road accessible?

When the assumptions of society change in such a dramatic way (that a human must navigate a road-based vehicle manually) the downstream effects are hard to predict but undoubtedly will follow the same path all automation has: more efficient, less polluting, and more productive use of time and energy. When you're dealing with something as ingrained and as prevalent as the automobile, you're talking about a massive boost in these things across the entire world.

You are assuming a society where everyone shares everything. I don't think that's likely with the introduction of cars that drive themselves. Most early adopters may not be "sharers" either, so they may not push the technology in that direction.

I think jellicle is right, that this invention can cause just as much harm as good.

When intelligent people make decisions, they consider the worst and best possible outcomes.

I don't consider Uber a "sharing service." Uber's model will probably be the model for the future, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be, with the difference that they may maintain the fleet themselves. What is the upside to owning a car if you can dispatch one to your house to take you anywhere in a few minutes, or if you can have micro-rentals of a few days at a time where the car will not return back into the network if you really want "instant gratification" of hopping in the car the instant you want to go somewhere. Look at what Uber is done in cities if you want evidence that this model can have a massive effect on the incentives of car ownership.

Add to this that the public will probably be incentivized to tax or otherwise limit car owners, and the value proposition gets even worse. It could turn out waiting for an automated vehicle from a network to arrive is still faster door-to-door, since it may have privileged access to high-speed roads or lanes that owned vehicles may not, due to regulation a la HOV, etc.

edit: Also I don't disagree that in the early adopter phase autonomous cars may introduce inefficiencies. But the autonomous car is a 100, or even 1000 year invention, not a 10 year one. In many ways it may just be a single one-time event, when ground-based personal transportation for a civilization becomes automated, so it may have no shelf life at all.

> To attack your specific example, why do you assume the cars will drive around passenger-less, and not merely continually make productive uses of themselves, such as by delivering other packages or acting as deliverymen for physical goods?

Because they won't most of the time? Let's say that during peak rush hour, N people + M packages need to be transported. That means that in order to satisfy peak demand efficiently, we need N+M cars and road capacity. During off-peak hours, lets say that only 20% of the population needs to travel. That means you've got the other 80% of the cars sitting around doing nothing just like they are today. If the average distance to nearby parking is say 2 miles, then we have 80% of the cars just driving empty 2 extra miles to prevent themselves from taking up road capacity (while today we trade off by creating parking lots).

Despite that, I do think there will be some improvement in terms of car use. Namely:

* the average car size will shrink to probably that of a smart car (2 seats, little cargo room) * parking lots will shrink (but not disappear) due to effective stacked parking * vehicle efficiency will increase (human drivers are inherently bad at maintaining fuel/energy efficiency with acceleration/deceleration)

The danger is that this once again will make car use "cheap" and like the article suggests, extends sprawl yet again. So we'll just have another half a century of poor land use just it might be slightly more efficient this time around.

Regarding you point on peak demand, I would expect that any 'autonomous taxi service' would use demand based pricing to mitigate the impact of peak hours. Essentially this means, that for a lot of people, the cheapest way to get to and from work will still be public transportation/biking/walking (at least during peak hours). Of course, if autonomous vehicles become cheap/ubiquitous enough, at some point along the price curve, it would make sense to have a ton of extra capacity to satisfy peak demand. Also, car sharing services would add another factor into the equation. Taxi companies would need to be profitable, whereas car sharing companies would only need to return enough value to the individual car owners to convince them to participate (i.e. participating in the service does not necessarily have to be 'profitable' for the owner, it just needs to offset enough of their costs to convince them it is worth it).

On your point about sprawl, I can just as easily envision the opposite happening. As car ownership becomes less of a necessity, I do not need to worry about a garage or parking when considering where to live. Additionally, I don't think that autonomous vehicles will necessarily make car use cheap, I think more realistically, the marginal cost of driving (i.e. cost per mile) will still be a non-insignificant amount, but the convenience will increase dramatically (especially for people who do not own cars), but I imagine commuting an hour to work each way using an autonomous taxi service will still cost you a pretty penny (partly due to the demand issues mentioned above). Also, long commutes still suck, even if you aren't driving the car. I participated in carpool for a year (one hour each way, my car was too crappy, so I never drove, just pitched in for gas), and I was able to get some work or reading done, but I still hated it.

