Google, Detroit diverge on road map for self-driving cars
uk.reuters.com
uk.reuters.com
Clearly the end game for self driving automobiles is far, far fewer cars in the world. In 25 years, relatively few people are going to be owning cars at all. You'll subscribe to a self-driving car service (or maybe your government will run it) and whenever you want to go somewhere, you'll enter your automotive needs into your mobile device and five minutes later the appropriate self-driving cycle/car/truck/van will pick you up in front of your house.
There won't be a need for every family to own 3 cars that spend 90% of the day turned off and taking up parking space. Of course Google and Detroit aren't going to see eye to eye on this...
Are you comfortable travelling with others who you don't know? I know many young women would be somewhat uncomfortable about climbing into a vehicle with some random stranger.
Even without that aspect, you've got to be around people you may not get along with. On buses people can mostly keep to themselves, and it's more or less expected; at least in my society; that they will - how much of that would be true in the tighter confines of a car?
And are you prepared to keep to someone else's schedule? A mismatch of five minutes may be more significant than we expect.
I'm not saying it won't happen. What I am saying is that I wouldn't care to make a strong commitment to the idea that in twenty five years or so most people won't have a car, or that there'll be fewer cars on the road. I can easily imagine a future in which most people decide that it's worth owning a car, even a self-driving one, for the privacy and convenience aspects.
All I was responding to was that if you grant the parent comment's assertion that people will move to car services, it's very likely to me that rush hour will be the one problem that is very easy to solve, because you would have such a large volume of people all going to the same place. Even the issues with personal space and shared vehicles aren't that big of a problem - self-driving cars don't need to look the way they look now. You could have 4 separate compartments in them, so that it's not possible to touch or interact with the other passengers, for example. (Also, I've participated in casual carpool in both New York and San Francisco, and it works remarkably well - many people, including young women, do travel every day in the car of a complete stranger that they don't know - and it's even more dangerous, because it's controlled by a human driver!)
My guess is, however, that in the future the hardware costs of under-utilized vehicles will be considered to be much lower than the "inconvenience costs" of not having your own vehicle, and rates of car ownership won't be dramatically affected by the advent of the self-driving car.
It's certainly possible that cost was the major driver of these sorts of things, but my guess is that the convenience of having your own car ready at all times will remain paramount. It's also plausible to me that airbnb-like services renting out self-driving cars will be common, which would simultaneously alleviate the need to own a car and reduce the cost of car ownership.
I imagine the switch to primarily self-driving car services will have a greater impact in cities, where the density will be high enough that the latency between wanting a car and getting one will be smallest. If a car has to drive for 20 minutes just to pick you up and take you to the store to get some milk, you'll probably just want your own car.
Why is such a time-frame for this kind of a transition so ludicrous?
In 1989 cell-phones were uncommon and looked like this: http://phoneevolution.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/1.jpg.
In 1899 there were about ~8,000 automobiles in the United States [1]. In 1924 Ford was producing over 2M Model T's per year [2].
In 1903 we saw the powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft by the Wright brothers. In 1927 somebody flew an airplane across the Atlantic ocean. [3]
[1] http://web.bryant.edu/~ehu/h364/materials/cars/cars%20_19th....
[2] http://web.bryant.edu/~ehu/h364/materials/cars/cars%20_30.ht...
[3] http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/wb-timeline.html#1903
So I am going to have to disagree, 25 years would have to be the most optimistic kind of prediction, assuming that all players are willing and pro-active, rather than passive and resistive (both in society and legally speaking).
That person will profit from their vehicle whenever they're not using it (and tax free against the cost of the vehicle?). They'll either build up a fleet or others will catch wind and do the same. Someone buying a new vehicle will be choosing between the default or something that self-drives only them around or something they can share with friends or rent out to the masses. An equilibrium will be reached where the needs of the city are covered for the costs involved.
Want to go to a restaurant and drink more than you could and still drive? Easy. Want to have a truck show up and help you move a sofa? Easy.
25 years is a long, long time...
I know I would never want to share my car with strangers, any more than I would want to let strangers live in my house while I am at work. This may change I suppose, but if it does I think it will be more by force than by choice.
25 years from now, we'll still eat similar things, use similar vehicles, transact in similar ways, but I think that the gap between the front of technology and those old things will widen. We won't see current cars quickly replaced, but I'm confident that Google & co will make decent progress with each year on their technology, then regulation, then adoption.
As for sharing your car, remember that eventually generations of future drivers will know little different. Or gradual cost pressure or advantages will influence decisions. It will start with use of vehicles in resort/campus-type situations, then eventually start to replace second vehicles then may be the only car for some people.
