It seems obvious to me that industry outsiders are going to have a drastically different road map for self driving cars than the entrenched players.
Clearly the end game for self driving automobiles is far, far fewer cars in the world. In 25 years, relatively few people are going to be owning cars at all. You'll subscribe to a self-driving car service (or maybe your government will run it) and whenever you want to go somewhere, you'll enter your automotive needs into your mobile device and five minutes later the appropriate self-driving cycle/car/truck/van will pick you up in front of your house.
There won't be a need for every family to own 3 cars that spend 90% of the day turned off and taking up parking space. Of course Google and Detroit aren't going to see eye to eye on this...
I wanted to take this further to get some utilization numbers.
1. In 2012, Americans spent 1 hour/day travelling (where work travel is about half of that). That's about 4% of their time. [1]
2. There were 253M registered vehicles in 2012 [2].
3. There were 313M people in the US in 2012 [3].
So a first-order approximation of vehicle utilization: (253M vehicles * 1 year) / (313M people * 4% time travelling * 1 year) = 2.2 trillion vehicle-hours / 110 billion travel hours = 3.4% utilization. So that "90% of the day turned off and taking up parking space" is more like 96%.
It would be interesting to take this further to expenditures. Consumers spent an average of $9,000 on transportation in 2012 [4]. If we increase vehicle utilization to, say, 21% from 3% using a subscription/micro-rental service like parent described, and assuming per-vehicle costs are constant, how much would the average consumer save on transportation costs? And how much would we save on parking space?
Mind you, self-driving cars can find computing traveling-salesman routes slightly less of a hassle than humans do—and so punching into your phone that you'd be willing to carpool if it meant arriving faster would likely mean a car (whose occupant had expressed the same preference) immediately stopping on its way to wherever it was going and picking you up. Only the people who want complete privacy will have to wait.
Extend this thought to its logical conclusion, and you realize that (self-driving) commuter busses and light rail can be programmed into the network as plain-old cars that happen to have high occupant capacities. You set that you're willing to take a bus (and one is en route), it'll stop for you. You set that you want a less noisy/drunk/homeless-filled experience, and you get a car instead.
You could also set a price threshold, where everyone in the car must already be willing to pay as much as you are to be picked up there and then. Low threshold—a taxi-like sedan comes. High threshold—a limo.
You beat me to posting this. I think we'll see automated public transport using minivans that can quickly navigate smaller streets. The route home might be different each time, but you'll always get an indication of ETA. Part of the hassle of catching a bus is the last mile and the wait. If a vehicle is arriving shortly after you hail it (or prebook it) and right at your location, those two factors are eliminated.
For the privacy factor, I think people will just get used to it as they have with current public transport, or tiers will be in operation (as you suggested) or someone will inevitably design a pod-based vehicle with seats facing port and starboard and a clever door system.
I do wonder if people will be uncomfortable with other passengers knowing exactly where they live and work? Perhaps designating pickup from the nearest corner would help with that, and pricing that encourages that (to save extra turns down side streets) will help too.
I really do think this is the solution - if carpooling can be made as simple as checking a box, with time savings, and money savings, the only downside would be sharing a car, and a lot more people would do so. Demand and traffic would both be controlled by dynamically pricing 'private' vehicles.
Your phone could also learn your departure time, and automatically determine when there are cars available / pricing is optimal to tell you to leave.
You could road test this idea with existing public transport. It would be interesting to see buses turned loose with GPS guidance say, within a city centre.
That's the crux of the problem. You have to build for maximum capacity, even though that happens comparatively very rarely. The electric grid faces the same problem, perhaps worse.
I remember an enlightening graph of power grid demand over a year sorted by demand. (Which I can't find for the life of me.) The vast majority of the time is spent very near the average, but a very small amount of time needs almost twice the average, and another very small amount of time demands half the average. The problem is, the grid must be big enough to supply that 3-times-a-year double the average demand, which just sits there idly the rest of the year.
I imagine demand for transportation is similar though not as exaggerated.
There's no reason the grid must accommodate peak demand. Two other options are simple failure to meet demand (you only get 10 amps) and dynamic pricing to reduce demand (if air conditioning costs $100/hr you might not use it).
The costs associated with throttling/halting these sectors far outweighs the cost of overbuilt infrastructure. Electricity is already sold by the megawatt in "day ahead" commodity form so businesses have already priced this information into the market.
