They seem to be coming and I wondered if we are seeing the last generation of people learning how to drive cars. Will driverless cars become so popular that teens will never learn to drive? They already seem to be getting their licenses at later ages then when I grew up. I don’t even see many kids on bikes anymore. I’ve a nephew 10 years old and he probably will still learn to drive, but kids 2 and under, most won’t. Just seems wrong to me.
it’s not like one day everybody will stop driving cars. It will take decades before it becomes economically feasible to replace all cars, trucks and service vehicles with driverless vehicles. I predict people will still be driving manual cars for the next 50 years at least.
Even when driverless cars become common on the roads it’ll still be a few decades before the requirement that a licensed driver be behind the wheel gets abolished (ditto for thw wheel itself).
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Not just later, but fewer people are getting licenses already. From an article on The Atlantic:
Anyway, I think it’s likely that driverless car services will become available soon, and become much cheaper than Uber is now. That would probably accelerate the trend of people not learning to drive.
You don’t need driverless cars to live without a driver’s license. My wife is a fully independent adult and never learned how to drive. Live in a walkable neighborhood, work close to home, use public transportation, and have Lyft on your phone. Many younger people are doing these things. It’s not a new idea. My grandmother did this (except for the Lyft part) until she learned to drive in her 60s.
I suspect fewer people will learn to drive over time but my guess is the percentage of 18-year-olds who have a driver’s license won’t drop into the single digits for a couple of decades at least. There will be plenty of manually operated cars around for a long time. Even some autonomous cars might have manually operable features that require licensing.
Maybe driving is going the way of hunting?
If the government decides they’re safer, its not hard to see them requiring all new cars be equipped with the function. And with the young being addicted to their phones already, why drive? Let the car do it. And if driverless cars are safer, then insurance companies will jack up premiums on older cars, making it harder to own. I don’t see anyone (with a few exceptions) who is born today will know how to drive a car. How many people today can drive a horse and buggy? The transition to new tech is quicker than you think.
Anecdotally, I was in my late 30s before I got my driver’s licence and bought a vehicle. (41 now and I still own my first car…)
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There’s a bit too much speculation in this one for a factual answer to be possible. Let’s try IMHO for now, but if this turns into a substantive debate then the mods there can kick it over to GD.
Moving thread from GQ to IMHO.
There is a good article on self driving cars in the June 2016 issue of Scientific American. The author emphasizes that most people seem to have unrealistic expectations of the current state of the art, and manufacturers are encouraging these fantasies. The dream of taking a nap in your car while it drives you to your destination (SAE level 5 automation) is far far away. He estimates it might happen by 2075 but not much earlier. A car that mostly drives itself but relies on a human for backup (SAE level 3) will probably never happen because of the problem of quickly capturing the attention of a driver who hasn’t been paying attention to the road. What probably will appear in the next decade are SAE level 4 cars, which drive themselves but only in limited situations, such as on specific designated roads or specially designed parking garages. It’s going to be a long time before a person can go anywhere they want in a car, without a driver’s license.
If driverless cars are safer, then owners of driverless cars will enjoy lower insurance premiums, just as drivers with lower risk profiles today already enjoy lower premiums than their more risk-prone cohorts.
However, driverless cars being safer won’t make older cars more risky than they currently are; there would thus be no justification for jacking premiums on older cars. Free-market competition should keep premiums right where they are.
It can be done, but adding those constraints severely restricts where you can choose to live. Urban areas generally have good/adequate public transit and are dense enough to be largely walkable. Suburbs, not so much. If you’re fortunate enough to snag a job in a big city and enjoy urban life, then you can certainly do just fine without a car (and in many such cases a car is actually more of a liability).
Unless laws change, and the penalty & liability for a human driver causing an accident becomes greater.
Actually if driverless cars are safer you would expect everyone’s insurance costs to go down since there are fewer dangerous drivers on the road. I actually anticipate a fully automatic car would have no insurance requirement for the owner and instead the car manufacturer will be liable in the event it causes an accident since their product was defective. After all if the car is truly driverless how can the occupant be responsible. Sort of like holding a passenger responsible for a taxi drivers accident.
Agree completely.
Which raises the issue that widespread availability of cars triggered the evolution of extensive suburbs in the post WWII years. Transportation systems and city construction co-evolve.
As we see more people being less inclined to drive, that *might *move the evolutionary pressure the other way. i.e. More interest in building or rebuilding walkable smaller cities & towns, mixing residential and commercial development by the block, not separating them by miles, etc.
Which is the causation and which is the caused won’t be obvious. Dense environments are vastly more energy efficient. So we may see a real pressure in that direction depending on how energy tech evolves.
We’re already seeing that. Some people are more interested in living in an urban, walkable environment and some cities are developing what I’ve heard called “transit villages” where the housing and offices are within a short walk of the train station.
Who is responsible for the ongoing maintenance of the vehicle? Perhaps not the “driver” (lead passenger actually), but certainly the owner. That entity (be it an individual or a rental company or …) will certainly have a need for liability insurance.
Given the pitiful state of most older cars’ maintenance today, it’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.
The liability will be what it always has been: you pay for the damage you do. The damage caused by a driver-induced crash in the future isn’t likely to be greater than it is now just because there is a preponderance of driverless cars. To cite a current analogy, I don’t believe drivers of vintage cars pay more in a crash, despite the fact that their car may lack ABS, stability control, lane departure monitor, automatic braking, and all the other amazing safety features being offered in late-model cars.
Re: penalty - if you mean tickets for violating the rules of the road, I suppose that could be regarded as a wildcard. Whether they go up or not will depend on whether governments want to use them as a tool to incent the transition to driverless. But if you’re a decent driver, then your citations are few and far between, so authorities would have to resort to rather large increases to make this a meaningful incentive.
I was thinking the liability for wrongful death may increase when traffic fatalities become less common. But I may be mistaken about that, since the monetary value of a person’s life is not strongly influenced by how likely he/she is to die from car crashes.
Also, it’s possible that whenever there is a collision between a human-operated and an automated car, it will be deemed to be the human driver’s fault.
Good drivers should take a hint from Russia and fit their car with a dash cam; this is true even now. Driverless cars are expected to be better than human drivers, but they won’t be infallible, and it’ll be nice to have video proof to back you up if someone else’s driverless car collides with you while you’re piloting your own vehicle.
The automated car will no doubt have a black box that will be used to determine the fault of the accident.