6 ms·

I really like the idea of a fleet of computer-controlled electric cars that function like an on-demand taxi service. Think about it, you need to leave for work

I really like the idea of a fleet of computer-controlled electric cars that function like an on-demand taxi service. Think about it, you need to leave for work at a certain time? Just jump on Google Taxi (I use Google as they're the only company that has working driverless cars that I'm aware of at the moment), log-in using your account (that you either pay per ride, weekly, monthly, yearly, yearly+ etc.), calculate your commute, and reserve a car to show up at your house at that time and place. It takes you to your destination then shoots off to an electric or hydrogen-based fleet of these cars standing by at charging facilities in neighborhoods and cities all over the world. If they became ubiquitous enough you could have as little as a five to fifteen minute wait for a car. However, I think the auto industry would fight like hell to keep this kind of system off the roads as it would severely dent auto sales. I mean hell, I know I wouldn't want a car if I could just have a subscription to a car. Especially if it wasn't just like Sedans. Imagine being able to rent a truck immediately at a moment's notice, then ride back home in a Sedan, all without having to worry about driving anywhere? That's a world I would like to live in. Then once populations reached the 5,000+ ppl/km2 we could start building mag lev rails and get more into that kind of public transportation.

AJ007 15y ago
And Google could probably provide the service for dirt cheap or even free by charging commercial venues per person delivered (at least if your business wants to be at the top of the list for "sushi.")
- stretchwithme 15y ago
  More likely is that hot meals will be delivered by a robotic transportation system. The same thing thats happened to a night out at the movies will happen to eating out at a restaurant. Except instead of a disc being delivered by snail mail, tiny robotic vehicles will text you when your meal arrives at the front door.
  - seanp2k2 15y ago
    Or we could stop wanting to live out in the boonies and actually build things that people can walk to, then stop being so lazy.
    - stretchwithme 15y ago
      I would prefer to be able to walk to everything I need. But unfortunately, that usually comes with a lot of other problems I'm not interested in. The fact is that in a modern economy many things are shipped from business to business and from business to individuals. Laziness has nothing to do with it. Everything thats available in local businesses also has to come from somewhere. Many things must go through many hands before they become available across the street. There's no reason a human being has to chauffeur things from place to place.
- icebraining 15y ago
  Or you'll watch a couple of ads during the trip ;)
  - danssig 15y ago
    Only if there's an option to pay for that not to happen.
Cushman 15y ago
I love this future because it completely routes around the public transportation dilemma we have in the US. The fact is that automated electric vehicles on paved roads would work perfectly here, could completely replace personal cars, would provide huge cost savings, not to mention saving thousands of lives a year from traffic deaths alone. And this is something we could actually do. The government could take $X billion, get a cost-effective robotic car platform off the ground, start replacing vehicles on a 1-to-1 basis, and outlaw manual driving on public roads inside of 20 years. It would make existing electric vehicle technology perfectly suitable for trips of any length, since you can simply change cars at the charging station and be on your way inside of a minute. Completely feasible. But alas... Inertia.
- repsilat 15y ago
  Automatic, cooperative routing also has great benefits over greedy time-minimising routing. In addition to the micro-level benefits (no stopping at traffic lights, fewer traffic waves) there are network-level benefits because the Nash equilibrium of user-optimal routing can be really crappy. I highly recommend reading about Braess' Network Paradox for a great illustration of this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
- brc 15y ago
  Well, the benefits of a private fleet of robotic cars is the ability to have many different providers - so I wouldn't want the government to have anything to do with it, save for setting safety standards for robotic vehicles. There is no need to try and dictate the type of fuel, either. But I'm interested to understand why people think a robotised taxi service would be much cheaper than human-driven taxi service. Is the driver really the highest marginal cost in the system? Does removing a driver really drive costs down that much? I wouldn't have thought so. Oh, and your desire to ban manual driving is never going to fly. The most you would want is perhaps dedicated driverless roads where you aren't allowed to drive - much like bus lanes are now. That would allow for higher speed possible if computer systems can show they can safely transport occupants (or goods) at speeds higher than human drivers.
stretchwithme 15y ago
I think a lot of that will happen. But what technologies power the vehicles or enable the roads are secondary. The efficiencies gained by reducing vehicle size will slash costs. A great many people will commute in a single seat vehicle with 50 horsepower if its a quarter of the cost per mile. Especially if they aren't stuck with it the rest of the time. As long as they can just as easily get larger vehicles for other occasions. As far as alternatives to conventional roads, we already have them in major cities. Some are elevated and some are underground. Today only mass transit uses them, but I fully expect robotic cabs to destroy mass transit. Even people who don't value convenience will ultimately go for them. So subways and elevated railways, once abandoned by trains, will be converted so they can be used by individual vehicles.
- FrojoS 15y ago
  This is a great point that I haven't heard yet. Reducing the cost by a factor of 4 might be a bit to optimistic though.
  - stretchwithme 15y ago
    It may very well be overly optimistic. But many features of today's automobile are there because of human needs for performance. Optimize for efficiency for a moped-like 3 wheeled vehicle and you may get something completely different. http://www.niutoday.info/2011/09/14/supermileage-team-proves-nation’s-best-again/ I'm not saying cars will actually be like this, but robotic vehicles won't need mirrors or more than one seat or even a steering wheel. A lot of things are could change.