Driving age in Australia is 16. So there are another 9 years before someone is born who will reach driving age by the 25 year mark.
They exist, but in most towns nobody uses them at all.
If self-driving cars were even half as common as regular cars, there would be a dozen parked on the street by your house. You wouldn't need to wait more than a few minutes, and cost could be lower than standard car ownership due to better utilization of the vehicles.
I think that's very likely not true in most places where population densities are low. There will probably be some rebalancing, but I don't think it will be as dramatic a shift as the parent comment made it out to be.
There's lots of places with lower population density than that, but the viability of something that costs 60 or 70 percent of what a taxi costs kicks in at some pretty low point.
1. In 2012, Americans spent 1 hour/day travelling (where work travel is about half of that). That's about 4% of their time. [1]
2. There were 253M registered vehicles in 2012 [2].
3. There were 313M people in the US in 2012 [3].
So a first-order approximation of vehicle utilization: (253M vehicles * 1 year) / (313M people * 4% time travelling * 1 year) = 2.2 trillion vehicle-hours / 110 billion travel hours = 3.4% utilization. So that "90% of the day turned off and taking up parking space" is more like 96%.
It would be interesting to take this further to expenditures. Consumers spent an average of $9,000 on transportation in 2012 [4]. If we increase vehicle utilization to, say, 21% from 3% using a subscription/micro-rental service like parent described, and assuming per-vehicle costs are constant, how much would the average consumer save on transportation costs? And how much would we save on parking space?
[1]: http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/most-tim...
[2]: http://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicles... See also for similar 2009 data: https://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1096....
If "everybody" still has to go to and from work between the hours of 8-10 AM and 3-6 PM, pretty much everyone's going to want their own car.
Extend this thought to its logical conclusion, and you realize that (self-driving) commuter busses and light rail can be programmed into the network as plain-old cars that happen to have high occupant capacities. You set that you're willing to take a bus (and one is en route), it'll stop for you. You set that you want a less noisy/drunk/homeless-filled experience, and you get a car instead.
You could also set a price threshold, where everyone in the car must already be willing to pay as much as you are to be picked up there and then. Low threshold—a taxi-like sedan comes. High threshold—a limo.
For the privacy factor, I think people will just get used to it as they have with current public transport, or tiers will be in operation (as you suggested) or someone will inevitably design a pod-based vehicle with seats facing port and starboard and a clever door system.
I do wonder if people will be uncomfortable with other passengers knowing exactly where they live and work? Perhaps designating pickup from the nearest corner would help with that, and pricing that encourages that (to save extra turns down side streets) will help too.
I wrote a bit more about all of these likely developments here for anyone else fascinated by the rise of automated vehicles: http://www.isaacforman.com.au/n/self-driving-cars/
Your phone could also learn your departure time, and automatically determine when there are cars available / pricing is optimal to tell you to leave.
I remember an enlightening graph of power grid demand over a year sorted by demand. (Which I can't find for the life of me.) The vast majority of the time is spent very near the average, but a very small amount of time needs almost twice the average, and another very small amount of time demands half the average. The problem is, the grid must be big enough to supply that 3-times-a-year double the average demand, which just sits there idly the rest of the year.
I imagine demand for transportation is similar though not as exaggerated.
Can everyone dynamically shift business routines due to "demand"?
There's no particular reason emergency service shift changes need to be synced to the common business day -- indeed, my intuition would be that accident timing patterns would make this a bad idea independent of traffic impacts -- but there's also no reason that employers with employees for which they have strong fixed-time needs couldn't subsidize (or, in the case of public necessity where the employer is the government, exempt) their employees traffic fees.
> Can everyone dynamically shift business routines due to "demand"?
Yes, they can -- but, of course, there is a cost (which varies from situation to situation) in doing so. Of course, there's also a cost -- particularly an externalized cost born by others -- of traffic. If you effectively internalize the external cost (i.e., make it born by the people making the decision to engage in the action), then behavior should reflect the true costs and benefits resulting from the action.
The costs associated with throttling/halting these sectors far outweighs the cost of overbuilt infrastructure. Electricity is already sold by the megawatt in "day ahead" commodity form so businesses have already priced this information into the market.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption#Ele... [2] http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=10211
And of course they can be different sizes (eg 13 people, or 23 people). Or a local small car can take you to a feeder location where you get on a big bus and the process reverses at the other end.
Sure you can still pay for your own reserved car, but it is likely to be even more expensive than pay as you ride.
The big problem with existing solutions like public transport and car pools is they are cumbersome at either end and require precise in advance organisation for timing and capacity, plus being inconvenient if you don't fit their deployment patterns. The major benefit of self driving cars will be algorithms can maximize utilisation and reduce individual costs. Owning your own car will look like a really bad decision by then.
