I've been saying this to anyone who will listen for years. I really believe this technology will touch everything. Real estate markets will shift dramatically as the average commute time halves or quarters. Transport costs will plummet, making every single physical object cheaper. Public transit will be dirt cheap, always punctual, and take you absolutely anywhere. Tens of thousands of people each year will escape death; millions will lose their jobs.
Safe to say I'm really, really excited about the future.
90 percent of those in the transportation sector will lose their jobs. Car companies will go broke when demand plummets. Pizza delivery will not be an entrylevel job.
I think the net effect will be hugely positive, but like all paradigm shifts this is going to cause immense social upheaval and initially look like it only makes things worse.
> Just because it doesn't have a driver doesn't mean it doesn't need to be manufactured. Car companies will do fine.
No they won't; every > 1 car family will have 1 car only after this, because, when at work, you just send your car back on it's own for the wife and kids. Big reduction. If your neighbor has different hours than you have, you can combine that by sending the car back when you arrived. I think it'll have a huge impact on car sales; we just don't need many anymore as, unlike now, they are not useless without a driver.
Take the next leap and see that you don't need to actually own the car at all. No need to send a car back home. No need to negotiate with your neighbor.
We all share a fleet of cars like a taxi service. Need a car? Pull out your smartphone app and push the "call" button that sends a nearby car to your location. You could also schedule a pickup for the exact time you get off work.
No need to send an empty car back home to your family during the day. No need to let the car sit empty in between rides.
This will definitely exist, but not everybody will want to give up personalized cars. Too many people see their car as part of their identity.
We have the tech right now for every workplace to have open seating and non-personalized computer workstations, and while some companies do this, most people still want their own desk space and personalized computer.
I think a major point is using a car as storage. Many professionals I know keep a lot of stuff in their cars, particularly if they are not sure what kit they'll need when they go out to a client. In the trades this is even more extreme, some people run entire businesses out of their cars/vans.
Why not a semi-autonomous trailer? Hitch it to any car for charging. You can leave it on the site, arrange for it to meet you somewhere you're walking, even loan your kit to a colleague across town with the push of a button-- and still get around on your own.
Needing personal mobile storage is not needing a car if you already get a car for free.
>Too many people see their car as part of their identity.
I think that's because of the feeling you have when you drive a large machine yourself. If you are not behind the wheel anymore, will it still be the same feeling?
And yes, SOME will have this; there will exist a need for cars, I'm saying it will just be far less than it is now.
People used to make friends with horses-- and many of those who can afford to still do. But the massive economic incentive to sharing a car will make this not a choice for any but the very wealthy.
I think only freaks / hobbyists / throwbacks will end up owning cars. You don't have a personalised power station do you? Transport is just a means to an end. They'll be new and cheaper ways of signalling status with driverless cars, equivalent to 1st class travel on trains.
Note that in Europe car ownership amongst the younger demographics is plunging. The novelty has worn off, no one can be arsed with them anymore.
Yeah especially in cities I see this happening really quickly; most of my friends in Amsterdam and Malaga don't see the need for cars at all. If you need to go far you have trains, planes, busses and rentals.
I foresee certain technical careers, such as us developers, having combo driverless cars that also double as their office. It picks you up, you simply start working. The destination that day is where ever you want to have lunch, or some meeting with a client or fellow developers on your team. You just work, in your traveling office, and arrive at desired destinations for your breaks.
I commute by bus, with the most skilled of drivers who somehow manage to travel at freeway speeds with standing passengers without killing them all. But trying to work on a moving vehicle is an unpleasant experience. I really can't do anything more productive than a phone call or reading.
I don't think there's anything inherent in a self-driving car that causes it to have a smooth ride with minimal sensation of movement like a train or plane, it's more a property of the road.
...except if said family has kids of the age that they need
car seats, which are a pain in the ass to install correctly; ripping them out and putting them back in twice a day is both ridiculous and unsafe. And you can't realistically even have shared cars with pre-installed car seats, because they need to be adjusted all the frigging time as the kid grows.
FWIW, neither my wife or I had ever owned a car, we managed just fine with public transport and car-sharing. But once the baby came along, we pretty much had to buy a car.
Yes, you too will benefit from robotic cars! You may have to pay your service some premium for a toddler-safe vehicle, but only when you need to take the kid; and what you'll get is a way more expensive vehicle than you could otherwise afford, with a back seat completely designed around toddler safety. There won't be straps to adjust, because there will be no requirement that this car can be converted for the transport of adults, or bicycles, or anything else.
All of that aside from that the system will be safe enough that you can trust your toddler to order and ride in vehicles by themselves if necessary.
Have you ever seen a toddler outside a movie? All the automation in the world isn't sufficient to contain the hijinks of a determined two-year-old.
That said, I'm totally in favor of self-driving vehicles and wish they'd hurry up so I can get one. Containing that two-year-old is way easier when you don't have to concentrate on traffic at the same time!
My experience -- admittedly not parental, and certainly skewed towards highly functional families -- has been that young children tend to be about as responsible as they need to be to get what they want. Not to say that we're going to obsolete parents any time soon, but I do think we can make our world safe enough that we won't need to watch them as much.
Yeah those kind of services are already very popular in, for instance, Amsterdam (Greenwheels.nl). I know a lot of people living/working there who just did away with their car and use one of the available short term cars all around the city. When they are auto drive they can just drive to your door; depending on the cost it's a no brainer.
> when at work, you just send your car back on it's own for the wife and kids.
And I have to wait for my car to come back if I have any immediate need to use it during the day?
> If your neighbor has different hours than you have, you can combine that by sending the car back when you arrived.
I'm not sure people are that much into car pool. And then there is issue with whose property the car is, people don't always let other people use their property even if they don't need to use it right now.
