I think you overestimate how willing someone is to sit in a small car with 3 other strangers during their morning and evening commutes. I don't see a huge impact on ownership at least in the first decade or two of autonomous cars. Lots of people still have relatively specific needs, e.g. requiring car seats of various sizes for their young children, needing to pick-up or drop-off kids at school, sports practice, etc.…
Every morning I sit with many strangers in a train car for about an hour commuting to work. Sure a car is not quite the same, but I don't think it's that much different either. Society will adapt.
I'm also looking at it from my point of a view, as someone in their mid-30's. I'd assume the generations before mine will be much more likely to accept this than my generation.
But why have a garage and a driveway in the future? If you can "hail" a self driving car within 5 minutes then having one in your house becomes a waste of valuable space.
Cleaning comes to mind as a serious, unsolved problem here. The reason I like my own car is because I know the history of its dirt.
I've been using "car-sharing" (really an unfortunate mis-nomer) systems for some time now. Cleanliness has never really been an issue.
I'm interested to see where all the major players end up in 5yrs: • Tesla bootstrapping a ride service on the backs of buyers • Waymo directly rolling their own fleet • Uber trying to get a self-driving fleet up, burning mountains of money to maintain their "monopoly" on Uber for rides • Lyft working with GM to get a fleet up • All of the other car manufacturers trying to get autonomous vehicles going, presumably hop…
> Also: Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive. Which probably means general demand for vehicles will fall off a cliff. I've seen this sentiment so many times now that I have to ask a serious question to anyone who echoes this sentiment: Do you own a personal car right now? If so, why? All of this... excitement over the transformations that self-driving vehicl…
Different usecases drive different needs. If you live in the suburbs, it's easier to own a car than to get an Uber and wait for 20 minutes every time you are going out. If you live in the city, it's cheaper to set aside money for Uber than to pay for a car and a parking spot.
Also, getting a driver has never been this easy. Taxis have existed for hundreds of years, but smartphones are a recent invention. There's a huge difference between calling a phone number and trying to setup a rendezvous than the current workflow on Uber or Lyft, that literally takes 10 seconds from the moment I unlock my phone.
> Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive But how is this going to work? In cities, everyone uses their car at exactly the same time: roughly, between 8-9 in the morning and 5-7 in the evening. If you don't own a car, chances are you won't get one when you need it to get to work on time. Or, if there are enough cars for peak hours, then demand for new cars will…
Fully autonomous fleets of cars will push societal changes we can't yet predict. Right now everyone shows up to work at about the same time. Is that a fixed position society will always uphold? I don't know, there's a lot of things I don't know. The only thing I can predict is that in the same way the personal automobile upended the social structures of the day, autonomous vehicles will likely do something similar.
We can predict some of the changes. I'm looking forward to the day where those with poor sight and poor reflexes (eg many old people) can get around cheaply and easily, without much risk to themselves or others. Drunk driving injuries and deaths should plummet as well. Self driving cars will be enormous for blind people that don't live somewhere with robust taxi facilities.
I can see the potential of self-driving cars for long distance trips (e.g. SF-LA) or for big trucks, but I can't see it for everyday use especially if someone has kids. How many times an average person in US uses her car? 2-3 without kids and maybe more than 4-5 with kids(I think my numbers are probably too low)?
For this to be viable economically, the pricing has to be very low and in order to be very low all of the people has to use this "self-driving service". This creates another problem though, you will have to plan your "short ride" ahead of time, e.g. what happens if you want to leave at the last moment and no car is available around you? And then there is another problem, if the self-driving service is cheap the ownership of the car is going to be even cheaper. A lot of variables and difficult to answer questions. I don't know if we ever going to be a society without car ownership and to be honest as long as there is no traffic I like driving, and it makes me relax. I see it more as a fancy option for cars, like what Tesla does, but to completely remove the car ownership is going to take many decades. Before cars there were horses and stuff so the transition was easier. This is going to be very tough.