If people wanted an immensely efficient and affordable taxi system instead of the illusion of freedom granted by owning their own four-wheeled icons of conspicuous consumption, they wouldn't need to wait for practical driverless cars.

Taxis are not practical. They're too expensive, in most cases. If they weren't, they'd already be everywhere. You have to pay for the human, and in developed countries, the human isn't cheap enough. (This is, generally, considered a good thing.)

Every hour driving my own car is an hour I'd be paying a human to do the same task I can do myself in a situation where there is little else for me to do. Can you see how cost-inefficient this is on a labor basis until the need for labor is removed? Taxi drivers are up there with gas station attendants and toll collectors in terms of "jobs where the person who is being serviced could perform the same task easily for free." These types of jobs are extremely at risk to automation (see FaskTrak and self-service gas pumps) since if the person being serviced can perform their job, likely a computer can too.

The reason Uber works in cities is not because it's somehow cheaper to take taxis on a per-hour basis than owning cars there, but because the need to do so is less frequent so the overall net cost per year is less than owning a vehicle where parking space is at a premium. As soon as you get into a situation where you need to use your car regularly for (relatively) long periods of time, like living outside of the city in America, the labor costs of the driver go through the roof and the "illusion of freedom" is a very real one.

Ok, I'll bite. Why is it an illusion? I'm still young enough to remember the utterly transformative effect easy access to a car had on my life.

Because you can still use a driverless car to go anywhere your manual car can?

(see also: DUI checkpoints)

If people wanted to share things with others, the world would be an entirely different place. But people are selfish.

The city block you're living on probably only needs one stand mixer, one waffle iron, one clothes iron. You could all just share one of these rarely-used appliances between you. Why don't you?

We could already build the world you are envisioning, trivially. Any municipality in the world could create an excellent fleet of mass transit vehicles - I mean a truly excellent system, capable of getting you anywhere you want to go at a very reasonable price and high speed. But no place does that. It exists nowhere.

Because people want their own cars. They don't want to share. And the cheaper these vehicles get - a requirement for your techno-utopia - the more people want their own.

Do you think Bill Gates' car will be out delivering packages when he's not in it? Okay, now why do you think everyone else is different from Bill Gates?

> Why do you even think that centralized parking garages will be as necessary when autonomously controlled vehicles can coordinate to efficiently fill any designated parking space that is road accessible?

That doubles the road problem, not decreases it. The autonomous cars spend four hours in a traffic jam on the two-lane bridge in order to park in the $1.50 parking lot instead of the $2.00 lot. You don't mind because you aren't in them. Anyone who has to actually cross the bridge is screwed. Traffic jams are actually BENEFICIAL to autonomous vehicles - free unpaid parking and low fuel usage - as long as the vehicle isn't needed immediately. Autonomous cars will SEEK OUT and JOIN traffic jams, when not needed, to minimize their cost of operation.

Freaking American biases. There are cities in the world where infrastructure sucks, people are many, and parking is rare. I already take a taxi to and from work, this robo car thing will catch on really fast here, of only to optimize throughput in a very congested city where there is no room for new roads.

How is what your parent described unique to America?

America has lots of space, low cost of car ownership and operation. Parent was talking about parking costing only $1.50 or $2, I mean, nowhere else in the world, even developing world, is parking ever that cheap!

It is cheaper for me to take a taxi than drive because the taxi doesn't have to park, obviously, the taxi doesn't just go back to where they came from after taking me to my destination. Crazy americans, they live in such a fantasy world and they don't realize it.

Do you really think an autonomous car will seek out and join a traffic jam? How many times do you think an owner of an autonomous car will have to be left stranded because their car intentionally got itself stuck in a traffic jam and couldn't pick them up before they trade that vehicle in for one without such a short sighted "optimisation"?

The point is at any given moment, a given car is not "your car." If car A gets stuck in a traffic jam, and car B suddenly becomes the optimal vehicle from the fleet to get to you from a cost/time perspective, then suddenly car B begins travelling to you. Congestion on highways becomes a shared cost to all travelers, those who are in transit and those who are awaiting transit, and as such those travelers are able to potentially bid or pay in commensurate to how they value the time they have or will lose due to the congestion.