That chart is misleading because it shows consumption of all sources of energy, not just electricity. We don't use 28% of our electricity for transportation (yet!). Listings of electricity consumption by sector [1] show that the residential sector consumes the biggest share of electricity in the US. And the residential sector also has the highest seasonal variability in power consumption [2]. So better demand control for consumers might actually pay off pretty well.
Bingo. If getting to work at 9 AM costs me five times more than getting to work at 7, you can be sure I'll figure out a way to do the latter. Motivating large chunks of the population to think about rush hour would be a "good thing".
> What if you are a fireman and you need to get to your shift? Can those burning people wait?
There's no particular reason emergency service shift changes need to be synced to the common business day -- indeed, my intuition would be that accident timing patterns would make this a bad idea independent of traffic impacts -- but there's also no reason that employers with employees for which they have strong fixed-time needs couldn't subsidize (or, in the case of public necessity where the employer is the government, exempt) their employees traffic fees.
> Can everyone dynamically shift business routines due to "demand"?
Yes, they can -- but, of course, there is a cost (which varies from situation to situation) in doing so. Of course, there's also a cost -- particularly an externalized cost born by others -- of traffic. If you effectively internalize the external cost (i.e., make it born by the people making the decision to engage in the action), then behavior should reflect the true costs and benefits resulting from the action.
A friend of mine works in energy and once said "If roads catered for traffic the way power networks cater for power demand, the Sydney Harbour Bridge would be 100 lanes wide."
That is easily solved the good old fashioned way - through prices. Charge more during the most popular times. Also note that the vehicles can spontaneously carpool - and could incentivize an existing rider. (Do you want a $5 discount on this journey if it goes 5 mins out of the way and you share the vehicle?)
And of course they can be different sizes (eg 13 people, or 23 people). Or a local small car can take you to a feeder location where you get on a big bus and the process reverses at the other end.
Sure you can still pay for your own reserved car, but it is likely to be even more expensive than pay as you ride.
The big problem with existing solutions like public transport and car pools is they are cumbersome at either end and require precise in advance organisation for timing and capacity, plus being inconvenient if you don't fit their deployment patterns. The major benefit of self driving cars will be algorithms can maximize utilisation and reduce individual costs. Owning your own car will look like a really bad decision by then.
You are proposing that this is easily solved by charging enough to enforce widespread, MASSIVE social change (that is, changing from a 9-5 commute schedule), which will be most punitive for those who also have least control over the behaviour being punished (as your job pays more, the likelihood of flexible hours increases). Unless your proposal comes along with "and use those fees to provide housing for people to live next to the Walmart/pharmacy/bank that they work in so they don't have to pay to commute" then it seems pretty damn inequitable.
It is already expensive at peak times - transport is not free in time or money.
The change doesn't have to be MASSIVE. For example shifting by 15 minutes may be enough to better match capacity. The most expensive would be point to point direct service for just you. But the driverless vehicle could pick up several people for a lower cost to them, but taking more time.
ie the worst case wouldn't be substantially different than today with its limits and hard routing/timing on public transport. It will also be easier for competition to come in compared to today which will help.
It is still possible to provide social services. For example in Britain my over 65 parents get free bus passes. Lower income people can be subsidised in similar ways.
This is a really great observation - I think we need to think of it less as a 'car rental' service, and more as a ride rental service. If people are comfortable sharing the car with other people, it could automatically assign a group of people to a certain car as they walk out of the building. Essentially little buses, except they don't have to stop as often. A side benefit would be less cars on the road = less traffic.
That is assuming the same type of cars and same driving patterns will be used. I actually think cars have a horrible user experience so there is plenty of room for innovation and improvement; you are stuck in a seat, can't move your legs much, have no workspace in the back seat, I have to maintain my own car, gasoline is expensive, etc.
Probably even less utilization if you take into account public transportation, which probably make up for a significant portion of commute time in large urban areas.
I'm really not sure that this is the case at all. Taxis already exist in basically every city in the US, as do vanpools, bus services and heavily subsidized public transportation, but we still have significant rates of car ownership. Self-driving cars do improve on the "human-driven-car" model because they have faster reaction times and the like, but the aspect of self-driving cars where you don't have to be in control of the vehicle isn't anything new.
