Is there any market research that indicates serious DEMAND for self driving cars?!

In My Humble Opinion
181

The question in this thread is whether or not there is a demand for such a car, not whether or not all cars will be replaced by self driving cars on a subscription service.

Some of those saying that they would not use such a car, infer that they also do not think that others would want to use such a car, and bring up problems that are either something that are not something that the vast majority need to deal with, or are problems that have already been dealt with, and are actually improved by the technology. Things like “how will we keep people from vandalizing them?” “how will there be enough cars to move everyone?” “what if there are not 3 people in a city that want to leave that city at 3 different times?” “what if there is a deer in the road?” “what about other bad driver?” “what if the road is flooded?”. These may be good things to bring up to make sure that they have been adequately addressed, but they are addressed, and don’t need to be repeated over and over, as though these are insurmountable problems, when they have already been surmounted.

The only true holdup that I see is the technology to develop the reliable self driving car, and it is hard to see exactly where we are on that, but I think that we have probably made more progress than many in this thread seem to think, given the nature of their concerns, like how it would react to pedestrians or wildlife or a flooded road.

Once self driving cars have achieved a high enough level of proven safety, I don’t see why people wouldn’t move to them. We have quite a number of bad drivers out there, who should not be driving, and the only reason that they are driving is because the bar for driving is set so low precisely due to the necessity of driving in most areas that do not have excellent public transport. Remove that necessity, and we can raise the bar.

I don’t know where exactly the cars are now, but I bet they are better than your “average” driver, and I guarantee that they are better than your worst 20% of drivers, and certainly better than any driver who is tired, distracted, inebriated, or angry.

And, in the long run, it is a bit of an all or nothing, or rather, just all. In a hundred or two hundred years, being able to drive a car will be as common a skill as riding a horse is now, and owning a car would be about as common as owning a horse is now. The only question is is the exact nature of the timeline.

182

A person with an up to date car today will hear an angry beep if he tries to change lanes next to you. Your car might beep also. A driverless car won’t run a light, and it will always be looking sideways also and thus at least try to avoid the red light runner. My wife was almost killed by one of these clowns, and she wasn’t even the first car through the green. It was inattention, not evil on his part.
It is not the car being perfect - it is the car being better than drivers today. Not that much of a challenge.

Unlike the mass of people, cars learn. Every new driver starts from zero, every new car starts with all that was learned by older models.

In the long run, that’s going to be your problem. In the short run you wight want other people to debug the cars. But in not very long the car will come with thousands of hours of experience in driving on LA freeways (which are more crowded but more sane than Bay Area ones) which will be a lot better than any person will have.

BTW, I see no reason that a computer can’t figure out that the traction control system isn’t working as well as you do and turn it off. I bet people complained about braking systems in the same way - now we accept ABS without much thought, since the computer can do a better job of applying the brakes than we can.

183

Oh, but you can. It’s called “infill development,” and it happens when land in less-dense (or otherwise underused) urban areas becomes valuable enough to bulldoze for higher-density uses. For example:

http://mrsc.org/home/explore-topics/planning/development-types-and-land-uses/infill-development-completing-the-community-fabric.aspx

Also, a lot of municipalities are considering getting rid of zoning for single-family houses specifically with the goal of increasing density (among other goals) To wit:

It’s not like a city that drops single-family zoning will start knocking down existing houses. Rather, these zoning changes are designed to increase density over a long period of time.

Speaking of changes over time:

Yes; that is exactly the plan. The disconnect, I think, is the time scale you’re imagining. In other words, you may remain at your employer and never move, but over a long period of time, it’s likely that workers in general will live closer to their employers (in general). So maybe neither you nor your colleagues will move, but as the labor force turns over, the average employee of the average company will live a lot closer to work than they do now. I’m no millennial, but many of them consider living within walking distance of work to be a huge perk.

(I do too. My commute is an easy 20-mile drive, but I’d much rather dump it and walk 10 minutes instead).

I’ve read a lot in this thread that seems (to me) to reflect the urban/rural divide in the US. Lots of people (including some in this thread) like living in the country. I prefer the city, but my living in the city doesn’t preclude anyone from living in the country. Self-driving cars aren’t going to force people out of the countryside.

Many ideas and technologies that work tremendously well in cities are unworkable in rural areas. Similarly, lots of rural concepts make no sense in urban areas. This sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but people like to say, “That idea is ridiculous because it wouldn’t work for me.”

Well, no. The idea doesn’t work in your context right now. It may be the best thing since sliced bread for people in other contexts, or perhaps your context will change in the future. But it’s not an either/or debate.

Self-driving cars are coming for sure. To me, it seems reasonable to expect that self-driving car services will replace a lot of privately-owned cars in cities. As you go out to the suburbs, more people will choose to own their self-driving cars. In rural areas, the vast majority of people will own their cars, just as they do now. It’s a continuum. That doesn’t break rural lifestyles and it makes a lot of sense for urban-dwellers. Beware false dichotomies.

