But if you have your own self-driving car, you can tell it to pick you up without you walking the 3 blocks. And you know it could since if a shared car can do it so can yours.
So I’m with you.
Once robot cars are made pretty damn safe and reliable, I’d be glad to be able to nap or read during either a long highway trip, or in heavy, slow-moving city traffic.
They don’t need to show you anything. They just need to provide a service, then you can decide whether or not it fits your needs. They are not marketing towards you, they are marketing towards those who are not opposed to the idea from the outset. Once you see all you co-workers arriving all refreshed and happy at work, while you are still fuming about the drive, you may find your calculation changes.
Some people will opt for a service, some will own their own car. Some car owners will rent their car out when they are not using it, some won’t. Not sure why the naysayers seem to think this is an all or nothing proposition.
At first, very few people will give up their cars to go ride sharing, but as the service become cheaper and more efficient, more and more people will also switch. Families with 2 or 3 cars may very well find that just one car is enough, with the car being able to return home after dropping someone off at work or school or band or gymnastics or whatever, and the ability of a fleet of ride sharing cars when the one car isn’t quite enough.
You say that the cost is less important than the convenience. Wouldn’t it be even more convenient to hire a human driver who drove you around everywhere, who would come and pick you up at your door, take you straight to work, and drop you off in front of your office? Why don’t you have that? Or would that cost be too much for the convenience it provides?
I feel that in the future, many people will make the same calculation, and come to the conclusion that the convenience of always having a car specifically dedicated to you isn’t worth the cost, just as you have come to the conclusion that having a driver dedicated to you isn’t worth the cost.
Some will, some won’t. I think that over time, more and more will, and it will be uncommon, but not necessarily rare to own your own car within a generation or so.It will also be illegal to drive in manual mode, on most public streets, outside of emergencies, unless you have a very, very highly qualified driver rating, putting you in the top 5% or better of current drivers.
One of your concerns about timing and scheduling is that you do not think that there would be 3 different people in a city that would want to leave work at 3 different times during rush hour. That strikes me as a very odd concern. The whole point of rush hour is that is the time that lots of people are leaving. You would not schedule this particular car to retrieve 3 particular people, you would have a fleet, that would be available as people need to leave.
As far as what to do with the cars during non-rush hour. Well, there are still deliveries going on. You are in the office, so you don’t notice, but as I was a delivery driver, I certainly did notice that there was still quite a bit of traffic outside of rush hour, and most of it was delivery or courier of some sort. Cars will also need charging and maintenance, and the slow time would be a good time for that as well.
As far as other poster’s concerns about vandalism, there are several ways to address that, one of which was proposed by, and dismissed by the poster who was concerned, and that is having a camera in the car. There is also the fact that anyone who orders and rides in the car will be known, and if they do any damages, it will be known who they were. The examples the poster was using was that of places where things are truly anonymous, and there is no accountability. That would not be the case for a driverless car. They would have the same level of vandalism as rentals, which is not 0, to be sure, but is not really a significant problem, elsewise, rental car agencies would not be willing to rent out their cars.
Having just cleaned out my garage for the year so that I can fit my car in when weather is inclement, I can think of several reasons to have a garage. It is a useful place to store tools. It is also a nice place to throw your nasty belongings when you get back from a camping trip until you have time to go through and clean them. It can also function as a dock of sorts, where your ordered car can pull in, and you can get in, without having to expose yourself to the elements, should it be rainy or cold.
As is, though, there are many neighborhoods around that do not have garages, who only have on street parking, and they seem to do well enough.
yes, I think I was comparing it to current Uber/Lyft, where 3 mins is pretty good, but I can see how that would be less attractive than owning your own. Thinking a bit more, I think traffic patterns will also eat up a lot of the theoretical gains. For example, the three hour rush hour example, yes, one car could carry 3 people, but after it carries the first into the city, then the car is in the city and either has to drive back, or it is still 3 cars for 3 people. I think this will be a boon for people living in the city, but I don’t think it will get to rural areas for quite awhile.
We get 30 feet of snow a season at our house. I drive over the continental divide at 11,500 feet in the central Rockies every weekday on the way to work and back. I leave my house at 6am. I’ve missed two days of work in 26 years due to weather. That’s just what you have to do when you live where I do. That’s the kind of weather I’m saying never to 
.
