The Unintended Effects of Driverless Cars

https://plus.google.com/103583939320326217147/posts/TpN1g1oSVbN

by mbrubeck • 15 years ago

420 333 15 years ago

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piinbinary• 15 years ago

I expect that at peak use (rush hour), the total number of cars needed would not be so substantially lower than the current number of cars owned. Perhaps a factor of 2 or 3.

Of course, with driverless cars, people may begin to stagger the starting / ending hours of the work day to allow for owning fewer cars.

askedrelic• 15 years ago

But again, the consequence of a driverless car is that the steering wheel could be removed and fitting 4 strangers comfortably in a car becomes much easier. I would argue that carpooling/ridesharing would increase and ultimately decrease the number of cars needed.

kkowalczyk8• 15 years ago

That's true but consider that most of those people go to/from the same place.

If entity that provides those cars is big enough, they can match up the destination and optimize the traffic so that people going to the (roughly) same place share a car. When I was commuting from SF to MV for work, I had to use the whole car. There were plenty of other people who were commuting at the same time from/to very similar destination and used the whole car. It's not hard to algorithmically put several such people into the same car.

Today cars are 4/5 seaters so you get at 3x reduction compared to current levels (taking into account that not everyone drives by himself today) but you could easily redesign the cars to not be much larger and taking 8-10 people. Or make them straight up buses. Google already does that with their shuttles where they pick e.g. people from SF and drive them in big buses to MV, except it would be much more efficient because the potential pool of people transfered would not be just "people who work at Google and live in SF" but "every person who lives in SF and works somewhere in MV", which is a much bigger number.

danking00• 15 years ago

Although I agree with your argument, I think it actually is algorithmically hard to do this.

Isn't this the travelling salesman problem?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem

Of course, a non-optimal, but good enough routing is probably fine.

EDIT: Added last sentence.

codelion• 15 years ago

The post is misleading, people do not have multiple cars because they cannot drive, it is because they have to use it for multiple things at the same time. Morning going to work, dropping kids etc. will happen all at the same time. Peak car usage will not be affected by self driving cars.

dantheman• 15 years ago

That is true, but the times can be shifted if the car can drive back after dropping you off.

For example: 1. Drive to work 2. Drive home 3. Drive to school 4. Drive home 5. Drive to store ...

Many parents already drop their kids off @ school and thus are adjusting their schedules appropriately.

MichaelApproved3• 15 years ago

You're going to increase your fuel bills dramatically driving ack and forth like that.

_delirium• 15 years ago

I don't think peak usage is equal to the total number of owned cars; that would imply that there's some time of day at which every single car is simultaneously being driven, which is pretty hard to believe.

It'd require inter-household car sharing on a significant scale to take advantage of that, though.

jerf• 15 years ago

So your hourly car rental rates will go up during peak usage until it balances out peak usage. While car rental companies may decline to change their rates on a minute-by-minute basis the only reason is to prevent customer confusion, nothing technical will stop it. Supply, demand, and price information can optimize a system like nothing else.

And even during peak times, car rentals will be augmented by a suddenly-reinvigorate public transport system; your car may take you to a bus, to be picked up by a car on the other end.

The only missing bit of tech is the actual self-driving car. Everything else is simple and obvious extrapolation from brain-dead simple Economics 101 and already-existing network technology. Modern car usage will be seen as only an incremental improvement on horse-drawn buggies, with the real revolution happening much later.

kkowalczyk8• 15 years ago

Actually, I think such a system would kill public transportation because it would become cheaper to use the cars than public transport.

I don't know the exact breakdown but my guess is that salaries of drivers are much more expensive than buses and gas, especially given those are often unionized jobs with very costly benefits (pension etc.).

rubashov2• 15 years ago

People have multiple cars because they want to live among people who can afford multiple cars, and more specifically avoid the urban poor who cannot afford them. American car dependent suburbia exists in large part due to white flight. I imagine cheap driver-less cars would screw up this system.

dmnd• 15 years ago

I don't agree these effects are unintended rather than highly desirable benefits.

cellis• 15 years ago

[3] - Is all that matters. The industry and their constituents could easily push back driverless cars 20 years, and this is without any catastrophic accidents happening. So I'd say about 35 years before we see driverless cars disrupting anything.

Turing_Machine4• 15 years ago

Insurance companies matter a lot, too, though they don't get much coverage in the article. Like others, I don't find the arguments for lower overall usage very persuasive, but I could buy them being significantly safer.

If enough statistical evidence accumulates to demonstrate that these are safer than manually controlled cars, look for the insurance companies to impose a severe cash penalty on driving the car yourself. If the difference is large enough, you might find yourself unable to purchase insurance for a manually controlled vehicle at any price.

mangodrunk• 15 years ago

But couldn't these be safe to the point of you not needing insurance?

tobtoh3• 15 years ago

The movie iRobot was an interesting take on such a future.

In a few scenes in the movie, the female lead (the robot psychologist?) reacts in horror to Will Smith manually driving his petrol driven motobike because it has not auto-pilot and 'you realise petrol is explosive don't you?!?'

And after Will Smith has the forced accident in the tunnel (when attacked by the robots), his boss accuses him of unsafe driving because the blackbox reported that he had disengaged the auto-pilot.

So quite conceivably we'll end up in a future where manual car driving is seen in the same light as drink driving or speeding is seen today.

VladRussian• 15 years ago

like any progressive technological development it will bring only improvements, including refusing to go to specific places specified by a transmission from central traffic control or automated blocking of doors and delievering you to court/jail/administrative hearing ...

modeless3• 15 years ago

There's another unintended effect I haven't seen talked about anywhere: when cars no longer require human drivers, the cost of driving in human terms (time, frustration, danger) will be drastically reduced, but the energy cost will only be reduced by a small amount. The logical consequence of this is that cars will be doing a lot more driving and as a society we will spend a lot more energy on transportation overall.

jacques_chester3• 15 years ago

This sounds to me like the Jevons Paradox.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

brianbreslin• 15 years ago

interesting link, do you think this increased use could go hand in hand with increased efficiency? think about it. if every car drove optimally, they would meet their planned MPG. Now no one gets the listed MPG as they all drive like, well humans.

invalidOrTaken• 15 years ago

While I suspect you're right in that the # of miles driven would increase, I suspect that automated hypermiling would more than compensate for it, leading to a net decrease in energy usage.

modeless3• 15 years ago

I doubt it. How much more efficient do you think automated cars would be? Now think about all the people who will decide to live farther from work because they can work (or play!) on their commute, all the people who will take long overnight road trips while sleeping in the car, all the cars that will drive empty from place to place for various reasons, and most of all the businesses that will all have free automated delivery. I could easily see all that resulting in a 5-10x increase in car-miles driven.

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

This is why I hope Google will license their technology only to all-electric cars. Both technologies are disruptive, and they might as well hit 2 birds with one stone.

melling2• 15 years ago

Electric cars might not become the norm for another decade. The technology is still nascent and it will improve significantly over the next decade.

Also, why would you want to restrict an improvement that could benefit gas powered cars too? A self-driving car would probably be more efficient than a human driver. Fewer traffic jams would be less wasted fuel.

loboman2• 15 years ago

But if less people have cars (say every 10 people share a single car), then the energy used to build cars diminishes.

modeless3• 15 years ago

The energy used to make a car is dwarfed by the energy it uses on the road over its lifetime.

kkowalczyk8• 15 years ago

My assumption here is that when we have driverless cars, they wont be purchased by individuals but a few global providers will emerge that will provide those cars as a service (similar to how we only have few rental car companies, or how ZipCar is a leader in its field or how Uber is becoming a single provider of taxi-like service).

In that scenario, both the cost of cars and cost of energy (gas or electric) will have direct negative impact on their revenues so they will have a very strong economic incentive to drive down that cost.

A single buyer isn't well informed and isn't very rational, so a nice shape of the car might be more important than mpg mileage. Our hypothetical provider would, however, consider it one of the most important characteristics.

Combine that with a great purchasing power of such provider. If they buy 10000 cars and they want high mpg, you can be sure that car companies will spend most of their effort on increasing mpg.

gyardley• 15 years ago

Why wouldn't driverless cars be purchased by individuals?

I want one and I have money - when they're available, why wouldn't I be able to buy one?