It's certainly possible that cost was the major driver of these sorts of things, but my guess is that the convenience of having your own car ready at all times will remain paramount. It's also plausible to me that airbnb-like services renting out self-driving cars will be common, which would simultaneously alleviate the need to own a car and reduce the cost of car ownership.
I imagine the switch to primarily self-driving car services will have a greater impact in cities, where the density will be high enough that the latency between wanting a car and getting one will be smallest. If a car has to drive for 20 minutes just to pick you up and take you to the store to get some milk, you'll probably just want your own car.
I've frequently heard the idea bounced around that self driving cars will eliminate the need for ownership. I'm glad you mentioned taxis, because it brings up something that has bugged me about this idea for a while. I live in a metro area of 200,000. This metro area has exactly zero taxis. (We do have a free ride services that is funded by the local city for getting the elderly and disabled around, which probably has six cars.) The three reasons are size density and wealth. As density goes down, mileage to get from point A to point B goes up, which means costs go up. It also means that cars are potentially occupied for longer periods, so you would likely need more cars to service the same population in denser areas. So ultimately taxis are not economically feasible here. So because you don't have to hire drivers, those costs go down and potentially lower the barrier to entry, but you have potentially more expensive vehicles, and higher maintenance costs that may somewhat offset the savings. So you could charge more for the service here, but being a poor city, would anyone here pay the extra costs? Enough to sustain the business model? Or will we have to suffer with significantly worse service--wait an hour to get picked up. I'm sure the business model would work in SF, NYC, Chicago, but here it will have to come down a lot in cost. Also (to the parent poster,) I just see the possibility that a migration like this could take place within 25 years just ludicrous.
In 1899 there were about ~8,000 automobiles in the United States [1]. In 1924 Ford was producing over 2M Model T's per year [2].
In 1903 we saw the powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft by the Wright brothers. In 1927 somebody flew an airplane across the Atlantic ocean. [3]
I would like to point out that all of your examples are of expanding industries, not industries that underwent large societal, cultural, and legal transformations into entirely different industries. Society, culture, and laws are made for expanding industries, they have to be evolved and rewritten for industries of change.
So I am going to have to disagree, 25 years would have to be the most optimistic kind of prediction, assuming that all players are willing and pro-active, rather than passive and resistive (both in society and legally speaking).
At first, someone might own their own robo-car but make it available (through some brand/software) to service other people on demand. Imagine it's called "Uber Libre" or something so it leverages an app and efforts in major cities. Assuming that insurance/security is covered by Uber Libre, the risk to the vehicle owner will be reduced.
That person will profit from their vehicle whenever they're not using it (and tax free against the cost of the vehicle?). They'll either build up a fleet or others will catch wind and do the same. Someone buying a new vehicle will be choosing between the default or something that self-drives only them around or something they can share with friends or rent out to the masses. An equilibrium will be reached where the needs of the city are covered for the costs involved.
Want to go to a restaurant and drink more than you could and still drive? Easy. Want to have a truck show up and help you move a sofa? Easy.
25 years is not that long. To me it feels like it was yesterday. And everything today feels pretty much the same. People still work pretty much the same sorts of jobs, at the same hours, still eat Big Macs for lunch, they own cars that work pretty much the same as then, get pretty much the same fuel economy, live in homes or apartments that are pretty much like the ones then, they buy their food in supermarkets that are pretty much the same as then, etc.
I know I would never want to share my car with strangers, any more than I would want to let strangers live in my house while I am at work. This may change I suppose, but if it does I think it will be more by force than by choice.
Not disagreeing that many things stay the same as you listed, but at the same time, there have been incremental changes everywhere that would be noticeable in their absence years back. I perform a job that didn't exist 25 years ago, I stay in touch with friends in new ways and so on.
25 years from now, we'll still eat similar things, use similar vehicles, transact in similar ways, but I think that the gap between the front of technology and those old things will widen. We won't see current cars quickly replaced, but I'm confident that Google & co will make decent progress with each year on their technology, then regulation, then adoption.
As for sharing your car, remember that eventually generations of future drivers will know little different. Or gradual cost pressure or advantages will influence decisions. It will start with use of vehicles in resort/campus-type situations, then eventually start to replace second vehicles then may be the only car for some people.
Driving age in Australia is 16. So there are another 9 years before someone is born who will reach driving age by the 25 year mark.
