Acquiring a car isn’t very hard. You can rent 'em pretty cheap. You might be right about requiring more explosives (I’m not an engineer). If so, then a pretty simple solution is to require that storage lockers be reinforced to resist explosives to the same extent that car cabins are.
That’s mostly a cite that people are stealing trash cans for their scrap metal value. There is one line that mentions security.
I found this cite that mentions “bomb-proof” trash cans being installed in places in London.
Which leads me to believe that you are right that trash cans are being removed in some places, but also that I am right that there are technological solutions that would allow for storage lockers with reasonable security.
This isn’t an all or nothing proposition. You can keep your car. I’ll grab a self-driving one that delivers itself to wherever I am, thanks
The trend is towards not owning things. People want to rent the things they only use some of time. It’s everywhere from cars to bikes to computer storage to movies to books to music.
The safety standards for self-driving cars are going to be incredibly high due to the liability concerns. This means that self-driving cars will be WAY safer than driving yourself. This will lead to significant incentives towards self-driving cars. Insurance companies will want you to use them, governments will want you to use them and, of course, manufacturers will want you to use them.
Commodification. Hiring and paying drivers is a huge cost for transportation companies. Eliminating that portion of the equation is a huge game-changer, hence there will be significant push from fleet owners to move in that direction. Also, because self-driving vehicles are driven more efficiently, fuel costs will also be reduced significantly.
I think the status aspect of cars will be with ones that AREN’T self-driven. It will be a luxury to have the time and money to own and drive your own car.
Also consider all the little annoyances that come with car ownership. Imagine never having to fill it up. Never changing the oil. Never filling the tires. Never changing the washer fluid. Never dealing with a mechanic ever again. That’d be pretty sweet. I understand that some (many?) people ENJOY maintaining their vehicles, but there are many, many more people who would love to forgo all those headaches.
Some of what you’re suggesting in item 6 (no maintenance, etc) is or soon will be possible even without a self-driving car. Various companies (including some of the manufacturers) are testing “car subscriptions” as an alternative to ownership or lease.
What I’m not convinced of is that it’s a logical necessity that once self-driving cars are common, that we’ll all automatically switch to a ride-sharing system where people don’t own cars. There’s still too much utility in being able to drive your own car on your own schedule and leave stuff in it, etc… already. Nobody’s been able to articulate very clearly why self-driving cars are such a game-changer vs. the current ride-sharing services we already have in terms of people not owning cars. There’s always some hand-waving about it being cheaper, but that’s not conclusive, and there’s no mention or credence given to the idea that cars are valuable as places to store stuff, refuges in bad weather, etc… What are people going to do if it starts raining while they’re at the park- stand there and get wet while they wait on their robo-Uber to show up 5minutes later? What about putting your gym bag in your trunk while you’re at work so you can go to the gym afterward? Now you’ll have to schlep it into the office and back out. And so on.
I’m not convinced that the pay-for-what-you-use model is all that revolutionary just because some people have moved it onto mobile devices. We’ve had the ability to rent stuff for hundreds of years- taxi rides, hansom cabs, bikes, innertubes on rivers, and so on. There are reasons that people buy cars instead of taking taxis everywhere. Or buy houses/cars instead of renting them. These guys just made it easier and are taking advantage of currently unregulated niches.
I’m getting firmly into the ‘opinion’ realm here, but I think you’re vastly overstating the advantages of car ownership. Your examples are trivial to counter.
Storing stuff in a multi-thousand dollar depreciating asset that costs time and money to constantly maintain is not an advantage. I go to the gym all the time and never store my gym bag in my car. And even if I was used to storing it in my car, the advantages of NOT spending thousands of dollars a year on a mobile gym bag storage system should be obvious to all. And even you must admit that the disadvantage of waiting five (!!) minutes under an awning or a tree while your driverless on-demand car arrives is pretty minimal when countered against all the advantages associated with on-demand transport.
That said, I totally agree that driverless vehicles won’t make sense for a certain percentage of folks. Examples might include:
-People who just like driving a car
-Families with babies with lots of stuff to haul around
-rural folks
-folks who need specialized vehicles like farmers or utility workers
-folks who don’t trust computer-controlled things
But, (with no data, mind you) I think that percentage is pretty small. Maybe 30 percent on the outside.
So long as the costs are materially lower than buying, I think the majority (51%) of transport in the developed world will be driverless and on-demand within __ number of years (I don’t know…30 years? Sooner?)
I think many people (perhaps including me) don’t realize just how expensive it is to own a car. Upthread, I linked to an article suggesting that in some urban areas, it’s cheaper not to own a car, even if you have to rely on something like Uber every day to get to work.
This absolutely describes me. Give me a car that will get me where I want to go with no input from me, and I will take it. Being able to sleep or read while on a long drive would be an absolute joy.
