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Transportation in general will become much cheaper. Because driverless cars will get into far fewer accidents than humans the cost of insuring them will be a fr

Transportation in general will become much cheaper. Because driverless cars will get into far fewer accidents than humans the cost of insuring them will be a fraction of what it costs to insure a human driver today. And when transportation gets cheaper basically every product that needs to be moved gets cheaper (assuming the companies using this technology don't just pocket the savings). Also, basically drivers of all kinds will no longer have jobs.

monkmartinez 10y ago
How are you so sure driverless cars will get into less accidents? Furthermore, how is this technology going to be make everything less expensive. Please explain. For the record, I think this technology will make the prices for these vehicles prohibitively expensive for the mass market.
- omg_ketchup 10y ago
  Well for one, you don't need to own your car. You just use it. If you (or anyone you know) owns a traditional automobile, it sits unused for 90% of its life. In a driveway, on the sidewalk, in a parking lot, etc. You pay for 100% of the car, but only use 10% of it. If you could rent it out to others ('the grid') while you're not using it, they would share some of the burden, lessening yours. They make things safer because they don't drive drunk.
  - monkmartinez 10y ago
    You know there is a whole legion of jobs that require a vehicle? All construction jobs for example. Most service techs require a bunch of expensive tools and need a secure place to keep them on site. The list literally goes on and on... Can an hunter ride share the pacifica out to the forest with his/her hunting gear? How about bicyclists? People with kids know about activity shuffling... I am not sure that sharing will work for my families schedule. Driving drunk isn't the bulk of the accidents I go to on a regular basis. If we could just eliminate texting while driving, we could see a significant drop in accidents.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      Once they're available (and I see no reason not to continue thinking that door-to-door self-driving is decades out), the ownership question definitely gets interesting. But I don't think it's as obvious as some think in part for the reasons you say. Furthermore, a lot of people use their cars at the same time of day. It's also the case that a lot of auto depreciation is mileage-based rather than time-based (especially in non-snowy/salty environments). The questions others raise about the maintenance/update requirements for these sorts of vehicles are interesting ones. My guess is that, like Zipcar and Uber, they will make a difference at the margins but won't cause a wholesale shift. But who knows? Especially if, as I believe, this happens over a number of decades with demographic shifts happening in parallel.
    - iainmerrick 10y ago
      Can an hunter ride share the pacifica out to the forest with his/her hunting gear? How about bicyclists? People with kids know about activity shuffling... I am not sure that sharing will work for my families schedule. Easy: many households now have two (or more cars), but self-driving cars will allow many of them to reduce to a single car. One people carrier for family outings, on-demand robot taxis for commutes and quick errands. Maybe not a total revolution, but a 50% reduction in household car ownership would be a pretty big deal (it'd make neighbourhood parking a lot easier for a start).
  - Noos 9y ago
    Do people not get that this also shortens the life of the car? I mean, let's say I use it for a total of 12,000 miles per year. that's 10% of the time. If I rent it out for an additional 50% of the total time, that's going to hit 72k miles in a year! For the average person they are going to have to replace cars ridiculously fast, and increase, not lessen, the burden of car ownership.