Never been involved in any type of accident regardless of fault in 42 years of driving, I’m one of those people that believes they’re a pretty dam good driver. Maybe especially so in inclement weather.
Let’s look at the economics of shared cars. Yeah, the car company does not have to pay a driver, but the cars will average to be more expensive than the car the Uber driver owns, and will be for a good long while. Plus, if the Uber driver has no fares during off times that is his or her problem. Uber doesn’t care. If Uber owned the car, it would be their problem.
Let’s look at the comparison between shared ownership and private ownership. First, shared cars only work when the development of the self-driving car is advanced enough to let them work in all circumstances. Privately owned cars can be mostly self-driving. The driver taking over for the last mile, no problem. So there will be lots of mostly self driving cars in the base before shard cars get started.
A shared car is only going to be good for four years, before it needs to get upgraded. Kind of like rental cars today. But a private car lasts for ten years or so on average, so the driver is going to be able to amortize his car over a longer period, and thus has a cost advantage.
Shared commuting? Ever take a shuttle from the airport? Great thing, but you usually have to leave more time than if you had rented a car, and often you make several stops picking people up. Well worth it once in a while, but not every day.
There are plenty of times where a service is great/ We took Lyft to the airport for this trip. But not every time.
Yeah, the services can buy the optimal number of cars. But optimal is for them, not for you. Optimal means that you are going to have long wait times and/or more expensive rides during peak periods. If that happens often enough, people are going to think owning a car makes sense.
In cities privately driven cars may vanish, or almost vanish. In that case a shared service and mass transit are going to be better 95% of the time. But in the rest of the world, not so much.
The utility would be the money that you get for renting out your vehicle to others. You use your car to go to work to make money, meaning that you consider making money to be a utility function of your car, but consider the utility decreased when it is making money for you by driving other people around. That does not make any logical sense.
You can still have it set to only take fares that will keep it within a certain radius, and finish up and be ready for you (and maybe even run through a cleaning, charging, diagnostic on the way) at whatever time you want it to be ready.
Although, I don’t see most people who choose to own their own cars renting them out in this way. The same rationality that makes them decide that the expense and inconvenience of owning a car is worth it may also make them make the decision that it is better to have it sit in the driveway or in a parking spot than to be making you money.
Metropolitan areas are not like computer memories. You can’t defrag them to make them more dense. If my workplace were closer to me, it would be further from half my colleagues. Unless your plan is for all of us to move our houses?
About the same as if we all drove self-driving private cars.
And as for parking, do you really think parking on the side of the road is going to be adequate? Every try on-street parking today?
I don’t think it’s the naysayers who are presenting this as an all or nothing proposition. From “Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities”:
(Granted, that’s “dense urban areas”, but I still don’t know what, exactly, a “dense urban area” is, or who gets to define it. And even in Manhattan or San Francisco, it isn’t actually against the law to own your own non-autonomous vehicle, although it’s certainly not really practical for most people who can’t afford to buy the brownstone mansion with the attached garage.)
And also:
By contrast, I don’t think any of the “naysayers” to the idea of some kind of “car-subscription service” are saying that no one at all can or will or should make use of such things–people already do use Uber and Lyft, or Zipcar–we’re just pushing back against the idea that in The Future everyone will use car-subscription services all the time and personally owning a car will be a thing of the past (like personally owning a horse).
(I do see some naysayers who are actually pushing back against the idea of fully computer-controlled self-driving cars, whether personally owned by you or as part of a car-subscription service. Some of that is undoubtedly irrational–just like people’s fear of flying commercial airlines vs. fear of driving on public streets and highways–but some of it is a perfectly reasonable desire to make sure this exciting new technology actually works as advertised before we all climb aboard.)
People being forced not to have private (at least partly) self driven cars, either directly or indirectly, will be a political decision. Given the US body politic as it is now, no way in hell would that happen, even with SD cars at 100% of hype. But, maybe I’m a ‘naysayer’ (not sure how it’s defined), I don’t think cars which can drive themselves safely in nearly all conditions nearly all the time, with an add on cost comparable only to today’s safety software (blind spot warning etc) are a few years away. I think that could be a few decades. And society could be different by then otherwise.