Under this scenario, no matter how efficiently navigated, traffic would actually increase. It might not be bad since half of the legs would be reverse commute, but still, drive-hours double.
I'll disagree with it. A lot of cars are needed all at once. There's definitely over-capacity, but a lot more than 10% of people still need to get to work at around 9am and leave sometime around 5pm.
I can't wait to see driverless cars available everywhere, but I'm afraid of the pushback, especially from governments who will inevitably come up with stupid regulations that will make it as cumbersome to use as possible.
Also, given that I live in France, I'm sure there won't be any Google car allowed anywhere before the French automakers are able to make one -- which is to say, probably never.
Right, because, for instance, they prevented Toyota to sell their Prius because none of the French automaker had a plugin hybrid ?
You know, it's easy to always blame the government when the real problem is that you start your thought process as if it was hopeless from the beginning ...
Driverless cars would be a fantastic improvement to society, but I think you might be underestimating how much people will compensate. Traffic rises to fill roads, and only a small part of public transport budgets are for drivers (it looks like around 10% for LA)
> only a small part of public transport budgets are for drivers (it looks like around 10% for LA)
Well, you also have to consider that bus systems are built around driver scarcity. What if buses were half as large, and run twice as often? They can't now, because that would double driver labor costs.
If buses were the size of vans, capital costs might even decrease due to having access to van-market economies of scale (the market for vans presumably being significantly larger than the market for buses).
The sensible model seems to be called "flex service" or "demand responsive transit" (1): Dynamically routed small shuttles where customers place trip orders to the transit company, and the routing system figures out paths for the shuttles so customers get where they want to go in reasonable time.
Well, there's no force that makes traffic "rise to fill roads"; there's externalities to having increased traffic capacity that may cause transportation needs to increase. We still have a lot of underutilized roads.
The main difference in terms of capacity, I think, is that once we have majority- and fully-autonomous roads, the system will actually not allow the road to exceed capacity. Individual vehicles will respond to signs of lower throughput by getting off of the potentially congested road, while centralized signaling systems will help coordinate routes and departure times to optimize-- and due to the non-Newtonian nature of traffic, keeping throughput high actually increases road capacity.
So if you get into your car at 9am and say, "Take me to work," it's not going to say, "Time with traffic: One hour," it's going to say, "We should depart in twenty-five minutes." Even better, if you are subscribed to a service like most Americans will be, you'll instead tell them the day or week or month before, "I need to be at work by 9am," and they'll say, "There will be a fifteen dollar capacity fee. Would you rather arrive at 8:30 or 10?" And let you and your work decide exactly how much of the economy's money it's worth for you to be there at exactly the same time as everyone else in the time zone.
That's way beyond driverless car, that's a global optimization problem. If it were possible, you wouldn't even need driverless cars to implement it. System-to-car communication and slightly more complicated street lights would be enough.
For example, many cities already have lit signs that forbid turns from cross-streets onto oversubscribed roads, your nav system could allow you to pay the congestion fee and get authorization to disregard the sign and take the turn. Similarly, you could get out your smartphone and queue yourself to a destination and be told when you get to leave and take the fast route for free. As long as queuing at home got you to your destination faster than queuing in traffic, it would be the individual best strategy to do it and enough people would use it for it to work.
The hard part is probably doing traffic scheduling at an acceptable latency, for a city like LA you'd need to model the behavior of millions of cars however many iterations your optimization algorithm needs every few seconds. These kind of problems are really computationally expensive, it may not be economical with current systems and algorithms.
> That's way beyond driverless car, that's a global optimization problem. If it were possible, you wouldn't even need driverless cars to implement it. System-to-car communication and slightly more complicated street lights would be enough.
I disagree, I'd say scheduling is the smallest part of it. On most trips I take, there's a single major road that covers most of the distance, and I'm most likely to be delayed by traffic on that road slowing or halting completely. It's the moment-to-moment perverse behavior of other drivers when it comes to merging, changing lanes, accelerating and braking that causes that to happen, and having intelligent drivers on the same roads at the same times would make a much more significant impact.
In other words, you're saying we could do global scheduling with traffic lights, which is true. I'm saying that with sufficiently competent drivers we won't need the lights, and I think that will cause a qualitative shift in the nature of traffic.
The road network is society's circulatory system. Everything we do is touched by roads.
They have essentially created remote realtime monitoring systems for society. Human traffic, weather, parking, etc. As well as solving the biggest optimization problem that exists today.
Truck shipments can now be done overnight without worrying about driver fatigue. Emergency vehicles can take the most efficient route, as well as efficient avoidance of other vehicles. And traffic lights can be optimized as well.
That's a great question, and my trivial answer is: Because people want to sleep in a different place from where they spend the day. Now, is it good for us, abstracting out travel time, for those to be in very different places? That's a whole other issue.
I do imagine communities will see many of the same benefits as individuals; that is, lower transport costs will mean its possible to build affordable, self-contained communities farther away from urban centers without sacrificing quality of life (including the ability to go to the city if you want to). But that's behind the event horizon to me; hard to speculate.
You're missing one important factor - many people, me included, just like to drive cars and they don't treat them as "transport vehicle only". I would refuse to use a driverless car even if it would be more economic, more safe and would transport me faster.
And the car will humor you, and make it feel like you're in control, until you try to change lanes and the car takes over to prevent you from sideswiping the car that you didn't know was there.
I'm sure you feel that way. But I'm certain plenty of people felt that way when horses were replaced by cars. There is no arguing with better. As likely as not the government will eventually force your hand with driverless only lanes / roads.
Anyway, if you really want to enjoy a driving experience get a motorcycle!
Many will not take such a rational approach to the safety issue. Every driverless car fatality will get huge press. No one I know has ever died in an airplane, but quite a few I know are afraid to fly.