Are you suggesting that I won't want to? I'm skeptical - the convenience of being able to use something whenever I want trumps cost. Or are you suggesting that I won't be able to?

artsrc2• 15 years ago

According to the wikipedia article, if we decide that the decide that increased energy (or road space etc.) use is a bad thing we can fix Jevon's paradox with taxation on car use.

learc8318• 15 years ago

Road space shouldn't be a problem, from studies I've read with increased speed and traffic density that come from driverless cars you could fit several times more traffic on the current roads.

ajmurmann• 15 years ago

If every car is driven sutomatically, cars can be driven much more efficiently, since there won't be any need for stop signs or traffic lights in the current form. Cars can just coordinate that one car slows down a little and one car speeds up a little. The only reasonfor card to stop will be pedestrians. Of course I assume that there will be only driverless cars. I am fairly sure that human driven cars will be illegal in less than 20 years. Most accidents will be caused by human driven cats which will lead to a ban. I also predict that the US will be one of the last western countries to ban human driven cars

cbr2• 15 years ago

     human driven cars will be illegal in less than 20 years

I think this is very unlikely. Maybe 20 years from the commercial introduction of driverless cars, or 10 years from when they are the default?

mbell• 15 years ago

While this concept sounds amazing to me, lets not forget that we are not the majority. I just got off the phone with a relative who hates taking a plane, they would rather drive 24 hours to their destination. I consider this concept to be pure insanity, but i don't think this is limited to a small portion of the populous. There is much more at play in the mind of the 'average American(in this case)' than efficiency and 'the car will drive for me'. The lack of a feeling of person control is not among the lesser of these issues.

bdunbar• 15 years ago

i don't think this is limited to a small portion of the populous.

I do that.

But it's not because I hate planes but I've got three kids. Airfare for five to visit grandma in Virginia is prohibitive compared to the cost of driving.

I'm not a nut about it: if it's just my wife and I, we fly.

But on those long drives especially, I'd love a car to do the driving.

brc6• 15 years ago

I like driving and make no apology for it. I love to set off and drive for a 1000 miles or more. I enjoy driving to no particular destination in particular. It's no more or less rational than liking golf or playing computer games.

buff-a2• 15 years ago

Actually the energy used would be reduced by quite a bit. They can drive in formation. This reduces energy expended by reducing drag. It also reduces congestion. It is estimated that congestion wastes 2.4B gallons of gasoline in the US [1]. They can take alternate routes. And if we get smart traffic signals, then they wont have to stop as often by coordinating speed with the flow system. Not to mention eliminating people flooring it out of frustration.

[1] http://dsc.discovery.com/cars-bikes/do-driverless-cars-offer...

wazoox• 15 years ago

Given the current (and undoubtedly soon aggravating) energy crisis, on the contrary energy cost will probably be the limiting factor in most human activities in the coming decades, therefore shared cars will be making even more sense.

joshu2• 15 years ago

Cars aren't engineered for high use. We'd have to radically redesign the car itself to go 250k miles/year.

ScotterC• 15 years ago

the flip side is that if they might do better with constant use. Diesel engines for instance, do better under constant, consistent load. Engines would remain lubricated and heated. Stratification and temp changes would have less effect, etc.

wtallis2• 15 years ago

Are you sure about that? If it's the norm to pay for a share in a fleet of cars, then those cars will probably be owned and managed by a company that will ensure that they get timely preventive maintenance. Yes, there will be changes in how much is reasonable to pay for added durability, but do you have any evidence that cars need to be radically redesigned?

joshu2• 15 years ago

Ever been in a taxi with 300k miles on it?

rdouble• 15 years ago

not looking forward to the autonomous volvo 240 future

there• 15 years ago

sending your car home for your spouse to use and then back again to pick you up at the end of your day means it's using twice as much fuel on wasted trips with no occupants.

tobtoh3• 15 years ago

Well by the time we get driveless cars, we'll probably be on the tenth generation of 'Prius' technology and the wasted fuel cost will be marginal compared to the cost of a car.

philwelch3• 15 years ago

Using a 2000 pound block of steel to transport one human being at high rates of speed is fundamentally energy intensive. Even with rainbows and pixie dust it would waste lots of energy.

dr_rezzy3• 15 years ago

You arent seeing the bigger picture here. If you choose this level of efficiency, after getting dropped off at work, 'your car' will simply locate the next closest customer. If you want to spend the resources on your own private car or a more available one, more power to you.

drewcrawford• 15 years ago

But people tend to live in the suburbs and work downtown; so the net traffic in one direction is much greater than the net traffic in the other direction.

joe_the_user2• 15 years ago

I don't think the article's argument justifies the idea that fewer cars will be sold.

Cars wear out primarily through driving. If you simply switched to automatic driving, what you would have is fewer cars being driven more often and so being worn more quickly. If car-mile consumption stays the same, new-car production would stay the same. On the other hand, if the auto-drive cars increased carpooling, then you'd see a decrease in car-miles consumed and so a decrease in production. But if auto-drive cars drove around empty more, you might have even more car-miles being consumed.

Moreover, you'd have a "big bang" where people decide to mostly stop driving the old, non-automatically-driving cars and so there'd a huge spike in consumption at that point.

The space saved by avoiding parking could be really large, still.

A nice thing would be that at the start, a person might be able to finance their self-driving car by renting in out when they didn't need it. Those economies might make the phenomena spread really quickly.

prophetjohn2• 15 years ago

If you simply switched to automatic driving, what you would have is fewer cars being driven more often and so being worn more quickly

At the very least, I expect that would be offset by some amount by the fact that automatic cars are going to be driven in a much more efficient and car-friendly manner than they are when a human is operating it with their imperfect motor skills, their ego, their laziness, etc. The way the cars operate would be (or at least could be) algorithmically optimized so that all those little things you're encouraged to do (like pretend there is a glass of water on the dash when you're driving, etc.), actually happen.

fragsworth• 15 years ago

Also, once Jiffy Lube starts accepting driverless cars, you would see oil changes and maintenance done on a more regular basis since you wouldn't have to drive it to the shop, further extending the lifespan of the vehicles.

jacques_chester3• 15 years ago

The passenger-mile invariance would be offset by the selection of different design tradeoffs. For example, most driver cars have far more performance "on tap" than will be used in the entire lifetime of the car.

Such performance is not free. It causes engineering tradeoffs that increase maintenance costs, complexity and of course reduced fuel efficiency.

But it's easier to sell a driver car with some oomph than not.

There will be other design tradeoffs you and I have not thought of (and could not think of) that will add up to further efficiencies.

kkowalczyk8• 15 years ago

The article might not but I think that it would totally happen.

My assumption here is that there would emerge a big car provider who would provide those cars, similar to how there's only few major car rentals, or how ZipCar is leading in its category or even how Uber emerges as a single taxi-like provider. The economies of scale are very big here.

Given that, some things you have not accounted for:

Higher average utilization per car. I don't know how much commute traffic accounts for total traffic, but by judging rush traffic on 580, it's quite a lot. Most of those people go from the same location (e.g. SF) to the same location (e.g. Mountain View) and today most of them drive alone. Today 4 or 5 of them would be scheduled by an algorithm to use the same car.

Because of that the cars would get re-designed for a higher capacity (at least 8-10 people) or even straight up buses. A big provider would have so much data that they could optimize the hell out of sharing cars.

Similarly, the cars would utilized, on average, much better. Again, a company with enough data could really optimize for a lifetime of a car and they would have economic incentives to do so (unlike a single customer for whom even gathering the necessary data would be cost prohibitive).

Our cars are, without a question, utilized very inefficiently. Someone operating a fleet of tens of thousands of cars would have not only economic incentive but also necessary data and necessary transaction volume to optimize per-car utilization, because for them it would translate directly into large savings.

learc8318• 15 years ago

I can't upvote this enough, people seem stuck in their concept of what a car is. Without a driver we are free to redesign cars in so many ways.

We no longer need to worry about designing it so that the driver can see every angle, so we can design more efficient seating layouts. We can even add partitions so the 10 passengers don't have to see each other.

Long distance deliver vehicles can operate at lower fuel efficient speeds.

We can combine delivery and passenger vehicles.

The list is endless.

wcarss4• 15 years ago

Good point about efficiency gains becoming a more direct incentive; I look forward to it. However, I doubt that optimization would trend solely toward high capacity vehicles - think of taxis airport taxis as two classes of hireable fare, divided into single user single destination and multiple user single destination. What we need is a multiple user multiple destination system.

Taxis are for in-city travel and occasionally nearby inter-city travel, and the regular car has ended up being fine. They do have a few larger vehicles for big groups, but those are special case vehicles. On average, they tend to get 1-2 people at a time wanting to go places.

Airport taxis tend to be closer to a commute-oriented vehicle. Several people are going from here to somewhere else, so they tend toward 5-6 person vehicles which operate through the night on >1hour long trips.

Corporate transit systems like Microsoft's Connect system are essentially multi-user multi-destination. Those make buses make sense, but there are a relatively small number of buses making set route transfers while a hive of taxis provides last-mile service.

The "Future of Transportation" article from a few days ago [1] suggests that the average vehicle has 1.2 people in it, and that apparently takes commuters into account. Now we must consider: will behaviour change to increase carpooling?

