What If Your Autonomous Car Keeps Routing You Past Krispy Kreme?

Basically one of the reasons new technology rolls out slowly is that there are lots of people asking these sorts of questions and trying to have answers before they ship. Sometimes that works well, sometimes not (cite battery issues on 787).

Routes and retail along those routes will enter a new era. Building a store you have to take into account algorithms of the vehicles. Slight changes to a widely used system could shut down a business faster than individual human choice (although it may also make other businesses seen more as it distributes traffic across more roads - hot spots could become medium and less travelled areas could become more lucrative).

Also, wouldn't it lessen ad hoc pulling into McDonalds on the way home? If the machine is in control then you might not go get a donut even if it is along the route, you'd schedule it in more ahead of time. In the same way e-commerce is more direct, traveling will be more direct and the items at the checkout are not as distracting, same as passing other stores, you'll be busy doing other things like passengers possibly.

The trick is convincing enough people that they should pay attention to the route they pay for.

There are some interesting financial issues where driving me, slowly, past every McDonalds would waste a lot of time and gas. How much gasoline will I have to buy because a retailer purchased X number of drivebys?

For a variety of interesting and irrelevant dietary reasons I don't eat at McDonalds. Presumably a smart enough socially connected car would understand that and not waste my gasoline, time, mileage, and a restauranteurs purchased drivebys so it would not route me past McDonalds. There are two amusements. The first is lying and suddenly according to social media 90% of americans are now following a paleo vegan diet, or never eat any cuisine except Bolivian (because to the best of my knowledge there are no centers of Bolivian cuisine anywhere nearby me) The second is the car equivalent of "swatting" where you fool a social network into believing the victim is a huge supporter of NORML so it routes the car thru some interesting neighborhoods, or endless fun with rightwingers who are now "in the closet" per social media so they get routed past certain bars and bathhouses and such.

One significant problem is autonomous vehicles would remove the need to pay as much attention outside... so advertising would seem fairly pointless. I use mythtv at home to skip legacy TV network commercials; coming up with an exciting new technology to tailor TV commercials to me, which I'm going to skip anyway, sounds very much like horseshoe mfgrs trying to tailor their horseshoes to appeal to the new automobile invention a century or so ago. If no one's looking out the window any more, why spend all that money on signs? Just send them email spam. You can sent a lot of social media spam for the cost of running a giant neon sign 24x7 for a decade.