8 ms·

If all cars were autonomous

95 points by osrec 9y ago

osrec 9y ago
I stumbled upon this when searching for "what if all cars were self driving". I really feel that a great deal of the problems with making self driving cars more prevalent are related to the human-driven cars that are on the road along side these autonomous vehicles. Having only autonomous vehicles on the roads seems to have some powerful advantages, including lighter vehicles. I would love to see a region or city go totally driverless to empirically test whether autonomous vehicles really can provide the added benefits mentioned in the article.
- kps 9y ago
  > including lighter vehicles Much lighter. All the people driving alone could be in cars one-quarter the size if they didn't have to worry about being crushed by Canyoneros. Aside from the cost savings, half-width cars can offer a traffic volume / speed improvement by sharing a lane. (Ultimately though lane markings can go away along with traffic lights and signs.)
  - osrec 9y ago
    Yeah. I've always found it strange that to move an 80kg human from A to B, we also have to shift a couple of tonnes of metal. Seems really excessive!
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      One often ignored thing in this conversation is we often use the ability to carry more. I keep my emergency kit in the back (I'm part of a CERT team) as well as spare chargers and cables and stuff. I keep telling myself I should stock a spare change of clothes too. Obviously sometimes I drive with friends or family, load up my car with groceries, occasionally move furniture or computers. The car is a relatively reasonable standard for covering an individual's regular use cases for transportation.
      - Turing_Machine 9y ago
        I wonder if some kind of detachable "trailers" might be the answer here. For normal driving, you'd have a single-passenger pod (with maybe enough cargo space for a bag of groceries or whatever), but you could hook on extra passenger or cargo pods as needed.
  - skrause 9y ago
    Self-driving cars used to move only one or two people around will probably look a bit like the Renault Twizy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twizy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twizy
CoryG89 9y ago
This is something I often thought about as a child. I didn't imagine self driving cars as they are being developed today. Rather, I thought about what it would be like if all cars were controlled by a common system. I would imagine cars all taking off together in unison from a stop at traffic lights, cars being merged together from two separate lanes without bringing everything to a crawl. Maybe we'll get there one day.
- blunte 9y ago
  The beauty of a fully automated and coordinated system is that vehicles would only stop at the end of a journey. Intersections would be a graceful interleaving of vehicles in all directions. This would conserve a lot of energy that is currently wasted on braking and acceleration, and the passengers have less frustration of being stopped when it is their strong desire to be _going_ somewhere.
  - philrw 9y ago
    CGP Grey did an animation of it here: https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE?t=3m46s https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE?t=3m46s
    - skrause 9y ago
      That video is just full of false assumptions. For example at 0:25 he attributes the delays between cars starting at traffic lights to bad reaction times of humans. No, you start with a short delay because otherwise there is no way to reestablish the safety distance to the car in front of you. Which you still want to have with automated driving because self-driving cars won't solve sudden mechanical failures.
      - the8472 9y ago
        How do you think that safety distance is derived?
  - likeclockwork 9y ago
aerovistae 9y ago
There is a small portent here of something I think we should be cautious of: > The space that is currently used for car parks could be used for something else. We should be careful that this space does not uniformly end up being used for yet more skyscrapers and office buildings, but open space and parks instead. I feel like this is a major decision moment for ending up with beautiful cities or dark cyberpunk monstrosities.
- rwmj 9y ago
  Why's that a bad thing? Increased density in cities means more space for nature in the countryside.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    1. Green areas in the city improve air quality. 2. I don't want to have to travel 30+ minutes to see more than a single tree in one place. Frequent access to nature (or a sufficiently advanced facsimile) is life quality. 3. If a city is sufficiently large, traveling to its outside may be prohibitively expensive for poor people who are thus barred from experiencing nature. (This concern affects developing countries and sci-fi dystopias more than current developed countries.)
    - arkades 9y ago
      It’s not like #3 hasn’t happened before. Central Park is so far north in Manhattan because it was originally meant to be inaccessible to those without the means to afford a carriage.
- mhandley 9y ago
  Even if we still need car parks, cars parking themselves can park really close together (no need to open doors), and block each other in (they'll move autonomously to let another car out). If you go multi-story, you could have some floors with a really low ceiling where regular (non-SUV) cars could park at a lower price. I'd bet you'd need a lot less space for the same number of cars.
nealabq 9y ago
If all cars were autonomous you could change how roads are built. They could become more like sewer pipes, sunk at least partly into the ground. Car designs would change and become more cylindrical and without windows. The car interior would be covered with displays. Travel videos will become a thing. You can see why you might want to start practicing with boring machines and hyperloops. These things aren't just for Mars.
- rwmj 9y ago
  How would you drain these pipe/roads? Most current roads have a positive camber to aid drainage.
  - louwhopley 9y ago
    You could do the same in a pipe. I'm sure this problem has already been solved, given the thousands of road miles in tunnels that already exist. :)
    - gaius 9y ago
      given the thousands of road miles in tunnels that already exist The Big Dig in Boston cost what, $20Bn? For less than 4 miles of road tunnel? The maths just doesn't work. What does average road cost per mile?