184

I missed the edit window, but I wanted to clarify that although I quoted Voyager, the second part of my post was directed more toward some arguments Enipla and others have advanced.

I should also acknowledge that my point about false dichotomies basically duplicated part of K9Befriender’s post.

185

You do, however, need to phase out privately owned cars to make there be no privately-owned cars and everyone use some kind of ride-share or car-share service instead. I was specifically objecting to the idea of privately owned cars becoming obsolete that was floated in this thread.

Sure, I’ll think of smartphones. And guess what? People still use non-smart phones, and even land-lines; despite their utility for some people, smart phones have not ended the use of dumb phones. Most businesses have a plethora of non-smart phones in their office, for a quick example. In the same way, even if ride/car sharing has its uses for some people, I don’t see the end of privately-owned cars anytime soon.

186

I think they will be run by the same short-term profit driven CEOs that typically run large companies now, and will provide the same level of customer service, especially once they achieve ubiquitous status. I would expect that car companies will end up providing the kind of service that cable companies do, and you can replicate the feeling of feeling lucky that your installer actually showed up in the 4 hour block, not available on weekends or evenings, that you were required to select and block on your schedule for installation. I don’t buy these ‘you will get a car within 15 minutes even at rush hour’ claims, and while I might like to call cable company execs ‘mentally deficient orangutans’, they aren’t actually that.

Note that ride share services like Uber and Lyft either drive the price or wait time through the roof at peak hours, they do not manage the kind of ‘less wait than having your own car’ that we’re supposed to look forward to in the future.

187

There’s a huge difference between “obsolete,” “non-existent” and “forbidden.” Land-line phones are obsolete. Pagers are obsolete. Horses-drawn carriages are obsolete. Mechanical wristwatches are obsolete. But nobody is being asked to give those up. And nobody in this thread is suggesting that privately owned cars will be non-existent or forbidden.

188

Pretty much any European town with more than 10K people would be superdense by American standards; quite a few with less than that, actually. The town where I have my address of record varies in official population between 2K and 4K registered inhabitants (lots of second houses; whether people register there or in their actual primary address depends on stuff such as school needs) and has more apartments than rowhouses; the only houses with no shared walls are farms.

189

The problem with the cable company is that they are a near monopoly. Whether I use cable or POTS, they both suck. If I could get someone else to run a broadband to my line or my business, I would.

The difference between a communication company and a car service is that there is much less to promote the monopoly. If the services that exist are not serving their customers, then another service can enter the market.

You are looking at an industry with virtually no competition, and using it as an example of how an industry that would have easy competition would function.

190

I’ve lived on top of the continental divide for 26 years. I’m a GIS programmer. If you find out about some system that can handle a foot of snow better than I can, please let me know. Tell the car manufactures too.

191

I wonder who’d going to pay for the infrastructure to charge a fleet of zero-emission vehicles. That’s gonna take a heckuva lot of electricity to one location.

I haven’t heard that they can yet handle unexpected & unusual road conditions, like flooded roads, snowy conditions, black ice, & potholes. A significant portion of the country has the potential for flash floods & the entire northern part deals with the other things on an at least annual basis. Do you have a cite that they can yet?

192

I couldn’t find any links to polls, apologies if I missed them.

Very age-dependent, though, so that should age out.

193

My answer to the OP is that the use of forms of transportation that don’t require driving show there’s a demand. As does the amount of people who drive for a living, since automating their jobs would save companies money (at the expense of a rather staple job in the US, I admit).

My response to the constantly repeated argument is that, as long as there are these huge peak commute times, there’s an issue of having to have a lot of cars that are not in use most of the time, or there will have to be delays. However, it’s possible that, eventually, self-driving cars could make trips faster, and thus the delay won’t mean you actually have to leave earlier.

But, as long as a majority or signficant minority are human controlled, they are the weakest link in the chain, and that greatly decreases the speed advantages. That said, people may choose just to get around earlier. Especially if they don’t get carsick, and could do stuff while on the trip.

But do note that a lot of people get carsick. That is something I see don’t see mentioned much in the driveless car discussions. A huge portion of people would be restricted to the same tasks they could do while driving, removing that extra advantage.

More importantly, actually being able to be in control of the car often prevents carsickness. So self-driving cars could actually make things worse for some people. And not from personal issues, like pride, nostalgia stubbornness. But an actual physical problem.

Not saying that makes them bad, just that it’s a downside not often discussed.

194

I am looking at multiple actual real-world industries run by people, not orangutans, and noting that they don’t deliver the kind of sub-quarter-hour wait times that proponents of car services in this thread claim are completely inevitable. I don’t buy the repeated ‘of course the market will give you exactly what you want’ claims when real life experience is that the market often sucks at delivering good service to actual people at a reasonable price.

