Yet we trust 16-year old kids to do it after passing a 15-minute driving test.
Those are all legitimate concerns, but there are arguably better solutions to them that don’t require using a $20,000 vehicle as essentially a storage locker.
And at least some of them are thinking about using cars in an old model in a way that won’t make sense when the economics change.
As far as taking things to return on a lunchtime errand, or sending your clothes to the dry cleaners, why would you accompany your return? You can just hire a portion of a delivery car, put your return inside a suitable compartment, lock it, and the receiving department at the returning store will handle it.
Self-driving cars means any errand that is as simple as sending a thing to a place can be done automatically. You won’t have to combine your commute with your trip to the dry cleaners because there will be a delivery car to take your clothes to the dry cleaners.
I think the one that will be hardest are having small children. Parents of small children generally lug a ton of stuff in their cars. Strollers, diaper bags, snacks, etc. On the other hand, people who live in big cities often manage to have children and not cars, so there are solutions to those problems.
An enterprising city could easily devote 10% of current vehicle parking space on streets to temporary storage lockers that people who need to have their suitcases or softball clothes after work could use. It takes a lot less space to store a suitcase on the side of the road when you don’t have to store a vehicle around it.
I also don’t think that no one will own their cars. Currently, even in Manhattan, 22% of households own a car. But I think ownership rates will plummet. Suburban American households with children will rapidly find that they can easily make do with one car instead of two. And when that car gets old they will realize that it’s cheaper to just use the fleet than to buy a replacement. I predict that a decade after a self-driving taxi service launches in a city, the number of privately owned cars in that city will be cut in half.
But you do trust them when you’re being flung through the air at 600 mph at 30,000 feet?
I’m hoping that my next car (10 years or so from now) has a self-driving setting. I like driving for fun, but I could do without some of the commuting (stop and go traffic for miles just is not the “fun” part for me). And would happily turn it over to a car so that I could read or sleep while I got to work. Also, I am getting older and I do worry about losing mobility when I get to the point where i can’t drive. It’ll be nice for the car to drive for me.
I was estimating what a nationwide survey would say. My NJ commute was nice also, I doubt I would have wanted a self-driving car for that. Not to mention that I don’t know how it would have handled suicidal deer, more of a threat there than other drivers.
Lets not forget things like drinking and separately underaged and (again separately) unlicensed driving. There demand is there for a solution for these crimes and also injuries and deaths.
Some of these may not be the demand of owner, but of society (such as driving drunk would be totally eliminated as cars will take control of it detects bad reaction times. Freeing up the courts and the cops time.
Others like not having to pay for parking, as the car can drive around/to free parking/or to home. Could be very big in big cities. Also add not haivn gto find a parkign spot, be driopped off right at the door, and let the car park itself.
If you have a recent car you do already. If the various computers in your car all crashed, you’d be in trouble.
Good points. Another is that the demand for the cars would peal at 9 or 5. In the last few years congestion in my local BART station has increased due to the large number of people taking Uber or Lyft. If a lot more people took self-driving cars it would be even worse, not to mention possible long waits. If I had to wait twenty minutes to get a car for a ten minute drive home, no thanks.
Most people don’t want to carry that stuff in & out constantly, nor to many people have a place at work to store that stuff.
Well, from my experience people are not that great at avoiding deer either. The car would at least be scanning all over for them, even in the dark. This might be a plus for self-driving cars.
An additional problem at least for me and my neighbors or pretty much any one that lives in serious snow conditions is what if the car says, um, no, I’m not gonna drive through that snow bank. Or no, your driveway is too slick in my opinion.
Sure can probably be overcome. But there is a lot of things to cover that I don’t think has even been considered.
I think there are a couple of (arguably separate) issues that always seem to get conflated in these discussions:
“In The Future, all cars will be self-driving cars!”
OK, cool. We can quibble about whether or not these self-driving cars will still have a system of manual controls, for “last-mile” driving, or “recreational” driving, or driving in unusual places or circumstances, or strictly for emergencies; and how easy (and legally and socially acceptable) it will be to access those manual backup controls; and so forth. Still, even for the most dedicated lovers of driving (the sort of people who call still manual transmissions “standard transmissions”, even in America), having a car that has the ability to drive itself is clearly a considerable technical advance, and could obviously come in very handy in all sorts of situations, from the mundane (“Car, drop me off at the holo-theatre–oh, and you’d better go find a re-charge station. Be back here by 23:15 at the latest”) to serious emergencies (“Car…take me to…hospital! GASP!”)