  - shiftpgdn 9y ago
    Much of Houston's freeways are built far below grade and surface roads slightly below grade. It allows the roadway to function as drainage during heavy rains.
11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
Last week, I got an e-mail from Subaru telling me my windshield washer fluid was low (it was). The e-mail provided information on how to refill it, and, a link to make an appointment for service if I felt something else needed attention. If, instead, my brake pads were worn and the car were fully autonomous, I could have scheduled it for service while I am at work and it could have driven itself in, got new brakes and driven itself back to my office. No loaner car, no time off from work, no hassle waiting in line for a service adviser, .... File under the 'productivity' column, and I expect cars will be better maintained than now, since we procrastinators will be able to simply click a link and forget about it.
tarr11 9y ago
My immediate thought is a dystopian version of this article: If all cars were autonomous, society, the economy and the environment would all suffer. Here is how… * You will be forced to watch non-stop ads in these automotive cars, similar to how some taxi services work today. You can turn these off for a fee of course. * Hackers or bugs in softawe may easily cause global traffic jams * Congress will pass laws controlling when, where and how you may travel * You may be blacklisted from traveling in any autonomous by corporations, governments, police etc. * The aggregate amount of automotive travel will increase exponentially, causing more carbon emissions and even worse traffic since more people will have access to travel * Sprawl will get worse, as people move further away from urban areas since they can do other activities in cars. * Investment in mass transit will diminish, since funds will move towards automatic cars.
- corodra 9y ago
  Agreed. There’s an article of a remote hijack of I think it was a Jeep using Ulink or whatever it’s remote interface was. Scarey with its limited capabilities. To be fair, I won’t even blame the auto industry for having vulnerabilities in their software. At this point I’ve come to accept that any bit of technology has flaws and can be exploited. No matter how great their dev team is. Comical as it was and unrealistic for the time period, the latest fast and furious movie showed a potential scenario of a fully autonomous traffic. It’s going to be the same reason there’s no flying cars. The tech has been around for easily 20 years. But if you watch enough Air Disasters, autopilot and other computer controlled airplane functions still fail catastrophically. To this day. The average person is not capable of flying an airplane. Shit, the average person still isn’t great at driving a car. Sure that brings to argument that then all cars should be self driving. But the added risks, I don’t think so. The current sample data of self driving cars is still small and there aren’t active hackers looking to truly exploit yet. It’s like when people said that Macs were immune from viruses back in the day. No, people made viruses for windows because they can cause more wide spread damage since they were more widespread. Few had macs thus, why bother? But it doesn’t matter. Self driving cars will happen and something bad will happen in that time. There’s too much money to be made. This isn’t being done to save the world. It’s a control scheme as you pointed out. It’s funny how the older you get the more you realize that when someone starts to spout they’re trying to saving the world, they’re covering up some type of scheme to make money and make the world a shittier place.
rthornton 9y ago
> Less congestion. I don't think that this is obviously true, especially in cities. When the cost of taking an autonomous car from door to door is comparable to the cost of public transport, there would likely be more traffic on the road, not less. We've already started to see this to some extend with Uber in big cities
praveenster 9y ago
This TED talk provides some interesting insights about self driving cars of the future: https://www.ted.com/talks/wanis_kabbaj_what_a_driverless_world_could_look_like https://www.ted.com/talks/wanis_kabbaj_what_a_driverless_wor...
gumby 9y ago
They miss the point of not owning a car (partially mentioned in both "economy" and "environment"): the car is usually the #1 or #2 (after house, if you own one) household expense; it's a depreciating asset with a terrible utilization rate (typically less than 5%). Bought by individuals, who typically have much worse credit than corporations. If you pay by the drive for a car service operated by a large company that borrows at the prime rate, your cost per mile is liable to be much lower. Given the huge costs of car ownership, it's hard to believe any residual emotional bond of owning a car could trump the economic benefits. And as for electric: knowing aggregate demand means you never have "range anxiety", and the charging infrastructure can be much less obtrusive. Social consequences? Well, when you take that Google-operated car to Manresa it will likely detour past MacDonalds and offer you a 2-for-one discount on Big Macs if you go there instead. And there will be no ad blockers... Oh, and you want to take that car to where there will be an alt-right rally? Oops, no cars allowed to drive there (either by government edict or because the car owners don't want to risk their cars being destroyed). The self-driving fleets can't arrive soon enough for me, but I am aware of some of the malign risks as well...
- BrentOzar 9y ago
  > They miss the point of not owning a car No, they're assuming you still own your car - it's just that your car would be autonomous. Only the last section ("More flexible ownership") acknowledges the possibility that you might not own the autonomous car. Self-driving cars and subscription-ownership cars are two circles on a Venn diagram that don't have to exactly overlap. I'm a great example - I want a self-driving car of my own, but I don't want to share it with anybody else. (I've played the Zipcar game in Chicago and I'm over that.)
  - majewsky 9y ago