Basically, there is no free lunch, a traffic jam is a capacity problem where demand outstrips supply, so unless you assume autonomous vehicles (once collectively networked as part of a national system) are somehow going to be less efficient at using road capacity than the same vehicles being driven by independent humans who have no global information, they will be a better solution. The fact that autonomous vehicles will be able to utilize alternative routes off-highway pre-emptively before actual congestion occurs alone is huge. Nevermind the fact that a large reason traffic jams occur is actually not a capacity problem per se, but due to a propagation of small jams into larger ones, in both time and space, due to human beings controlling the vehicle and propagating traffic waves:

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

In other words, traffic jams caused by accidents, road blockages, merging, or any other non-capacity related issues will likely no longer occur if the vehicles are autonomously controlled.

Why not a tragedy of the commons with "rational agent" cars that are attempting to minimize parking fees. A neat idea but I think if driverless cars did this then cities would adopt traffic jam fees to realign their cost/benefit strategy in the "driving" game.

As I mentioned elsewhere, this argument somehow equivocates black car services with car sharing. The point is, why own a car that you have to maintain, depreciates, and requires parking when you can have brand new, well-maintained vehicles transporting you around for a small monthly fee?

Your Bill Gates analogy only seals my argument. Bill Gates, in all liklihood, has a personal driver and rides in a top of the line vehicle most of the time, that he may or may not own. (He likely doesn't care.) The reason this lifestyle is only available to the rich is not because of the cost of the car, but because of the cost of the driver. If the driver were to be removed, your average person could likely afford to be transported in a clean, new, safe, well-maintained vehicle they pay for on-demand from an autonomous vehicle fleet.

Why own a washing machine when you can rent one at a laundromat for a small monthly fee?

Why own a phone when you can rent a payphone for a small monthly fee?

The answer is a combination of convenience and personal status.

> The city block you're living on probably only needs one stand mixer, one waffle iron, one clothes iron. You could all just share one of these rarely-used appliances between you. Why don't you?

If I can press a button on my iPhone and have nearly any brand or quality of waffle iron appear on my counter in 30 seconds, then disappear automatically to save counter-space once I no longer need it--then wow, yes, please, sign me up for "sharing." It sounds vastly, absurdly better than ownership.

> Do you think Bill Gates' car will be out delivering packages when he's not in it? Okay, now why do you think everyone else is different from Bill Gates?

Well first, there's the obvious question: do you think Bill Gates rents an apartment? Okay, now why do you think everyone else is different from Bill Gates?

Besides--when Bill Gates travels, I highly doubt he buys a new car in every city he lands in. He probably gets into a limo. Just like buying a new car while traveling would seem absurdly wasteful today, owning a car (plus a garage/insurance/gas) might seem absurdly wasteful when you can get the exact same feature-set for a fraction of the cost.

> The city block you're living on probably only needs one stand mixer, one waffle iron, one clothes iron. You could all just share one of these rarely-used appliances between you. Why don't you?

Probably because they can't be bothered with the small logistics of a sharing system. But it isn't totally unheard of:

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

If not for some sense of selflessness, such systems should at the least motivate the more frugally-minded people: only borrowing or renting rarely used appliances, offering and getting services from each other with minimal bureaucracy, and optionally operating within a sort of currency system that isn't taxable.

unimaginative? I see plenty of ideas, and wouldn't call all of them obvious.

I also think there is at the very least a core of truth in it. For example, that 30% time gain in not looking for a parking spot. If people now want to spend an hour on travelling and gain 10 minutes that way, it isn't strange to assume that they will be willing to move 10 minutes driving farther into the suburbs (cheaper house, larger garden, etc).

So, I expect traffic to increase. An extra reason for that to happen is that time currently spent operating your car could be spent in other ways. For example, you could watch a full-length movie/do some yoga on your way to work every day. For a movie/yoga enthusiast, that could make the 1.5 hour trip preferable over the 1 hour one, especially since it will come with the cheaper/better housing.

"the downstream effects are hard to predict but undoubtedly will follow the same path all automation has: more efficient, less polluting"

You mean as in "living in a suburb and driving a SUV to work is less polluting than living in the center of town and driving a bicycle or walking to work?"

Do yoga? In a car that upstream posters are saying will be the size of a SmartCar?

Upstream posters aren't very imaginative :-)

The original smart was 2.5m long. That is surprisingly spacious if you replace the petrol engine with electrical ones in the wheels, the petrol tank by 10 cm of batteries in the floor and give up the back trunk (you wouldn't really need one for commuting)

I also don't see why all people would start using smaller cars. If these driverless ones make economic sense, they can't be more expensive than current ones, and currently there are plenty of people driving cars larger than smarts.