This reads to me like arguing for your right to fire guns into the air. You think driving is fun? So do I. I also think it's the most likely way I'm going to die right now, and that thought terrifies me every time I get into a car. (And how much would it suck to be one of the last few hundred thousand people to die in a car crash before it never happened again to anyone?)
We already have tracks, which like firing ranges allow people like us to indulge our hobby in both safety and company. Driving a car on public roads is a ludicrously dangerous and irresponsible thing to do just because it's fun.
It is by far the most dangerous activity (in an accidental death sense) that most Americans participate in. Is it more dangerous than a lot of things most Americans don't do? No, but that doesn't make it not really, really dangerous.
How about terrorism? A terrorist could load a bomb on one of these cars and send it to its destination. It will be a poor man's guided missile. That would have implications on security procedures.
There was a Clint Eastwood move in the '70s wherein Clint and his Chinese (yes, kung-fu was a theme) partner were chased through the streets of San Francisco by a remote-controlled car with a bomb strapped to it. At the end of the chase, the car exploded, with Clint and his partner still in it. It's where the "Dirty Harry" franchise is generally considered to have jumped the shark, but I personally thought it was great fun. Personally, I think the film was clearly a parody, but Clint played is completely straight, which I found pretty amusing.
What's my point? "oh no, terrorists!" is about the silliest objection I can think of to self-driving car technology.
I am actually working on software right now for managing the interiors of driverless cars. Forgot your purse? Get a text. Puked in the car? We'll bill you to clean it. Put in a bomb? Call da police.
And I can't believe people honestly told Google to dump the project and "focus". Oh Wall Street... They worry about tomorrow's profits, but Google is thinking about next year's profit.
This is combined with more people working from home ... more people ordering on the Internet. Generally the use of cars is going to continue to go down substantially.
I'm with you in thinking that this technology will be quite revolutionary. When I was in elementary school, the school year before the moon landing, my classmates and I made a time capsule, filling it with our predictions of the world of 2001. The time capsule was opened that year (I was overseas at the time, so I missed the big ceremony for that), and our predictions could then be tested against reality. We all recognized that exhaust emissions of cars would have to be reduced, and they were, but by incremental improvements in Otto-cycle engine designs rather than by switching to electric cars, as we predicted.
What we didn't anticipate was truly personal, individual vehicles that could drive themselves even within within twenty years of 2001. I thought that the world would move toward more fixed-path public transportation solutions, like the monorails that always featured in 1960s visions of the future.
The comments below your comment on use cases are very interesting. This whole subthread is food for thought. My thought, as a married man with three children still at home, and one grown child in another state who might still join us on family trips from time to time, is that we will probably buy ONE more car that isn't self-driving, to replace the older of our two cars in the next few years, and then ONE self-driving car to be my wife's main commuting car, with her stuff stashed inside. For all other trips, we will subscribe to an on-call car service, which will surely be cheaper per use than full ownership of a second car. The car service cars can be parked all over town for instant availability. They will be intelligently dispatched by algorithms that balance speed of arrival with passenger preferences such as whether or not the car has child safety seats, whether or not the passenger prefers to work or to relax with a great sound system during the drive, and so on. I greatly look forward to this lifestyle. I substitute a lot of walking and bicycling for car driving already, and just knowing that eventually (not REAL soon) all the cars sharing the road and street with me will have competent robot drivers is a huge improvement.
The Wall Street Journal article "Why Driverless Cars Are Inevitable--and That's a Good Thing"
from a few months ago has more about the economy-changing dynamics of driverless cars. I can't wait--but I'll observe the speed limit while I'm driving as I attempt to wait.
AFTER EDIT: Responding to comments elsewhere in this interesting thread, why I think Google Maps will probably be licensed into most self-driving car packages, even if the hardware is built mostly by other companies, is that Google Maps is relentless in adding data to its geographic database.
SEP 6 2012, Alexis Madrigal's column in The Atlantic, shared previously to HN, "How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything"
The Google Street View photography of my former neighborhood in Panchiao, Taiwan is PHENOMENAL, and data like that are being gathered all over the world. If I like, I can take a photo in 3-D view with my Nexus 4 phone, GPS geolocation turned on, and add data to the database any time. Generally, any time anyone is on a drive with a Google device turned on, Google gets some of the data that helps it predict current driving times for differing routes to the destination--an enormously helpful feature of Google Maps for drives during rush hour in the Twin Cities.
Holy shit. Forbes is an absolute cesspool of a website.
There are about three paragraphs of text, and then I have to pony up another ad impression by clicking through to the next page in order to keep reading. All the while, two enormous fixed nav bars follow my every move at both the top and the bottom of the page. Meanwhile a veritable flotilla of fixed-position "social icons" on the left beg me to help Forbes advertise their content. And to the right of the article? Adverts as far as the eye can see. Even within that center column, the content is occasionally interrupted with links to other unrelated content. And below the article text itself are a bunched of "Sponsored Content You Might Like" links doing their very best to look similar to "Related Stories".
What's going on here? Is this what it takes for Forbes to turn a profit?
Their print links[1] are pretty good though. Normally, I object to linking to print pages because they usually are formatted in a way that makes them unreadable (e.g., very tiny font and very wide columns), and often provide no way to reasonably find the non-print version if you want to look for things like comments and related articles.
However, the Forbes print link uses a reasonable font and a reasonable column width, and has at the bottom a link to the non-print page. (It does invoke a print dialog, which is a bit annoying).
At least the mobile version looks kind of Ok, only a small banner at the bottom, though the pagination is most definitely annoying, especially because it prevents Pocket from correctly extracting the text from the article.