    > I want a self-driving car of my own, but I don't want to share it with anybody else. That's assuming that you will even be able to buy a self-driving car as an individual. (Or at all.) I find it highly plausible that car companies will expand to fill the entire vertical of car design, manufacturing and as-a-service operation. The service-oriented model was not really viable until now because the model of individuals buying cars was pretty much the only accepted option. But car companies have already started the vertical integration (many of them all have their own carsharing subsidiaries).
hennsen 9y ago
... all communicating via the cloud...and if the network or cloud has an outage we have a million accidents at once, or just stand still.
TwoBit 9y ago
The way my Tesla auto drives, traffic jams would be worse. It's slow to respond to speedups and keeps too far a distance, even at its lowest setting.
- osrec 9y ago
  That may possibly be because it's over compensating for the potential human error of other drivers.
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  My Volvo (XC90) is the same way. It's not as advanced as the Tesla but it has a traffic jam assist feature. If the traffic goes from almost full stop to moving along I often have to override it and accelerate manually to avoid someone cutting me off or honking at me.
  - shiftpgdn 9y ago
    Ah yes! Just the other week I turned on Pilot Assist on our XC90 during a long road trip and people playing on their phones in left lane stabbing their brakes make for a very rough ride as the car keeps braking and then re-accelerating to try to keep a constant distance. Not to mention all of the people cutting you off because you've left enough space for them to jam their car in front of you. I had to intervene a number of times and reposition myself in traffic to get away from "non-smooth" drivers,
mtgx 9y ago
Isn't Volvo planning on using Chinese self-driving software? As with the vast majority of Chinese software, I wonder if it will also contain a backdoor for the government.
- shiftpgdn 9y ago
  Volvo has a partnership with Mobileye (based in Israel.)
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Isn't it with Autoliv? https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15878900/volvo-nvidia-self-driving-car-partnership https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15878900/volvo-nvidia-sel...
jotm 9y ago
Wait Volvo, where's the millions of people starving, on benefits and/or smashing your brand new cars because they have no job?
legulere 9y ago
Cars dropping you off autonomously reduces the demand for parking, however it will also double traffic. This leads to worse traffic flow and more congestion, contrary to the claimed positive benefit. A lot of things on the list are also almost completely orthogonal to autonomous driving, like electric cars and flexible ownership models
- manmal 9y ago
  If autonomous cars are operated by centralized services (Uber/Lyft/...), then they can offer cheaper rides if you are willing to share a car with different people. Especially when congestion is at its worst, chances of matching people with the same destinations are also the best - the daily morning jam on highways is mostly caused by people driving alone in their cars. Why not share 90% of the way with X other people, if it lasts only 2 minutes more for changing from/into a small first/last-mile vehicle. And why not deploy lots of small buses which carry 10+ people through the congested areas? This could even be encouraged by lawmakers; but I think this group rides would be so much cheaper that many people would use them whenever possible. Just like you don’t use your car if you live next to a subway and your destination is also right next to a station.
beefman 9y ago
Most cars won't have people in them.
bluedino 9y ago
>> The car could become an extension of the office and allow commuters to arrive at work less stressed and better prepared. Wouldn't it be far easier for companies to embrace telecommuting than to have a worldwide network of autonomous vehicles?
- BurningFrog 9y ago
  Those two things are entirely independent.
rustoo 9y ago
An alternate, better version: If all mass transit was autonomous
- osrec 9y ago
  My issue with mass transit is destination granularity. I can imagine having individual cars that can "clump" together to form a mass transit system, and then break off as and when required to arrive at specific destinations.
naskwo 9y ago
Here's a classic joke: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pnw/microsoftjoke.htm http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pnw/microsoftjoke.htm
Apreche 9y ago
Everyone is waiting for autonomous cars to be near-perfectly safe before accepting them. The thing is, let's say that autonomous cars are only 0.25% safer than the average human driver. That means switching to them will reduce accidents by 0.25%. That's a significant amount considering how many traffic accidents there are. Considering that traffic accidents result in the actual death of human beings, it is morally imperative that we require as much autonomous driving and reduce as much human driving as possible. Even the far-from-perfect autonomous cars we have now are safer than continuing to let humans drive.
- sithadmin 9y ago
  Something you're neglecting to account for is that there's more to driving than simply moral hazards and safety. There's also the matter of liability and financial risk. While it may be arguable that it's morally preferable and safer to adopt self-driving cars if they can be shown to reduce the incidence of accidents by any amount compared to human drivers, it isn't desirable for the corporate entities producing vehicles capable of fully autonomous operation to make them a mass market product until it is remarkably safer to ride in an autonomous vehicle compared to a human-operated vehicle. One of the biggest boons for automakers in the status quo is that the liabilities associated with operating their products is mostly distributed to the users. From a financial risk perspective this is a massively preferable operating model (and not dissimilar from what you see with 'disruptors' in the consumer space like Uber, Air BnB, etc). When we remove the primary cause of faults while driving from the picture (the human agent operating the vehicle), the distribution of risk that has generally protected automakers in the past disappears. When an autonomous vehicle crashes, the automaker now must fend off claims about vehicle features (sensors, software, etc.) that will in some way be directly responsible for causing traffic accidents.