But yes, it probably wasn't the best example.

> The positive economic effects and the transformative effect driverless cars will have on society is pretty hard to overstate.

I'm sorry, but (to me) something that makes it more convenient to be an utterly gluttonous consumer of energy is not a positive transformation for society.

Modes of transportation that weigh 10-20 times their payload are not the solution. We should be focusing our attention on ones that weigh < .20 times their payload. Bicycles and feet.

This is silly. Key points:

- Driverless cars will reduce the total number of cars, thereby reducing the total space we use to store cars. If people share cars, we only need one car per five or ten people. NYC has only 13,000 taxis for eight million people.

- Having cars drive around in circles wastes lots of expensive gasoline, which someone has to pay for. If gas is $4/gal., the car gets 20 mpg and it drives at 60 mph, we're talking $12 per hour, or $150 to drive around all night.

- Right now, there is nothing illegal, or even difficult, about renting a van, driving out to the middle of nowhere and living in it. Almost no one does so, because it's uncomfortable and inconvenient. Where would you shower, cook, do laundry, etc.?

I'm a fan of driverless cars but I enjoyed 'jellicle's take. Applied in their most selfish mode, driverless cars could really suck.

Sharing cars might work for people currently using taxis, but 1) why aren't they using taxis right now already, and 2) there are things people like having in their own car. Car seats are a big example for families. And LATCH doesn't work anywhere near as good as it does on paper.

Re taxis, right now you have to pay for the human driver's wages, and for the driver's medallion. This makes taxis much more expensive.

Re car seats, obviously if there's a lot of demand for them, driverless car companies will pre-install them on some of their fleet.

This is a bit of a tangent, but also, Selfishness Does Not Work Like That. When you look at a totally "selfish" part of the economy (eg. consumer electronics, or sports cars), it often works beautifully efficiently - every year, we get better stuff for less money. When you look at "selfless" parts (eg. education, health care), they are often giant clusterfucks. Are there exceptions? Certainly. But one can hardly say it's axiomatic that "selfishness" = "bad".

(Re healthcare, yes, in America it's unusually bad, but in Germany/Canada/Switzerland/etc. the price we pay per suffering alleviated still keeps going up and up and up.)

Having a driverless car pull up with a child seat littered with food in various states of digestion and other bodily fluids is not my idea of the future.

Considering some adults can be more unsanitary than children, it seems we may also need a way to automate the cleaning of interiors.

Yup. Unfortunately, easily cleanable interiors are not generally compatible with attractive luxury interiors. Why do taxis have plasticy seats? Because it's easy to clean them.

> Driverless cars will reduce the total number of cars, thereby reducing the total space we use to store cars.

Why would you think an invention that makes cars better would reduce the demand for cars?

Why, the same way that increased fuel efficiency doesn't affect the number of miles people drive! ;)

I don't think he said it would reduce the demand for cars, instead his theory is that it would reduce the demand for individual ownership of cars. The demand would probably increase, but be serviced by fewer cars because of more efficient use.

I think the assumption is that the cars won't literally circle the streets forever and that some parking will remain, just that it can be more efficiently allocated when the proximity from parking-space to destination isn't as-critical. [1]

Though, like you, I am highly skeptical about the curb-side-pickup fairy tale, due exactly the same sorts of situations you describe: concerts, theaters, last call -- even something as routine as picking the kiddies up from school.

People don't seem to realize that if automated cars delivered themselves to the curb at the end of a concert, a 200 space lot would more than wrap an entire city block. [2]

[1] Some breathless fantasists seem to think automated parking will somehow result in more-cars-per-structure, simply assuming valet stands translate into efficiency -- though almost certainly never having been a car porter or valet and knowing it's primarily just a convenience. You're just not going to see the 50-100% space-efficiency gains they seem to imagine.

[2] Assuming a city block of 1/8 of a mile and 20' per parallel space. That's 33ish spots per side of the block, not counting curb-cuts, hydrants, padding for intersections, etc. In reality, a 200 space lot would probably wrap a block twice or more.