Specifically, what is presently preventing people more people from taking buses to work? (lots do take buses and trains already, but many people drive 10 to 100 minutes)

It could be that a bus doesn't get you /right/ to work. It could be that you would never think to contact everyone in your neighbourhood and figure out that you could buy a bus and run it just for you guys. It could be that the cost of owning and using a car is just low enough that it doesn't really save you anything. It could be an aesthetic sense of independence.

My bet is that this will work out like Microsoft's system. Major transit routes can scale passenger levels up and move efficiently between well placed bus-station/pickup hubs, and armies of taxis will shuttle you to your final destination. Google's bikes are nice, but last-mile service will have to deal with a broader sprawl. Most of them will be focused on getting from hub to delivery and vice versa during morning and evening, but then, what happens during the day? Even weirder: what happens at night?

1. http://swiftprt.com/blog/2011/12/the-future-of-ground-based-...

9999• 15 years ago

Unfortunately there are a few assumptions being made here that don't really jive with car usage in practice. 96% usage? People's schedules aren't that flexible, my spouse and I commute at the same time to different places, and a large chunk of the people in my apartment do as well. This is known as rush hour.

ImprovedSilence• 15 years ago

Not to mention that driving places, without actually driving people places (ie, back home to drive the wife) effectively doubles the mileage, and thus my gas (or the energy source du jour's) consumption.

edit: Also, to build on the above comment, the benefit of having a car is having the freedom to use it when you want, it's always there. Driverless cars always in motion are basically public transit. Just take the bus/taxi/subway already.

learc8318• 15 years ago

>Driverless cars always in motion are basically public transit

Minus the cost of the driver.

The point of ubiquitous driverless cars, is that one could get to you so quickly that for all intents and purposes it would always be there.

Also they don't always have to be in motion. Just give people a discount on service if they let cars park in their driveways while waiting for instructions.

buff-a2• 15 years ago

It is a tragic failure of imagination to believe that a driverless car will offer the same opportunities as a bus or subway. Yes, I'm sure there will be a public transit version of them. Yes, I'm sure that you'll occassionally have to reject one because there's a pool of vomit it in it. But, no, it'll be nothing like walking down the street for a bus, or, for a young woman, hailing a taxi driven by a stranger, at night.

gwern• 15 years ago

Assuming usage does not go from 4% to 96% and he is only partially right, will there still be no interesting societal transformations along his outline due to an increase to, say, 50%?

skizm• 15 years ago

My first thought about driverless cars is that stock in alcohol companies would skyrocket. I know a good many people who would go to the bar on a more regular basis and now that they have a driver for the ride home. Also on a week day after work, why not have another beer? No risk of hurting someone or a DUI, right?

rubashov2• 15 years ago

America needs to get back to its roots as the premier boozing nation. We were long known for this. Hell, there was practically a civil war over the whole whiskey rebellion thing.

mousa• 15 years ago

How about employment? It will make millions of jobs disappear. Truckers/taxi drivers/bus drivers/etc. make up a pretty huge group of people.

melling2• 15 years ago

Aren't you making a Luddite argument?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Different jobs will take their place. There are a lot fewer farmers these days, for example. The real trick is to find effective ways for people to get the training.

throwaway64• 15 years ago

if somebody has worked most/all of their life in a low-education unskilled labor job (the kind that are most likely to be disrupted by computers), who says they even have the ability to become a robotologist or something very intensively knowledge based? In the future these will really be the only kinds of jobs computers cant do. The problems here are much more complex than the Luddite issues of yesteryear, and its disingenuous to write somebody off as a dumb Luddite.

marvin• 15 years ago

The Luddite argument is going to become obsolete one day. There are only so many iGadgets and squeaky plastic toys people are able to pay for. Just because an argument has been correct for along time, doesn't mean it will always be correct.

This is the wrong place to make this argument (it should probably be made at length) but I think the only real solution when we have a super-efficient, highly automated world is to drastically increase taxes to the super-rich and subsidize people with obsolete skillsets. But regardless, we'll no doubt see more interesting developments here in the next ten years. The current unemployment situation is just the beginning, although a lot is going to happen in the meantime.

(This is from a country where about 10% of the population is currently on welfare and we almost de-facto already have the economic subsity system I'm describing)

zefhous• 15 years ago

We're in the software business. Putting people out of jobs is what we do. Pretty much any technological advancement puts people out of jobs. But it's okay! There are more productive things they can be doing. That's kind of the whole point!

100k• 15 years ago

Kevin Drum has argued that once computers are smart enough to drive trucks, what are truck drivers going to do instead? Computers will be smart enough to do just about anything else they could do.

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/09/who-will-tend-mach...

joshsharp• 15 years ago

Ars Technica did a good series on self-driving cars where they came to many of these conclusions already.

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/10/future-of-driving...

moultano• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

As the efficiency with which a resource is used increases, the tendency is to use more of it rather than less.

Concretely, if I don't have to drive the car myself, I wouldn't hesitate to drive anywhere. I'd go to the city every day if I could read on the way, and sleep on the way home.

nostromo2• 15 years ago

With shared resources, this might not be the case.

Today, car owners have already spent $x on their cars -- so they have an incentive to use their investment to the fullest.

Compare that with a shared-car system like ZipCar. ZipCar is generally much more efficient than owning a vehicle (if you don't use it to commute) -- however, since you pay per hour, you have an incentive to skip the car when it's not necessary.

By removing the sunk-costs of ownership, you could incentivize conservation rather than consumption.

EGreg3• 15 years ago

With ZipCar, you have to first get to the car, and then also get back from the car. For most people, the car they own is in their driveway or parking spot.

bigiain8• 15 years ago

Maybe - I wonder just how elastic the miles-traveled vs convenience curve is.

There is surely an upper bound to how much traveling any person wants to do. If it were 5% more convenient for me to travel by car, I _might_ travel 5% more, but I couldn't see myself traveling 50% or 100% more no matter _how_ convenient you could make that travel.

rythie2• 15 years ago

Well fuel is still not free. In the U.K. at least you would hesitate due to the high cost (much lower in U.S.).

namank• 15 years ago

This is a far down the road vision. It calls for a huge shift in the mindset of the consumer AND the manufacturer, to say nothing of the society. Then there is the infrastructure and error handling - what happens when it gets a flat tire on its way to pick up the kids after dropping you off?

Lets give it 15 years. 15 years is a long time for technology but not so much for societal evolution.

I can see the driverless car being on the road in 5 years and I see it being used for carpools. But the vision as painted in the post? Yes, I'm a skeptic.

Very interesting stuff though...I can't wait till they hit the road.

apike• 15 years ago

I think the legal issues are underestimated here.

Who is liable if your driverless Civic drives you into a tree? What if it runs over a pedestrian? Honda? Google? You?

Driverless cars could dramatically reduce the dangers of driving, but it's a lot more complicated if a machine learning algorithm kills somebody than if a mistaken human being does.

blrgeek• 15 years ago

That's a poor argument.

All it needs is for someone to take liability. If you own the driverless car, then you buy the insurance. If it's leased from a pool, then they buy the insurance.

The software vendor for their part take an over-arching insurance on software errors across thousands of cars. Done deal.

Today if you have a 20 year old your premium is higher. Tomorrow if you have a driverless car, your premium might be low even if you have a 16 yr old. Parents buying a first car might just buy a driverless car for a lower insurance premium & the safety of not having the kid drive!

benihana• 15 years ago

It seems that to most Americans, the draw of the driverless car won't be "hey, this is more efficient and is costing me less overall." Rather, I think it will be, "hey I don't have to pay attention in the car anymore, I'll be on my phone playing on the internet the entire way home!!!!!!!" Followed shortly thereafter by, "hey why doesn't this car have the internet in the front seat?"

yuxt• 15 years ago

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, Americans spend more than 500 million 'commuter hours' per week in their automobiles. Once driverless cars take over this time can be spent on browsing web (clicking ads)

philwelch3• 15 years ago

That's the most backwards-ass business model I've seen. Google could probably make more money by selling the damn technology.

luigi• 15 years ago

I brought this up in Matt Maroon's post about the topic back in January, and he brought up a good point: People like to own their car because it's a moving storage locker.

http://mattmaroon.com/2011/01/03/google-will-become-an-ai-co...

eurleif2• 15 years ago

The use case I'm imagining is people going shopping, and wanting to put bags from one store away in their car before going into another. So what if you could summon up a self-driving car, put your stuff in its trunk for a fee, and then call back the same car later with your stuff still in its trunk? It could go be a taxi while you're busy shopping, and not allow other customers to unlock its trunk.

shasta2• 15 years ago

Or we'll get a car design with a removable trunk.

rdl2• 15 years ago

This is probably one of my favorite things about owning a car, and why I have a sedan vs. a hatchback. Being able to store emergency supplies (couple cases of water, a backpack, ...), personal tech supplies (spare mbp charger, cable toolkit, etc.) in my car makes life much easier. Realistically this is 100-200 pounds of stuff, and I wouldn't want to have to carry it to/from a car myself every time I got a robot car.

napierzaza• 15 years ago

So the effect of a driverless car is going to be a driverless taxi. Why doesn't everyone use a taxi now? I'm sure it would cost less than cars do. But nobody really does the cost-benefit analysis of these sorts of things.