I think it’s likely well before then there will be SD car services in defined and limited areas of generally favorable road and weather conditions, and private cars with relatively minimal add on cost of SD features which can drive the car much of the time. But neither of those things would threaten the mass market for private cars, if it’s left more or less up to market forces and choices.
IOW I don’t foresee a single well defined point of a technology everybody will jump on board with (and maybe you don’t, but I think the point is worth underlining). Just like eg. NY is different from almost everywhere else as to whether owning a car makes sense even now, the applicability of SD services will vary. It seems lately that SD hypers (if there are naysayers aren’t there also hypers?) are scaling back near term aspirations a bit to places in eg. Arizona (lots of good driving weather) with well marked roads, etc. for real SD car services near term. Maybe the tech will jump quickly from that to almost anywhere, almost any condition (I realize it doesn’t have to be 100% to cause big changes in the car market) or maybe it won’t. AFAIK. Not an expert but it’s kind of area where people who know more will also tend to also be more enthusiastic, and not necessarily because knowing more shows it’s such a sure thing. Sometimes it just because they get excited and tend to treat challenges as things that will be (or even they will) quickly overcome…but it doesn’t always play out that way.
Car-sharing services (like Zipcar) are inconvenient and expensive. Taxis (including things like Uber/Lyft) are convenient but expensive.
Self-driving cars will merge the two, since there’s no real difference between a taxi and a rented car when the car drives itself. The cost will go down because the fixed cost of the capital will be split better among more people, and because you don’t have to pay a driver. The convenience will go up because there will be more of them.
Again, I’m not saying that everyone will do anything. I’m saying that at the margin it will be more convenient and cheaper to use automated taxis than to own personal cars for vastly more people. Not everyone. But many many more people.
Imagine for a moment that you were designing a system that would work.
The number of cars you need is the number to support peak car usage (plus some buffer for emergencies). The nice thing about that is that peak car usage happens twice a day at rush hour and is extremely predictable. Most people drive exactly the same route every day at basically the same time.
That makes it very easy to plan for. You can schedule your commute car. And it will be very easy for the service to find people who can share rides with a minimum of waiting because, again, people behave very predictably at peak car-usage times.
Any other normal non-peak car usage will be fine. There is plenty of excess capacity waiting on the side of the road.
I think this will be a fun thread to revisit in a decade.
I’d still argue that. For the commute, couldn’t you puzzle things out just as well if you weren’t paying such close attention to the road? I don’t rule out the phenomenon where having your mind partly on something else, can let you figure out the work-related topic, of course.
And for the long drive: You could listen to those audiobooks still - but if you got drowsy, you could doze off. This is speaking as someone who’s done similarly long drives, and loves her audiobooks, but would love it if I could have “down time” while driving. Imagine not having to stop every 2 hours to restore your alertness, or have to split your attention between driving and navigating, or figuring out where to stop for lunch, or whatever.
I read your other posting about the day you figured out how to deal with the snow - and yeah, that kind of thing would be tough to program for. I am by NO means saying self-driving cars answer every need. The best software (I’m in IT as well, by the way) cannot replace the on-the-spot problem-solving of the human brain when anything unanticipated happens.
Like a lot of innovations, the cart starts in front of the horse. Companies investing in it may believe that most of the kinks are temporary and they want to invest in them to get a jump on the competition. And once those kinks are ironed out, that they can create a demand through advertising and maybe specialized services (hotel and airport shuttles, as an example). I have my doubts also about them. Certainly, they can be made more reliable than they currently are. But I also am unsure about how much to put my trust and my life into the hands of one (at least for now). I think they are coming whether people want them or not.
Mama Zappa - Good points and I’ll address them below. But before I do that, I do want to say I am not against self driving cars any more than I’m against the internet or home made noodles. I’m a GIS programmer. I know a bit about spatial analysis and what cars will be required to do.
