Autonomous driving cars

[usedtobe]

Every new technology has a different adaptation rate.

Now, in the US, both the (remaining) Boomers and Gen X viewed driving and car ownership as great milestones in life. “Cold, dead hand” approach to SDC.

The new urban millennials are the early adapters of rideshare and zipcar (membership club with by-the-hour rates for a wide variety of vehicles).

They and their eventual children will be the make-or-break market for this technology.
My data point: learned to drive in hilly narrow roads prone to ice over (now called “black” ice).
You either learned how to drive or died trying (quite literally).
Give me a ground-hugging coupe or roadster with instant acceleration and a 5-speed on a hilly course and I’m in Paradise.
(and there had damned well not be a SDC putting along ahead of me)

[PastTense]

OP, cars only used 4% of the time… Actually only a small percent of your possessions are going to meet this criteria (about an hour a day). What are you doing about sharing the rest of the stuff?

[Flyer]

@Machine_Elf

Engines do pretty good when you keep them running. Cold-starts are the thing that causes a lot of the wear: pistons/rings don’t seal well because they’re not up to full operating temp, and (for port-injected gasoline engines) there’s a lot of liquid fuel splashing onto the cylinder walls, compromising lubrication. If Random Joe runs his engine 5-10 miles between cold starts, the pistons/rings/cylinders are going to have significant wear by the time he accumulates 100,000 miles (10,000-20,000 cold-starts); he should expect some oil consumption. OTOH, if a taxi driver runs his engine 100 miles between starts, then by the time he hits 100K miles (1000 cold-starts), his engine is still going to be very healthy. As the Jalopnik article indicates, the engine can be healthy for several hundred thousand miles.

Not sure what happens for a single family sharing a SDC. The utilization surely won’t be 75%; if one driver results in 4% utilization, then a DINK couple sharing one SDC might expect 8% utilization. If the engine is still warm/hot when the second user gets into it, then that’s not really a true cold-start, so the engine is better off for it. I don’t think they should expect 500K miles out of it, but at 100,000 miles, the engine will likely be in better shape than it would with a single driver; they’d be more willing to keep the car for 200,000 miles or more.

Similarly, many people park their cars outside, where the sun takes its toll on paint and upholstery based on calendar time, not utilization. In many parts of the country, salty winter roads also chew up the body. An SDC with >8% utilization will be in better shape at 100,000 miles than a conventional car with 4% utilization.

Bottom line, a well-utilized SDC would not get worn out in 18 months; I would still expect it to be in good shape for many years. In addition, if you only have one car, you free up space in your garage for other junk, like bicycles, motorcycles, and a garage band. Or if you pay for parking, then you pay for less parking. Or you can get by in a house with a single-car garage.

But very, very few modern cars get scrapped because the engine wears out; they get scrapped because something else (or several something elses) wears out, and the repair would cost more than the car is worth.

200k miles of driving creates the same number of bumps, jars, stops for red lights, etc., regardless whether it takes 2 years or 30 years to reach that odometer reading.

[RTFirefly]

@Dewey_Finn

Self-driving cars and car sharing don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. Plenty of people already use car sharing services, especially those in congested cities, where parking is hard to find and expensive, and a car is needed only infrequently. Most of the time, you use public transit, walk or use a taxicab. But once a week or so, you need to make a major shopping trip to Costco or IKEA or perhaps you want to visit a friend in the suburbs who is nowhere near a commuter rail station, so perhaps you use a car sharing service then.

I strongly disagree with this. First of all, if you have self-driving cars, Zipcar-style car-sharing services aren’t limited to high-density areas anymore. As things are now, you need to be able to walk to a Zipcar location, but if the Zipcar can drive itself to you, you can be a few miles away.

With self-driving cars, you’d still likely want to own the car capacity you use every day. But as things stand, most of us who live in low-density areas (i.e. suburbs and beyond) have to own enough car capacity for your family’s peak use, whether that involves bigger cars to transport the whole family in one vehicle, or enough cars so each person old enough to drive can have their own car, or both. That will go away in the era of self-drivers.

My prediction is that if self-driving cars become a reality, within a generation the typical car will carry just one person, because that’s the capacity the vast majority of people need the vast majority of the time, and on those relatively infrequent occasions when they need a bigger car, they’ll reerve a multi-passenger Zipcar.

[treis]

@Shagnasty

I am not a communist in any sense of the word and never plan to be (that includes girlfriends, spouses or anyone for that matter). Nobody but me drives my vehicles and I use them for a lot more than basic transportation. For example, in my current SUV, I have every piece of recreational equipment I would want to use in the back ranging from an inflatable boat to a basketball, tennis equipment, a fishing rod and even survival gear. I like using it any time the opportunity arises including on my lunch break.

I love driving, hate other people messing with my stuff and am practically allergic to public transportation (shared cars are still public transportation in my mind). I want a great sound system programmed just the way I want it and a stash of some of my favorite books and magazines stored neatly so that I have access to them any time I am bored. All of that is incompatible with a shared vehicle. My iPhone just won’t cut it.

In short, not no but hell no. It sounds great if everyone else does it because it will free up a bunch of parking spaces but I will be keeping it personal and private. Can you even tell an autonomous car that you want to stop beside the road to pee or just cruise the strip to see what is going on? If not, those are some other huge drawbacks.

And what are you going to do when stores stop building parking lots?

Ford said something to the effect of “If I asked my customers what they wanted they’d have said a faster horse”. People are treating driverless cars as the exact same thing as regular cars. They are not. It’s a revolution that will fundamentally change how we view and use transportation.

As I said above, parking is a huge concern when constructing buildings. A typical garage for a home is around $20,000 not including the land. Think about the cost of the land for that big box parking lot. Or a high rise garage in a city. These things are expensive and they’re going to stop building them.

Someone else mentioned that they won’t improve traffic or would even make it worse. But how much is commute time going to matter in the future? I don’t want a long commute because it’s wasted time. If I get a car that drives itself and provides me a reasonable place to work then my commute becomes time I can work. That changes my commute from wasted time to work time.

My car has 4 seats. 95% of the time it’s just me. Me + 1 covers 99% of the time. It’s only very rarely that I have 4 people in my car. Yet, I bought a 4 seater just to cover that rare case. With driverless cars (and car sharing) I can use a single person car most of the time, a fancy one for date night, SUV to go camping, Minivan for the kids, etc. It also opens the possibility of things like rolling hotels. If you want to take the kids to Disneyland you leave at 8pm, sleep while the car drives you, and you’re there in the morning when you wake.

These are just a few things I thought of off the top of my head. Like most revolutionary inventions there are a multitude of changes that can’t be foreseen.