95 points by osrec 9y ago

I stumbled upon this when searching for "what if all cars were self driving". I really feel that a great deal of the problems with making self driving cars more prevalent are related to the human-driven cars that are on the road along side these autonomous vehicles. Having only autonomous vehicles on the roads seems to have some powerful advantages, including lighter vehicles. I would love to see a region or city go totally driverless to empirically test whether autonomous vehicles really can provide the added benefits mentioned in the article.

kps 9y ago
> including lighter vehicles Much lighter. All the people driving alone could be in cars one-quarter the size if they didn't have to worry about being crushed by Canyoneros. Aside from the cost savings, half-width cars can offer a traffic volume / speed improvement by sharing a lane. (Ultimately though lane markings can go away along with traffic lights and signs.)
- osrec 9y ago
  Yeah. I've always found it strange that to move an 80kg human from A to B, we also have to shift a couple of tonnes of metal. Seems really excessive!
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    One often ignored thing in this conversation is we often use the ability to carry more. I keep my emergency kit in the back (I'm part of a CERT team) as well as spare chargers and cables and stuff. I keep telling myself I should stock a spare change of clothes too. Obviously sometimes I drive with friends or family, load up my car with groceries, occasionally move furniture or computers. The car is a relatively reasonable standard for covering an individual's regular use cases for transportation.
    - Turing_Machine 9y ago
      I wonder if some kind of detachable "trailers" might be the answer here. For normal driving, you'd have a single-passenger pod (with maybe enough cargo space for a bag of groceries or whatever), but you could hook on extra passenger or cargo pods as needed.
- skrause 9y ago
  Self-driving cars used to move only one or two people around will probably look a bit like the Renault Twizy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twizy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twizy

CoryG89 9y ago

This is something I often thought about as a child. I didn't imagine self driving cars as they are being developed today. Rather, I thought about what it would be like if all cars were controlled by a common system. I would imagine cars all taking off together in unison from a stop at traffic lights, cars being merged together from two separate lanes without bringing everything to a crawl. Maybe we'll get there one day.