The market is worth trillions... not Google's solution. One thing tech reporters seem to have failed at recognizing is that this research has been taking place at every major car company out there - many many others are legitimately in the race. Ultimately its the manufacturers that get to pull the trigger on how driverless cars will become driverless.
Still, I can't help but feel that maybe Google have the final piece of the puzzle. We've had computers and sensors powerful enough for decades, only Google have all of that maps data, polished again and again by android users using maps (and now Ingress) to make it more reliable.
Google almost specialise at crunching massive data into useful products, and building reliable supersystems from millions of unreliable subsystems.
Car companies might have some software knowledge these days but they really are a long way from the capabilities Google has. They solve car problems, but it might turn out that this is an information system problem.
Can you elaborate on how you think that map data is important? I would expect that mapping data at best gives you a route - something the user could supply. Naively, I would think that the hard problems are responding to obstacles in the road, cross walks, stop lights, etc., where map data won't help much.
My (admittedly limited) knowledge of the cars is that they 'cheat' a lot, in that they don't just look at sensors to make decisions rather they look at a map of data to determine ie approach this corner at maximum 40mph, pot holes on left side of road at this point, always stop at this intersection as it's tricky to see, etc. So the parallel between improving maps data with phones will be improving the car detail map data with cars.
Even Google's own data isn't perfect. A couple of years ago someone even tried to sue Google for "getting her on a highway" and then having an accident. I think she was walking, and obviously she can't blame Google for not noticing the highway!
But with self-driving cars, it's different. A car landing on a highway, when it's not supposed to be there, and then getting into an accident, is not good news. So that's why I think accurate map data will be very important for this.
Mapping data will be important, but not to prevent accidents. Maps will not be 100% accurate, so even with perfect maps, cars will end up on roads they think aren't highways while in fact, they are. There also will be newly one-way streets that aren't in the mapping database yet, roads closed due to construction or accidents, etc. Yes, both will be rare, but multiplied by millions of cars (necessary to get the 'worth trillions' part)? Not so.
So, let's say you are driving a vehicle that isn't allowed on the highway but incorrectly takes one. How do you think maps will help with the "and then getting into an accident" part?
> We've had computers and sensors powerful enough for decades, only Google have all of that maps data, polished again and again by android users using maps (and now Ingress) to make it more reliable.
Of what relevance is Google's map data (which they buy from vendors)? Google's map data doesn't tell the car if a pedestrian or another car or a fire hydrant is where it is about to go. The car has to figure that out all by itself and in real time.
Map data is neither necessary nor sufficient to drive a car.
At the scale where a driver-less car operates, the map data is only relevant as to whether it's managed to get its owner where he wants to go. If that question is still relevant, then it has succeeded.
You don't quite understand the scale at which Google operates. What they're essentially doing is building a 3D model of the entire world, using their own data (did you think those Street View cars were just taking pretty pictures?). By comparing the real world against the model, they'll be instantly able to distinguish between the fire hydrant (which was there yesterday) and the pedestrian (who wasn't). No algorithm relying purely on real-time data will be able to compete.
I don't think you understand the scale of the world.
Street View is YEARS out of date in most major international cities and doesn't exist in the majority of smaller cities. It would be dangerous borderline criminal for a self-driving car to be relying on it for anything important.
A driverless car is already loaded up with all the sensors you need to fully map the road.
Google's cars start with an extremely detailed map of the road, including where the lanes are and where everything should be. And, every time a Google car drives the road, that map can be updated.
This obviously isn't ready to deploy nation-wide right now, but there's a pretty obvious growth path here. If you were to buy a Google car for your commute, you might have to manually drive it for several days in order for it to learn everything it needs to know. Eventually, the other self-driving cars on the road will also be helping build a map for you, and you for them.
You forget that Google has driven almost every road on the planet for exactly this reason. They have collected much more data than just those images you see on the street view app, and it's not just "mapping data". The street view images are merely a by-product.
Basically Google has recorded all the driver's reactions to whatever is happening on the road, and this allows them to teach the bot to drive. Using this data the bot can virtually drive the roads again and again, until it doesn't make mistakes. There's no way car companies can compete with them.
There are other companies, but I think I've mostly seen this kind of tech from small companies and start-ups, rather than big auto-makers. Sure most of them have been working on "automization" of the car, but only for certain specific technologies, not "self-driving car" technologies.
The best Audi could show at CES was self-parking, and even that needed infrastructure put in place in the parking lot for it to work, so it's not even in the same class as Google's self-driving tech.
Also as others have said, Google might have the most accurate data in the future for such technology, which means cars using Google's self-driving tech will be the safest out there.
Additionally, Volkswagen/Audi autonomous efforts go far beyond 'self parking.
They partnered with Stanford AI Lab , won the Darpa Grand Challenge, climbed Pikes Peak, etc.
The key issue being overlooked in these discussions of 'Autonomous vehicles at scale' is that all of these projects revolve around Lidar - and I'm unsure how well that scales with multiple laser sources throwing off 'point cloud' data.
:shrug:
Not only car companies either. Lots of state DoTs like CalTrans (in conjunction with UCBerkeley) have been working on self driving cars. The Caltrans-UCB PATH prgram was begun way back in '86 and demoed self driving cars back in '97!
Yes, it's true the roadbeds had to have embedded mags but it was a beginning. It was exploratory and they got it to work back then. It was different tech, for sure. My point is that people were looking at solutions more than two decades ago. We don't expect solutions to follow the same path to resolution.
Plus, it's a good thing that there are others in this race. It creates diversity of solutions, which should end up being safer, more robust and less likely to suffer cascading failures.
Blind people, disabled people, people unable to drive in any way will be more independent.
No need for expensive parking in a city. Car can go somewhere else cheaper. Expensive land used for parking can be better utilised.