195

You are however ignoring k9’s point about cable being a natural monopoly. That is, it would not be feasible for several different companies to run different ‘last mile’ cable networks in the same area. So, cable competition is limited to technological alternatives to cable (FIOS type TV from the phone company, satellite TV, cellphone network).

SD car services are not inherently monopolies. It’s feasible that a half dozen or more companies could provide basically the same SD car service in a given area and compete on price and customer satisfaction. So cable is not a good analogy.

However, it is IMO a good question whether there actually will be a lot of competition among SD car service providers in the long run. At the technology end of the business one or another software/sensor set could eventually achieve market dominance like Microsoft or Google products. And the same thing seems even more likely to happen with the service networks. Even now among ‘manned’ car service apps there’s Uber, Lyft, and some other ones I’m not recalling but I’m not recalling them because they aren’t important most places.

However, tech has tended to display a phenomenon where companies have a virtual monopoly, but they don’t really act like classic monopolies, such as stereotype of cable companies or older stereotypes like the pre-dereguation phone company, or govt run services like the motor vehicle bureau (though I’m not sure the stereotype is 100% accurate for the first or last, our local cable co is not bad on service, and technological alternatives have made them more competitive on price also; and the NJ DMV, MVC as called here, doesn’t have nearly as atrocious and nasty service as it used to have years ago).

I think it’s hard to predict how hard car services will keep innovating to improve pricing and service, whether by means of SD cars or otherwise (like VTOL a/c service, etc) and how happy people will be with it. I agree you can’t just say ‘market will solve it’ if there’s a tendency toward monopoly. But again it’s not a natural monopoly like last mile cable, electrical, water, wired phone networks.

196

Just give me self-driving on the Interstate. I’ll handle everything else.

197

Well, you added a bit more to the list than I claimed, now didn’t you.

As far as most of those, sure. Flooded roads, a SD car will deal with better than a human driver, as an SD isn’t going to be stupid enough to drive into it. An SD can use ranging to see how deep a puddle is before driving through it much better than a human with mk1 eyeballs can.

Snowy conditions, we already rely on traction control in many of our cars, as well as for black ice. Potholes suck for human drivers, I’ve seen people get their cars torn up by them pretty badly. An SD would be far more capable of detecting and avoiding one.

For complete level 3 emergency conditions, sure, the SD may not be able to get you around, but technically, neither can the human mk1 driver, that’s why it’s considered a level 3 emergency. To object to a technology that may struggle to handle what humans completely fail at is backwards, IMHO.

Please cite that I said that they were run by orangutans. I did not, I said that they were run by monopolies. You are complaining that, when something goes wrong with your service, that it takes time to schedule someone out to repair it. That person will have several jobs that day, all of which are pretty much an unknown amount of time, they may be a 5 minute job to plug a cable into a wall, and it may be a several hour job where the house needs a complete rewire. These are not concerns when the only thing is picking people up and dropping them off.

You may also note that you are not waiting hours for the actual service that is provided by the broadband company, you are only waiting milliseconds for your internet pages that you have requested to return to your computer. It is only when something is wrong or needs changing that the other service, the one that is not the primary function of the service that you are comparing it to, is relevant.

So, you are comparing the timing of a repair service of a monopoly to the primary service of an industry with very low barriers to entry. Your comparison fails to connect on any points of similarity whatsoever, so your analogy is entirely irrelevant.

198

Aren’t they all conditions a vehicle might encounter?

The ranging device would need to point down to be able to see there’s a pothole or (deep) flooding. I don’t think a hood of a normal car is high enough to get the angle the computer needs in time to be able to stop. Do you have cites for this working somewhere?

I’m not talking about traction control, I’m talking about staying on an unseen (due to snow) paved surface.

I’m not saying there’s not idiots out there; I’ve personally pulled some out of flooded cars before but I’ve never driven off the road in snow, & I evaluated the conditions of the flooded road before continuing. Where it was shallow enough that I could still see lane lines, I proceeded; where I couldn’t, I turned around.
We get those conditions just often enough that I’m not even thinking about a SDC that can’t handle them because it’s too dangerous. It’s the 80/20 rule; 80% is easy, it’s that last 5% or 3% or 1% that’ll kill me if the SDC doesn’t have it right.

199

And not to forget that in level 3 conditions (what ever that is) the car does allow the human to turn off traction control because it’s not as good as the human driver. I do it quite often. Technically the human is better than the SD and can handle it. It’s k9befriender that has it backwards.

200

And to continue. I think that many people that have such confidence in SDC’s really haven’t spent much time driving in really serious snow. Snow that makes you lock in 4 wheel drive 6 months out of the year. Yea, I know I’m not the norm, but the thousands of people that live near me know what I’m talking about. And for me ARE the norm.

I rue the day when I have to have a SDC that says Uh… No. When I’m absolutely sure I could handle it. SDC’s are going to have to get many, many exponentially times better before I can consider one.