UrbanPat2• 15 years ago

Eh, that's doubtful actually. In most US cities (other than, say NYC, SF, and a handful of others), taxi service is expensive and slow to arrive. Parking is free, and cars can be obtained relatively cheaply.

mbrubeck• 15 years ago

Taxis today aren't driverless, and paying a human driver is a significant cost, especially in any country with a relatively high cost of living (and therefore high labor costs). Driverless taxis could change this significantly.

Lots of people do already use mass transit every day, which has a cost structure closer to driverless taxis (because the labor cost of a bus or train driver is amortized across more passengers).

MichaelApproved3• 15 years ago

"And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold."

Incorrect conclusion. Cars being used 20 times more will break down 20 times faster. Less might be needed on the road at the same time but they'll break down and need to be replaced at a much faster rate. Over a serval year timeframe the amount of cars turned over will remain roughly the same.

I also wouldn't send my car home to pick up my wife and drive her to work because my fuel bills will skyrocket through all the extra driving around.

The shared resource makes sense. It'll be similar to taxi services that exist now. You call for a driver and the closest shared car will come to pick you up.

rsheridan63• 15 years ago

>Cars being used 20 times more will break down 20 times faster.

Not true if they're owned by big players who professionally maintain them. Want to buy a used LLV (postal truck from the eighties/nineties)? You can't, because they haven't been surplused yet.

Also, cold engines wear much faster than hot engines, so an engine that runs all day does not wear out as quickly per mile as one that's driven a few times daily.

MichaelApproved3• 15 years ago

Sure, they haven't been surprised but they surely have had enough parts replaced that we can consider then new cars several times over.

You make a good point that a fleets maintained better than the average citizen but they will still break down and still need to be replaced faster that the author is stating. We will still have roughly the same amount of turnover over the course of a decade.

nl8• 15 years ago

I'm not sure if anyone else has realized it yet, but driverless cars will have to be taxed on a time-on-road basis, rather than at a flat rate.

The reason? The economics of electric cars and parking.

Initially it seems that they will fix the parking problem - driverless cars can be sent to park outside the CBD, reducing traffic and freeing up space.

But the problem is that people/software will optimize for price, and for electric cars the cheapest scenario is for them to be stuck in a traffic jam on a public road.

Instead of going to a parking bay, the software will route them to the nearest traffic jam, where the car can sit with the electric motors off for a large amount of time. Inevitably, some software will misjudge how long their charge will last, their batteries will run flat and the traffic jam will get worse.

As far as I can see the only way around this is to increase the cost of being on the road.

zasz• 15 years ago

What does CBD stand for?

nl8• 15 years ago

Central Business District

rottencupcakes2• 15 years ago

Who exactly will do this? No major car company would risk their reputation selling a car with that programmed into its software.

Even if groups of hackers installed this on their cars, I can't imagine this movement gaining enough critical mass to honestly be a concern.

nl8• 15 years ago

Who exactly will do this? No major car company would risk their reputation selling a car with that programmed into its software.

What's the risk, exactly?

Our car has an "ultra-economy mode" where the motor turns off when stationary - many cars already have this.

Our car can park itself - many cars already have this.

Our car will find a parking space, optimizing the route to and from the parking garage - that seems logical, why would a company not do that?

Our company will optimize the route to and from the parking garage, and the time spent in the garage vs on the road based on price vs economy of the car - why would a company not do that?

The problems only occurs when hundreds of cars independently make their own decision to drive as slowly as possible to and from the parking space.

(Edit: someone else pointed out that UPS routes their trucks to avoid left turns. This isn't too dissimilar to that - they do it to improve fuel economy, this would be done to improve costs too)

wcarss4• 15 years ago

Maybe not.

If you made it a flat fee, then it's kind of like runs-batted-in. The car has to get more people delivered to make money, so once it gets you to where you need to go as efficiently and quickly as possible, you get out and it speeds off to complete another fare.

Increasing road-cost would have the opposite effect, I think. If the cars make money just by being on the road and not by completing tasks, they lose the incentive to finish and jam-sitting becomes optimal.

nl8• 15 years ago

Yes, I agree this could be an option.

But I'm not optimistic about the share-car thing, at least in cities without a strong existing public transport system. In most cities too many people travel at rush-hour, with unique route requirements (dropping kids at school etc).

prophetjohn2• 15 years ago

Why are there going to be traffic jams? Computers are driving the cars. There's not going to be accidents anymore. There's not going to be that weird bottleneck effect where one sheepish person slows down to much and eventually everyone behind them stops.

nl8• 15 years ago

There will still be traffic lights, bottlenecks, and for the foreseeable future there will still be conventional cars.

Driverless cars will still be limited by physics (their size and how fast they can accelerate). If car routing algorithms deliberately route cars to places where the traffic is slow (because they can loiter, saving on parking while using little power) then the traffic jams will be worse.

If we rebuilt the road system specifically for driverless cars maybe we could eliminate traffic jams. Otherwise...

eftpotrm3• 15 years ago

Fuel taxes already do this, while providing a strong incentive to run smaller and / or more efficient cars.

Roughly, 50% of my fuel bill is on direct taxation. That's it's primary tax cost, not the fixed annual license cost, and gives me a tax bill that's elastic by usage in exactly that way while also promoting efficiency.

Of course, best wishes to anyone trying persuade the average man in the street that this is A Good Thing....

nl8• 15 years ago

You may have missed the bit about electric cars.

They can turn off their motors without losing any efficiency (which is why hybrids do so well on efficiency in city traffic). Depending on how slowly the traffic moves there will be a point where it is cheaper to stay in traffic (with the motor off x% of the time) compared to paying for parking.

zohebv• 15 years ago

Interesting post. However, I think the primary consequence of driverless cars could be more mundane - everyone will end up using cabs/taxis far more often. This is the life I lived in Bombay a decade ago. The parking, cost overhead of a car is so high and rickshaws/cabs are so cheaply and plentifully available, that walking out of your home and hailing a cab to go wherever you want is the best option.

Cabs in the West are expensive because drivers need to be paid more and cartels are at work. If both these costs are eliminated then what works in a country like India is, suddenly, the best option for commuters in the West. Realtime pooling of cab passengers is a possibility, a traveler could be offered a choice of picking a co-traveler for a reduction in fare(or even cash back!) when already travelling in the car.

Families could still own cars, but they will probably pay for insurance on a per-mile basis, rather than a per-month basis, so that the incremental cost of owning a car is minimal. Effectively, you end up owning a cab that only you use and pay cab fare to the insurance company :-) The ratio of cabs to private cars would then be an interplay of insurance costs/parking costs and ride sharing benefits, with cities leaning towards cabs to escape parking costs. So, things wouldn't be too different :-)

One unfortunate consequence could be the increase in suburban sprawl and traffic congestion with driverless cars as people start caring lesser about longer commute times. Automated cars will probably be better behaved in traffic, but the road capacity will be pushed to its limits.

learc8318• 15 years ago

Most traffic is caused by the delay in human reaction times, and driverless cars can operate safely at much higher speeds and at much higher densities. Roads could handle massively more traffic if they were only packed with driverless cars.

maximusprime6• 15 years ago

Where the hell do you get that idea?

Most traffic in the US is caused by the lack of roundabouts.

EGreg3• 15 years ago

I agree with everything except the last part. Cars will still wear out after the same number of miles.

wavephorm• 15 years ago

If you can just network the driverless cars up to the existing public transportation systems then we'd have a truly useful device.

Just walk outside your house and a car drives on up, opens its doors, and takes you to the most convenient location to transfer to a public bus, or if economical to pick up other passengers going near your destination.

ccc3• 15 years ago

A couple of comments:

And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold

Actually, no it wouldn't. If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now. That means cars will have to be replaced much more frequently. There would be fewer cars sold than there are now, but it wouldn't be 20x fewer.