You can rent your car out to others while you’re not using it.
No real need for personal car ownership. Why pay to own when you can rent whenever you need from car manufacturers or rental companies? Get the car that best suits your needs for a particular day at your door when you need it.
Cars spend a lot if their life doing nothing. The car will be fully utilised and always in service making the most of the valuable resources used to build it.
A car no longer needs to be car shaped. You can have cars for specific needs. A bar car if you want!
Traffic efficiency when everyone has them. The road network can be utilised more effectively as the cars will be able to share data and calculate the best route.
You can spend more time doing other things like looking at their adverts.
They will be safer. Computers won’t make the mistakes caused by humans doing stupid things like sending text messages while driving. Drink driving. The won’t break the speed limit etc.
I think the implications are huge, but I question the 90% reduction in cars figure.
While it's true that most people don't drive their car most of the time, when they do drive, most of them are driving within a relatively small time window.
I could imagine a 25-50% reduction in the number of cars, but I just don't see 90% happening unless it's accompanied by a huge increase in people working from home or working non-standard hours.
You haven't taken into account car pooling. Driverless cars can do adhoc car pooling. I can even see things like local 4 seater driverless cars picking you up, and taking you to another 10 (or more) seater vehicle for the rest of your journey. (By definition the congestion is because a lot of people have overlapping routes.)
Additionally you are no longer to blame for your commute since the driverless system would be responsible for timing, in much the same way trains are to blame for timing now. I'd also expect the driverless system to have variable pricing - need to get to work by 9am instead 9.15am and it is $5 more out of your pocket. Ultimately your employer is paying that and they have an incentive to only do so if it is valuable.
It wouldn't be long before every car used in this way became like a small limousine. The efficiency of driverless cars would easily outweigh the cost of such a redesign.
Most of the reason for that (at least in my experience) isn't about some deep desire for privacy, but for the prosaic reason that it's a nuisance to arrange with someone else to meet at a certain time and place, to make sure that everyone in the car pool gets out of the house in the right 10 minute window, etc
Being able to just call a car to drive you to work, while an automatic system figures out the car sharing arrangements in real time, could remove a lot of the barriers.
Current cars are personalized which makes sense given who uses it and how much they cost. Sharing is annoying for logistical reasons and because you don't want people messing with your stuff.
Driverless cars have many possible solutions. A simple one is pricing - it costs $5 more if you refuse to share. (And another $5 more if you want massage seats.) It is possible to completely partition the seats from each other so each one is effectively its own cocoon where you can play your own music as loud as you want and are completely isolated from the other passengers.
Heck it is even possible like many current electrics to have a base chassis that includes the motors and batteries in the floor, and have pods that mount on top. You could have your own personalized pod you keep at home.
While I agree car culture is powerful, I've been persuaded that it'll be over 50% faster than you think. The cost saving of not owning a car will become apparent quickly. Cars that can be much smaller (since you no longer buy/rent a car for the biggest task you have a year), carpooling gets MUCH simpler.
It's going to reshape cities and entire industries. We'll get most of the best of cars (flexible mobility and independence) and get rid of most of the worst of them (cost, insurance, waste of public space, car-centric architecture, deaths, drunk driving, etc.).
In economics, the Jevons paradox [..] is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.
I'm going to disagree with other posters that Google is not going to own this market. It's hard to think of another company that is even close to being able to execute on this. It's the ultimate big data problem. The in-house experience of Google at running computing infrastructure is a must-have for this type of system to work.
Not for general public driving, of course, but for fleets of trucks and excavators that operate globally 24/7.
At various sites they are already operating driverless equipment using tech developed in house.
For what it's worth, oil & gas & mineral exploration work drove a large part of the civilian development of tools like Google Earth / Google Maps in the decades prior to the first public offerings by Google (who acquired their tech from others (the chaps from Sydney for Maps, Keyhole for Earth)).
I still see it as orders of magnitudes off in complexity. You're talking about a system for autonomously controlling every motor vehicle in the U.S., or even the world -- that's effectively the end game. Google is among the handful of companies that has the computing infrastructure to have a "pulse" on the world at all times, and within those companies they are heads and shoulders above the rest in terms of being able to implement large scale, distributed information processing algorithms with low latency at that scale. It's a very rare, maybe completely unique cross section of capabilities. Google is better suited to solving this problem in many ways than any other problem they're currently solving.
The point is the capabilities I'm talking about have nothing to do with cars and everything to do with computing. Pointing to another company doing autonomous vehicles as a counterexample is kinda-sorta missing my point.
> You're talking about a system for autonomously controlling every motor vehicle in the U.S.,
Not a (single) system, rather one such system per car - standard protocols for inter system comms are yet to arrive and each vehicle needs to react to local changes such as pedestrians w/out reference to an external global computing infrastructure.
It's not a big data, massively interconnected problem at all - the elegance comes from local smart behaviour - even for broader problems like optimal pooling.
Others can enter the driverless vehicle market and there are companies like Akamai Technologies that could provide any required interconnect. Google is a player, but by no means the only player.
It's both. Its hyperlocal real-time understanding and eye-in-the-sky big data analysis to keep everything running smoothly. Think about where you end up 10-15 years after this technology comes out: "cars" driving on multi-level, many-laned highways travelling 150-200mph a few meters apart, traffic flow coordinated to optimize energy usage and minimize time to destination. It's a hard problem and not solvable via local agents alone.
> It's a hard problem and not solvable via local agents alone.
Oh, Really?
Ants seem to do okay.
Following your, umm,, solution of critical external hyper networked global oversight it seems there'd be the mother of all traffic accidents if the servers went out.
Biologically emergent local behaviour seems wonderfully adept at converging on globally optimal solutions via local agent actions. Perhaps you're right, maybe Google is the only company capable of replicating the efficiencies of termite mounds.
