This is what I think will drive the market.
If it cost me $150 a month in insurance to drive a Ford vs $75 a month to drive a Nissan equivalent, then as a consumer I’ll have more incentive to buy a Nissan. And as a manufacturer, I’ll have every incentive to get my safety ratings up so I can best Nissan’s insurance rates so I can sell more cars.
This is actually a rare instance in which a business model benefits everyone involved.
This is the argument against them. Race tracks are (private) roads that are in great condition & aren’t used in bad weather. Our governments can’t maintain our existing roads. Look at all the potholes, & worn/missing lane lines, & closed bridges because they’ve deteriorated to the point that they are structurally deficient.
What happens when there’s heavy rain/ponding or snow on the road? What happens when one of us takes our old jalopy out for a ride, the one w/o car-to-car communications? What happens when there is a cyclist or a runner on the road? What happens when I get to the end of the magical driverless expressway & I haven’t finished my nap/reading the chapter?
I’m not a big fan of cruise control. Yes, I’ll use it a bit to rest my leg on long drives, say 5 minutes an hour. However, I find it easier to be become distracted if I’m not using my brain (& leg) to drive at my desired speed. I’m fearful of it driving for me & then turning onto a road that it can’t handle & me (or you) not recognizing this fact.
If it can go 500,000 miles without an accident in regular traffic, it is a lot better driver than I am. Far safer.
The complicated part is not bad road, its other drivers/vehicles. A couple potholes are not going to send the system into a fit. Google already has some ReallyFuckingSmartPeopleTM throwing the system curveballs all day long trying to break it, so they can teach it to deal.
Insurance is a non issue, you are still responsible for your car, period. You want to blame the manufacturer, sue like you would over any other mechanical defect.
The manufacturers are not complete morons and stand to lose alot if they put out a self driving car with shitty driving skills.
Sure there are people who can out drive the computer. They will probably be in the top 5-10% of drivers, not the top 50% that will claim to.
Too many variables for a computer? Yet morons who didn’t start high school can do it effectively? Driving computers will be tracking and doing things no human could hope to manage especially in a crisis:
Monitor individual wheel RPM
Apply brakes to individual wheels
Awareness Of angles, vector, and position no human could follow
360 degree visibility and awareness of moving objects the driver cannot see
the ability to stop a car safely even with the driver incapacitated
If a car sees something that confuses it, it can always default to stop and have the human driver handle it.
A computer can run half a dozen sets of calculations modifying those calculations as the situation develops and choose a best case scenario faster than a human being would even realize he has a problem.
Ask anyone in EMS, its not a lack of skill that causes accidents, its shitty decision making. People try to “beat the light”, try to turn too fast on wet roads, driving under the influence, tired, not paying attention, distracted, the list goes on.
Trucking companies are already drooling over the idea that long haul trucks might be able to run longer days if not 24 hours and making better gearing/speed decisions for better mileage. I heard a rumor walmart is already hoping to run things like having trucks running without a driver between distribution centers and stores then have the dock crews on each end handle parking/docking at each end.
My concern is more with customization. Change rims/tires and you can introduce shifts in how the car perceives its situation. granted common tire types can be tested but plenty of folks will try to do their own tire swaps then blame the car when it starts erroring out of auto drive when wheel speed and sensor speed do not line up.
The thing that will really improve mpg is when the evolution of self-driving cars makes single-occupancy cars the norm. A car configured to carry just one person and maybe a bag or two of groceries will require a lot less fuel than even the most efficient car designed to carry 4-5 people.
The thing about self-driving cars is, once a driver is no longer required, you’ll only need to own as much car as you use every day, because Zipcar won’t need to be on your block - if you need a 4-passenger car for a weekend family trip to Grandma’s, you can have Zipcar send you that car from their lot a few miles away. So Zipcar and its competitors can work in the 'burbs as well as in the cities. You’ll be able to get extra car capacity when you need it, so people will start buying only as much car as they use daily, and the single-occupancy car will take off. (Figuratively, not literally - we’re talking self-driving cars here, not flying cars. ;))
RT,
That makes me wonder, will taxi companies be successful in blocking this new form of competition? We see with Tesla that dealerships can be successful in blocking direct sales. Taxi companies and probably bus driver unions will be opposed to this. Taxi companies could make the case that it’s an automated form of taxi cab for which they need to buy a permit and those are purposefully limited in number.
Hopefully they won’t prevail and I guess they’ll eventually lose but it could take a while.
I also wonder if people who insist on driving themselves will eventually be seen as weird and reckless control freaks.