Taxis are expensive and slow. There are relatively few of them, so you spend 20-40 minutes waiting for them to pick you up, and then pay them 5x-10x as much as it would cost you to drive yourself.
If self-driving cars were even half as common as regular cars, there would be a dozen parked on the street by your house. You wouldn't need to wait more than a few minutes, and cost could be lower than standard car ownership due to better utilization of the vehicles.
The whole point of mentioning taxis was that the part about self-driving cars where you don't have to control the vehicle and where the vehicle just goes and picks someone else up after you are done with it is already served by taxis. It's definitely likely that self-driving cars will displace taxis, but it's not clear that it will actually be all that cost-effective in most places. The argument to be made is that the driver is such a large fraction of the cost of a taxi that reducing that to a single fixed-cost addition of a computer + sensors is going to dramatically change the pricing structure in such a way that people will give up personal vehicles.
I think that's very likely not true in most places where population densities are low. There will probably be some rebalancing, but I don't think it will be as dramatic a shift as the parent comment made it out to be.
I'm in a town in a ~2,000 square mile county, where the county population is less than 40,000 and the town is a bit more than 10,000. There is a county transit authority (which is subsidized) that runs a couple of buses and a few taxis (I don't think they are subsidized, but labor here is cheap and it isn't a hard place to find your way around).
There's lots of places with lower population density than that, but the viability of something that costs 60 or 70 percent of what a taxi costs kicks in at some pretty low point.
They are great containers of stuff, you can leave tools, laptops , spare clothes etc in them without having to load and unload every time you want to go to work.
They're also status markets, so I suspect the rich will want to keep their own cars for this purpose which will lead to the middle class also being hesitant to give them up.
You also have logistical problems like what if I take an autonomous car for the day and decide I need to take a long cross country trip in it?
You also have special requirements for some cars, like perhaps I need access to a car with a lot of seats or I want to be able to carry a trailer and I can't guarantee that a car fit for this purpose will always be available.
If you assume the point that people would prefer to use self-driving car services over having their own vehicle, then I imagine this wouldn't be as big a factor, since we already have a ton of unused vehicle capacity (with most people driving around with 1 or 2 people in a car that seats 4). You can imagine that modern car services with a significant customer base would be able to coordinate "carpool" type situations to significantly decrease spare capacity.
If I assumed that, sure. However, I'm not sure that I should. We're now talking about a situation that contains a highly social aspect.
Are you comfortable travelling with others who you don't know? I know many young women would be somewhat uncomfortable about climbing into a vehicle with some random stranger.
Even without that aspect, you've got to be around people you may not get along with. On buses people can mostly keep to themselves, and it's more or less expected; at least in my society; that they will - how much of that would be true in the tighter confines of a car?
And are you prepared to keep to someone else's schedule? A mismatch of five minutes may be more significant than we expect.
I'm not saying it won't happen. What I am saying is that I wouldn't care to make a strong commitment to the idea that in twenty five years or so most people won't have a car, or that there'll be fewer cars on the road. I can easily imagine a future in which most people decide that it's worth owning a car, even a self-driving one, for the privacy and convenience aspects.
Well, I mean, I'm on your side, I don't think that self-driving cars are going to cause a huge spike in people using car services because having a car you don't have to personally drive is not new technology at all. This may be somewhat cheaper than having a person driving you around or something, but I really think that on balance people will end up having their own personal vehicles.
All I was responding to was that if you grant the parent comment's assertion that people will move to car services, it's very likely to me that rush hour will be the one problem that is very easy to solve, because you would have such a large volume of people all going to the same place. Even the issues with personal space and shared vehicles aren't that big of a problem - self-driving cars don't need to look the way they look now. You could have 4 separate compartments in them, so that it's not possible to touch or interact with the other passengers, for example. (Also, I've participated in casual carpool in both New York and San Francisco, and it works remarkably well - many people, including young women, do travel every day in the car of a complete stranger that they don't know - and it's even more dangerous, because it's controlled by a human driver!)
My guess is, however, that in the future the hardware costs of under-utilized vehicles will be considered to be much lower than the "inconvenience costs" of not having your own vehicle, and rates of car ownership won't be dramatically affected by the advent of the self-driving car.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were. There are plenty of up-and-coming cities with relatively low car ownership (and lots of growth) today. An autonomous-zip-car-ish offering wouldn't have to displace existing motorists to become dominant in such cities. It would just have to outgrow individual-ownership, which would seem more likely than not. Particularly as it subsumes the entire cab and rental industry.