It honestly makes me think that, much in the way that SpaceX is a sleeper for Elon Musk's desire to retire on Mars, so too was Google a sleeper to produce enough data and computing power to honestly enable self-driving cars.
$15T GDP, ten percent of which is transportation. I think that a truly self-driving car and truck could eat 20% of that, easily. So $300b a year...
That's why the CA legislature pssed legislation to allow self-driving cars on public roads with such unusual alacrity - this is a technology we want to ensure gets a foothold in California, both for direct revenue flowing to the state and for the second order economic gains that would result from wide deployment - environmental improvements, lower accident rates, and new service markets. EDIT: as well as the ongoing perception of economic and technological leadership, which has taken a bruising after our per-student educational funding fell to an embarrassing 49th in the nation.
after our per-student educational funding fell to an embarrassing 49th in the nation
I had heard that funding levels in California, as ranked against other states, had fallen in recent years, and that is surely embarrassing to Californians, who historically have taken pride in generous state funding for schools up to and including universities. But of course even more embarrassing to California in the years that I have been an adult have been the poor results in California schools, even compared to funding levels there that were higher than in some other states. I wish the school administrators in California well in learning how to spend their resources better. I note that the Gates Foundation studies of effective schooling practices often include schools in California in the study samples, and I hope actionable data lead to better results.
Combine driverless cars with electric motors. Add a few driver-free high speed tunnels which connect to the existing road network (I assume tunnelling will eventually be cheaper than building new roads). Then we'll have a growing, backwards-compatible high speed freight distribution system which delivers to the doorstep. And as cars get quieter and pollution free (locally) our cities will suddenly become civilised places to walk around in, breathing freely. Maybe we'll hang out like philosophers in the market squares of Athens or Florence :-)
So how many years are we talking until we see them in the US? Europe? Asia? Not seeing 1 or 2 with millionaires in them but when I buy any car I have the option, or, even better, it's mandatory driverless (which makes sense as the roads would be safer with only driverless cars there)?
For me, this would actually be a solid reason to move to the country they have it first. I find driving an absolute waste of time, but busses and metros and trains are just not a good substitute unless almost empty and comfortable (which most are not).
Sergey Brin's actual statement was "You can count on one hand the number of years until ordinary people can experience this" as transcribed from an interview.
That is an ambitious prediction, and I wonder what that suggests about the cost of the self-driving system, as fewer and fewer cars look affordable to many "ordinary people" these days. I think Brin, being a billionaire for several years now, may have a warped sense of what "ordinary people" can really afford, so I give it ten years till I'm likely to be able to buy a car with self-driving features. But that means I can buy at most just one more car without self-driving features (to replace a car that threatens to fail at any moment, after almost 170,000 miles of driving since 1999), and then the next car I buy will be a self-driving car. Cool.
Hmm, no mention of the disruptions in employment due to driverless cars. There go taxi drivers, bus drivers and a big segment---truck drivers, so I would expect a large push back from the various unions (I'm extrapolating from _The Box_, a history of container shipping).
The next several years should prove "interesting" for the car market. Driverless cars and assorted state DOT departments pushing for black boxes in cars on the basis of tracking milage are both going to see pushback from the general public.
I've bought two new cars (and 1 used) in the last 15 years. The oldest lasted 11 years and 256000 miles. The used was a truck when I bought my house. The newest is a diesel wagon getting 40+ miles to the gallon, I don't plan on selling it anytime soon.
I will be loath to add GPS for purposes of tax calculation (sure it can be done based off registration or other means -- at least the GPS data isn't there). And, I don't predict any incentive to move people from driving their own cars to self-driving cars.
The above is in addition to the "independence" baked into the American culture about the open road and the automobile.
The disruption will come late to the end user. But all of fleet car - this is a god send, taxi firms without the stupid medallions, totally safe, couriers, trucking companies ... these can see a lot of value.
Also there are some situations when driving a car is not an enjoyment but a chore - almost any place where traffic is heavy.
The above is in addition to the "independence" baked into the American culture about the open road and the automobile.
Do you think there is something inherently wrong with the feeling of independence and happiness attained from the car culture in the US?
I am still dubious that self-driving and non-self-driving cars will be able to share a road in the future. If this doesn't happen, I doubt Americans will freely give up their 'right' to drive the way they want.
Not the parent, but I do think there is something inherently wrong about it.
I grew up around cars, driving cars (heck, my college job was the stereotypical pizza delivery guy). I live in a metropolitan area where I can go just about anywhere I need to with the swipe of a card and waiting a few minutes on a train platform. The feeling of independence that I didn't need to worry about the CV boots on my axles screwing up and costing me hundreds in a replacement axle. The feeling of independence that I'm not contributing significantly to pollution. The feeling of independence that _getting out and walking somewhere_ gives me. The feeling of independence that I get to read a book on my commute instead of staring at the ass-end of an SUV jettisoning metric tons of fumes while in stop-and-go-traffic.
Do I wish I had a car for getting out of the city and into the countryside sometimes? Well, sure.
That's what zipcar is for.
I _do_ admit that the feeling of driving is exhilarating. Pushing the pedal down, feeling the engine rev, connecting with the road through the tires.
For the majority of uses, I can see driverless cars completely taking over. And for those who want to drive endless country roads? Well, driverless cars will probably be built to drive with the expectation that every other car on the road is being driven by a drunken teenager on a methamphetamine binge. For liability purposes.
And in certain parts of the country, you can still see horse-drawn carriages clopping along the shoulder.
So you'll [the quintessential driver, who just wants to drive because of some ass-backwards ideal of freedom which is actually more crippling than freeing] will be just fine.