- aquadrop 10y ago
  > How are you so sure driverless cars will get into less accidents Same reason robots in manufacturing are better than humans. They don't have bad mood, they don't have bad day, they don't need to speak on the phone while driving, they don't drink etc. > how is this technology going to be make everything less expensive Because in Europe/USA most part of the cost in low-weight vehicle transportation is salary of the driver. Also self driving cars will be less costly to maintain (less accidents, better monitoring), if big fleet operated by companies they also have benefit of large scale etc
- rhino369 10y ago
  The additional hardware and software will be expensive as hell to develop, but once it's invented, the marginal cost should be fairly cheap compared to the price of a car. processing power = cheap software (marginal cost) = just gotta pay for updates and fixes sensor package = expensive now because nobody is making 6 million of them a month. Once they do, it'll be a lot more affordable. That doesn't mean it'll pay off for Google, uber, Telsa, Ford, etc., but if they build it, it'll move to all cars rather quickly.
  - monkmartinez 10y ago
    > The additional hardware and software will be expensive as hell to develop, but once it's invented, the marginal cost should be fairly cheap compared to the price of a car. Go talk to a pilot and ask them about Garmin products and the autopilot of their plane. Also ask them about update the software on these devices. Ask how much money they are asked to fork over for software... Have a look at the self-driving tech of the John Deere tractors and how well that has gone for the farmers. I don't think the bulk of people here have really thought about this in a negative light.
    - rhino369 10y ago
      Yet its cheap enough that every commercial plane has it and every tractor has it. Sure they'll try to take their pound of flesh but not to the extent it would make the products affordable.
      - monkmartinez 10y ago
        Are you serious with this reply? It is obvious that you do not know very much about the cost of these systems. It is pointless to continue.
    - Qwertious 9y ago
      How many 747s et al are there, in total, in the world though? According to http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/584144.html http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/584144.html AIUI, about 300,000. For the entire world. There's more than that number of cars in just about any city in the world. I'd expect tens or hundreds of millions of cars. Aeroplanes aren't even close to the scale we're talking about.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Transportation in general will become much cheaper. Because driverless cars will get into far fewer accidents than humans the cost of insuring them will be a fraction of what it costs to insure a human driver today. Insurance is a small fraction of the cost of transport by car, so dropping the insurance cost by some fraction won't drop the total cost by that much.
- abvdasker 10y ago
  Actually insurance in the trucking industry is pretty expensive [1]. In addition to commercial vehicle insurance for the actual truck there are frequently other types of insurance like cargo insurance and trailer insurance which would be affected by self-driving cars. Because trucking is already such a low-margin business any reduction in cost is actually a pretty big deal. 1. http://www.commercialtruckinsurancehq.com/owner-operator-insurance-money-saving-tips http://www.commercialtruckinsurancehq.com/owner-operator-ins...
astrange 9y ago
> Because driverless cars will get into far fewer accidents than humans the cost of insuring them will be a fraction of what it costs to insure a human driver today. The average US driver files a collision claim once every 18 years. I'd like to know the distribution on that one, but anyway, it doesn't seem like there is a reason to believe this.