You have the phenomenon right there. When I read at night, I do not think about work. A drive I’ve done for 26 years is a bit different. And yes, once again I’m not in the norm. As a programmer I do think a bit better with a small distraction. No that’s not quite right. Breaking focus is important. If you are in IT, I’m sure you know that sometimes problems are solved when you put it down for a minute and walk away. I think that’s true in life. Focus, can be a problem because you don’t see the solution around the corner.
Everyone has a different idea of what a long drive is. My two hour drive to Denver twice a month is fine for a little music. I don’t bother with it on my 40 minute drive to work. I think instead.
My Wife and I did a 4000 mile road trip last September. Now, audio books where great for that. Breckenridge>Pittsburgh>Gatlinburg>Austin>Houston>Home. We are traveling to Arizona in the spring (b-day gift from my wife to get out of the snow) and it’s gonna be about an 11 hour drive. Won’t bother with a book. Won’t get finished. We will listen to NPR, and XM channels. I love the comedy channels on XM in my Wifes car. I’ve just put down a deposit on a 4-runner (about the only good 4x4 left, and it has XM. My Pathfinder is getting a bit long in the tooth)
Thank you for that.
I deal with snow a lot, but the summers at 11-2 are worth it. Do I ski? No, to hell with that. I will be on my Kubota tomorrow moving snow though. I get plenty of snow time without volunteering and paying to be in it.
Interesting thing this morning driving up the pass. A road grader was working the road at about 30mph in front of me. Now these things are monsters. Six wheel drive with the blade on the front, underneath and a wing blade. These guys tend to leave every flashing light on the have. Including rear facing headlights. Not back up lights. These would put car headlights to shame. I’m kinda used to this shit. But coming across a vehicle in your lane with headlights pointing right at you is a bit disconcerting. I suppose that a self driving car would use radar distancing to figure out that this vehicle that appears to be coming right at you is actually moving away from you.
I persist in this thread that there is a lot of stuff that engineers and programmers have not thought about and it’s gonna have to be true AI before self driving cars are really safe.
Self-driving cars are on a level with aircraft autopilots in terms of the need for safety. However, flight is far more calculable, as you very seldom need to interact with other objects in your vicinity and moving in unexpectedly. Given that there have been a number of aircraft accidents involving computer error, including software faults and actions that a human failed to override in time, I don’t see self-driving cars as being a reality except under very controlled circumstances.
What are the problems? Firstly, the sensors. We all know that driving can present you with a visual mess that you have to make sense of. Among other things, driving at night in rain and with oncoming headlights. Or with the sun in your face. Granted that any satisfactory self-driving car will have to use ultrasound and/or radar to avoid the visual issues, that still does not mean that you are safe. Even if all cars are equipped with the equivalent of the TCAS collision avoidance system. The biggest problem for both learner drivers and automated systems is coping with the unexpected, such as a pedestrian suddenly popping out in front of you from behind a parked car, for example. Experienced drivers would say “somebody could come out from behind that parked car” and slow down, ready to brake if need be. In the same way, a human can (sometimes) spot ice or wet leaves some way ahead and slow done in readiness, an automatic system will have to react fast when the problem arises.
Secondly, the roads. The systems work best in an environment with clearly marked roads. Things are different out in the countryside away from the freeways. I don’t think Uber is planning to introduce Jeeps any time soon for those out in the sticks. This also applies if you need to use a GPS for navigation. Next factor: the weather. Things like lane control don’t work in the snow, for example. My guess is that autonomous vehicles could only be trusted in special lanes that have interactive electronics to control the vehicles, and it is an all or nothing deal. Mixing driven vehicles with autonomous ones is OK as longer as the driver drives like a machine. This would indicate that such systems could only work in urban or suburban environments or on long distance roads such as freeways.
Thirdly, the human factor. It would be possible to have a system where you get on the freeway and then you can let the machine take over while you play with your Smartphone. All well and good, but can the human react quickly enough in an emergency? And correctly? Driving is a matter of experience and learned habit. What if you have unlearned the reflex to brake hard in an emergency, leaving it to a computer? So you have a large number of drivers with even worse driving habits than some already have now.
If you want to sit back and twiddle, the best answer is public transport. If it is available.
Fourthly, control. Air traffic control systems work well if all the aircraft are going at roughly the same speed apart from takeoff and landing. The speed differentials are far greater on the road, down to cyclists at the one extreme. And, I don’t think that autonomous vehicles can handle overtaking well. I would never trust them for that.