What happens when the plaintiff’s bar get a hold of this. They contribute huge sums to political parties and will find any and all excuses to sue on the first error, real,or imagined, of an autonomous vehicle.
Computer reliability is served through redundancy. The space shuttle had 3 independent piloting computers that could override each other, there is no practical reason that this could not be duplicated in automobile-auto-pilot, and it probably ought to be. As well as redundancy in telemetry systems. Failure should not be an option, even if it results in a costlier design. Nor should zombie reliance on the accuracy of current GPS information – which I think has resulted in humans driving into impassable situations.
As a member of the Plaintiff’s bar, I can give you some clues. There will be black boxes, and those will have video and speed data. They will show exactly what happened, eliminating a lot of time wasted in litigation currently. The owners of these vehicles will still have required auto insurance that will pay for damages, and juries will not care if the passengers are drunk. It will reduce damage awards because it will not become insurable until it reduces the number and severity of accidents. After that point, insurance companies will first encourage it with discounts, and eventually require it.
Judges and juries do not make damage awards higher when a machine does the damage, they still award the damages. Unless there are allegations that Google (or whatever company that comes forward with this) committed some kind of fraud, there will be no punitive damage awards, just compensatory, which we already have. To get compensatory damages, you need to show causation.
Well, the right side of history seems to suggest that automated cars ARE going to happen, it’s just a matter of when.
Well, the right side of history seems to suggest that automated cars ARE going to happen, it’s just a matter of when.
The future is approaching quicker than anyone thought. This may actually become common within my lifetime.
Google launches 25 mph driverless car No steering wheel included.
My belief is that cars will become modular - they will be single occupant with a small electric motor, but will be able to connect to each other with retractable doors when two, four or even 8 people want to be in the same vehicle. There will be “luggage modules” that will also attach as and when needed
Not actually correct. Insurers will be much worse off. Insurers make money two ways:
the volume of cash they churn, off of which they make investment profit.
the margin between claims and premium off of which they make underwriting profit
The former is usually the biggest earner: most people don’t understand that insurance is mostly about making money off investing premiums received now before claims are paid out later. There is often little or no margin of premium received over claims paid.
Insurers do like things that reduce their risk to some extent because it gives them a short term profit: typically the risk goes down first, but premiums go down later because it takes competition in the market a while to catch up.
In the long term however, disruptive-level reduction in risk just tends to contract the market, reducing the ability to make investment profit, and leaving smaller volume on which to make underwriting profit.
I don’t think insurers will try to hinder self-driving cars: they won’t be able to resist the sugar hit from initial reductions in claims. Long term however, if self driving cars massively reduce auto accidents, it is going to reduce the entire motor vehicle insurance market to a small fraction of its current bulk.
Maybe. Or maybe the owners of taxi companies will be the companies that invest in self driving taxi fleets. I know taxi fleets are sometimes owned by driver co-operatives but excepting that, most taxi companies will see profit increases if they can get rid of their need to employ drivers.
Google wants their car to “shoulder the entire burden of driving.”
Google and I differ right from the start if they consider driving to be a burden.
I don’t care if all the texting, makeup-applying, hamburger-eating morons get a car that drives itself…it’s safer for them. But I won’t give up the wheel until it’s a law, and even then I’m sure I’ll go drive on private tracks etc.
As a guy who drives alot and gets tons of phone calls due to being self employed, this is the equivalent of me getting a driver so that I can manage my business on the go, an extra $10K on an self driving car/truck would be the best $10K I ever spent.
The Google cars travel some times on the road I commute to work on. It isn’t regular traffic, it is traffic from hell. The elimination of road boulders, dive bombers, car poolers who cross four lanes in 1/8 mile, and nitwits in general will make my drive a lot safer and faster.
But while the public is sure that they personally are great drivers, they are also sure that most other drivers are incompetent jerks, and that getting them away from the wheel will be a very good thing.
I assure you, the roads the Google cars have been driving on have plenty of pot holes and worn out lane markers. There are also plenty of runners and cyclists here. And the cars are not limited to the freeway.
Here is why they are really going to succeed. Older, experienced drivers are better than new drivers. It takes some time to get good, then you get old and get worse, and give up driving to a new generation. When driverless cars get better due to experience, faster hardware, and better algorithms, the improvements will be spread to all the cars. There are no teenage driverless cars. There are no geezer driverless cars.
My father-in-law gave up his car, which was the right thing to do. When I get to be his age I won’t be dependent on taxi services - I’ll have a car which will safely take me to the doctor and to the store.