I think the assumptions in the article are most applicable to an urban context, where car ownership is already nowhere near 100%, and alternative modes already exist that accommodate concerts, movies, etc. I'm reasonably certain, for example, that none of the movie theaters in the city where I live (Washington, DC) have surface parking lots. People are already used to not driving here, and I don't think the sudden arrival of self-driving cars will mean every single person will want curb-side pickup from the movie theater that's already half a block from a metro station.

Why would I pay for parking? The streets are free. "Only SUCKERS pay for parking" will be the motto.

People will be hacking their vehicles, right? They can program any behavior they want, right? NYC's off-street parking rates can easily exceed $20/hour. It is CHEAPER to tell your car to drive around aimlessly waiting for you than for it to park. Sure, traffic is miserable. But you aren't in it, so it's okay.

Find 15-minute loading zones. Park there for 15 minutes. Move to another one (your spot immediately taken by another empty vehicle). Repeat.

Park next to fire hydrants at no cost. Use the same visual scanners you use to navigate to detect approaching police and parking enforcement, and if one is detected, drive away.

There are limitless opportunities for self-serving behavior that ends up being hugely anti-social when any significant portion of the population does it. Basically there are three choices:

1. self-driving cars are locked down as all hell, The Man controls them all (proactive enforcement)

2. all the bad stuff is fined out the wazoo - Arab sheiks and Steve Jobs just pay the tickets, but no one else does - (reactive enforcement)

3. self-driving cars create a miserable traffic situation for everyone, in a massive tragedy of the commons problem (no enforcement)

Are the streets really free? Don't property and gas taxes pay for them? Is it really that hard to imagine a system that charges per-mile for driving on them? I don't think the three options you list are the only three and I also don't think this is an intractable problem.

To counter your (valid) points...

1. What if self-driving cars ends the idea of car ownership as we know it. Self driving cars turn the concept of driving from one place to another, into getting from one place to another. You could book your commute to work the night before, and a self driving minibus will come and pick you, and 15 other people up.

2. With self driving cars, an existing car park could potentially fit way more cars; cars could just park themselves in super tight, because they don't need to worry about leaving space to give humans access to the cars.

So they wouldn't have to "circle around" while you're watching a movie.

So negative!

Driverless cars allow for the ultimate carpool: Centralized car ownership. I pay a company a determined amount of money every month (say $50, because why the fuck not?), and I have access to a car. Think the best parts of City Car Share + cars that you don't need to somehow find your way to.

Car ownership itself, I can imagine would evolve based on this. Who the hell wants to deal with owning and paying for a car for things like hopping over to the grocery store when they can just phone one up, have it take them, and then pick them up.

The first users of driverless cars aren't going to be general public; it's going to be exactly what I'm talking about here, and that's going to set the tone of the whole driverless car conversation.

> Who the hell wants to deal with owning and paying for a car for things like hopping over to the grocery store when they can just phone one up, have it take them, and then pick them up.

Well, I don't know, everyone?

Is it the case that everywhere people are yearning for more taxi service, or to own their own vehicles?

Why does "making cars better" result in lowered demand for cars? Is that how it worked for cellphones? Microwaves? Televisions? Anything?

Let's try your argument for cellphones: they're so good and cheap now that people can share them. We could put one in a booth on every corner, and people could just rent them when they needed one. We could call them "payphones".

Maybe we'll try it for washing machines: As washing machines got better and cheaper, people yearned to have fewer of them, shared, in a centralized facility. That's why no one owns a washing machine nowadays and we all just go to laundromats when necessary. Right?

I think you are confusing "demand for cars" with "demand for what a car provides", i.e. transportation from one location to another.

A driverless car isn't necessarily "making cars better" but rather making transportation easier. So the demand for transport may increase while demand for individual car ownership may decrease.

Personally I don't think I'm in favor of a driverless car, and I certainly can't imagine the impact it they will have.

Actually a car provides transportation from one location to another right fucking now

If you have to wait 15 minutes for a car to show up it's no better than the bus.

Lets just ignore all the data that suggests that you will have to spend 15min looking for a parking space.

> Is it the case that everywhere people are yearning for more taxi service, or to own their own vehicles?

Everywhere? You can't make generalizations like that, because there isn't a global trend. In developing countries, demand for car ownership is up, because of increasing affluence and the poor state of infrastructure in those countries. In developed countries, demand for car ownership is down, because of halting suburbanization, increasing awareness of expenses and externalities of car ownership, and availability of comparable alternatives. This is most apparent in Europe, but the long-term trend is downward in North America as well.