I’d love a driverless car, because I don’t like driving. I would love to take mass transit, like the bus, right now, because it would be cheaper, and because I wouldn’t have to drive. But I don’t take the bus. I drive.
That’s because I never have to wait, even for five minutes, and also because I can drive anywhere, not just where the buses run. A driverless, shared-car system, in order to be equally convenient, has to have at least one driverless car right by me 24/7. And that isn’t a lot different from me owning the car in the first place.
Buses don’t run from my house to where I work every five minutes. There would have to be somewhere close to one driverless car for everyone like me, and they would have to be kept all over the place, if they were going to be as convenient as being able to get into my own car and drive home, even if I have to work late or even in the middle of rush hour or any other moment of the day or night.
Maybe, if it was ruinously expensive to own my own car, or conversely ridiculously cheap to use a driverless, shared-car service, maybe I would switch over. But as I mentioned, it is much cheaper now to ride the bus than to drive, and I don’t do that.
How much of a burden is it to push a button on your smarphone app >5 minutes before you get to the curb?
Is it really more convenient to have to have your own car, even if it means having find a parking spot every time you arrive at a destination? How much is that convenience worth to you?
I use Uber/Lyft a lot when traveling, and I personally find it much more convenient to call a car than to deal with my own car. Only problem is low availability at certain times of day (e.g. heading to the airport at 5am) but self-driving cars won’t have that problem.
Honestly, yeah. I live in Chicago and I used to use Lyft all the time. We used Zipcar for things like trips to the grocery store and such. Anything where we would have stuff to bring back. Then we bought a car a year ago. I figured it would mostly replace Zipcar usage. In the last six months I’ve used Lyft twice. It’s just more convenient to not have to wait some unknown amount of time (the estimates are always wrong).
And when you get out of work at 6 pm, eighty gazillion other people will be pushing that button at the same time. You think you’re going to wait only five minutes? Dream on. And if you have a car for commuting, you might as well use it for most other things.
When I commuted it took 40 minutes, and a lot of people drive a lot longer to areas where the chance of getting a fare back to where people were leaving work was kind of low. So the shared self driving car would do at most 2 or 3 trips a commute cycle, and no doubt use congestion pricing. That swings the benefit to a privately owned car. Especially since you get the same benefits of doing something else in a privately owned self-driving car as you would in a shared one, since the shared one would have to be very advanced and not need intervention.
People in a city who don’t use their car to commute would be good customers for shared rides. The rest of us, no. And the rest of us who live in suburbia and commute don’t really have to worry about parking spots, do we?
Shodan’s response I think nicely illustrates how this stuff will likely play out over time. Currently there do exist a set of people for whom owning cars doesn’t make sense: for me locally a lot of people in the close-to-downtown Seattle neighborhoods.
If self driving cars have an impact it’ll be a slow moving of that line between the two groups, where some people who were kind of on the fence about going car-less will be pushed over the fence, and some people who were adamant about owning a car will become less sure. This means that self-driving cars have made the going car-less options more cheap and convenient relative to car ownership. I suspect this will lag behind the actual “technically possible” implementation of driver-less cars by a significant time period. You have to get to the point where not only is the technology good enough, but it is a lot cheaper than a regular car plus driver’s wages. Even just getting to the same price point isn’t enough, otherwise the existence of things like Uber and Lyft would have had a far greater impact on car ownership. It has to be cheap enough so that not only is the cost to the user very low but it is economical to have enough density to guarantee a quick pickup even in the less urbanized areas. I’m skeptical that we’ll get there anytime soon for people who live and work in the suburbs.
That said, there are a lot of people at the margins who might cross that line. I’m borderline myself: downtown Seattle is a pain to drive to and park in. But I live in the Bellevue suburbs, so the local bus only goes past my house every 30 minutes. The optimal solution for me has in the past been a 10 minute drive to the park and ride and then an express (every 5 minutes, HOV lanes, etc.) bus into downtown. The local metro has just introduced an experimental shuttle service where you hail a shuttle to take you to and from the park and ride, which has actually worked well enough to make me use it instead of driving. If that service got cheaper to implement thanks to driver-less cars such that wait times were truly negligible because they could throw a boat load of shuttles at the problem then I think it could make an even more significant difference.
So now I’m in a position where one of our cars sits unused most weekdays. I don’t think it’d take much to push me over the edge and get rid of it.
We already have self driving trucks in controlled environments such as mine sites in Australia. The math is compelling, an average truck driver in a coal mine earns $130k per annum (source is my sister in law she is one), multiply this by 3 shifts a day and you can save $390k in labour costs alone. Add in that the efficiency of a machine is near enough 100% compared to a driver that needs lunch, toilet breaks, sick leave, annual leave, superannuation and well it’s a no brainer.
The mine she works at has 50 trucks in rotation.
Do I want a self driving car for myself? Possibly but I love driving!