blunte 9y ago
The beauty of a fully automated and coordinated system is that vehicles would only stop at the end of a journey. Intersections would be a graceful interleaving of vehicles in all directions. This would conserve a lot of energy that is currently wasted on braking and acceleration, and the passengers have less frustration of being stopped when it is their strong desire to be _going_ somewhere.
- philrw 9y ago
  CGP Grey did an animation of it here: https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE?t=3m46s https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE?t=3m46s
  - skrause 9y ago
    That video is just full of false assumptions. For example at 0:25 he attributes the delays between cars starting at traffic lights to bad reaction times of humans. No, you start with a short delay because otherwise there is no way to reestablish the safety distance to the car in front of you. Which you still want to have with automated driving because self-driving cars won't solve sudden mechanical failures.
    - the8472 9y ago
      How do you think that safety distance is derived?
- likeclockwork 9y ago

aerovistae 9y ago

There is a small portent here of something I think we should be cautious of: > The space that is currently used for car parks could be used for something else. We should be careful that this space does not uniformly end up being used for yet more skyscrapers and office buildings, but open space and parks instead. I feel like this is a major decision moment for ending up with beautiful cities or dark cyberpunk monstrosities.

rwmj 9y ago
Why's that a bad thing? Increased density in cities means more space for nature in the countryside.
- majewsky 9y ago
  1. Green areas in the city improve air quality. 2. I don't want to have to travel 30+ minutes to see more than a single tree in one place. Frequent access to nature (or a sufficiently advanced facsimile) is life quality. 3. If a city is sufficiently large, traveling to its outside may be prohibitively expensive for poor people who are thus barred from experiencing nature. (This concern affects developing countries and sci-fi dystopias more than current developed countries.)
  - arkades 9y ago
    It’s not like #3 hasn’t happened before. Central Park is so far north in Manhattan because it was originally meant to be inaccessible to those without the means to afford a carriage.
mhandley 9y ago
Even if we still need car parks, cars parking themselves can park really close together (no need to open doors), and block each other in (they'll move autonomously to let another car out). If you go multi-story, you could have some floors with a really low ceiling where regular (non-SUV) cars could park at a lower price. I'd bet you'd need a lot less space for the same number of cars.

nealabq 9y ago

If all cars were autonomous you could change how roads are built. They could become more like sewer pipes, sunk at least partly into the ground. Car designs would change and become more cylindrical and without windows. The car interior would be covered with displays. Travel videos will become a thing. You can see why you might want to start practicing with boring machines and hyperloops. These things aren't just for Mars.

rwmj 9y ago
How would you drain these pipe/roads? Most current roads have a positive camber to aid drainage.
- louwhopley 9y ago
  You could do the same in a pipe. I'm sure this problem has already been solved, given the thousands of road miles in tunnels that already exist. :)
  - gaius 9y ago
    given the thousands of road miles in tunnels that already exist The Big Dig in Boston cost what, $20Bn? For less than 4 miles of road tunnel? The maths just doesn't work. What does average road cost per mile?
- shiftpgdn 9y ago
  Much of Houston's freeways are built far below grade and surface roads slightly below grade. It allows the roadway to function as drainage during heavy rains.

11thEarlOfMar 9y ago

Last week, I got an e-mail from Subaru telling me my windshield washer fluid was low (it was). The e-mail provided information on how to refill it, and, a link to make an appointment for service if I felt something else needed attention. If, instead, my brake pads were worn and the car were fully autonomous, I could have scheduled it for service while I am at work and it could have driven itself in, got new brakes and driven itself back to my office. No loaner car, no time off from work, no hassle waiting in line for a service adviser, .... File under the 'productivity' column, and I expect cars will be better maintained than now, since we procrastinators will be able to simply click a link and forget about it.

tarr11 9y ago

My immediate thought is a dystopian version of this article: If all cars were autonomous, society, the economy and the environment would all suffer. Here is how… * You will be forced to watch non-stop ads in these automotive cars, similar to how some taxi services work today. You can turn these off for a fee of course. * Hackers or bugs in softawe may easily cause global traffic jams * Congress will pass laws controlling when, where and how you may travel * You may be blacklisted from traveling in any autonomous by corporations, governments, police etc. * The aggregate amount of automotive travel will increase exponentially, causing more carbon emissions and even worse traffic since more people will have access to travel * Sprawl will get worse, as people move further away from urban areas since they can do other activities in cars. * Investment in mass transit will diminish, since funds will move towards automatic cars.