The operating percent of a car will go from 4% to that 96%

This seems wildly optimistic to me. The driverless cars may be capable of driving around 96% of the time, but that doesn't mean they can be carrying people 96% of the time. No matter how efficient the system, if there are enough cars to handle peak traffic during the day, then a lot of those cars will be sitting around doing nothing at night.

shasta2• 15 years ago

Not to mention the immediate efficiency hit of the car driving empty between rides.

bigiain8• 15 years ago

I wonder what sort of population density and usage pattern you'd need before that worked in your favour?

If my apartment complex had a few dozen cars shared between a few hundred apartments, perhaps the car I take to go shopping could pick up the next door kid from soccer on the way back, then a different car might pick me up at the shops when I'm done, after dropping some other neighbour at the movies...

(I guess I'm now describing taxis. I wonder what the difference between this, and a taxi network of driverless cars is?)

frankus6• 15 years ago

If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now.

Existing cars, if driven 20 times as much, would wear out 20 times more quickly, like taxicabs do now.

But it's also possible that cars would simply be built with more reliable components and more durable materials, like current aircraft and public transit vehicles are.

It's not cost-effective to build an ultra-reliable car that's sitting idle 96% of the time, but the economics would surely change if the utilization rate is much higher.

bigiain8• 15 years ago

The thing is, taxis _don't_ wear out as fast as you'd think.

I remember talking to an old-school cab driver a while back, when I noticed his odo had ~650,000km (~400k miles) on it. We chatted a bit about it, and when I asked "So how long do cabs last" he said "3 good crashes." It doesn't which of the locally popular cab models you buy and it doesn't matter how far you drive them - you might need to fit a reconditioned diff or gearbox or even motor, but all of that is "routine maintenance" from his point of view. Its after the third time you've crunched it hard into something that it's time to get rid of it...

snowwindwaves• 15 years ago

cars wear out from two things 1) age 2) use A car, left sitting in the driveway for 30 years, unused and unmaintained, is unlikely to work very well or for very long. Rubber components like hoses, wire insulation, weather stripping etc become brittle and break.

As some other posters mention, cabs with 650,000 miles are not unheard of. I had a Toyota Landcruiser with 450,000km on the second engine, over 900,000km on the body.

A car that got 20x use would not wear out 20x as fast because a large part of a car wearing out is just age, not miles.

SideburnsOfDoom2• 15 years ago

> Existing cars, if driven 20 times as much, would wear out 20 times more quickly

Citation needed. I don't think they would.

brc6• 15 years ago

I was thinking along these lines on a similar thread recently. The particular thread implied that the cost would be much lower, because there was no driver involved. I agree that it would be lower, but not orders of magnitude lower, because the demand shape will be exactly the same - or even more pronounced.

My hypothesis is that the driver is probably about 10-20% of the cost of a fare, the rest is the capital cost of the vehicle + licensing fees + insurance, and the marginal cost of maintenance and fuel. Because inevitably cars sit around most of the time, then the price of 5-6 busy hours of the day has to make up for the rest of the time.

Further, with a disruptive business idea like this, I could easily see an auction-style interface for the vehicle booking, which would give a much better revenue curve (we are talking about Google). In that case, the peak-demand period would probably exceed the current (regulated) taxi fares. But the plus side of that is that a midnight ride would be very cheap due to lack of demand and simultaneous lack of a need to pay drivers more money to work nightshifts.

Turing_Machine4• 15 years ago

"that a midnight ride would be very cheap"

Except possibly around whatever local time the bars close.

fleitz2• 15 years ago

Yes, cars may still sit around doing nothing at night, but the number of cars for peak traffic will drop significantly because of the gains in utilization. Imagine you want to ride share with your friends, one car will ferry people to and fro the highway which will be almost impeccably timed with your friends arrival at a waiting area just off the freeway. You'll get in the car and continue to work, after you arrive at work that car will go pickup someone in the city who works a bit later and grab a couple of their friends on the way.

When you combine this technology with social networks and mobile the improvements to efficiency, cost, and quality of life will be astounding. This isn't going to be an overnight thing but I see this kind of thing becoming prevalent probably 5 to 10 years after the first driverless cars become publicly available.

Driverless cars would be worth it simply for the reduction in drunk driving.

hessenwolf4• 15 years ago

Driverless cars would be awesome simply for the increase in drunk driving. This is a really good point actually, you could go out for the night and still drive home.

Drink driving laws have had a huge negative impact on country living in rural Ireland, where the main social outlet is the local pub, and there isn't a taxi in the village.

nt_mark• 15 years ago

(cough) Public transport (cough)

anabis• 15 years ago

> if there are enough cars to handle peak traffic during the day I got the image of cars migrating across the Eurasia, taking Chinese to work, then Indians, then Middle-easterns, etc.

yason• 15 years ago

If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now.

This is just a matter of the practical design choices. Any machinery that is in heavy use usually gets fitted, appropriately, with more robust set of parts which last many times longer before wearing out.

Current consumer cars have bearings, joints, and moving parts that are carefully optimized to match the expected usage pattern (which is mostly idle) for a designated period of time and nothing more. That's why older cars can sometimes run for ages. Decades ago we didn't know how to make extremely light-weight parts from least amount of steel with a calculable expiry time of, for example, 40 thousand miles so engineers had to fit cars with slightly heavier and more expensive parts to make sure they didn't break too easily. Think about fitting bearings and joints from a heavy van into a light Japanese small car. Or consider old 70's-80's Saabs and Volvos that can last nearly forever.

Likewise for fluids and lubrication, it's easier to clock high mileages with a car that is mostly in use throughout the day rather than with one that is used a couple of times a day for commuting. The engine wearout is at its peak during the first miles after a cold start.

rdl2• 15 years ago

Also, the 1970s and 1980s were a low point for cars in general -- lots of new environmental regulations were kicking in (including a whale oil issue which was discussed on hacker news), causing objectively worse reliability for many cars in the 1970s and 1980s vs. the 1950s and 1960s. By the late 1990s the Japanese and German manufacturers seem to have resolved things, and by the 1990s, the US automakers.

redthrowaway2• 15 years ago

The biggest opportunity I can see here is Cars as a Service. Basically an automated taxi service you pay $50/month for to use a car whenever you want. You fire up the caas app,order a car, and the nearest one comes and grabs you. The best part: not location dependent. Your membership is good in any city (heck, even any country). It would be the end of taxis and even public transportation.

majmun2• 15 years ago

I imagine this is already possible but with people as drivers instead of machines, you just need some badass coordination in your cellphone app service.

redthrowaway2• 15 years ago

Possible, yes, but you have to both buy the cars and pay the drivers, one of the reasons taxis are so expensive (the other being licenses running in the hundreds of thousands of dollars). If we project 5 years down the road to a time when gas prices are even higher, electric vehicles are cheaper and more reliable, and the technology is ready for prime time, I could easily see cars as a service working.

UrbanPat2• 15 years ago

Here's a related question: What will cities look like with driverless cars being shared by groups of people? Parking needs will diminish significantly, allowing cities to become more dense, yet because the cost of driving will be reduced (by splitting the ownership costs of cars, by increasing the rate of shared commuting, and by allowing commuters to spend their transit time being productive), demand for urban land for residential areas may decrease overall. So my best guess is that in many cities commercial areas will become more dense, but residential areas could enter a decline. Any other ideas?

nostromo2• 15 years ago

Another unintended (or maybe intended) effect: cheap cabs.

Without cab drivers, there's no reason for the antiquated medallion system. That would lead to more cabs. Without medallion costs, drivers, tips, presumably cheaper insurance, and more efficient route-finding -- it should also be much cheaper.

With cab-bots, you could also do some awesome things like model the areas and times of greatest demand and make sure they are there immediately. Or, similar to UPS, route to avoid left turns to increase fuel performance.

frankus6• 15 years ago

When I was young and naive I used to dream about how a Personal Rapid Transit system that would whisk people around in private little pods along elevated monorail tracks could work. Clearly the answer is "it couldn't", not so much technically but economically and politically.

But it turns out we already have a really comprehensive network of ground-level "tracks" that lead up to nearly every residence and business on the planet. The missing ingredient thus far has been the ability for a vehicle to stay on this "track" without a driver, but it looks like Google and friends might have cracked that nut.

A second impediment might be powering these cars in an efficient manner, but batteries have vastly improved over the last decade, and as they are standardized, battery swapping and even third-rail-type power (at least on limited-access roads) become possible.

The land use implications alone are going to be huge, but I'm not entirely sure which way they'll flip.

On the one hand, we will no longer need vast parking lots adjacent to activity centers like malls, stadiums, office complexes, big-box stores, and airports. That means that stuff could be built in those parking lots, which could potentially greatly increase the density of current cities and suburbs.

On the other hand (h/t Karl Smith at Modeled Behavior) driverless cars would dramatically lower the cost of living in exurban areas, so people interested in peace and quiet would no longer have to compromise as much as they do now.

johnwall• 15 years ago

he forget to mention the ability to drink and drive legally.

iandanforth• 15 years ago

How has no one mentioned EC2 in this whole thread?

