It’s not all doom and gloom. The full up, sticker price of an automated car with solid engineering, all the testing and sensors, etc will probably be a decent chunk of change higher. I’ve seen estimates of 10 grand. So if the average car sold is 50% more expensive, but less cars are sold due to overlap like you say, it might be a wash for the industry.
You’re also creating value. Right now, a car is worth a certain amount to people. I buy a car, I, in exchange for a certain amount of irreplacable hours concentrating, can go to a destination. It also costs me a certain amount of depreciation and fuel.
If I am sharing the car with others, that depreciation is less to me personally. If the car is robotic, I can be sleeping in the back instead. If it drives carefully like a robot, it probably costs less fuel.
Point is, once taking a trip somewhere is a matter of mashing the buttons on your cell phone to summon an automated car, climbing in, mashing the buttons for where you want to go (obviously the app would remember where you’ve been before so you don’t even need to remember the whole address), and going to sleep in the back…people might take a lot more trips.
What if you had a girlfriend in another city or a part time job there? If you can commute back and forth while asleep, and this was a reasonably safe thing to do, people might start doing this routinely.
So, due to more total miles being driven, it could actually result in more total demand for cars.
Eh. But it’s making empty trips back and forth. I know the answer will be “but it could ferry someone else on the way back!” I wouldn’t want that any more than some anonymous stranger in my guest room. For us living in rural areas that just isn’t going to work.
For many of us, our car is an extension of our home. When you live in the sticks, that’s really what it is. We don’t and can’t take public transportation, and frankly, don’t care to.
If you could offer me an autonomous car for the same price that I pay for transportation now, that will instantly appear when ever I need it I MIGHT be interested in it if it could do the things I need. It would of course need to have room for dogs and whatever gear I need for wherever and whenever I need to go. Oh, I’ll also have to ask it to haul our trash to the transfer station.
This is not asking too much as I already have that service now. It’s sitting in my driveway.
I can’t imagine that self driving cars will ever become mandatory. It may work for some, but there are just too many variables that would make it fail to work for many.
Mandatory (from the title of the thread) is the key word here. They might be able to work in very specific limited conditions, for the rest? um no.
One thought I have had about that is that there will arrive a class of driverless cars that consist entirely of an engine, transmission and chassis. The passenger compartment will be a pod which will be owned by individuals/families. You keep the pod wherever you are: home, work, etc. and the car itself comes to wherever you summon it, hooks up automatically to the pod, and then drives you wherever. Gives you that personal space you desire, without your having to pay for the mechanical/fuel end of the car, saving lots of money. And since the car’s driverless, fuel costs are saved, since the routes won’t be simple back-and-forths as most commuting is. And of course, further savings as you can have individual pods.
Mandatory, probably never. Ever-present - also in the title of the thread, yes. After all, while age restrictions on driving are mandatory, kids younger than of licensed age drive on farms all the time.
I’ve been driving for more than 25 years - in that time I’ve driven in snow all of about 5 or 6 times.
I’ve never needed to go anywhere, at anytime, where snow stopped me.
Sure - in some places at some times, snow will be a major problem.
However that doesn’t mean that just because those people can’t use an autonomous car during the winter months, such a car wouldn’t be a huge benefit in the summer and these never going to be a market for it in places that very rarely get snow.
You may as well say there’s never a market for jogging singlets because a Maine winter is too cold for them.
I can believe that self-driving cars will be mandatory in some urban areas (like Manhattan) for better traffic control. I can also imagine a legal premise: if one gets into a car accident while under human control then the penalties are much higher; it would be tantamount to reckless driving (this assumes that autopilot is much safer).
A simpler and cheaper method would be that there would be a variety of companies providing driverless car fleets that are out roving for passengers.
Some companies would promise to clean the passenger compartment after every passenger. There would be online reviews you could check to see what other users have to say.
There could be special-purpose cabins that could show up. Want to impress someone? Mash a few buttons on your phone and agree to pay more, and a car with a limo style passenger compartment and a minibar shows up.
I suspect that if self-driving cars are much safer than human driven cars, if a human driver is found at fault the driver’s license will be forfeit, for life, period, since you can’t argue necessity in a world of self-driving cars. The penalty for being at fault in an accident where people are injured would probably include jail time even for minor injuries, and very long sentences for major injuries. Much safer to let the car do the driving.
So, here is my question in all this: When will self-driving trains become ubiquitous? There are a lot of automated trains in the world now, but they are not the rule just yet. It would seem trains would be perfect for this technology - so why are automated trains not yet universal?
Good point. I remember reading after the most recent horrific Amtrak accident that it would not have occurred if technology that was supposed to be installed to prevent the train from speeding had been installed. There was some snafu involving bureaucracy, I believe. Driverless cars will undoubtedly face similar hurdles.