It won’t happen overnight, not even sure it’ll happen during the rest of my lifetime, but it will happen. As less people buy cars, the cost will go up, making them more expensive, which means less people can afford them. At some point dealers start closing because there isn’t enough volume to keep them in business. Also, at some point new housing doesn’t include garages, driveways, or parking garages.
You can still get a carriage ride thru Central Park which means there are still a few people who make buggy whips but it ain’t exactly the industry it used to be.
One of the futuristic models I’ve seen is that all cars communicate with each other. Traffic lights & stop signs become a thing of the past; your car might need to slow down a bit, to say 30mph, but cars are seamlessly weaving thru intersections. That model falls apart when you throw some unseen variables into it: pedestrians, cyclists, larger wildlife. (Sorry, squirrels, you still become pancakes.)
Never gonna happen; the Brothers Tsarnaev put the final nail in that coffin. You can’t even find trashcans at medium/large events anymore because of security concerns.
Are you really suggesting that self-driving cars will be worse at avoiding pedestrians, cyclists & wildlife than human drivers? And why would this “model” preclude traffic lights for pedestrians & cyclists?
I think it’s “very low” only in comparison to what we have today. In absolute terms, there will still be millions of privately owned vehicles, for all the reasons enumerated above.
But the absolute number, while still being large, will be much lower than today’s number, also for reasons listed above.
Fleets of self-driving cars not only make the Uber/Lyft business model more economically competitive, they will also improve the accessibility of cars under that model. Right now, Uber and Lyft are limited to a number of cars equal to the number of drivers available, which naturally fluctuates during the day. But if they can deploy a fleet of cars, they can literally put as many as they want on the roads, and position them in accordance with their predictions for usage. They’ll have much more flexibility, and this will make response times much better as well.
You will likely see a rise in car-sharing arrangements like this one, which bridge the gap between Uber and traditional car ownership. A car that comes to your house at the time you scheduled it to be there, that you keep for however long you need it, and that then drives itself to the next user after dropping you off, also makes this model far more viable. In fact, if this were available, it’s what I’d likely choose.
And even if some families still own a car, the need for multiple cars will be significantly reduced, because the car can re-deploy itself from one family member to another as it is needed. Growing up, my family had two cars from the mid-70s on, but we could have lived with one if the car itself could drop my mom off at work for 7AM, and then pick my dad up for work at 8. I’m sure there’s lots of other families that are similar.
No, the car is not operated by the computer.It’s operated by the human driver. The computerized electronics just keep the internal parts synched smoothly.
When there’s an accident, it’s the driver’s fault, not the computer’s.
In self-driving cars, accidents will be the computer’s fault. And that scares some people.
It may not be a rational reason to be scared…but it’s a reason. And people don’t buy products that they are scared of.
This thread is about the market demand for self-driving cars. So if ,say, 15 % of the public is afraid of the product, that will reduce the demand, and be a challenge the marketers have to overcome.
I wonder what % of the public wants no part of trucks - yet that segment does just fine. Sure there will be people afraid during the early adopter period. But after a few years of ever-improving self-driven cars, most will get over it.
As for computers, yeah, you drive, not the computer. But computers do a lot of things drivers used to. Who shifts gears when you’re in Drive? Computers sit between you and the brakes, at least in my Prius. If the computer fails in your entertainment system, no big deal, but there are lots of computers in critical systems of your car today.
Think of it like a railroad. The train has right of way; the tracks are always open for the train to run at it’s allotted speed. Lights flash &/or crossing gates come down & (in theory) prevent vehicles from being on the tracks when the train comes. It doesn’t know about the car or truck stuck on the tracks until it’s too late to slow down & stop.
That’s nice as a proof of concept test; however, real world, at least where I live doesn’t have flat roads as wide as an airport runway with no obstructions. Many of the roads are two lanes, no shoulder with hills or curves in them that started out as horse paths in Colonial times. By the time a sensor recognizes an object the laws of physics prevent it from stopping in time whereas I as a human can recognize something up ahead when I see cars crossing the yellow line. I don’t believe that cars are up to that yet.