Automation, centralization, capacity planning, many of the problems are the same.

Now IF that analogy is correct I propose:

1. A few large entities will dominate the automated car business while enthusiasts and finicky users will happily continue to buy their own.

2. Manufacturers will see demand explode for a small set of highly efficient commodity vehicles.

3. Excess capacity will be resold for new businesses.

- Package delivery - Mobile Advertising - Portable infrastructure. (Need wifi coverage at an outdoor event? I'll send over a half dozen networked cars) - Portable storage (Think of those delivered storage pods, but that only were there when you called) - Entertainment (Rent a dozen cars and have them do some sweet driving)

Also, though this doesn't fit into the Amazon analogy, talk about a captive audience! Imagine, you're puttering along on a family trip to Yellowstone in your rental, it's around lunchtime, and the car suggests stopping at Burger King .. out loud ... with your kids listening. Can you imagine what BK would pay for that privilege?

ccourteau• 15 years ago

I wonder what the potential would be for vehicles to be hacked and their destinations rerouted by third parties. Would there be a centralized automation system or would the cars be independently smart and networked?

Natsu• 15 years ago

Driverless cars are a great idea and I really want to see them succeed.

But I can see more than a few problems. As they say, there are entrenched interests that won't like that. For example, if you can rent cars that way, I don't see the people with those very expensive taxi medallions being any too happy about that. Yes, getting rid of that would be a good thing, but the people who own them won't be any too happy about the value of their investment vanishing.

Also, there's what happens with accidents. For example, look at that story we have right now about the autopilot flaking out for what? A minute? Only to have the pilots get confused and crash the plane. People underrate intentional risks because they feel that they have control. Conversely, they overrate risks where they do not have that feeling. Driverless cars are firmly in the "don't have control" pile. Sure, the computer is likely to be a much safer driver than most people, but that also means being a nicer driver (which will really piss off some people, passengers and other drivers alike), and people with low skill overrate their abilities. Throw in any actual programming errors into the mix and I just have to hope you have good insurance and a good PR department.

tryitnow• 15 years ago

The value proposition here is basically replacing cab drivers.

This offers some really interesting challenges because there should be some sort of optimal routing algorithms that would allow a car to carry more than one passenger at a time.

I am sure Google is already working on something amazing in this regard.

The most exciting thing is the potential to radically reduce transportation costs. The cost reduction won't be an order of magnitude but it would probably be at least half the total cost of transportation we incur now.

orijing• 15 years ago

Guys, some of you who are criticizing the precise "assumptions" are missing the point! He's not saying that utilization will go up to 96% precisely, or that there will be 20x fewer cars. He is challenging us to imagine the possibilities ourselves, seeding it with some immediate (potential) implications. On first sight his assumptions seem reasonable, and it's up to us individually to determine what the ramifications are.

Indeed the potential is enormous for freeing up a lot of human time/etc. We will need less parking certainly, cars will be running newer models (since they're used more, they'll likely last less time) with better technologies, and potentially there will be more efficient routing algorithms to save energy, time, etc.

I like how HN is often first to criticize, but sometimes you're just missing the point. The point is to imagine for yourself the possibilities. For me, it's enormous.

fleitz2• 15 years ago

Fully agree, just had the critic argument with my roommates about this. It doesn't really matter if everyone gets on board this plan, what matter is that with a 90% utilization rate and cars that can move themselves, someone like ZipCar/Uber or whoever can offer something like $30/month for unlimited car usage within 40KM.

It doesn't matter to me if everyone else doesn't get on board what matters to me is that a service at those rates may be possible in the near future. People still have phones that only text and call, but it's becoming a rarity.

adabsurdo• 15 years ago

exactly. all those car-sharing services may become much, much more useful and prevalent when you can use your smartphone to whistle the car to come to you. that would also spell doom to taxis.

perhaps then only the very rich, those who live in remote areas, and true car enthusiasts will want or need to have their own car.

a bit like a 100 years ago, everybody from the middle-class up had a maid, but now only rich people do because machines now do most of the household work for us.

maximusprime6• 15 years ago

You're assuming that having driverless cars is more desirable than having human controlled cars. I doubt most people see it that way.

pepijndevos• 15 years ago

I do hope car companies will switch to using truck-quality bearings on cars. Trucks are more like airplanes in that respect, they easily do a million miles and spend a lot of their time on the road.

Confusion• 15 years ago

I think that will happen automatically. The market would change: cars would be bought more and more by companies providing them to others for a fee, like with trains and airplanes. With the current logistical problem of car-sharing out of the way (specifically: the labor costs associated with a driver and the risks that human poses to the car), that becomes viable very quickly. Those companies would differentiate between cars on different criteria than current consumers and would demand higher quality, longer-lived cars. Car manufacturers will have to adjust.

VBprogrammer• 15 years ago

To say change to truck (I assume you mean the Heavy Goods Vehicle, rather than the pickup variety) quality bearings is a vast simplification. Cars manufactures over the years have been striving to reduce the cost of producing cars, the weight (improving performance and efficiency) and reducing the maintenance requirements of their cars.

This means we have things like sealed ball joints which can't be lubricated, spark-plugs which are expected to last for 75,000 miles, gearboxes without sump bolts as the oil 'never' needs changing and sealed units which cannot be opened and/or put back together without specialized tooling.

Trucks on the other hand are expected to have a very regular maintenance schedule with lubrication points (or complex single point lubrication), the weight of the vehicle parts is smaller in comparison to the load meaning there is little incentive to reduce weight (and even counter productive in low traction situations). They also have a much higher millage expectation within their expected lifespan and so are designed accordingly.

coffeeaddicted• 15 years ago

No more "I can't drink tonight I'm the driver" excuses - our society is doomed!

Tloewald2• 15 years ago

It's a really interesting article. I'm not sure if he's missing some more likely and fundamental consequences.

1. Travel time and thus speed are less important. So driving will become slower, safer, more fuel economical. BTW this will increase utilization because people will be in transit longer per trip.

2. People will travel more and for new reasons. E.g. I might hop in a car and tell it to go somewhere scenic while I work. This is going to increase utilization and possibly increase fuel consumption.

3. People will install beds in their cars or switch to bigger more comfortable vehicles. You can now sleep on the road (overnight travel). Another huge increase to utilization and fuel consumption. Bad for hotels.

4. People will accept longer commutes since they can read, sleep, work, etc. en route leading to further expansion of suburbia.

Key message: more people driving more miles for more reasons at lower speeds.

Just the idea of owning one car and sending it home for the wife to use is hardly full of win. Better yet we all share public autocars, but that smells of communism and many Americans will never wear it.

Far from increasing efficiency through greater utilization, I see self driving cars as turning cars into mobile houses and becoming more personalized and used far more.

"If some of my homes had been more like my car, I probably wouldn't have traveled this far." Paul Simon.

tibbon2• 15 years ago

Driving cross country without driving sounds awesome really. About the only thing I minded about going to Burning Man was the drive there. We were all tired (scary) and I'd much rather have just sat and enjoyed my friends (and sleep) for the 36 hour trip.

sstrudeau• 15 years ago

Americans use shared cars all the time. They're called taxis. Also, ZipCars, rental cars, shuttle busses...

namdnay• 15 years ago

I can't help thinking this guy is reinventing the bus.

Symmetry2• 15 years ago

Buses have problems with aggregation, they don't go exactly where you want to go and you have to stop the bus whenever one of the passengers wants to get off or one. Also, you might have to share it with crazy people ranting at you.

Driverless cars cut down on most of the downsides of public transportation, but they do lose the fuel efficiency.

Lagged2Death4• 15 years ago

Here's the problem I see.

The potential for car-sharing and an attendant rise in utilization rate has existed for a long time. (There's little reason something like Zipcar couldn't have been organized by telephone years ago.) Yet it has only caught on in a small way, and only in places where there are other overwhelming advantages to that scheme, in cities where car ownership (parking) is terribly expensive.

I think he's overlooking something regrettable but true: the low utilization rate, great expense, wastefulness and general economic insanity of private cars are critical parts of their appeal to consumers. Many people who could commute by train or bus choose to take a car instead, even though it's hugely more expensive, more stressful, and often not much faster. They'd rather feel like they had some control than no control. They'd rather sit in a seat no strangers have been sitting in. They like knowing the glove compartment is crammed with their own crap and not someone else's. They like the fact that their car will be waiting for them and for them alone in the parking space where they left it, with no need for waiting or a call-ahead reservation.