The change doesn't have to be MASSIVE. For example shifting by 15 minutes may be enough to better match capacity. The most expensive would be point to point direct service for just you. But the driverless vehicle could pick up several people for a lower cost to them, but taking more time.
ie the worst case wouldn't be substantially different than today with its limits and hard routing/timing on public transport. It will also be easier for competition to come in compared to today which will help.
It is still possible to provide social services. For example in Britain my over 65 parents get free bus passes. Lower income people can be subsidised in similar ways.
They are great containers of stuff, you can leave tools, laptops , spare clothes etc in them without having to load and unload every time you want to go to work.
They're also status markets, so I suspect the rich will want to keep their own cars for this purpose which will lead to the middle class also being hesitant to give them up.
You also have logistical problems like what if I take an autonomous car for the day and decide I need to take a long cross country trip in it?
You also have special requirements for some cars, like perhaps I need access to a car with a lot of seats or I want to be able to carry a trailer and I can't guarantee that a car fit for this purpose will always be available.
Slightly inconvenient compared to ownership, but much cheaper.
Some people will side with convenience, others with economics.
At present cars largely follow us round. If they're not doing this but are instead moving on to the next occupant, the odds are that that person won't be in the exact same location, and the next journey, and....
(Also bear in mind a huge amount of the demand clusters around start and finish times for offices and schools. The possible utilisation is significantly lower than one might think.)
If self-driving cars working on a taxi model rather than a personal chauffeur model become a thing, we're going to get used to seeing traffic jams consisting significantly of empty autonomous cars. That won't be especially popular.
Autonomous cars that are "deadheading" (traveling empty to their next point) could be ushered into segregated high speed lanes/corridors (100+ mph), as no passenger means no safety issue.
Even without knowing this it's pretty obvious that if you have a large portion of users heading to one area (increasing the density of users in that area) they'll probably want to leave that area or move around it so you should have a higher density of cars in that area even if they aren't all being used.
Arguably, reducing the number of cars in existence at any given time doesn't reduce the number of cars sold. Rather, you'd have to reduce the rate at which they wear out and/or reduce peoples' reliance on transportation.
Owning a self-driving car could be interesting though. Perhaps you could let it participate in a ride provider while you're at work or sleeping, having it return well before you may need to use it. Also, it enables some interesting new activities such as you drive to a boat launch, take off in a canoe, and have the car drive downstream and wait for you.
Once you find X, you're going to have to stop and/or back off a little on automation. You can't just keep on pushing towards 0. I presume Google has already found the X point during their program.
Google is ultimately right to be aiming at fully auto if the goal is fully auto, not just "driver assistance." There's a big area where half measures just won't work. I wager it'll take quite a lot of work to get to that goal, but it at least seems achievable. And appropriate for an entity not already "in the business".
If expressway shoulders were consistently safe to pull over upon, that would be a good approach, but they're not.
I wish the article had expanded more on this topic. Both companies could make significant gains by partnering and cutting out the old money from the automotive industry. Not that I'm saying I hope that happens, I'm neutral on that matter for now, but I'd like to see a lot more R&D done on autonomous driving tech in my lifetime.
"Moreover, a study by consulting firm KPMG last year found that American consumers would trust brands like Google and Apple more for self-driving cars than they would automakers."
Which reminded me of this from a while back:
"Early concept research had made it clear that cueing the GM name resulted in a substantially lower quality perception and credibility, whereas cueing a Japanese name (such as Sony) did the reverse."
http://books.google.com/books?id=OLa_9LePJlYC&lpg=PA1946&pg=...
I confess I don't understand why the focus is so strongly on the taxi-replacement market; it's interesting, sure, but largely unviable outside metropolitan areas. It can't serve people who go shopping and want to use their cars as lockers during the shop, or people who leave sports gear in the car while they work then go to the gym later, or a number of other cases. Who pays for them? It'd be an expensive business to set up and you'd have regular arguments about taxi licenses that'd make the fuss about Uber look tiny. Who'd clean them? You bet people would do unsavoury things inside them. No; it's a small, awkward to serve.
Fit a 'self-drive' button to my next mainstream car though, and you have a killer product. You can keep it just like your normal car whenever you want, but when you don't - just press the button, program the navigation and do what you want. That night I'd have slept. This evening I'd probably have read on my way home from work. The technical challenges are no greater and it's much easier to set up.
That's a killer app, not an autonomous taxi. Your car, with an invisible chauffeur on demand. The first manufacturer to properly pull it off won't be able to keep up with demand.
Yeah, but metropolitan areas contain lots of people, and also fairly high concentrations of money, so serving them is particularly attractive.