I'm interested to see where all the major players end up in 5yrs: • Tesla bootstrapping a ride service on the backs of buyers • Waymo directly rolling their own fleet • Uber trying to get a self-driving fleet up, burning mountains of money to maintain their "monopoly" on Uber for rides • Lyft working with GM to get a fleet up • All of the other car manufacturers trying to get autonomous vehicles going, presumably hop…
> Also: Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive. Which probably means general demand for vehicles will fall off a cliff. I've seen this sentiment so many times now that I have to ask a serious question to anyone who echoes this sentiment: Do you own a personal car right now? If so, why? All of this... excitement over the transformations that self-driving vehicl…
I have two kids. They need car seats. We often haul stuff between home and the in-laws. This makes perma-Ubering infeasible.
We need a radically new car seat design, either:
1. Super portable and quick to install/remove, or
2. Built into the car, safe for all ages, easily extended/retracted.
It feels there's a mountain of hype around autonomous vehicles. I think the core challenges to a fully autonomous vehicle (with no human backup), are still far from solved. They need to reliably deal with an almost infinite number of edge and corner cases, each quite different from the last. For example: - communication with other human drivers. In London, this is required all the time, like when parked cars block th…
I'm not sure what your point is. Fully autonomous is still in progress, and still has work to do.
It feels there's a mountain of hype around autonomous vehicles. I think the core challenges to a fully autonomous vehicle (with no human backup), are still far from solved. They need to reliably deal with an almost infinite number of edge and corner cases, each quite different from the last. For example: - communication with other human drivers. In London, this is required all the time, like when parked cars block th…
A lot of these problems can be solved with a combination of telemetry, limited scope rollout, and an emergency abort procedure.
I'm interested to see where all the major players end up in 5yrs: • Tesla bootstrapping a ride service on the backs of buyers • Waymo directly rolling their own fleet • Uber trying to get a self-driving fleet up, burning mountains of money to maintain their "monopoly" on Uber for rides • Lyft working with GM to get a fleet up • All of the other car manufacturers trying to get autonomous vehicles going, presumably hop…
> Also: Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive. Which probably means general demand for vehicles will fall off a cliff. I've seen this sentiment so many times now that I have to ask a serious question to anyone who echoes this sentiment: Do you own a personal car right now? If so, why? All of this... excitement over the transformations that self-driving vehicl…
I can't add anything profound, but I will say that 40+ years ago I camped at Disney's Ft. Wilderness campground, with all my many brothers and sisters. The electric trams had a routine schedule that came around and stopped almost in front of your campsite, all of kids would simply jump on, go to anywhere in the park like the stores, the showers, the outdoor theater, and hop off again. It was incredibly liberating and fun, our parents didn't have to be involved, we could go where and when we wanted. It was fun. I know, childishly silly, right? Just a way of getting people around a big place? Also called a Bus? No, not really as buses don't go where all the people live. Transportation was a critical part of Disney's attempt at showing how his futuristic communities would work. Now whether those specific trams were directly part of that, I dunno. But it did make your community activities, events, places, much larger and much more accessible, efficiently, and no worries on parking, maintenance. I have never forgotten that feeling of ease and efficiency of movement and freedom, and I saw that promise echoed in the Waymo video.
Remember parking is often 10+$ a day. And can be more of a hassle or less conveniently located than a transit stop.
A good portion of traffic in downtown areas is people driving around trying to find parking.
When I lived in downtown San Diego, I felt sorry for the car people. Some streets are one way only and some parking is two hours only, etc. If you aren't extremely familiar, it can be a nightmare to try to figure out where to park and then find your way back to the building you are going to.
And then one day I realized some of the buildings were multi story parking structures and it kind of made me mad. So much of the city infrastructure is whored out to the needs of arrogant, obtuse car people, very much at the expense of everyone. It brings quality of life down and cost of living up for absolutely everyone because of people wanting the right to drive their own damn car everywhere, no exceptions.
And I stopped looking on them with pity or sympathy and started looking on them as parasites who totally deserved whatever small misery they were inflicting on themselves with driving around, looking for parking. But I did not deserve the misery they were inflicting on me with things like worse air pollution.