“In The Future, no one will OWN a car; you’ll just ‘subscribe’ to a ‘car service’!”
On the other hand, I think there are a LOT of practical as well as emotional objections to this idea. As an alternative, I think it’s great–if people want to do this, either temporarily or permanently, that’s totally cool, and having Self-Driving Car Subscription Services available to people (at a reasonable price, not just for the 1% or the 0.1%) would be a clear technological and social advance. And I’m sure, if SDCSS were widely available, some larger percentage of the population would choose to live a more Manhattan-type “car-free” lifestyle than does so today, even in places that are very far from Manhattan; and, again, that’s totally cool. But I am a little dismayed at some statements* that often seem to come up in these discussions to the effect that the old-fashioned personal car ownership model (including personally owning a self-driving car) will be obsolete–and will maybe even be priced out of the market to the point where only people who are eccentric and rich will even have personal car ownership available to them as an option. In 20th/early 21st century America, even people who are not that well off can still own a car (albeit in some cases they only “own” it–them and the bank), which is their very own personal mobile space; if that gets eliminated (or even just priced out of the market for most people) all over the place (not just in a handful of very automobile-unfriendly densely-populated urban areas), I think that would be going backwards, socially and technologically speaking.
*See for example, Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities (which may be something of an “astroturf” group for Uber and Lyft and so on):
What exactly is a “Dense Urban Area”? In some place like Manhattan or San Francisco, personal car ownership has already long been impractical for most ordinary people, and I don’t suppose they even miss it. Hey, they’re living in New York City! Or San Francisco! The Big City, baby! But…is Atlanta a “Dense Urban Area”? Or Los Angeles, Houston, etc., etc., etc.?
Cars are certainly MARKETED as symbols of status/power/freedom - just look at any car ad - the reality for most of us as we schlep back and forth to work in rush hour traffic is much less exciting.
Now, what do people with REAL status/power/freedom do? - very often, have someone else drive them around…I’d be happy to join them, even if my chauffeur is in electronic form.
There already are people in urban areas like Manhattan who manage all these things without owning their own cars. Delivery services take care of things like the dry cleaning and as for the rest, they schlep the stuff on the subway or taxi.
I could see a lot of reasons for high demand. I don’t have cites, but off the top of my head.
Self driving cars will be shared, which will be cheaper than owning your own car. People will save money, which increases demand.
If you live in a city, you don’t have to drive around endlessly looking for parking.
Self driving cars will make weekend travel far easier. You can get into a car with a bed (like a Class B RV) around 8pm on a friday, and then wake up at 6am on a saturday a thousand miles away. Then you do a weekend trip, and you drive back sunday night for work monday morning. It’ll cause a huge spike in weekend vacations.
People hate rush hour traffic, self driving cars will remove stress. Self driving cars are also less prone to traffic jams, so people will get around faster.
And most importantly, self driving cars are safer. There are 5 million car accidents a year in the US alone, causing 2 million injuries and 30,000 deaths. Globally there are far far more. These cars will be much safer.
Not only that, but when it becomes obvious that self driving cars are safer, then governments will start mandating them. What happens 15 years after self driving cars come out and it is proven that human driven cars are 100 times more dangerous? Will governments still let people drive themselves? Probably not.
Also, if you’ve ever watched the ABC series “Shark Tank” (or Dragons’ Den in Canada), you’ll be familiar with Kevin O’Leary. He recently advanced the idea that, instead of owning a car, you should rely on Uber and Lyft instead. In some cities, it might actually be cheaper to use one of those services, even if you’re doing so every day.
Well and good. If you live in the sticks, you need your own car/4x4.
There will be a market for shared self driving cars, but a lot of people will still want their own car.
Which is fine. But it may cost $4000 a year to own a car vs $1000 a year to share a self driving car.
Its a choice people will make, people who want to own their own cars will still be able.
I agree on the first one. Once and if the devices and software are like say, having blind spot warning or low speed automatic braking now, things that add minimal cost and have no negative impact on the car’s abilities otherwise, only technophobes would turn down this option. Also, the usefulness of such an option isn’t precluded just because it’s actually pretty far from making the car truly self-driving in any condition.