It's just a question of "at what point do the consumer-facing products actually exist?" over that 25-year scale.
Far fewer cars possibly, but a big increase in vehicle miles.
At present cars largely follow us round. If they're not doing this but are instead moving on to the next occupant, the odds are that that person won't be in the exact same location, and the next journey, and....
(Also bear in mind a huge amount of the demand clusters around start and finish times for offices and schools. The possible utilisation is significantly lower than one might think.)
If self-driving cars working on a taxi model rather than a personal chauffeur model become a thing, we're going to get used to seeing traffic jams consisting significantly of empty autonomous cars. That won't be especially popular.
> If self-driving cars working on a taxi model rather than a personal chauffeur model become a thing, we're going to get used to seeing traffic jams consisting significantly of empty autonomous cars. That won't be especially popular.
Autonomous cars that are "deadheading" (traveling empty to their next point) could be ushered into segregated high speed lanes/corridors (100+ mph), as no passenger means no safety issue.
I'm pretty sure it would be easy to predict the spikes in usage. In the mornings people mostly want cars near their homes to take them to work. In the afternoon/evening they want cars near work to take them home.
Even without knowing this it's pretty obvious that if you have a large portion of users heading to one area (increasing the density of users in that area) they'll probably want to leave that area or move around it so you should have a higher density of cars in that area even if they aren't all being used.
I'm skeptical about the ownership projections. It's very hard to beat the latency of owning a car that sits ready to go in the garage.
Owning a self-driving car could be interesting though. Perhaps you could let it participate in a ride provider while you're at work or sleeping, having it return well before you may need to use it. Also, it enables some interesting new activities such as you drive to a boat launch, take off in a canoe, and have the car drive downstream and wait for you.
> Clearly the end game for self driving automobiles is far, far fewer cars in the world. [...] Of course Google and Detroit aren't going to see eye to eye on this.
Arguably, reducing the number of cars in existence at any given time doesn't reduce the number of cars sold. Rather, you'd have to reduce the rate at which they wear out and/or reduce peoples' reliance on transportation.
So are we only talking about Major metropolitan areas? Because to completely displace car ownership I think it will take more then that. Also I would guess that the percentage of people who own cars in large cities is already significantly lower then most other places.
Incumbents are correct that adding evolutionary features will allow maturation of technology and public acceptance. However, you cannot use that route to get to a completely autonomous vehicle. There will almost certainly be a red area once you get to the "car only needs human attention X% of the time" phase, where X will be somewhere between 60 and 1. Once the human is allowed to tune out, they're going to and won't be able to come back fast enough in many many circumstances. Heck, that happens today when X is 100.
Once you find X, you're going to have to stop and/or back off a little on automation. You can't just keep on pushing towards 0. I presume Google has already found the X point during their program.
Google is ultimately right to be aiming at fully auto if the goal is fully auto, not just "driver assistance." There's a big area where half measures just won't work. I wager it'll take quite a lot of work to get to that goal, but it at least seems achievable. And appropriate for an entity not already "in the business".
Exactly this. The moment you make an autonomous vehicle where some period of time can be done with no driver interaction, drivers will fall asleep. What do you do when it's time to get the driver back into the action, and they don't respond?
If expressway shoulders were consistently safe to pull over upon, that would be a good approach, but they're not.
"Some industry observers have suggested that Google should pair up with Tesla, which is also developing self-driving technology and which shares Google's Silicon Valley mindset."
I wish the article had expanded more on this topic. Both companies could make significant gains by partnering and cutting out the old money from the automotive industry. Not that I'm saying I hope that happens, I'm neutral on that matter for now, but I'd like to see a lot more R&D done on autonomous driving tech in my lifetime.
It is much better to develop self driving technology in-house rather than risk being stuck licencing technology from Google in perpetuity. The software is the easy part. The regulatory and societal hurdles are the hard part and Google is already working on that for free.
A big selling point of Tesla cars is the performance, which is irrelevant if you are not driving. Teslas are sold as fun to drive, to people who like driving.
"Moreover, a study by consulting firm KPMG last year found that American consumers would trust brands like Google and Apple more for self-driving cars than they would automakers."