If not? Well, we have four-wheeler specific mudding "roads" out there right now, don't we? I could see the blue ridge parkway, for example, being a driver-only road (it is incredibly fun to drive).
Counterargument is that people exerting their freedom to own a car has built a society where areas without effective mass transportation are common, thus forcing others to also buy a car.
Suburbs would have been built differently if not for private car ownership. LA would not exist in its current form.
Usually you can choose where you live. Where I live (Germany) the government unfortunately subsidizes car travel and living in the country side. Not sure what the economics factors are in the US. I suppose gas is cheaper, but still, owning a car must cost a lot of money. Really cheaper to go car+suburb than pay the additinal money you saved on the car for rent in the city?
Oh, I completely agree -- the feeling of mobility freedom when I got my first (and only; now sold) car was unparalleled, and a prerequisite for me being able to live on my own outside the family home.
But that freedom would not be infringed by a driverless car, would it?
In addition to pushback about our 'right to drive the way we want' (which will inevitably be complicated by government regulations on driverless vehicles), there's the practical fact that cars that require a driver will be here for decades. My family just got rid of a '92 Volvo, and a few years back, a '67 Mustang, still street legal. If 45 year old cars are still on the road, it may be that none of us live to see the promise of a completely computer controlled system.
On the other hand, a "Cash for Clunkers" on a big scale could accelerate the transition.
"Do you think there is something inherently wrong with the feeling of independence and happiness attained from the car culture in the US?"
Not at all. Note, I had a car that in 12 years, I put 256000 miles on, while I had a second vehicle during that time that had many miles put on it as well. I personally love road trips. One area where modern vehicles (hybrids and eventually self-driving) have no place (for now) is off roaring. Every year or two, I do road trips that include up to (and sometimes exceeding) 1000 miles off road -- not just dirt, but jeep trails, high clearance, having one person act as a spotter kind of stuff.
Where my comment was directed is that all the technology in the world isn't going to do away with the car culture you point out anytime soon (probably not in my lifetime).
I am still dubious that self-driving and non-self-driving cars will be able to share a road in the future
How exactly do you figure? You don't think regular drivers can handle a road with computer cars? Or you don't think computer cars can handle a road with people?
Why would the DOT want a black box? They already have reliable and difficult to circumvent revenue streams from gas taxes and registration fees. Congestion charges only make sense in extremely rare places like London, and even there they just use plate recognition.
One overlooked factor is how much marital discord this will save.
"I drove last time, it's your turn to drive."
"But they'll be serving just beer. You don't even like beer."
etc etc
I also look forward to the day when you will be able to go to the pub, get absolutely wankered, and still be able to get home safely without waiting for cabs.
Like some others have mentioned, the title is somewhat misleading. There is no feasible way that Google ends up owning the entire market. And I'm not talking about the actual cars, because they're definitely not getting in the car making business. Even when it comes to the software, they could only be the only provider in the market if it becomes a government regulated monopoly.
As a side note, I think the resistance to driverless cars will be a big psychological stumbling block. I can't ride in the passenger seat of a car without hitting the "brakes" and pressing my foot into the floor. It will be tough to break habits and to trust that the software is safe.
One of great ironies of the 21st century is going to be that humanity had to build autonomous flying drones before it could build autonomous cars (to develop the algorithms), and autonomous cars before it could build flying cars (because average people could never be reasonably expected to pilot a flying car.)
But mark my words in 2100 we will, at last, have flying autonomous cars (or something that can be described that way.)
The interesting part about this is everything mentioned was about saving money on things. It sounds like it could destroy a few trillion in revenue. I don't think it is actually worth trillions to google though. (Obviously it could be worth a lot though)
Sensationalist headline but I can conclude that Google and SpaceX are the tech leaders of our generation. Love hearing about companies focused on the future. To think that potentially this guy who has to depend on other people to take care of him and drive him places, or he has to take the bus, won't have to because he can hop into his self-driving car and be independent.
The software might become like Android---a standard. Largely because of interoperability: it's advantageous for cars to talk to one another in order to coordinate on the highway better than just with sensors, so it makes sense for them all to be of the same operating system. Further, people who make apps for these cars will want to deploy to as many as possible. So, "IceDriver 2015" will choose Google's car OS over (shivers) GM's OS.
> it's advantageous for cars to talk to one another
If "never trust the client" is a truism in software, I'd assume it'd be doubly so for P2P communication, and add another doubling for a situation involving humans + relatively high masses and speeds.
The solution is much farther off than Google would like you to believe. As in, we'll be lucky if driverless cars become feasible before fusion becomes commercially viable.
I've worked on autonomous cars, and no, I am not a crank. I could go into technical reasons why this is nowhere near ready, but there is no need. The onus is on Google to prove that they have the technology (or that it will arrive soon), and proof has not been forthcoming. I'm not even claiming that Google is claiming that autonomous cars are almost here--I am saying that people should take their carefully controlled demos with a grain of salt.
> It's selling automotive technology that will soon become standard in cars.
This still means that they aren't going to be making the "triiiillions of dollars!"
[Dr Evil pinkie finger here]
I mean sure, they can make a lot of money further down the value chain. But so do Motorola whenever someone installs a few dozen PowerPC chips into a new BMW.
It's just lazy link-baiting conflation of the Biggest Number Available with what might actually happen, and that annoyed me.
All those other car companies? They are the ones with the brands and the cars people want. They are the iphones in this situation.
Sure, if you're pushing a new powertrain you can do okay making one or two of your own cars (which will take years) and you can shortcut the time to build up a brandname to a degree by being exclusive, but none of that effort is warranted because this technology does not require that sort of vertical integration.
If your competency is not making cars but rather automated cars, why would you want to get into the business of making cars?
Google has loads of money. They can buy a car company. Tesla has a $4B market cap. Or they could invest significantly in a car company. Or they can strike exclusive agreements.