As for your analogies, they do not seem very apt. A major benefit to cell phone ownership is the ability to be contacted by or to contact people at any time, which a payphone does not provide. A major benefit to washing machine ownership is the ability to do laundry without schlepping your heavy clothes three blocks to the laundromat. The major benefit to car ownership—point to point transportation, on demand—would be provided by a competent robotaxi service. It won't kill car ownership, but for a significant number of people, robotaxis would provide everything they need out of a transportation, at a fraction of the cost.

Contrary to what you've been stating, there is precedent for replacing goods with services. Quite recent precedent, in fact. How many people do you know who subscribe to a service like Netflix? Of those people, do you think their consumption of DVDs (and, prior to that, VHS tapes) went up or down once they got Netflix? What about music: How many people are buying physical CDs these days, do you think, compared to in 2000? Sometimes a centralized service is superior, sometimes it isn't. The market will decide.

Between car ownership and robotaxis, I know which one I'd choose. There are a lot of people in this thread who agree with me. I think your "I don't know, everyone?" is entirely unjustified and I think you're vastly underestimating the frustration and expense involved in car ownership for a large number of people.

In North America, where I live, what I see everywhere around me is that people are literally putting themselves in financial jeopardy to buy the largest, shiniest, most luxurious car they can possibly make payments on.

So, I have to ask: do you have some stats for this long-term downward trend in car ownership you speak of in North America?

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.VEH.NVEH.P3

Sorry I can't link directly to the info for the United States, but if you look at the data the peak was in 2007. People who analyze this data are predicting the trend to continue. That doesn't mean it will, necessarily, but it seems to me the forces pushing car ownership down aren't going away any time soon.

Taxis are incredibly expensive compared to a car on a per mile basis. $1.00 is considered pretty cheap for a taxi while owning a Honda Civic averages out after all costs to around $0.35 per mile if you drive 15k per year. Now spread the registration, property tax, depreciation, and maintenance among 5 people and that cost is down to $0.17 per mile for 75k miles per year. I got these numbers from Kelley Blue Book if you're interested.

So in the end, you can run a 100% margin on top of the overhead of the car itself and still make fiscal sense for consumers.

Here's the problem with centralized car ownership: Everyone wants access to a car at roughly the same time. Everybody in your "carshare" will want the car at 8AM & 5PM on weekdays, and all day on weekends.

Thus, the "carshare" company will need almost as many cars as it has subscribers- at which point you will be paying $300/month instead of $50/month, comparable to paying a loan on your own car.

Of course, pricing models can pressure some people to give up the car on weekends or drive to work at 7AM, so the "carshare" can indeed have somewhat fewer cars than it has subscribers. However, unless it can cause a dramatic shift in usage and field far fewer vehicles than it has subscribers, the cost of subscribing will be so close to owning a car many people will opt to continue owning their own.

I'm told ZipCar already suffers from this, and by nature is most popular among people who need a car extremely infrequently- a fairly small portion of the population.

I mostly agree with this. Any rational business model would probably require some demand and usage based pricing, and if you are using a shared car the same way you would if you owned it (i.e. commuting to work during peak hours, weekend trips), than it should come out to roughly the same cost as ownership. However, in high density urban areas, parking is still a real pain. In my opinion, this is really where the potential for driver less cars is. A dedicated parking spot can be expensive, and street parking can be a nightmare.

the "carshare" company will need almost as many cars as it has subscribers

Citibike has 60,000 members but only 6,000 bicycles. But they're always around to use. Are bikes somehow magically different than cars?

> Are bikes somehow magically different than cars?

It's not so much that bikes are magically different than cars, but that NYC has many more viable transportation alternatives than ordinary American cities. If you find yourself missing a bike for the return trip, public transport is a reliable backup in NYC. This is not the case in most other cities in the US.

Some of the hype we're hearing about driverless cars reminds me of the hoopla surrounding the Segway. Other than niche cases, neither will have much impact in the next 20 years.

Why wouldn't there just be on-demand car rentals? Wanna go to the movie? Request a car 5 minutes in advance and the nearest ones with capacity for your passengers show up. Let the car go right after you get to the theater and make another rental call afterwards. Far fewer cars will be in much more use.