> It can't serve people who go shopping and want to use their cars as lockers during the shop, or people who leave sports gear in the car while they work then go to the gym later, or a number of other cases.
Well, sure, it doesn't serve the "use a vehicle as a stationary storage facility" role very well. OTOH, if it sufficiently reduces the per-use cost of using a vehicle as a vehicle compared to traditional ownership or taxi-with-a-driver, it can free up money for alternative, at-destination lockers.
> Who pays for them?
Lots of possibilities, there: cities (perhaps particularly suburbus) as last (few) mile(s) connectors for mass transit systems. Or companies that want to disrupt the taxi market.
> It'd be an expensive business to set up and you'd have regular arguments about taxi licenses that'd make the fuss about Uber look tiny.
So, maybe Google just does it directly. Its not like they don't have a huge pile of money to pay the startup costs.
> Who'd clean them? You bet people would do unsavoury things inside them.
So, like a hotel, you do a user agreement that covers that, and have internal video monitoring (like most public transport) to identify the source of problems and assign responsibility.
> Fit a 'self-drive' button to my next mainstream car though, and you have a killer product.
Yeah, that incremental upgrade is the more obvious direct market for consumers, and its easy to see why conservative players are focussing on it. Its also not surprising that Google's vision is bigger and less conservative.
Very few of my age cohort have a driver's license. Even if we had the time and money to get licensed, due to student loan debt we can't afford a car, or insurance, which is much more expensive for the young.
I would buy the self-driving car (2 of them) because I could read in traffic, or relax while listening to music, or watching a movie.
And if tired, on the way to Vegas from LA, push "autopilot button".
It's safer to let autopilot drive than to try to drive sleepy, trust me.
You don't need to spend 40k to get a vehicle that works.
Read this --> http://www.tropicalmba.com/entrepreneurmobile/
Commercial vehicles live or die on their economics alone. Separating concerns in this way makes the issues clearer. Assuming they become established in the commercial market, producers can then address the consumer market. At that point, car drivers may rationally decide whether they'd prefer to pay the prevalent market premium for not using a self-driving vehicle.
Amazon might never deliver by drone, but the market for micro-deliveries by autonomous, wheeled vehicle could be huge.
Self driving cars are sexy and all but there is so much that could be done with a much simpler system.
The old 'personal rapid transit' ideas come to mind. For those too young to remember, that was a system where the cars would show up at the station when paged. The cars were on tracks but travelling either on a 'through' track (no stops) or pulling into the station when passengers enter/exit. Built using rubber wheels on a paved "track" such a system could be built more cost effectively than highways (no trucks) and with much better efficiency than metros (your car stops at your entry station and exit station only.). All the technology to build that exists today, and it would be massively more efficient than BART, but it isn't even being advocated.
Its one thing to deliver ads and mail, a simple mistake or improper product usage by the end user doesn't hurt someone, but cars are a whole different ball game.
and don't underestimate that some people who get in one will try to cause problems.
Except for when they released Google Buzz and exposed a bunch of private data to the world, endangering some people who were relying on their trust in google to keep themselves hidden from abusive exes and/or various other dangerous sorts of person. Oopsie!
Consider how Elon Musk is disrupting entire industries by refusing to think like this. IMO inexperience can be an advantage when competing with an entrenched industry. And experience can easily be bought where needed by a well funded company.
Google might effectively pay for the data and field testing they're getting from early users by charging a lower price than you'd ordinarily expect for all that fancy hardware.
I don't know how all this will, in fact, play out; I'm just saying driving assistance and full autonomy don't have to be rival approaches.
To some extent this is already the case with some manufacturers, many models across a range are built on a consistent platform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_platform
There is a point where physical improvements on platforms are well into diminishing returns and the bigger improvements are in software and control (the classic "software is eating the world" thing applies here).
I don't have a problem with this but I suspect the automotive industry might ;)
I think it is a little funny that a company like AirBnB would qualify as a tech company (even though I would classify it as a travel agency that uses technology) whereas GM would not (I would consider GM an out and out tech company).
But I agree that software will have more of an impact on vehicle sales performance in the future, I'm only objecting to the idea that software=tech.
Even how software is made via things like lean software development, scrum, and some agile practices are rooted in the Toyota production system.
Companies like Toyota in their very culture is lean, not bloated.
Even Google, despite all the diverse projects, only knows how to make money one way. Toyota group is far more diverse.
Also car companies in japan are heavily invested in robots. So there is plenty of disruptive tech happening there.
I would definitely would prefer my taxi driver to be a person than a computer. (and honestly the trip would take twice as long in the city with a computer driver)
I'm sure Volvo would be interested with their focus on safety.