That’s what some of the computers in a car today do. But other computers operate the electronic stability control, the collision avoidance system, the lane departure warning system and the GPS/navigation system. All of these are steps towards self-driving cars.
As long as there’s still such a thing as ‘rush hour,’ most people who routinely commute by car at rush hour will want their own car, because it makes more sense to have their own car.
If it’s your car and you’re driving (ETA: OK, riding in it - assume that’s what I mean throughout) it every day, owning it means that it’s there waiting for you when you need it, and you don’t have to worry about whether the rental service is going to have a car at your door in time to get you to work on time.
You can also keep your own stuff in it, which is what most of us do with our cars already.
And of course, when you drive it every day, it’s not likely to be cheaper to rent a car at peak demand time every day than it would be to own it.
As far as the question in the OP goes, you betcha, when self-driving cars work as intended, I’m ready to switch over. When I can do what I want with my time in the car - surf the Web, take a nap, whatever - I’m ready for that.
In 15 years or so, it’ll be time for me to give up my car keys; it would be nice if I can still go where I want because the car can take me there. And it would be even better if I could buy a self-driving car before the Firebug is eligible to get his driver’s license in a few years. That won’t happen, but I wish it would.
While public policy around security certainly don’t always make sense, I don’t see how replacing a parking space, which anyone could park a car that has a bomb in it, with a locker, which anyone could put a bomb into, adds to security concerns.
Also I haven’t noticed a change in the number of trashcans at events I’ve attended. Cite that that’s changed? Where do people put their trash?
It’s hard to fight economics. The vast majority of people have their own cars because it’s the most convenient and economical way to handle their transportation needs.
Self driving cars change the economics. It will be nearly as convenient and far more economical to rent than to own. People respond to prices, and the prices of taxi services will plummet.
Car-sharing services like Zipcar have already changed the economics, at least for people in cities. For a long time some people in places like NYC have forgone owning a car, in favor of taxis, the subway and car rentals (from Hertz, Avis, etc) but companies like Zipcar have made it even easier.
Exactly. And self-driving cars are going to bring that change to everywhere but really rural areas.
Until I had small children, Zipcar would have been great for me. I mostly walked or rode my bike to work. On really rainy days I could take the bus. I just needed a car for occasional trips.
Except that the closest Zipcar location near me was like 7 miles away. Which was so inconvenient that I never signed up. How many people would be Zipcar converts if the Zipcar would deliver itself to you wherever you were!
Look at what the Tsarnaev’s did with something small enough to fit into a trash can. While the casualty count may be higher with a car/truck bomb, the fear level is probably the same. One also wouldn’t need the additional funds to acquire a car & more explosives, given the some percentage will be contained by the reinforced passenger compartment. Also, I’m guessing one could acquire the relatively small amount of explosives necessary for a locker bomb under the radar a lot easier than the amount needed to fill a car.
They either leave it on the ground or carry it with them.
Trains can’t stop in time because they have so much mass. I’m sure you can come up with some situations where a person will be faster than a self-driving car at stopping, but the car will react much more quickly and won’t get distracted. And also probably won’t be speeding. On average, I’d bet on the car.
Self driving? Hell, I’d be happy with a standard car feature that screams “Go, ya fuckin’ moron!” When someone sits at a green light looking at their cell phone.
I find my self saying that almost every day nowadays. And that’s just a small problem with driving.
Just this Sunday Mrs. Homie and I were driving back from my side of the family in Illinois back to our home in Missouri. It was about 1:30 in the afternoon, and we’d both just had big meals. The full tummies, the hum of the engine, and the utter banality of the “view” in Central Illinois conspired to put us both on the verge of sleep. Which was, of course, impossible.
So what were we to do? Pull over and try to catch some winks in a Toyota Yaris? Try that yourself and report your results back to me. Find a hotel that would rent to us for a couple of hours? Not outside of Skid Row in major cities. Power through it? What other choice did we have?