EDIT: I'm willing to me a Long Bet [1] with anyone regarding fully autonomous self driving vehicles in regular use in 6 years.
- As a 'driver' I get a car that let's me free up large chunks of my time - As a company like Uber the driver 'input' to my model is now far more consistent, predictable, and inexpensive - As an insurance company I can start undercutting my competition by charging less to insure this substantially safer means of transportation while still pocketing a nice margin - As a car manufacturer I now have an extremely compelling reason to sell cars to people that would otherwise wait between 4-6 years in between car purchases - As a government I can (if I'm smart) try and pass laws that will result in drastic reductions in accidents, deaths, etc... I'll also likely be bringing in a lot of business and money by being on the leading edge of this (less traffic and congestion, new opportunities for businesses that leverage these cars, etc...). Whatever revenue I lose in traffic tickets I can make up for in other ways (like a reduced need for traffic enforcement).
As soon as any of the above are able to make/save money this is going to snowball.
The lobbying power and influence of the teamsters and taxi unions is probably the single largest hurdle but if self driving cars are as safe and cheap as it appears they will be this will be a speed bump, not a roadblock.
As a driver, you probably lose your job. Not with the 3-5 year out model, but the one that comes 10 years after that. Even with the 3-5 year model, suddenly the competition for your job becomes extremely tight and starts to focus on things like people skills and entertaining, since the automated car will be doing most of the "heavy lifting" most of the time in a way that is automated into a commodity.
As Uber, you save a lot of money but you also lose a lot of moat, it becomes much easier/cheaper for other companies to suddenly field a fleet of cars.
As a car insurance company things look really iffy for you, again not so much in the 3-5 year timeframe but a bit further out when the human is completely unnecessary since at that point the insurance will be more about insuring the companies making the cars and car software and less about personal insurance, which means there is still significant money to be made, but probably far less than now (if the safety of automated cars turns out to be as great as it should) and by far fewer players.
As a car manufacturer, you'll do well at the beginning but the eventual model of a networked driverless transportation system should require far fewer people to own fewer cars and still live as if they do own cars, which is a long term problem for you when you've built a business optimized to sell cars to broad market consumers on a 5-ish year cycle.
As a government you should, in an ideal world, be in pretty good shape for the reasons you outlined, but good luck dealing with the lobbyists from industries this may "disrupt".
I do think driverless cars are quite a bit closer than most people think, for a lot of reasons, I just think they are going to upset a lot of applecarts on the way in, which isn't necessarily a bad thing unless you're an applecart vendor.
Note that drone could mean a car in this case. UAV being an unmanned aerial vehicule.
As it is, I'd even settle for voice control on my phone that could reliably understand me.
They added a slight "aggression" back in 2011, if other cars aren't letting it out it starts pushing forwards a bit:
> Sometimes, however, the car has to be more "aggressive." When going through a four-way intersection, for example, it yields to other vehicles based on road rules; but if other cars don't reciprocate, it advances a bit to show to the other drivers its intention. Without programming that kind of behavior, Urmson said, it would be impossible for the robot car to drive in the real world.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...
I really don't understand why people think small behavioural differences like that require decades of work. Things that humans find difficult and stressful are likely to be the things that are significantly easier when you have a reaction time measured in milliseconds and full 360 degree vision.
And what does "regular use" mean? That seems like the critical component of a bet like this.
If anyone can buy a self-driving vehicle, Uber and Lyft are aberrations, as anyone (even FedEx and UPS) could provide self-driving vehicle livery services. Its no longer a marketplace business; its a fleet management business (and both UPS and FedEx are extremely capable at managing capital expenditures, fleet operations, and system capacity).
Another interesting consideration is who is building and selling these automated vehicles. Hypothetically a future Google building vehicles could acquire Uber and now they own the entire value chain.
A company such as Google could earn a substantial piece of the rider's revenue from advertising which would make it hard for competitors much like Yahoo & Bing under earned Google on search inventory. At that point it becomes very hard for competitors. Does ad based earnings sound unreasonable? Consider that companies, such as Delta, already are bidding their organic listings down on Google. They rank #1 for their name yet still buy the inventory. You could jump in the car and say KFC -- and KFC pays Google for the ride. Or you say "fried chicken" and Google gets even more money to take you to the nearest KFC (or may be Popeyes in that case.)
Secondly, consider additional activities in the vehicle. A car build to drive itself is going to be configured differently than a manned vehicle. May be a Facebook car arrives and you strap on the complimentary Oculus headset.
I don't know what it is, but don't discount the ability of a self driving car service to substantially differentiate itself beyond competitors in the future.
Any of these options will make it extremely difficult for public transit to compete. Certainly cabs are done without gifted monopolies. (Also worth considering if a self-driving cab company can retain any political power without having a fleet of human drivers)
Whether or not Uber is overvalued, they are taking the money. Probably the better choice. The US stock market keeps hitting highs, at some point there will be a drop, or may be a crises with junk debt (very low yields just like 07) and it is going to be a lot more difficult to raise money over night.
I agree someone is going to need to clean them out though.
You could outsource the car cleaning with an agreement at any full service car wash.
One doesn't even need a physical presence anywhere to make the business work.
There will be significant power losses (10-20%) and alignment issues.
One thing I really like about the whole inductive road concept is that it totally removes the need for a battery, one of the most expensive parts of an electric car.
You'd basically have a full-size slot car (if you remember those) track (but without sliding contacts).
While high-capacity electric vehicles like a Tesla wouldn't be able to wirelessly charge, it should be trivial to build a physical dock they can connect to with no human intervention (similar to how SpaceX designed the DragonEye mating connector for autonomous mating to the ISS).
Hence, I see the self-driving car to be more of a competition to short-term rentals like Zipcar. In situations where you don't want to drive (have to work/talk on phone; after a you've had a few drinks etc), you'd still need a driver.
It took one year before the race was finished.
You may as well pose it as "what if we invented teleportation?" Many of the end results are going to be similar.
(Google's current effort relies on extremely detailed mapping of all the roads involved, but given the continued existence of the StreetView program that approach probably scales tolerably well.)
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1094329_self-driving-car...