monkmartinez 10y ago

How are you so sure driverless cars will get into less accidents? Furthermore, how is this technology going to be make everything less expensive. Please explain. For the record, I think this technology will make the prices for these vehicles prohibitively expensive for the mass market.

omg_ketchup 10y ago
Well for one, you don't need to own your car. You just use it. If you (or anyone you know) owns a traditional automobile, it sits unused for 90% of its life. In a driveway, on the sidewalk, in a parking lot, etc. You pay for 100% of the car, but only use 10% of it. If you could rent it out to others ('the grid') while you're not using it, they would share some of the burden, lessening yours. They make things safer because they don't drive drunk.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  You know there is a whole legion of jobs that require a vehicle? All construction jobs for example. Most service techs require a bunch of expensive tools and need a secure place to keep them on site. The list literally goes on and on... Can an hunter ride share the pacifica out to the forest with his/her hunting gear? How about bicyclists? People with kids know about activity shuffling... I am not sure that sharing will work for my families schedule. Driving drunk isn't the bulk of the accidents I go to on a regular basis. If we could just eliminate texting while driving, we could see a significant drop in accidents.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Once they're available (and I see no reason not to continue thinking that door-to-door self-driving is decades out), the ownership question definitely gets interesting. But I don't think it's as obvious as some think in part for the reasons you say. Furthermore, a lot of people use their cars at the same time of day. It's also the case that a lot of auto depreciation is mileage-based rather than time-based (especially in non-snowy/salty environments). The questions others raise about the maintenance/update requirements for these sorts of vehicles are interesting ones. My guess is that, like Zipcar and Uber, they will make a difference at the margins but won't cause a wholesale shift. But who knows? Especially if, as I believe, this happens over a number of decades with demographic shifts happening in parallel.
  - iainmerrick 10y ago
    Can an hunter ride share the pacifica out to the forest with his/her hunting gear? How about bicyclists? People with kids know about activity shuffling... I am not sure that sharing will work for my families schedule. Easy: many households now have two (or more cars), but self-driving cars will allow many of them to reduce to a single car. One people carrier for family outings, on-demand robot taxis for commutes and quick errands. Maybe not a total revolution, but a 50% reduction in household car ownership would be a pretty big deal (it'd make neighbourhood parking a lot easier for a start).
- Noos 9y ago
  Do people not get that this also shortens the life of the car? I mean, let's say I use it for a total of 12,000 miles per year. that's 10% of the time. If I rent it out for an additional 50% of the total time, that's going to hit 72k miles in a year! For the average person they are going to have to replace cars ridiculously fast, and increase, not lessen, the burden of car ownership.
aquadrop 10y ago
> How are you so sure driverless cars will get into less accidents Same reason robots in manufacturing are better than humans. They don't have bad mood, they don't have bad day, they don't need to speak on the phone while driving, they don't drink etc. > how is this technology going to be make everything less expensive Because in Europe/USA most part of the cost in low-weight vehicle transportation is salary of the driver. Also self driving cars will be less costly to maintain (less accidents, better monitoring), if big fleet operated by companies they also have benefit of large scale etc
rhino369 10y ago
The additional hardware and software will be expensive as hell to develop, but once it's invented, the marginal cost should be fairly cheap compared to the price of a car. processing power = cheap software (marginal cost) = just gotta pay for updates and fixes sensor package = expensive now because nobody is making 6 million of them a month. Once they do, it'll be a lot more affordable. That doesn't mean it'll pay off for Google, uber, Telsa, Ford, etc., but if they build it, it'll move to all cars rather quickly.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  > The additional hardware and software will be expensive as hell to develop, but once it's invented, the marginal cost should be fairly cheap compared to the price of a car. Go talk to a pilot and ask them about Garmin products and the autopilot of their plane. Also ask them about update the software on these devices. Ask how much money they are asked to fork over for software... Have a look at the self-driving tech of the John Deere tractors and how well that has gone for the farmers. I don't think the bulk of people here have really thought about this in a negative light.
  - rhino369 10y ago
    Yet its cheap enough that every commercial plane has it and every tractor has it. Sure they'll try to take their pound of flesh but not to the extent it would make the products affordable.
    - monkmartinez 10y ago
      Are you serious with this reply? It is obvious that you do not know very much about the cost of these systems. It is pointless to continue.
  - Qwertious 9y ago
    How many 747s et al are there, in total, in the world though? According to http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/584144.html http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/584144.html AIUI, about 300,000. For the entire world. There's more than that number of cars in just about any city in the world. I'd expect tens or hundreds of millions of cars. Aeroplanes aren't even close to the scale we're talking about.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Transportation in general will become much cheaper. Because driverless cars will get into far fewer accidents than humans the cost of insuring them will be a fraction of what it costs to insure a human driver today. Insurance is a small fraction of the cost of transport by car, so dropping the insurance cost by some fraction won't drop the total cost by that much.

abvdasker 10y ago
Actually insurance in the trucking industry is pretty expensive [1]. In addition to commercial vehicle insurance for the actual truck there are frequently other types of insurance like cargo insurance and trailer insurance which would be affected by self-driving cars. Because trucking is already such a low-margin business any reduction in cost is actually a pretty big deal. 1. http://www.commercialtruckinsurancehq.com/owner-operator-insurance-money-saving-tips http://www.commercialtruckinsurancehq.com/owner-operator-ins...

astrange 9y ago

> Because driverless cars will get into far fewer accidents than humans the cost of insuring them will be a fraction of what it costs to insure a human driver today. The average US driver files a collision claim once every 18 years. I'd like to know the distribution on that one, but anyway, it doesn't seem like there is a reason to believe this.