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.
Safe to say I'm really, really excited about the future.