Unless all cars are driven by machine, the driverless car won't make a huge difference in our lives. You can already experience the magic of not having to drive by paying someone else to do it for you.
The real gains of automation occur when a machine doing the job can do it faster than a human. Computers calculate and communicate faster than people, and factories/robots build stuff faster. A machine driving a car has to obey the rules of the road and react to other human drivers. This puts a hard limit on their potential.
Now once all cars are driven by machine, we will see amazing changes. No traffic lights for starters.
This view seems deeply flawed. One of the upsides of public transportation is that I can read / sleep / work / talk with people with 0 distractions. The downside is that the commute is 3-5 times longer.
If I can get the shorter commute time of my car AND have the benefits of not having to pay attention, that's a huge gain even if my travel time isn't any faster.
Additionally, there are plenty of use cases that don't rely on interaction. Ideally, my car can drop me off at the door to the grocery store and go park itself and then come pick me up when I text it that I'm ready to go home.
The comparison to current public transportation is unfair. First, imagine what public transportation would be like today if as much money had been invested as has been invested in cars. There are more licensed vehicles in the U.S. than there are licensed drivers.
Cars simply cannot beat public transportation in raw material use, operating cost or road space utilization. My car occupies 70 sq ft of road space. At most, it can fit 5 people. That's 14 sq ft per person. A typical bus uses half that (calculated from an MCI D series). Since raw material use is more dependent on the volume, the savings will be even greater there.
My car gets 30 miles per gallon. Fully loaded, that's 150 person-miles per gallon. A fully loaded bus beats that even if it only get 3 miles per gallon. However, since buses run standard routes, they can be wired directly to the power grid, eliminating the need for separate fuel and eliminating the need for the batteries than an electric car needs.
And this is with current technology, developed despite substantially more money being spent on cars and highways.
The reason your commute is faster with a car is that there aren't enough buses/trains. Vehicles with dedicated routes (such as trains and buses driving on bus-only roads) don't get caught in traffic. If they were comparably common, there's no way you could beat them on time either.
First, imagine what public transportation would be like today if as much money had been invested as has been invested in cars.
Honestly, I do this all too often. What if the American passenger railroad system had never been left to die? What if the Big Three hadn't bought up streetcar services all over the country and run them into the ground? What if we'd been investing money for the past half century in making advances in new rail technology instead of trying to make dangerous cars slightly less dangerous?
The intermittent dialog about high-speed rail here brings to mind an obese diabetic who has resolved that he definitely needs to start going to the gym one of these days.
Imagine cars on demand. You don't own a car, you text a car to get you to work at 8:30, the car picks you up at home, drops you off (no parking space required) and goes on to the next ride.
Yes almost like a taxi, what I meant to say is that today you don't drive to work in a taxi because they are so expensive most of the time or inconvenient because few are available.
If driverless cars became maintream I'm pretty sure it would drastically decrease the price of such commutes thus changing the way we own a car today.
It's called PRT (personal rapid transit) and in my view, it's the one glimmer of hope in turning a century's worth of investment in automobile infrastructure from a liability into an asset. It's a fantastic idea that's gaining some limited traction in places like London Heathrow (http://www.ultraprt.com/prt/), where hopefully it can gain enough of a foothold to expand. Right now, PRT systems tend to use their own rights-of-way, but with the advent of true driverless cars, all that could change.
This is wrong of course. Imagine you could hire a driver, now imagine he worked for free and was always at his best driving ability.
The things that self driving cars will do first, really really well, are:
1) Drive people around who currently use chauffers because they can use the driving time productively.
2) Lower the barrier to attending events, restaurants, etc in urban areas where parking is an issue. (if you car can go park itself a couple of miles away and you can phone it up when you want to go home, win)
3) Reduce the number of DUI accidents as people go out, have a good time, and their car drives them home.
Self driving cars that can drive amongst human driven cars will be a huge win. Now why a search company would do with that, who knows.
> 2) Lower the barrier to attending events, restaurants, etc in urban areas where parking is an issue. (if you car can go park itself a couple of miles away and you can phone it up when you want to go home, win)
It lowers the barrier on travel in another way too. Put a comfortable bed in the self driving car and anywhere within 8 hours drive is now a night's sleep away. Weekend tourism would be a lot more fun that way.
Rush hour in major cities would be an entirely different experience with automated cars.
In my observation, the vast majority of congestion is caused by drivers either overcompensating for changes in conditions (ie slowing down even more than the car in front of you slowed down) or otherwise reacting slowly.
I believe highways could handle considerably more traffic if all the traffic were automated.
I think it's possible to see significant gains if only some of the cars were automated, actually.
Left lane for automated cars, right lane for manual prudes.
In mine and a lot of others' observation the main cause of traffic is people's inability to merge. People suck at it. And that in turn creates traffic waves... http://trafficwaves.org/
Increased density of cars on the road has the potential for a huge economic wins, in terms of getting governments out of widening highways to increase throughput.
Automated cars would be be able to (one day) receive information about down-the-road conditions and congestion which would enable the automation of William Beaty's "jam busting" techniques at a more expansive scale: http://amasci.com/amateur/traffic/trafexp.html (For example, slowing down gradually, rather than screeching to a stop as you pile into the back of a jam.)
It would be sweet to see a time where only a majority of the cars on the road are driven by machine. I imagine them driving in packs, and leaving lots of buffer space between them and the lone human driver.
Yes, these secondary affects are interesting to think about. Also, if people don't have to drive 95% of the time, people will forget how to drive, and will probably be unable to instantly switch into 'operator' mode when/if the car decides to transfer back into manual mode. For this reason, I don't see the technology being successful until it can drive reliably enough that it never has to switch back into manual mode.
Can you imagine reading a book, watching a movie, eating (or whatever) in your car and suddenly the situation gets so hairy that the car switches back into manual? I don't think that would work out, especially if the last time you had taken the wheel was 5 years ago.
The real gains of automation occur when a machine doing the job can do it faster than a human. Computers calculate and communicate faster than people, and factories/robots build stuff faster. A machine driving a car has to obey the rules of the road and react to other human drivers. This puts a hard limit on their potential.
Now once all cars are driven by machine, we will see amazing changes. No traffic lights for starters.