And of course there's the fact that parking an enormous, expensive, gas-guzzling monstrosity in the office lot or the driveway has a genuine (shallow, materialistic, emotional, and pitiably simian - yet still genuine) effect on your friends, neighbors, minions, and yes, on yourself.

He's supposing that driverless cars will somehow finally yield to economic pressures that have been present (and irrationally resisted) all these decades.

JoshTriplett3• 15 years ago

I don't see the points you mentioned as the primary benefits of a car over a bus or train. A car requires no waiting, and takes you directly to where you want to go, with no stops or detours. A bus or train requires waiting, makes various stops, does not take a direct route to your destination, and drops you some distance away from where you want, perhaps with a couple of transfers required for long distances.

Car sharing programs eliminate some of the drawbacks (no detours or stops), but several still apply (no guarantee of timely availability, one or both endpoints does not coincide perfectly with your destination). On top of those, you also pay more than mass transit, and you still have to do the driving.

Give me a transit mechanism which picks me up from my house at the time I want to leave, and takes me directly to my destination with no stops, and I see no reason to ever drive a car again.

I certainly believe that some car enthusiasts exist who actually driving, rather than just doing it to get to a destination. However, I don't believe those people make up the majority of drivers, or even a significant fraction; I think most people just want to get from point A to point B, and driving sucks the least for them.

sauravc• 15 years ago

The main point is convenience. Limos are shared resources, but no one complains about not having access to their glove box when riding in one, because they're so awesomely convenient and the level of service is spectacular.

This is where car-sharing services of the past didn't go. They went with the cheapskate (why have a car payment?) enviro-friendly (share cars) route. I think of a driverless pod service as on-demand limo service, with the potential to be at a price that's cheaper than owning your car.

Still wanna hear the roar of your motor on the open freeway? Sure go ahead! There are plenty of people who enjoy riding horses too! I don't think either of these "hobbies" are going to go away and I wouldn't ever want them to either.

brc6• 15 years ago

I agree with your points, except I don't agree with 'irrationally resisted'. If we take it at face value that someone does something (ie, own their own car) with clear alternatives available (ie, using shared cars) the behaviour is rational. It mightn't seem right on a cost-per-mile basis, but then it just shows that people place value in other things above and beyond cost-per-mile.

Wanting to own your own car even though it is more expensive than the alternatives is no different to wanting to buy designer clothes at 10 times the price of wal-mart offerings. You might call them irrational, but clearly the person making the free choice finds value in the proposition, thereby, as far as they are concerned, it is rational. In fact, we hear people rationalising it all the time.

gcl2• 15 years ago

"I like how HN is often first to criticize, but sometimes you're just missing the point."

Welcome to the internet. Not sure how long you've been here but anything posted publicly will get criticized and torn apart regardless of where it's posted.

ldng• 15 years ago

Ford is kind of already aware of this, see Bill Ford's TED talk : http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_ford_a_future_beyond_traffic_g...

majmun2• 15 years ago

I love driving car. Only problem that I have and this could solve is parking in zone where it is expensive and somehow park car somewhere else. But I could possibly solve this problem NOW by paying students or someone to park, and get your car for you. The prize has to only be cheaper than parking expanses.

driverless car cost will be higher than this I imagine.

izend• 15 years ago

The largest unintended effect will be the massive loss of employment in the transportation industry.

naa42• 15 years ago

All these economic points can be applied to public transportatipon (i.e. trams, trolleys, subway). They also have much higher utilisation of equipment and number of drivers is negligible comparing with the number of passengers. So the problem is the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... Well, maybe Google can introduce public transportation once again.

b1daly• 15 years ago

While this is a fascinating thought experiment are there really so many people who think there will be mass adoption of driverless cars in the near to mid term?

The technical, political, socialogical, and psychological barriers to the OP vision seem huge. Just to mention one that I haven't seen mentioned: winter driving. In snowy climates the driving conditions are very unpredict able. Cars get stuck and require all sorts of creative driving techniques. If the sort of seamless automatic driving doesn't work in such an environment then human driven vehicles will still be on the road in large numbers. Being on the road means they can be driven to the dense, warm urban areas where automated driving might work better.

You could outlaw human driven vehicles in certain places, but it highlights the need for the creation of parallel infrastructure to be created in areas where land is scarce. The transition period would be stretched out and chicken vs egg type problems could be insurmountable for the foreseeable future.

switz• 15 years ago

A [nice] motorhome that's driverless would be awesome. Have to be in New York at 9, but live in Philadelphia? Fall asleep in your motorhome the night before and wake up at 8 a.m. already in the city. Not to mention the gas/electricity/emissions benefits from a machine controlling the acceleration and motor.

choxi• 15 years ago

post is so good, read it 3 times

ajuc• 15 years ago

It's not about average throughtput, it's about peak throughtput (during rush hours). Big percentage of families will want their cars at 8-9 and 16-17.

So utilisation of cars will never be 90%, more like 45%, which is still big change, I agree.

It's also possible that companies will do the sensible thing and adopt adjustable working hours (many software companies do this already here).

jsvaughan• 15 years ago

One unintended effect is that accidents are going to be quite different. Although driverless cars are bound to be safer, I wonder what people's reaction will be to computer error causing death. The style of computer error is not likely to correspond to reasonable human factors (like bad conditions, icy roads etc - all that can be programmed in), but bugs / bad radar echo zones / new roads not yet mapped etc - there are going to be deaths caused by circumstances that a human would have easily, safely dealt with.

danssig• 15 years ago

Once we have automated cars why would anyone own one? Cars are the biggest waste of money we have right now. On a house you spend more but you have the potential to get it back or even make a profit. Not so with a car, it's just loss and a lot of that.

The sensible thing to do would be to have cars as a service. Why tie yourself to one type of car when you can just order what ever you need for that specific trip? Why does every family need 2 cars when nearly all our time is spent in one place (e.g. home, the office, the golf course).

Cars as a service can enjoy the same kinds of economies you have with e.g. the phone network. You don't have to have enough for everyone because everyone won't be using them at the same time. You need only worry about peak time, which you even have some control over since you're making the driving schedules.

Papirola• 15 years ago

read some sci-fi: last chapter of flashforward (the book)

Tichy• 15 years ago

Unintended? For me, those were always the main motivation for driverless cars.

maximusprime6• 15 years ago

Driverless cars will never go mainstream. It's not something the masses want or need. Just a project for techies to have fun doing for the sake of doing it.

lasonrisa• 15 years ago

Nah, people will sell their houses and buy a truck with their home which would follow them around. What we will actually rent is the parking space.

eftpotrm3• 15 years ago

What this seems to ignore for me is the car-as-status / car-as-identity case. Speaking personally when I had to trade from a rather nice executive saloon to an MPV / minivan, much as I knew it was sensible I hated it because of the self-image connotations. Which is possibly why I've now got a 350Z ;-)

Why does anyone buy a BMW or a Mercedes when a Ford is substantially cheaper for the same space and performance? Image. That's a sector which is always going to buy their own cars rather than leasing one from a pool, because even a shared 'prestige' car (a rather meaningless tag given current BMW sales figures, but I digress...) starts rapidly losing its lustre.

Which then may well mean that we gain a new social stratification - prestige car, own car, driverless pool car. Which could well see older used cars and taxis dropping out of the market, but I doubt it'd have an effect on the general car market on quite the same scale that the writer envisages.

GFischer3• 15 years ago

Make owning your own car a luxury and tax it to hell :)

I hope they do that AFTER the driverless cars gain traction (not before as here in Uruguay where the president thinks that choosing not to use the mediocre public transportation is a "luxury").

frobozz2• 15 years ago

Maybe, but I suspect that the order of adoption might change that. I agree that there will probably always be a segment of personal cars, but that segment will be small and shrinking. Speaking from the other side of the fence: if I still lived in a zipcar city, I'd be rid of my car in a heartbeat. I always considered my lack of car ownership as a positive status symbol.

One sort of person who buys prestige cars* would be the same sort of person to be an early adopter of personally owned driverless cars, after all, being equipped with the latest magical technology is one of the things that confers prestige. Once that has happened, membership of an exclusive car-sharing club might become desirable, offering the opportunity to network and do business on the move. After all, people do buy first-class tickets on trains, despite the massive expense, regardless of the fact that it gets you there at the same time as standard class.

I could also envisage a future in which personal car ownership is often seen in the same light as the ownership of certain models of car (e.g. porsche boxster) are today - i.e. a gauche attempt at a status-symbol by a nouveau riche oik.

*(The other kind, who wouldn't go driverless, are the kind of petrolhead who relishes the man-machine hybrid that they become when they get behind the wheel, but they will eventually be restricted to racetracks)

icebraining2• 15 years ago

I can see it being like planes today. Some few have their own jets, some more rent them, most people use the cheap, generic ones.

maigret• 15 years ago

Two unrelated comments:

- The most massive impact of driverless cab will be to send all taxi and truck driver to unemployment all of a sudden. Many post workers and pizza guys also nearly after.

- Google is not the only one working on that. Audi has some very nice driverless tech going on, as do a few other universities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car

Edit: formatting

drblast• 15 years ago

Cars will be designed so as not to run over children. Children will stand in front of cars as a prank to cause massive traffic jams and make the evening news.

People will use cars as advertising. You will receive free cars as "samples" and this will cause problems because it will happen too often.

Automotive spam and script kiddies would not be pretty. I'm pretty sure a driver will always have to be behind the wheel.

matthiasl• 15 years ago

If kids causing traffic jams was a real problem, why doesn't it already happen all the time on pedestrian crossings?

rafcavallaro• 15 years ago

Because human drivers have the ability to exit the vehicle and "dissuade" the obstructionist child. In fact, the mere threat of exiting the vehicle has been known to send children running.

wtvanhest• 15 years ago

Airplanes are not utilized 96% of the time. Most are sitting on tarmacs all night long.

Just like cars will be sitting when it isn't rush hour. There may be a few less cars sold on the margin, but this will not impact things as much as you think.

I could possibly see more rental/share programs, but those exist in big cities and are called cabs.

Which, brings me to a bigger problem which is cabs, those guys are definitely not going to have jobs.

JulianMorrison• 15 years ago

I have said before, driverless cars will end the private car.

First you get your car doing taxi work for money while it would otherwise be parked in your workplace. Then you get a social stratum of people who only ever use other people's cars, because it's simpler than buying one. Then you get commercial fleets of driverless taxis out-competing the per-individual car in the taxi role, until it's not economic to run one. Then you get the collapse of the economic/logistic infrastructure for per-individual cars.

And yeah, driverless taxi fleets will only park to fuel, be serviced, or wait on a fare.

Aissen• 15 years ago

Hacker News side note: it's time to show plus.google.com instead of google.com in the domain preview.

Apparently it's already done with appspot.com, wordpress.com and others, so it shouldn't be too hard.

supar• 15 years ago

I'm all for driverless transportation, but let's face some important facts.

Why didn't we _already_ remove the drivers on trains? The train/metro system is basically a closed system which is much easier to control than a car in traffic. This is a genuine question: why? It looks like a much easier to solve problem.

Second problem will be certainly be fuel. A 20x increase in utilization means at least a 20x increase in fuel, unless the car is _transporting_ something at all times (which basically means car sharing). Sending your car home empty is crazy in terms of fuel.

Legislation is also going to be a hell of a problem, at least in EU.

dman• 15 years ago

What happens to people who want to drive the car themselves by choice. How long before the idea of a mere human driving the car is seen as too reckless because automated cars are doing lane merges at surgical precision at 120mph.

rythie2• 15 years ago

You have to wonder if people would even learn to drive manually in a world of driverless cars, maybe only a minority of enthusiasts would want to (cost/time concerns).

Also, if some enthusiasts were perceived to be driving dangerously compared to the computer controlled cars, that all manually controlled cars might be banned.

michaelfeathers• 15 years ago

Driverless cars seem like a great idea, but I've never seen anyone address the legal/insurance issues.

ajays• 15 years ago

Being nerds and geeks, we automatically focus on the numbers: is 96% utilization too high? Will there really be 20x fewer cars sold?

Those exact numbers are beyond the point. But a more realistic number for utilization may be close to 50%: half the time, the car would be on the way back to the next pick up point (or home or office or ....).

One of the main reasons planes have such high utilization is to recoup the high cost of the initial investment. You don't see _every_ plane being utilized 96%; heck, drive by any small airfield and you'll see lots of planes parked under a canvas, seemingly not going anywhere.

politician• 15 years ago

Speaking of unintended effects, what happens when the government begins to abuse its new capability to geo-fence areas that driverless smart cars aren't allowed to drive into?

Like protest meeting areas.

stevecooperorg• 15 years ago

I think I've missed an important part of this discussion -- if driverless cars would be revolutionary, what do they provide that an existing taxi service doesn't?

A taxi has many of the listed benefits;

- you don't need to buy the car - you don't need to drive the car - it's available on demand through your phone - the utilisation of cars is very high

So what is the functional difference between a shared-ownership, driverless car, and a standard human-driven taxi?

dr_rezzy3• 15 years ago

Nothing. You are correct in missing an important part of this discussion.

jomohke• 15 years ago

You don't have to pay the driver. Currently it's more expensive for me to take a taxi (in Australia) because the wage of the driver outweighs the extra costs (and inefficiency) associated with running my own car.

You see a lot more taxis in cities with lower human labour costs (such as Lima), or where the cost of parking outweighs the cost of the driver (such as Manhattan).

frankus6• 15 years ago

So what is the functional difference between a shared-ownership, driverless car, and a standard human-driven taxi?

Don't underestimate the price difference. It's one of those things where a large enough quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference.

In the US it costs around $15-$20/hour to hire a taxi driver (median wage is $11.20 per hour). Over the course of a month (24/7) that starts to approach the cost of the car. Granted, the taxi isn't used 24/7, but the operator still has to recoup the cost of having it available all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if about 90% of the cost of a taxi is due to employing the driver.

Even if all you do is reduce the cost of a trip by a factor of ten, you're going to see big changes.

ednc• 15 years ago

Seeing this and the MythBuster's cannonball debacle next to each other gave me a scary chill.

emehrkay• 15 years ago

"Yeah, because cars aren't a personal item? why don't we just make it public transportation? oh wait, they already have that. It's called a bus, train, subway, taxi. Sorry I like my gas car, because I can modify it and make it go fast."

What is wrong with people?

georgieporgie• 15 years ago

Why would a family need an entire car to themselves?

Because sitting on your own child's vomit is less horrifying than sitting on your neighbor's child's vomit.

I'm similarly excited for the arrival of automated cars (I'll be able to ride my motorcycle with a higher percentage of predictable drivers around me), but there's a point where personal property has a unique advantage.

ondrae• 15 years ago

The effects of 20x fewer vehicles in our cities will have enormous impact on urban design and planning. The very shape of our metropolises will be realigned away from the auto-dominated patterns of the last 60 years.

Walkable, livable, green urban cores will become the new standard.

niccl• 15 years ago

There's an aspect of this that I haven't seen mentioned. It seems trivial but I think it's got to be solved before pooled vehicles like this can work: cleaning the vehicles.

There's no incentive for the individual user to keep a shared vehicle clean. So what happens: squalor, or perhaps a new service industry of grooming self-driving vehicles?

nickthorn• 15 years ago

I can't believe this has so many upvotes! This is based on a silly assumption; aircraft are relatively more expensive than cars to buy, maintain, and use. So it is cheaper and affordable for more people if we time share them.

Cars are much cheaper, so we don't - the value of having a personal car ready right now is worth more to people than taking public transport. If aircraft were as cheap/convenient as cars to use/maintain/store/etc, then I'd have an aircraft parked up outside my house!

Driverless cars will have an enormous effect on society in lots of ways, but I highly doubt reducing the number of cars on the road will be one of them. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there are more cars on the roads, given that people who currently can't drive (because they're elderly/too young/disabled) will be enabled to.

johngalt• 15 years ago

Decouple the drivetrain from the cabin. The drivetrain is automated, and has standard connection types for the personal cabin. So you can have a mobile space that is "yours". Still has all the benefits listed in the article, and handles a few of the problems that "community car sharing" would create.

If a bunch of people are all going the same direction you can pack them into a 10 cabin bus, or a 100 cabin train. When their paths diverge you can have single cabin drivesets routed in advance to the destination. Tailor the drivesets for their intended use/range; short range electrics for small commutes, long range diesels, catenary powered on high traffic areas, perhaps a large multicabin driveset with wings?

idspispopd• 15 years ago

I like the idea. If only we had a system of cars, that for a small fee could drive us anywhere we wanted. That fee could be based on the number of kilometres travelled and the time spent in the car. We could call that fare a "taximeter", based on the latin "taxa" and the Greek "metron" meaning measure, together as "taxed metre", as that's a bit long - in time we could shorten it to "taxi".

Then we could have certain cities where only these "taxis" (and other kinds of public-transport) were allowed entry. Normal cars could enter, but would need to pay a special "congestion" fee.

Maybe London could try this out as they have a problem with congestion.

herval• 15 years ago

It's funny to note that in the FlashForward novel, the author presents the exact opposite view of the "future world": people buy more and more cars, and since they're auto-piloted, they don't even bother about parking anymore: "drive around the block and pick me up in 30 minutes" Entire traffic jams made of "parked" cars. Amazing!

The Unintended Effects of Driverless Cars

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