He's also working on automated maintenance facilities that would allow a self-driving car to report for maintenance/cleaning. The car drives up, receives service and drives off afterwards to the next pick-up.
The "automated fleet" idea is not how people are planning to see this idea play out. Automated, self-driving cars are one thing, but an automated fleet makes it sound like a train rather than many vehicles operating very efficiently (meaning without human drivers) but each with a separate destination.
To an alien watching from orbit, a country of automated cars would appear different from the present only in that the cars would be much closer together than they are now, with no increased danger of collision -- indeed, less danger. Cars would still leave the freeway and go to their intended destination just as they do now, just more efficiently.
> it wouldn’t make economic sense to use a self-driving car service to get to and from work.
It would if everyone still owned a car as they do now, the only difference being that the car drives itself. If the idea of a "fleet" were taken seriously, why not switch to trains or buses instead of cars? The only reason to have a car is to be able to go directly to your destination.
If only ¼ of car owners are on the road at peak traffic times then it could make sense to have automated car rental for a specific trip instead of car ownership. Assume drives to work take 30 minutes and that most people go to work from 6:00 AM to 9:00 AM. Also assume that we have inefficient routs requiring the car to drive the same distance for all pickups and drop-offs. Between 5:30 AM and 8:30 AM you could get three people to work with one automated car. Assuming this would it be cost efficient for companies to charge a low enough trip cost to make it more economical for people with fairly predictable driving requirements to rent a car as needed instead of buying one.
We wouldn't need to dedicate such a high level of inefficient resources to parking vehicles that sit mostly unused and it could offer us the opportunity to remake our cities to be more pedestrian and bike friendly.
When I hear the word "fleet" it usually just means a number of vehicles bought by one company: A car rental company has a fleet of cars. A trucking company has a fleet of trucks. A car dealer has a fleet manager. (Forgive me for pointing this out, I'm sure you know it already, just trying to clarify the terminology.)
Enterprise Rent-a-Car will already send any of the cars in their fleet to your door. Of course they send a human along to drive the car to you.
If they got an automated fleet they could offer the same service they do now, but they would just send the car over by itself.
At least that's what "automated fleet" sounds like to me. :-)
Both of which are kind of a big deal.
My car isn't just a train or a bus that goes directly to where I want it to; that's called a taxi. My car is a small extension of my house.
However I will say that your issues are pretty easily solved, imo. The car service simply customizes your ride experience with your radio choices. Car seats are necessary because of imperfect human drivers and (?) not necessary when robots are driving.
Removable/secure trunks could be stored at some site until needed, retrieved from cars and stored by robots since lifting and carrying are simple tasks for robots. When you request the next leg of your service, the first stop is the storage center where your secure trunk was stored.
I already mentioned about the maintenance facilities Musk is working on. Cheap and effective sensors detect gum/soilage, modern fabrics repel dirt and detritus and are cleaned to tolerable levels. Or another car comes instead. And your 2 hours in a car drops precipitously as smart-queuing greatly improves travel times.
The car service makes car pooling and mass transit more practical as well. Maybe you could hitch a ride with someone to work, but then you might have to stay late. With personal car ownership, you need to drive alone both ways, but with the car service, you can share the morning trip and if you need to take separate transportation in the evening. If buses in your area can't reliably get to work on time, you could have the car service pick you up to go to work, the the bus take you home.
And something similar on Singapore's roads too: tolls vary by time of day. http://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltaweb/en/roads-and-motoring/m...
Finally, taxis have a pricing feature common in many places: a surcharge for certain times of day (can be peak times, can be nighttime...).
But that's just me. The normal price to get to work on the MRT is less than 1 USD. So the difference between that and free isn't worth it for me to alter my schedule. Less well off people might be more influenced, and raising prices might be politically infeasible. (And I usually ride my bicycle to work anyway.)
Also, it's not a mass transit system, but the 520 Toll Bridge in Seattle uses this to price tolls. It was the first time I'd seen this, but perhaps there are other places where tolls operate similarly?
What are the energy cost implications of this? Okay, I drive my car to work, and it sits there until I go home. If it was part of a fleet, it would leave my work parking lot, go to some other part of town (empty, using energy), and so on. Okay, we can also save energy by ride sharing, but I speculate that it wouldn't take much to make that really unappealing. In reality, we don't just go from home to work and back; we stop at the grocery, drop the kids off at school, and so on.
We already have fleets of automatic cars - they are called taxis. Their neural net is wet, is all. So as a first approximation I'd say taxi fleets are a pretty good proxy for energy use and cost. Sure, the driver needs to be paid, but we can model that.
In your case I know it's not as applicable, but I often recommend to people that pay off their car loans that they should continue making that payment, just into a savings account. In less time than it took to pay off the loan (remember, you were paying interest too), you'll have saved enough to pay cash for your next auto. If you've been able to live with that money dedicated towards a loan payment, hopefully your budget can continue not to depend on the "extra" resulting from not having the obligation.
It might turn out that by the point the technology exists for self-driving cars, private car ownership will be extinct and driving a car within city limits a felony.