On the second though I think it again depends how much changes before all the time self driving cars really do live up to their billing in virtually any condition. And there could also be a two tier development where expensive systems that require high utilization to pay for themselves could really drive themselves, not just in good weather and well marked roads but really all the time almost anywhere. Whereas the cheap options in regular cars could sorta do it in favorable conditions (like some even now).
But again depending how long real SD cars take (whether that’s all cars or some), the way people use cars could change significantly due to other tech. That’s happening already when it comes to going out to the movies or shopping; if real SD takes even another 10 yrs that change a lot more. And if real SD takes 20 or more years then other tech could significantly change the standard suburban driving commute to cubical farm, store (where you work) or customer service office, though of course some people will always benefit from personal transport to work.
On people being deliberately (by collective political policies) priced out of owning cars, anything is possible. But IMO it’s quite apparent that green collective action that ‘you might think’ a lot of people would not like, is not gonna happen, generally. ‘Educating’ people about why they need to submit to it…not gonna work. Even if the educators are right, at least under their own arbitrarily limited set of assumptions (eg. we can’t fight climate change with direct climate engineering because that’s cheating, or ‘dangerous’; or that humankind really will fight rather than mainly adapt to it, very up in the air IMO). So I take it as given at least as far the US that there will not be collective policies forcing a great reduction in the number or use of cars. It could potentially happen according to freely made individual decisions. Not in a few years, but again real SD cars might be much further away than that.
I don’t know why so many people assume that self-driving cars=very low personal car ownership. It seems to me that it’ll be an option, but a hell of a lot of people have decided that it’s a forgone conclusion.
Yes, that is one of the costs of living in the sticks.
It will depend strongly on where you live, and what being able to drive when you want to means to you. In a city, taking public transportation will almost always be faster than driving, especially considering parking. Even if you want a shared car you’ll be able to get one quickly. In the sticks getting a car will take a while, and probably be more expensive.
And consider commuting. As a car owner you don’t mind your car sitting idle in the company parking lot for 8 hours because you get to use it evenings and weekends. Is this going to be a viable model for the owner of a sharing service? How many cars will be required to meet peak demand. Sharing rides might help some, but it is likely to prolong a commute, and even if you can work during it, you might not want to spend more time away from home than absolutely necessary. And with your own self-driving car good enough for this model you get to make good use of your commute time anyway while also minimizing it.
You may be projecting your own disaffection towards cars onto other people. Rush hour traffic is always a pain in the ass, but it’s not the only kind of driving that people do, and cruising for the hell of it is still a thing. Driving for pleasure is very much a form of freedom. I spent a few weeks in Nova Scotia in September, rented a Mazda 3 and drove all over Cape Breton…stopping wherever I wanted to take photos, fly my drone, or eat and take in some local color. Find a back road that looks like it might lead to a scenic view? Hell, I’ll take it. Theoretically this could be accomplished with a self-driving car, but, I presume, only by interfacing with some kind of fussy GPS touchscreen, not really the same as operating a vehicle whose controls are a direct extension of your hands, arms, feet, and eyes.
Now, if I were sufficiently wealthy, I would have someone else drive me around as needed for business. But you can bet your ass I’d also have a stable of exotic and classic cars to drive myself whenever I feel like it, just like a lot of other people at the “private driver” level of society. Shit, if I had enough money to throw at it, I’d try my hand at real racing, at least at an entry level like Formula Ford or Caterham. I’ve fantasized about this shit forever, why would I ever want to obtain the success that could enable it and not take advantage of these opportunites that 99% of people will never have?
This is not to say I’m against the idea of self-driving cars. I think they’d be badass. I love the idea of getting a modestly sized self-driving RV, starting it up, setting the destination, then go in the back and blaze a bowl, play guitar for 4 hours, crash in a comfortable bed for 8 hours, and wake up at a marina in Gulf Shores RESTED and ready to hop on a charter boat bound for a fishing spot 60 miles offshore. (As opposed to haggard and underslept from a 12 hour nonstop drive.)
The technology has its good points. I just don’t want to see it made COMPULSORY over manually operated cars. I think both can co-exist.