Which reminded me of this from a while back:
"Early concept research had made it clear that cueing the GM name resulted in a substantially lower quality perception and credibility, whereas cueing a Japanese name (such as Sony) did the reverse."
Driving home from visiting a friend recently I had a lightbulb moment on self-driving cars; much as I really enjoy driving (heck, I've got a sports car), the second a mainstream car with an autonomous mode becomes remotely affordable for me I will buy it.
I confess I don't understand why the focus is so strongly on the taxi-replacement market; it's interesting, sure, but largely unviable outside metropolitan areas. It can't serve people who go shopping and want to use their cars as lockers during the shop, or people who leave sports gear in the car while they work then go to the gym later, or a number of other cases. Who pays for them? It'd be an expensive business to set up and you'd have regular arguments about taxi licenses that'd make the fuss about Uber look tiny. Who'd clean them? You bet people would do unsavoury things inside them. No; it's a small, awkward to serve.
Fit a 'self-drive' button to my next mainstream car though, and you have a killer product. You can keep it just like your normal car whenever you want, but when you don't - just press the button, program the navigation and do what you want. That night I'd have slept. This evening I'd probably have read on my way home from work. The technical challenges are no greater and it's much easier to set up.
That's a killer app, not an autonomous taxi. Your car, with an invisible chauffeur on demand. The first manufacturer to properly pull it off won't be able to keep up with demand.
> I confess I don't understand why the focus is so strongly on the taxi-replacement market; it's interesting, sure, but largely unviable outside metropolitan areas.
Yeah, but metropolitan areas contain lots of people, and also fairly high concentrations of money, so serving them is particularly attractive.
> It can't serve people who go shopping and want to use their cars as lockers during the shop, or people who leave sports gear in the car while they work then go to the gym later, or a number of other cases.
Well, sure, it doesn't serve the "use a vehicle as a stationary storage facility" role very well. OTOH, if it sufficiently reduces the per-use cost of using a vehicle as a vehicle compared to traditional ownership or taxi-with-a-driver, it can free up money for alternative, at-destination lockers.
> Who pays for them?
Lots of possibilities, there: cities (perhaps particularly suburbus) as last (few) mile(s) connectors for mass transit systems. Or companies that want to disrupt the taxi market.
> It'd be an expensive business to set up and you'd have regular arguments about taxi licenses that'd make the fuss about Uber look tiny.
So, maybe Google just does it directly. Its not like they don't have a huge pile of money to pay the startup costs.
> Who'd clean them? You bet people would do unsavoury things inside them.
So, like a hotel, you do a user agreement that covers that, and have internal video monitoring (like most public transport) to identify the source of problems and assign responsibility.
> Fit a 'self-drive' button to my next mainstream car though, and you have a killer product.
Yeah, that incremental upgrade is the more obvious direct market for consumers, and its easy to see why conservative players are focussing on it. Its also not surprising that Google's vision is bigger and less conservative.
While taxis are one likely use for these cars I expect they'll also replace existing car share/co-op programs. I used to live in an urban area where I didn't need a car 99% of the time. I was in a co-op so I could book a car for a few hours the other 1% of the time. I don't see anything preventing someone from booking an autonomous car for a few hours while they get all of their shopping done. This type of use can also replace a second car for some families.
You have enough money to own a car, which implies you're old.
Very few of my age cohort have a driver's license. Even if we had the time and money to get licensed, due to student loan debt we can't afford a car, or insurance, which is much more expensive for the young.
I'm pretty young (22) and the overwhelming majority of my peers are licensed and usually have cars (disclosure: I don't have one myself). Although I do believe youth car ownership rates are much lower than in the past, there are a lot of places where it is near impossible to live without a car. The cars young people drive are usually cheap and old (potentially hand-me-downs from their parents or older siblings) and they only have liability insurance, but it is possible for a lot of people.
This discussion should probably start from commercial rather than passenger vehicles. In the latter category the driver is usually the owner as well as the cargo and the principle agent (my driving pleasure). There is an inherent distortion in the discussion around what the current drivers imagine they'd want.
Commercial vehicles live or die on their economics alone. Separating concerns in this way makes the issues clearer. Assuming they become established in the commercial market, producers can then address the consumer market. At that point, car drivers may rationally decide whether they'd prefer to pay the prevalent market premium for not using a self-driving vehicle.
Amazon might never deliver by drone, but the market for micro-deliveries by autonomous, wheeled vehicle could be huge.