Fifthly, software. Bugs and hackers. 'Nuff said.
This has been said before, but the average car is unused more than 95% of the time. Definitely true in two car households. Is ownership therefore really a good idea, or is it simply a matter of having the use of a vehicle?
Various schemes for car rental at short notice have been tried, but they do not seem to have really taken off anywhere. They are still expensive, and they only work in urban areas where it is possible to have car holding depots within a short distance. How short is short? That varies. Would they work better if the car trundled up to your abode, and trundled back when you have finished with it? Is it a matter of convenience, or cost? Or of the prestige of ownership?
And, once again, what about the folks outside the urbs? All the proposed schemes work best over short distances. And, of course, in relatively good weather. Will Uber still make house calls in deep snow?
As a driver. A good driver, you have to have an outlook that anyone near you may do something stupid at any time. Hopefully, they don’t all do it at once
Will that guy forget you are there and change lanes? Will that person stop for the light? How is that guy gonna merge? And onandonandon. Most of us are pretty good at examining and knowing about these threats. Frankly, it’s amazing to me that it’s not just a big demolition derby out there.
Driverless cars may someday also be able to examine these threats (for lack of a better word) and scale them on a level appropriately.
One approach people talk about is that the human can handle it if the computer fails to react appropriately. This is NO solution, you now are putting the human in a complacent mode that will not have time to react. This is type of solution is frightening.
For myself, having a computer drive the car would crank up my stress level to a level similar to teaching a person how to drive. And starting them off on an LA freeway. It introduces another threat. “OK, does the car see that? What’s it gonna do about it?”
The technology is very interesting, and will come about for certain applications.
I want to address this again. Dewey, do you see self-driving cars having better traction control systems then we have now? Currently they suck, both my wife and I have to turn them off when the going gets tough.
That’s one of the reasons I’m happily purchasing a new 4-runner that has a locking rear diff.
Brayne Ded - A good response. Yes, it’s nothing like auto pilot in a plane. Nothing at all.
People who like to go out on weekends and have a few drinks, or smoke legal pot, might appreciate a self driving car, as would the people they don’t kill.
It’s been like 4 solid pages of this, and even so I’m inspired to chime in:
Good god, yes! I would personally pay six figures for a real self-driving car, and I’m a lifelong car guy who’s always had at least one two-seater sports car, and often has a number of “hobby” cars on top of it.
So yeah, I’m a car guy. I love driving fast on windy roads, I love tinkering and upgrading my cars, and even so I’d happily spend stupid amounts of money on a real self-driving car. Because the “fun” use cases for a car are like 5%-10% of your total car-time, and the other 90% are drudgery.
The market demand? Anyone who hates being stuck in traffic with enough money to buy a premium car - aka, people in major urban areas, which is ~66% of the population of the US.
I’m amazed it’s possible to think that this demand DOESN’T exist, and think you must live somewhere where traffic isn’t really an issue…I literally can’t count how many times I’ve been stuck in completely stopped traffic and looked at all the unhappy people around me, and thought “how could we SOLVE this problem? How could we monetize this by solving this pain point?”
Well, Google et al are actually doing it. They’re going to solve the pain of traffic, and the literally 30 billion hours people waste in it every year (and that’s just in the US!). They’re literally going to liberate hundreds of billions of people-hours annually worldwide and move it from the “unavoidable drudgery” column to the “you can now spend this time as you like” column for billions of people!
I can’t even think of anything else that comes close to that level of impact on human happiness and self-actualization in the last 40 years, so it’s really surprising to me that you don’t think there’s a market demand for it.
And not just deaths from intoxicated drivers.
From World Health Organization: Global status report on road safety 2018:
From NHTSA National Statistics, in the United States in 2016 there were over 7,000,000 police-reported motor vehicle traffic crashes. 5,000,000 of these were “Property-Damage-Only” and 2,000,000 resulted in 37,000 fatalities and 3,000,000 injuries.
From NHTSA Traffic Safety Facts, Alcohol-Impaired Driving, Economic Cost for All Traffic Crashes: