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The driverless road ahead

economist.com

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Re: The driverless road ahead

#51

Post by SlipperySlope »

Driverless cars solve these problems that most people have ...

1. A need for status. Driverless cars will first greatly distinguish luxury cars from more ordinary cars.

2. Convenience and comfort. Driverless cars will remove the stress from rush hour commuting. Driverless cars will be much more comfortable for long-distance trips.

3. Safety. Driverless cars will obey the traffic laws. "drivers" and passengers of such cars will much less likely be arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

4. Efficiency. Driverless cars will use less fuel than otherwise comparable self-drive cars. For example, cooperating driverless cars can draft at highway speeds. Additionally, driverless cars can smooth out stop-and-go traffic, coast down hills and otherwise conserve momentum. And once driverless cars are commonplace, intelligent intersections will permit cooperating driverless cars to interleave without stopping - while accommodating self-drive cars with conventional signs and signals.

Re: The driverless road ahead

#52

Post by mibbitier »

SlipperySlope wrote: post #51

Driverless cars solve these problems that most people have ... 1. A need for status. Driverless cars will first greatly distinguish luxury cars from more ordinary cars. 2. Convenience and comfort. Driverless cars will remove the stress from rush hour commuting. Driverless cars will be much more comfortable for long-distance trips. 3. Safety. Driverless cars will obey the traffic laws. "drivers" and passengers of such…

1. Can you imagine Top Gear proclaiming driverless cars as the way to get status? No. They'll be ridiculed by anyone who knows anything about cars (Same way people who drive an automatic are ridiculed). Imagine "Drag and drop programming is the future of software development!!!"

2. Not convinced anyone really gets stressed driving, and not convinced that "not being in control of the car" would make anyone less stressed. Personally, when someone else is driving the car, I'm always more stressed not less. If I knew it was being driven by some software, my stress level would hit the roof. Everything I own that has "software", crashes every now and then. I don't really want my car to have more software than it needs.

3. Software bugs are plentiful in any system. Simple mechanics, and humans will always trump software for things like this. Surely if this stuff was so easy to automate, we'd have software flying planes already (Which seems a substantially easier problem).

4. Considering that we still can't make automatic cars that change gear at the right point, I'm skeptical.

Re: The driverless road ahead

#53

Post by paulsutter »

cs702 wrote: post #34

This piece strikes me as too Utopian. While most people, including me , will likely adopt driverless cars, a substantial minority of the population will never adopt them. Should driverless cars become mainstream, criminals of all kinds will quickly find ways to game the system to make vehicles driver-controlled, and (more ominously) will figure out how to hack into other people's cars and use them for nefarious purpo…

First step, convert carpool lanes to driverless lanes (which will exceed the capacity of the rest of the roadway). Next, require driverless cars for all controlled access highways. It will happen more slowly in the US, faster in China where they are more willing to mandate progress.

People who want to drive would do so on regular roadways. Within 20 years, virtually all cars would be driverless-capable, and society would have a clear idea of the advantages and whether to allow old school driving anywhere.

I dont buy the dystopian terrorist hacker paranoia. More and more of the physical world will be controlled by software. We will either make that secure or go back to living in caves.

Re: The driverless road ahead

#54

Post by [deleted] »

peff wrote: post #10
paulsutter wrote: post #2

>Just imagine. [Driverless cars] could, for a start, save the motor industry from stagnation...; and since [cars] would be able to drop off their passengers and drive away, the lack of parking spaces in town might not matter so much. Strange that the Economist would catch the diminished need for parking spaces, but miss the real economic impact of driverless cars: many fewer cars would be needed as utilization rates…

Is utilization over time important? If we assume that people will still travel the same number of miles[1], then while there will be fewer cars on the road at any given moment, they will wear out more quickly as they are utilized more heavily. Another way of thinking of it is that there is demand for a certain number of vehicle-miles per year. In the aggregate over the long term, it is no different if we buy 5 cars,…

[deleted]

Re: The driverless road ahead

#55

Post by ftwinnovations »

I think that once driverless cars are mainstream, which I have no doubt will eventually happen, it can usher in the age of the (driverless) flying car... finally! There seems like quite a bit of technological overlap, and from a safety standpoint I would much rather have people flying around in automated vehicles than human controlled.

If this came to be, coupled with high speed wireless, I would go so far as predicting the end of cities as we know them. They would serve essentially no purpose anymore.

Re: The driverless road ahead

#56

Post by du »

paulsutter wrote: post #2

>Just imagine. [Driverless cars] could, for a start, save the motor industry from stagnation...; and since [cars] would be able to drop off their passengers and drive away, the lack of parking spaces in town might not matter so much. Strange that the Economist would catch the diminished need for parking spaces, but miss the real economic impact of driverless cars: many fewer cars would be needed as utilization rates…

I don't think utilization (without taking into account the number of passangers) is important, as peff pointed out.

What will change demand is that the car occupancy rate will grow. And since one doesn't need to own a car anymore, the number of cars will be reduced. Bringing together strangers on the same route will get a lot easier in the future. And if one isn't using one's own car but essentially a taxi, we'll see a lot more ride sharing. Especially, if some of the oil price horror scenarios (at least partly) play out.

Right now, the car occupancy rate in the US is around 1.6[1]. Imagine it going up to 2, which is around the rate of some Eastern European countries a couple of years ago[2]. I think it will be even higher.

Another thing to consider is the demand change, since the usage changes (to some degree) and the buyers change (renting companies instead of consumers). If that benefits domestic car manufacturers, idk.

[1]http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2010_fotw...

[2]http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/term29-occupa...

Re: The driverless road ahead

#57

Post by manux »

mibbitier wrote: post #52
SlipperySlope wrote: post #51

Driverless cars solve these problems that most people have ... 1. A need for status. Driverless cars will first greatly distinguish luxury cars from more ordinary cars. 2. Convenience and comfort. Driverless cars will remove the stress from rush hour commuting. Driverless cars will be much more comfortable for long-distance trips. 3. Safety. Driverless cars will obey the traffic laws. "drivers" and passengers of such…

1. Can you imagine Top Gear proclaiming driverless cars as the way to get status? No. They'll be ridiculed by anyone who knows anything about cars (Same way people who drive an automatic are ridiculed). Imagine "Drag and drop programming is the future of software development!!!" 2. Not convinced anyone really gets stressed driving, and not convinced that "not being in control of the car" would make anyone less stress…

Concerning your 3rd point, there are some specific tasks in which Machine Learning algorithms beat humans by a significant margin (fraud detection, biomedical pattern matching, to name a few). Considering the recent engineering prowesses that incorporated ML, I think it's safe to assume that in a near future more tasks will be taken over by better-performing-than-humans software (for very specific tasks IMO).

Re: The driverless road ahead

#58

Post by protomyth »

swombat wrote: post #27
protomyth wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you think that a self-driving car fleet will have less cost? They will be regulated just like taxis. Including insurance and most importantly medallions. Replacing the drivers will not cut the cost in an industry that creates artificial scarcity.

It will in countries that aren't completely bone-headed about it. I guess a good measure of how corrupt a particular political environment is will be how long it takes to give in to the overwhelming reasons (ecological, economical and social) to allow the true, very low cost of self-driving cars to have its impact on the taxi industry.

I would be curious which countries those are? Is their a 1st world country that doesn't license their cabs to provide an artificial scarcity? Heck, some cities actually mandate the brand of car that can be used for a cab.

Re: The driverless road ahead

#59

Post by akgerber »

michaelt wrote: post #16
arethuza wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have cars that don't need you to drive them: taxis. Where I live the various different competing taxi companies compete to give a pretty high level of service - I can order a cab via an iPhone app or through an IVR system that only requires me to press a single key if I want a taxi there and then - payment is to account (work) or chip-n-pin. Even with a pretty decent taxi service I still own a car, as do m…

A cab in SF costs $2.25 per mile (plus a flag fee, plus a fee for waiting in traffic, plus an airport surcharge) The IRS mileage rate is 14 cents per mile driven in service of charitable organizations and 51 cents per mile driven for business. Taxis haven't replaced private cars because they're radically more expensive.

Here's an article on the economics of a taxi in NYC: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-12/new-york-taxi-co...

According to the article, at the end of a 12-hour shift, a driver goes home with $160 after paying $120-$130 to rent the cab & medallion and $8 for credit card processing. There's also gasoline costs, which the article doesn't give a number for, but as a guess, a driver might go through half a tank on a shift for $40, and that's in an inefficient large car with a V8.

So over half of the cost of an NYC taxi is the driver's labor, and a nontrivial portion of the taxi rental goes to pay for the taxi medallion, which has gone up in cost to a million dollars in recent years: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/06/taxi...

Many other cities have the same problem, like my hometown Milwaukee: http://wisconsinreporter.com/milwaukee-taxicab-battle-test-o...

The economics of taxi service in the US are largely driven by labor costs as well as regulations that have been perverted to funnel money to a rent-seeking set of license/medallion owners, not the running cost of the motor vehicle.

Re: The driverless road ahead

#60

Post by SlipperySlope »

mibbitier wrote: post #52
SlipperySlope wrote: post #51

Driverless cars solve these problems that most people have ... 1. A need for status. Driverless cars will first greatly distinguish luxury cars from more ordinary cars. 2. Convenience and comfort. Driverless cars will remove the stress from rush hour commuting. Driverless cars will be much more comfortable for long-distance trips. 3. Safety. Driverless cars will obey the traffic laws. "drivers" and passengers of such…

1. Can you imagine Top Gear proclaiming driverless cars as the way to get status? No. They'll be ridiculed by anyone who knows anything about cars (Same way people who drive an automatic are ridiculed). Imagine "Drag and drop programming is the future of software development!!!" 2. Not convinced anyone really gets stressed driving, and not convinced that "not being in control of the car" would make anyone less stress…

1. Agreed that its hard to imagine Top Gear writing that way. For example, for Mercedes they write: "Packed with every conceivable gadget, the S-class is traditionally a place where new technology is debuted – and because this is Merc’s flagship it usually works faultlessly." Car and Driver writes: "Mercedes also claims its new sedan is its safest yet. S-classes equipped with optional Distronic Plus cruise control go beyond the standard car's safety features with a short-range radar system that "looks" at an area closer to the front of the vehicle than the long-range radar used by the cruise control."

2. Regarding stress and strain while driving - here is a research paper that might convince you: http://www.ectri.org/YRS07/Papiers/Session-9/Schiessl.pdf

3. Experience with diverse embedded software systems, from medical electronics to military jets, has demonstrated that software can be indeed engineered, and verified, to be more safe than simple mechanical and purely human controlled systems.

4. In fact current automatic transmissions are now more fuel efficient than manual transmissions: http://green.autoblog.com/2010/08/18/greenlings-why-do-autom...

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