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I think Detroit and other manufactures are fearful of automation. If you ask them what the future looks like its driving assist technology. Fully automated driv
by adamio 10y ago
I think Detroit and other manufactures are fearful of automation. If you ask them what the future looks like its driving assist technology. Fully automated driving kills the emotional experience that is used to sell cars.
- qeternity 10y agoThe bigger issue is that autonomous cars make it extremely easy to massively boost utilization: driver assist still means your car sits at home, work, etc when not in use. This in turn means more cars are required by society. Autonomous cars can achieve much higher levels of utilization. This is the real reason legacy car makers don't want fully autonomous vehicles.
- jrockway 10y agoWouldn't Intel not want "the cloud" for the same reason?
- ben_jones 10y agoMy guess is that the cloud doesn't affect utilization that much. Auto scaling (IMO) is fickle and for the most part the same number of servers are running, in fact probably way more servers are running because their easy to provision (and then forget about).
- geodel 10y agoI think autonomous vehicles will be priced taking that into consideration. It is just expectation of people that they will be priced as cars and can be deployed as profit generating asset.
- smelterdemon 10y agoA car being driven all day (especially in cities, where the demand will be highest) is going to wear cars down incredibly fast. Manufacturers won't see that big of a hit if fewer people buy cars, if those people will replace it every year or two.
- Zigurd 10y agoIf it is profitable, it will be financeable.
- Kluny 10y agoI don't think the incentives quite work that way. When cars can be utilized at ~90% instead of >10% as they are now, that will make them useful for people who didn't previously use cars. Senior citizens who are too old to drive themselves, people who are too scared to drive or too bad at it, families that can only afford one used car, city dwellers who don't have parking spaces, probably more.
- mrfusion 10y agoI'm not sure though. There would be the same or more total miles driven. So they'd have to replace the cars that much faster. Tldr: It should be a wash.
- Fricken 10y agoThere's a lot of steel in today's cars that won't be needed if they're optimized for moving commuters around cities one or two at a time.
- Zigurd 10y agoEven more than that, if cars don't crash, they don't have to be crashworthy. BMW's concept motorcycle concept makes that point: If autonomous vehicles mean that road crashes become very rare, as other rare as, say, accidental strangulation in bed, you won't need a helmet to ride. A vehicle could be an minimal as a motorcycle and still be much safer than an S-class Mercedes.
- aetherson 10y agoMaybe. I'm not aware of much precedent for the idea that statistically safer X leads to fewer safety regs for X. Maybe you could draw a parallel with the over-the-counterization of various pharmaceuticals, but I'm not sure that's an analogy that would fill me with hope.
- massysett 10y ago
- mahyarm 10y agoThe demand for repair parts will increase significantly and cars will expire a lot faster. Cars that do 400 miles a day will reach 200'000 miles within ~1.3 years. Usually most cars are fairly low value by then. They would reach 400 miles by being on a highway for ~6.5 hours/day, which is fairly reasonable to assume.
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- asimuvPR 10y agoI feel we are witnessing what happened to the newspaper once again. Only this time there is an interesting twist: manufacturers have been bailed out. Will the government step in again? No one knows.
- suyash 10y agoAll of the Detroit automakers are heavily investing in semi-automatic to fully automatic driving. Most of them have technology labs in Palo Alto and hosting hackatons and recruiting top engineers heavily.
- sixothree 10y agoSomeone from Ford was on Marketplace last week describing how they want to move towards cars being a utility sort of product.
- Zigurd 10y agoThey are missing a huge value proposition: A chauffeur costs more than a car, and that's what I want: A personal driver to take me point to point, on demand, low-latency.