corodra 9y ago
Agreed. There’s an article of a remote hijack of I think it was a Jeep using Ulink or whatever it’s remote interface was. Scarey with its limited capabilities. To be fair, I won’t even blame the auto industry for having vulnerabilities in their software. At this point I’ve come to accept that any bit of technology has flaws and can be exploited. No matter how great their dev team is. Comical as it was and unrealistic for the time period, the latest fast and furious movie showed a potential scenario of a fully autonomous traffic. It’s going to be the same reason there’s no flying cars. The tech has been around for easily 20 years. But if you watch enough Air Disasters, autopilot and other computer controlled airplane functions still fail catastrophically. To this day. The average person is not capable of flying an airplane. Shit, the average person still isn’t great at driving a car. Sure that brings to argument that then all cars should be self driving. But the added risks, I don’t think so. The current sample data of self driving cars is still small and there aren’t active hackers looking to truly exploit yet. It’s like when people said that Macs were immune from viruses back in the day. No, people made viruses for windows because they can cause more wide spread damage since they were more widespread. Few had macs thus, why bother? But it doesn’t matter. Self driving cars will happen and something bad will happen in that time. There’s too much money to be made. This isn’t being done to save the world. It’s a control scheme as you pointed out. It’s funny how the older you get the more you realize that when someone starts to spout they’re trying to saving the world, they’re covering up some type of scheme to make money and make the world a shittier place.

rthornton 9y ago

> Less congestion. I don't think that this is obviously true, especially in cities. When the cost of taking an autonomous car from door to door is comparable to the cost of public transport, there would likely be more traffic on the road, not less. We've already started to see this to some extend with Uber in big cities

praveenster 9y ago

This TED talk provides some interesting insights about self driving cars of the future: https://www.ted.com/talks/wanis_kabbaj_what_a_driverless_world_could_look_like https://www.ted.com/talks/wanis_kabbaj_what_a_driverless_wor...

gumby 9y ago

They miss the point of not owning a car (partially mentioned in both "economy" and "environment"): the car is usually the #1 or #2 (after house, if you own one) household expense; it's a depreciating asset with a terrible utilization rate (typically less than 5%). Bought by individuals, who typically have much worse credit than corporations. If you pay by the drive for a car service operated by a large company that borrows at the prime rate, your cost per mile is liable to be much lower. Given the huge costs of car ownership, it's hard to believe any residual emotional bond of owning a car could trump the economic benefits. And as for electric: knowing aggregate demand means you never have "range anxiety", and the charging infrastructure can be much less obtrusive. Social consequences? Well, when you take that Google-operated car to Manresa it will likely detour past MacDonalds and offer you a 2-for-one discount on Big Macs if you go there instead. And there will be no ad blockers... Oh, and you want to take that car to where there will be an alt-right rally? Oops, no cars allowed to drive there (either by government edict or because the car owners don't want to risk their cars being destroyed). The self-driving fleets can't arrive soon enough for me, but I am aware of some of the malign risks as well...

BrentOzar 9y ago
> They miss the point of not owning a car No, they're assuming you still own your car - it's just that your car would be autonomous. Only the last section ("More flexible ownership") acknowledges the possibility that you might not own the autonomous car. Self-driving cars and subscription-ownership cars are two circles on a Venn diagram that don't have to exactly overlap. I'm a great example - I want a self-driving car of my own, but I don't want to share it with anybody else. (I've played the Zipcar game in Chicago and I'm over that.)
- majewsky 9y ago
  > I want a self-driving car of my own, but I don't want to share it with anybody else. That's assuming that you will even be able to buy a self-driving car as an individual. (Or at all.) I find it highly plausible that car companies will expand to fill the entire vertical of car design, manufacturing and as-a-service operation. The service-oriented model was not really viable until now because the model of individuals buying cars was pretty much the only accepted option. But car companies have already started the vertical integration (many of them all have their own carsharing subsidiaries).

hennsen 9y ago

... all communicating via the cloud...and if the network or cloud has an outage we have a million accidents at once, or just stand still.