Why deal with the hassle of actually owning a car company and factories and all the related problems of actually building things. Also what does Google gain by offering an exclusive agreement to a nice car maker? Wouldn't it be better to offer the tech to everybody, sit back, focus on R&D and take a percentage of every sale made while let them deal with all the problems of actually building and selling cars.
That would conflict with public safety considerations and possibly with antitrust/consumer legislation. The system has to work on a standalone basis even if communications go down, but you can be sure it will be super-easy to integrate with or obtain Google account privileges. Having been part of the test group for several Google hardware products, I'm optimistic about the possibilities - although Google will have to up its game regarding customer service, tech support etc.
A lot of people here seem to have the blinders on about this. It's kind of funny. I've posted this before the last time this came up. Car companies have been working on this for a while, unless Google's offering is just light years ahead of the rest, no car company is going to pay a Google tax for this tech (and it's unlikely it will be any better than what they are already working on).
Every manufacturer is not going to have their own solution. The top few, sure. But it's a different story for the long tail. It can't possibly make sense for all the companies with 1% market share and no notable software knowledge to write their own systems, especially with all the likely regulatory hurdles. It wouldn't be good, and it wouldn't be cheap.
There's clearly going to be a huge market for commodity solutions, and the economies of scale and the network effects suggest that it should narrow down to a few main ones.
Is Google's going to be one of those successful ones? Impossible to say for sure, but they do have a couple of huge advantages. They already have the geodata (all car manufacturers would still need to pay either Google or Nokia for that, even if they wrote their own software). And if I were a car manufacturer, I'd rather not license software from a direct competitor, but from an outsider. It certainly seems worth a bet.
Also, there has been huge consolidation in the market. For example, BMW owns Rolls-Royce and Mini, the Volkswagen group includes Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Porsche, Skoda, and others, Volvo is, IIRC, chinese and Chevrolet Korean, and there are lots of reciprocal relationships such as that betweeen Renault and Nissan.
There are almost more car brands than car designs.
And remind me again who would want to license technology from a company who has zero experience in delivering mission critical solutions.
Plus cars are 10-20 year commitments, is Google going to be there and still interested in this? I am not even mentioning the strings Google might attach, like using Google Tires to be "compliant and be able to use the {brand}" (see Android)
We'll all be dead from toxic smog before Google's driverless cars get anywhere.
I think the idea is extremely shortsighted. It's a technological feat but not a creative one. It just produces more cars, more fuel-burning and more roads. It's more cars and that will produce more pollution.
Ultimately, it solves nothing. You want to stop deadly car crashes? Help save wildlife from excessive roads and urban sprawl? Stop driving. Live and work locally. But that would take real change.
You have got to be kidding me, spoken like a true luddite. You realize if autonomous cars were suddenly a real thing, the entire world economy would shift and become wildly more efficient, right? One of the pillars of our transportation infrastructure is that vehicles have an operator. This dictates their form, this dictates the manner in which we build roads, bridges, etc. This dictates the manner in which we design supply chains, the way we transport energy, the way we build cities and towns. It's hard to imagine anyone using the word "short sighted" to describe the concept of autonomous cars. It's one of the most ambitious technology projects going on today and it stands to be as revolutionary as the original automobile.
You don't seem to understand the resources required to build a car, and the punishing toll it exacts on the planet. And how roads disrupt migratory paths of animals.
Technology isn't the answer to problems of air quality and the preservation of wildlife. Making significant changes to our lifestyle is, but we need to snap out of this delusional wishful thinking and make changes based on reality.
Actually technology is the only realistic solution.
You can keep trying to get 7 billion people to behave the way you want. Good luck with that. Or, instead you can give them something they want that also solves the problems you want solved. Renewable Energy, Recyclable products, less polluting products that are also more desirable (think Tesla Model s)
Making new tech that solves those issues and at the same time provides something more desirable than current products is the only realistic way forward.
> We will need more roads, more cars and that will produce more pollution.
Nope. Less. Cars-per-person will nosedive from almost 1:1 in the US right now to maybe 1:5 - that means the embodied energy wasted on cars will go down. Per-mile energy costs will go down too, if cars are driven efficiently.
It also enables the large-scale conversion of the US car fleet to electric propulsion. Cars can recharge themselves and aren't range limited because you can swap cars rather than waiting.
It's huge. It's as big as the invention of the car was. All the human hours wasted on moving things from A to B will gradually go away.
No Mr.Pot, overpopulation isn't the problem. Greed and misallocation of land and resources is the problem. Too many cars is a problem. And you calling the kettle black is a problem.
I don't drive, you do, therefore you are uncomfortable with the reality that you are destroying the environment and the air and shifting the responsibility elsewhere.
No, allocation of resources depends entirely on scarcity, because no working system of fair distribution will ever happen in the real world. Unless you rely on charity to take care of everyone, which I guess is your solution. More likely you haven't thought about it.
Cars don't have to be internal-combustion.
You have no moral authority, just shrill accusations.
Your lack of driving is a lame dodge for your destructive, hypocritical, blind consumerism; which is doing far more damage than a car ever could. Feel free to defend your lifestyle here and pretend you don't shit all over the third world as much as the average American. You're fooling yourself though. Either you work for a company that does a ton of environmental damage, or your parents do, and they pay your bills (more likely). You pay taxes to a government with a massive military machine that destroys the environment and subsidizes the worst companies. But maybe your lack of car makes you special.
I feel Skype + VNC form a good enough solution for many situations. I am working with my brother on a project like this and it is just as good as physically being at the same desk. The mouse and desktop apps seem almost as responsive as on a local computer. The sound is just as good as in person.
Safe to say I'm really, really excited about the future.