Please understand that I know that I’m an outlier in what is needed in transportation. Also understand that I know a lot of people just like me.
We are in the Colorado Mountains we are the only full time residents on our road. The County plows, but we are last on their list. That’s fine with me. I do have my own plow truck chained up on all four tires with a winch on the back.
Today the ‘well’ traveled road to our turn off road is not plowed. No big deal. About 8"s of snow. At my turn off (about 1/2 mile from our house) I make the turn and as no one has been over it and it’s very wind blown, I get stopped by snow. Not too bad, about a foot deep. White out conditions at this point from wind but I have driven this road for 26 years.
Not wanting to get stuck, I get out and walk 100 yards to check snow levels and leave some foot prints to follow in the conditions. Back to my vehicle, I decide that the best idea is to take off the Vehicle Dynamic Control, put it in low range 4x4 and go for it. If I get stuck, I have my truck at home that I can rescue myself with. And at least I’d be a little closer to home to get to my truck. The vehicle must at least get to the bottom of our driveway. Then I’ll take care of the snow.
If I get stuck, I’m gonna need my truck. If I walk it, I’m gonna need my truck.
I made it just fine. Got closer to home, plowed the driveway and most of the road.
There will never be an autopilot system that can do this. I’m a programmer, unless the autopilot could be turned completely off, it’s gonna cause problems. (I have a friend that had a problem with this when just trying to break through a little snow bank). She did turn the system off and got through. A driverless car is never, ever going to be able to make the “I’ve got a 50% chance of getting though. And even IF I get stuck, I’m going to be better off.”
I bring up this recent and common event (for myself) to counter those that say that autopilot is better than a human driver. Sure, a tired or drunk or distracted driver. But when things get pear shaped on an airplane or a car IMHO, the first thing that gets done, is that autopilot gets turned off.
You do realise that the use case you are describing is something 99.99% of the world population will never have?
And on top of that - why would you not program your truck to keep snow of that last mile?
For routine, normal, average driving computers are arguably more competent.
For the unusual, unexpected, and unforeseen a trained human is more competent.
That is why, despite having airplanes that are potentially self-flying we still retain human pilots on board. During routine operations the computers are better. During the unexpected the trained humans are better.
Note I said “trained human” - something you can’t take for granted in US drivers.
Well, let’s start with commercial applications. When it comes to long-distance trucking, having a driver is an expensive liability. Given the hours truckers tend to need to work, it’s one of the most dangerous jobs in America. And that’s not just technical concerns - Truckers are encouraged by the conditions of their job to overwork themselves in ways that are incredibly risky (that’s a long read but very much worthwhile). A computer doesn’t get tired. Computers don’t get drunk, or high, or hopped up on painkillers for a bad back gained at a job that is 16 hours of sitting down per day. And long-distance highway driving is among the easiest cases for self-driving cars, so this kind of thing may well roll out earlier than more general consumer cases. Also, you don’t have to pay a computer. It’s never going to cost as much as an actual employee.
Taxis face a similar dynamic. Being a taxi driver is also a very dangerous job, and not just because driving is inherently a pretty damn risky enterprise (but mostly because driving is really risky). A self-driving car is going to be cheaper and less risky than a human driver. Taxi companies, like logistics companies, are likely to be early adopters.
(Totally separated from the discussion at hand, please note that that’s a lot of people put out of work. Imagine if buggy-whip factories were somehow 3% of all employment.)
Then, beyond that, even assuming everything you said about driving being a status symbol is true, you can then add people with disabilities (particularly the very old) who cannot drive themselves, and young people who don’t want to bother with getting a license. You can add people who want to have a drink and still drive home afterwards, or people who have lost their license due to DUIs. There’s a lot of demand even if we take what you’re saying entirely at face value.
But I don’t. Cars are a symbol of status, freedom, and power… Driving isn’t. Everything you get out of a standard car, you get out of a self-driving car. All of the advantages, all of the freedom, all of the status. And you also get the ability to play
Super Smash Bros Ultimate while stuck in traffic on your way to work - traffic that the propagation of self-driving cars makes far less likely). Or, y’know, literally anything else with your time other than obsessively following the road, something humans are bad at doing - so bad that tens of thousands of us fail at it and die each year as a result (and millions more are injured).
So yeah, there’s definitely going to be a market there.
I feel nervous about trusting a human. We are demonstrably terrible at it. Computers are a lot better.
Lots of people were nervous when cars were new too. They could never imagine riding in one of those death machines. Most of them got over it. (And cars were crazily dangerous at the time.)
The same goes for airplanes, trains, electricity, radios, televisions, computers, photography, and even toilets. There were people who just couldn’t imagine how it would be beneficial to take a pipe and run it from the inside of their very own home into a giant pipe full of raw effluence and noxious gases, when they were doing just fine going in a bucket or a hole in the ground. The very thought nauseated them. They eventually got toilets anyways.