TwoBit 9y ago

The way my Tesla auto drives, traffic jams would be worse. It's slow to respond to speedups and keeps too far a distance, even at its lowest setting.

osrec 9y ago
That may possibly be because it's over compensating for the potential human error of other drivers.
throwaway2016a 9y ago
My Volvo (XC90) is the same way. It's not as advanced as the Tesla but it has a traffic jam assist feature. If the traffic goes from almost full stop to moving along I often have to override it and accelerate manually to avoid someone cutting me off or honking at me.
- shiftpgdn 9y ago
  Ah yes! Just the other week I turned on Pilot Assist on our XC90 during a long road trip and people playing on their phones in left lane stabbing their brakes make for a very rough ride as the car keeps braking and then re-accelerating to try to keep a constant distance. Not to mention all of the people cutting you off because you've left enough space for them to jam their car in front of you. I had to intervene a number of times and reposition myself in traffic to get away from "non-smooth" drivers,

mtgx 9y ago

Isn't Volvo planning on using Chinese self-driving software? As with the vast majority of Chinese software, I wonder if it will also contain a backdoor for the government.

shiftpgdn 9y ago
Volvo has a partnership with Mobileye (based in Israel.)
- icebraining 9y ago
  Isn't it with Autoliv? https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15878900/volvo-nvidia-self-driving-car-partnership https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15878900/volvo-nvidia-sel...

jotm 9y ago

Wait Volvo, where's the millions of people starving, on benefits and/or smashing your brand new cars because they have no job?

legulere 9y ago

Cars dropping you off autonomously reduces the demand for parking, however it will also double traffic. This leads to worse traffic flow and more congestion, contrary to the claimed positive benefit. A lot of things on the list are also almost completely orthogonal to autonomous driving, like electric cars and flexible ownership models

manmal 9y ago
If autonomous cars are operated by centralized services (Uber/Lyft/...), then they can offer cheaper rides if you are willing to share a car with different people. Especially when congestion is at its worst, chances of matching people with the same destinations are also the best - the daily morning jam on highways is mostly caused by people driving alone in their cars. Why not share 90% of the way with X other people, if it lasts only 2 minutes more for changing from/into a small first/last-mile vehicle. And why not deploy lots of small buses which carry 10+ people through the congested areas? This could even be encouraged by lawmakers; but I think this group rides would be so much cheaper that many people would use them whenever possible. Just like you don’t use your car if you live next to a subway and your destination is also right next to a station.

beefman 9y ago

Most cars won't have people in them.

bluedino 9y ago

>> The car could become an extension of the office and allow commuters to arrive at work less stressed and better prepared. Wouldn't it be far easier for companies to embrace telecommuting than to have a worldwide network of autonomous vehicles?

BurningFrog 9y ago
Those two things are entirely independent.

rustoo 9y ago

An alternate, better version: If all mass transit was autonomous

osrec 9y ago
My issue with mass transit is destination granularity. I can imagine having individual cars that can "clump" together to form a mass transit system, and then break off as and when required to arrive at specific destinations.

naskwo 9y ago

Here's a classic joke: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pnw/microsoftjoke.htm http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pnw/microsoftjoke.htm

Apreche 9y ago

Everyone is waiting for autonomous cars to be near-perfectly safe before accepting them. The thing is, let's say that autonomous cars are only 0.25% safer than the average human driver. That means switching to them will reduce accidents by 0.25%. That's a significant amount considering how many traffic accidents there are. Considering that traffic accidents result in the actual death of human beings, it is morally imperative that we require as much autonomous driving and reduce as much human driving as possible. Even the far-from-perfect autonomous cars we have now are safer than continuing to let humans drive.

sithadmin 9y ago
Something you're neglecting to account for is that there's more to driving than simply moral hazards and safety. There's also the matter of liability and financial risk. While it may be arguable that it's morally preferable and safer to adopt self-driving cars if they can be shown to reduce the incidence of accidents by any amount compared to human drivers, it isn't desirable for the corporate entities producing vehicles capable of fully autonomous operation to make them a mass market product until it is remarkably safer to ride in an autonomous vehicle compared to a human-operated vehicle. One of the biggest boons for automakers in the status quo is that the liabilities associated with operating their products is mostly distributed to the users. From a financial risk perspective this is a massively preferable operating model (and not dissimilar from what you see with 'disruptors' in the consumer space like Uber, Air BnB, etc). When we remove the primary cause of faults while driving from the picture (the human agent operating the vehicle), the distribution of risk that has generally protected automakers in the past disappears. When an autonomous vehicle crashes, the automaker now must fend off claims about vehicle features (sensors, software, etc.) that will in some way be directly responsible for causing traffic accidents.