This reads a whole lot like an industry that has lost touch. If you read some of the stories out of SpaceX when they talked about Aerospace companies quoting 6 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a part, that SpaceX turned around and did in a few weeks, you realize that there is the status quo, and the folks who don't accept the status quo, and the people who try to enforce the status quo but have forgotten (or never knew) why it was that way in the first place.
Self driving cars are sexy and all but there is so much that could be done with a much simpler system.
The old 'personal rapid transit' ideas come to mind. For those too young to remember, that was a system where the cars would show up at the station when paged. The cars were on tracks but travelling either on a 'through' track (no stops) or pulling into the station when passengers enter/exit. Built using rubber wheels on a paved "track" such a system could be built more cost effectively than highways (no trucks) and with much better efficiency than metros (your car stops at your entry station and exit station only.). All the technology to build that exists today, and it would be massively more efficient than BART, but it isn't even being advocated.
Google doesn't have the experience with liability that traditional automobile manufacturers are and I bet they tend to brush over items that made the other guys pause.
Its one thing to deliver ads and mail, a simple mistake or improper product usage by the end user doesn't hurt someone, but cars are a whole different ball game.
and don't underestimate that some people who get in one will try to cause problems.
>Its one thing to deliver ads and mail, a simple mistake or improper product usage by the end user doesn't hurt someone, but cars are a whole different ball game.
Except for when they released Google Buzz and exposed a bunch of private data to the world, endangering some people who were relying on their trust in google to keep themselves hidden from abusive exes and/or various other dangerous sorts of person. Oopsie!
> Google doesn't have the experience with liability that traditional automobile manufacturers
Consider how Elon Musk is disrupting entire industries by refusing to think like this. IMO inexperience can be an advantage when competing with an entrenched industry. And experience can easily be bought where needed by a well funded company.
There's a big mapping problem that could maybe be solved by selling cars that have plenty of sensor hardware--can figure out curb positions to the inch and all that--but at first only use it for semi-autonomous features (lane assist, auto emergency braking, etc.). As people drive them, they're recording a ton of data that can be sent back to the mothership to build detailed maps will be useful to provide full-autonomous driving later.
Google might effectively pay for the data and field testing they're getting from early users by charging a lower price than you'd ordinarily expect for all that fancy hardware.
I don't know how all this will, in fact, play out; I'm just saying driving assistance and full autonomy don't have to be rival approaches.
This is why I think the major "car companies" of the future won't be the current "auto companies", but the current major tech companies. The "tech" part is going to become increasingly a bigger competitive advantage, while the "auto" part will be completely commoditized, and you'll see current car companies going bankrupt or being bought out by the major tech companies. I think Tesla is mostly part of the "tech companies" than the auto companies.
There is a point where physical improvements on platforms are well into diminishing returns and the bigger improvements are in software and control (the classic "software is eating the world" thing applies here).
I don't have a problem with this but I suspect the automotive industry might ;)
Just to clarify, it seems that by "tech companies" you mean "software companies".
I think it is a little funny that a company like AirBnB would qualify as a tech company (even though I would classify it as a travel agency that uses technology) whereas GM would not (I would consider GM an out and out tech company).
But I agree that software will have more of an impact on vehicle sales performance in the future, I'm only objecting to the idea that software=tech.
“We’d say, ‘Well you don’t really know that much. And we’re not going to put our name on a project like that because if something goes wrong, we have a lot more to lose.’”
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I think that says a iot about the automaker point of view. They have experience with being sued for defects decades later, and they know the story of Audi and alleged "unintended acceleration"
I just don't see computers being able to be better drivers then humans. Especially when dealing with something a programmer hasn't thought of or situations which are hard to predict.
I would definitely would prefer my taxi driver to be a person than a computer. (and honestly the trip would take twice as long in the city with a computer driver)
Clearly the end game for self driving automobiles is far, far fewer cars in the world. In 25 years, relatively few people are going to be owning cars at all. You'll subscribe to a self-driving car service (or maybe your government will run it) and whenever you want to go somewhere, you'll enter your automotive needs into your mobile device and five minutes later the appropriate self-driving cycle/car/truck/van will pick you up in front of your house.
There won't be a need for every family to own 3 cars that spend 90% of the day turned off and taking up parking space. Of course Google and Detroit aren't going to see eye to eye on this...