Sure there'll be some negative aspects to just renting on demand, but it'll probably be a lot less than the negative aspects of everyone owning a car.

The biggest net negative is the continual replacement of labor with capital, putting more power into the hands of a few.

You are describing ZipCar.

Think carefully- what about your described usage is truly distinct from what ZipCar offers? What significant value-add would an autonomous car provide?

I argue that ZipCar is already a perfect model of what it would be like, because ZipCar already does what you describe.

* The car would come to you * An area that has heavy usage could see cars called in from lower utilization areas * I don't really enjoy driving * Ride sharing could reduce customer cost.

I mean, seriously, if busses would just show up when I was ready to leave and went pretty much where I want with only a few stops, I'd just ride busses all the time.

So, this request a car and it shows up 5 minutes later only works in the densest urban areas. In less dense cities and suburban areas, I don't see how there's any chance. Try ordering a taxi from the suburbs, see how long it takes to show up.

I'd treat this criticism as a list of issues to resolve, rather than an argument for your conclusion.

One thing I'd be interested in hearing explored: if we manage to reach a critical mass of driverless cars, can we start orchestrating their timing and pathing so that traffic light usage can be minimized? Traffic is modeled as a flow, but AFAIK there isn't another flow out there where we actually have near-total control over the movement of individual particles.

You're correct that the article is a puff piece, twisting the notion that suddenly all streets are going to be parking free. Your vision of cars endlessly circling events and houses day and night is even more absurd and completely disregards the cost of petrol.

But, somehow you then end your argument with: "therefore driverless cars are bad". As if this stupid future envisioned by the article is now the only possible future for driverless cars.

Wouldn't that location be those distant lots that are always empty now? That real estate is mostly wasted today because nobody wants to walk 2-3 miles and transportation options are either slow, expensive, or unavailable. You call your car right when the show lets out (maybe you can even set an alarm 10 minutes before its over if you're a good planner) and it's there after a comparatively short wait. Even overly congested airports like JFK have abandoned lots within a 10 minute drive.

I also don't see the point about traffic jams. How would they be any worse than a parking garage hemorrhaging visitors at the end of every event like we have today? I can't see the situation being anything but improved by having the cars already out on the side of the main road ready to head in the right direction.

Human nature is such that carpooling does not work unless you make it 'very' financially attractive. We've had decades to figure out a way to make it work, and it hasn't happened, nor will it. The only workable schemes of carpooling i can think of involve driverless cars.

The average users per car matters less than the total usage per car. The bulk of the environmental cost of a car is production. A car once made must be used instead of parked. Dual-purpose vehicles that move people during the commute and goods outside of it will boost usage a great deal, cutting down on the number of vehicles needed.

Oh, it's not human nature so much as complexity. Carpooling is most popular for regular commutes at set times, for exactly this reason.

When I decide to visit the hardware store on Saturday, there is probably someone I have never met that I could carpool with. But how do I contact them and arrange a carpool in minutes? If I have to post a listing a week in advance, it just isn't worth it.

Surely it will only be a minority that will actually own a personal car when a self-driving taxi will be cheap and without the hassle of insurance, servicing etc.

I envisage a variable pricing system where a journey booked earlier is cheaper as it can be fitted in more efficiently, and a significant discount for a vehicle shared with other passengers with similar journeys.

I don't see cars circling with no passengers, I see cars in constant use, only stationary to pick-up/drop-off or recharge. Way more efficient than what we have currently.

Actually, the prices will be cheaper when booked later, as the value diminishes to zero as time runs out. As the airlines and hotels have learned, an empty seat/suite is zero revenue.

> Driverless cars are the anti-carpool - cars driving with zero humans going anywhere, pushing that average down.

How so? Who's to say that the driverless car doesn't pick up another passenger once it drops you off at your destination? Who says consumers even have to be the ones who own the car? There could definitely be a taxi-based system put in place to keep cars efficiently moving people around.

I agree that all of this speculation is wild, but why add artificial constraints on a system that's still in an infancy stage?

Couldn't that "location" be a parking lot? The article did mention that some 25 - 30% of a city is devoted to the car today. Some of that is the street, street parking and parking lots. Why would the car circle instead of 1) returning home 2) performing a secondary function (delivery, driving another family member) or 3) parking?

Highways and empty parking spots will be used for driverless car parking during off-hours. When leaving a movie theatre, you will need to enter a digital queue.

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