- seanp2k2 15y ago
  I disagree. See "one lane road" problem. Throughput will be very low and average speeds for urban areas will be close to that of bikes, at best, unless you're doing on/off ramps. Also, re: many smaller cars... who will purchase/maintain all those? We don't have the infrastructure to support that on many levels. Personally, I think a system like that in /I, Robot/ is much more likely.
jberryman 15y ago
Absolutely. And your comment doesn't even mention the tens of thousands of lives that could be saved yearly, nor the millions of acres of paved wasteland that could be re-claimed for use by humans and real human communities. I hope someday an america jammed to the gills with empty, idle hunks of steel looks as bizarre and wasteful as it actual is.
- danssig 15y ago
  Surely that material can be recycled?
jarek 15y ago
> I mean hell, I know I wouldn't want a car if I could just have a subscription to a car. Especially if it wasn't just like Sedans. Imagine being able to rent a truck immediately at a moment's notice, then ride back home in a Sedan, all without having to worry about driving anywhere? It's called Zipcar or your local equivalent.
- sanjiallblue 15y ago
  Zipcar isn't prevalent in the US outside of major cities. But I've used it and it is similar to what I'm talking about, just imagine that but fully automated and run by fewer hipsters.
  - jarek 15y ago
    > Zipcar isn't prevalent in the US outside of major cities. Neither will any robotaxi or robocar system initially. I suppose some will view being run by nerds as an improvement over being run by hipsters.
  - rdouble 15y ago
    The definition of hipster has inverted if grey haired guys with MBAs are now hipsters.
hammock 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit
trussi 15y ago
Car-as-a-service. Nice.
brc 15y ago
You can do all of this right now either using a shared vehicle service (you drive) or getting a car + driver (whether limo or taxi). I'm curious as to why people think that robotising a car would lower the cost of hiring dramatically to the point where you were using it to get to work? It's my understanding that a taxi driver isn't the major cost in a taxi fare, and that fuel, capital cost + licence costs are the principal component in a taxi fare. I doubt this sort of thing would make much of a dent in car sales, at least that wasn't offset by sales of the automated cars. The biggest category for sales of cars is for people who regularly feature a combination of long & short drives in their life. This is typically not your average city-dweller, despite having larger numbers of people within cities. The average mum+2 kids isn't going to trade the family car in any time soon for this type of service, not when the cost of keeping and running an average family car isn't really that burdensome.
- natrius 15y ago
  Automated taxis will be cheaper and more convenient than owning a personal vehicle. The taxi driver is a significant cost. If you're sharing a car, you're paying a smaller share of the capital costs. Most people don't do that today because it's inconvenient. If cars drove themselves, it'd be convenient.
- quatrevingts 15y ago
  A 3 mile cab fare in Berkeley is $20+. The all-in cost of driving a basic private car is around 55 cents a mile (or 90 cents for a BMW). That only leaves license cost, so unless you need a $500,000 medallion, the rest goes to the driver. (And as long as the driver works for himself, the medallion is a capital investment which he can sell later.)
  - brc 15y ago
    But the cost of taxi licences is significant in many cities. I doubt any local/state/federal government is going to let the possibility of driverless taxis proliferate without similar licensing schemes. I agree that having a car running privately is a lower per-mile cost, but that discounts the number of 'dead' miles that a for-hire car drives - the private car always takes the person where they want to go, while ordering one up via the internet is going to at a minimum double the per-mile cost, because only half the miles (as an average) will be utilised. The car will also not always be in use because demand will never be that smooth, so the in-demand times have to be priced higher to make up for the quiet times. Then there has to be a higher insurance cost, plus a margin to cater for damage to the cab, booking systems, marketing, etc etc. It's not that hard to see where a cost goes from the 50c/mile to the ~$4/mile which isn't far under the taxi cost. Taxi drivers make just over minimum wage in most places. While the taxi (plate) owner does make a decent return if run well, it's not like there are a pile of taxi billionaires around. I'm just not convinced removing the driver is going to change the cost by an order of magnitude.
quatrevingts 15y ago
Once you switch over to autonomous taxis, so many possibilities open up: Imagine eliminating most visible parking. A small fraction of the world's vehicle fleet is in use at any given time; the rest of the time it's taking up a parking spot. Remove that and we can have wide sidewalks and bike lanes, parks and new development. Suburbanites get an extra room in their house and a bigger yard. Buses and light rail become obsolete, but heavy rail transit becomes much more practical, because the door-to-door problem is solved. A virtuous cycle of improved convenience, leading to greater ridership, leading to more trains and shorter headways could result. It makes a lot more sense to ring the bay with a 150 mph train when getting to and from the train is easy. (Then again, it might be easier just to run the taxis at 150 mph on dedicated roads.)
- danssig 15y ago
  You could get rid of passenger trains and just have the cars drive right in when they chose a train route. Also, for parking, we can take advantage of LIFO. Today, every single car has to be able to get out independent of the others. With robot cars only the last one of a given type (e.g. van, pickup, sedan).
suivix 15y ago
A problem with automated vehicles is that tons of youngsters will pull pranks on them, and would never be caught. I bet it would actually be a large problem.
JoeAltmaier 15y ago
I love hunky-doodle blue-sky plans too - they don't have to deal with reality. In reality, most people leave for work at the same time. So they all need a car at the same time. So we need the same number of cars as we have now. Carpool? Did I hear somebody say carpool? With robotic drivers that works ... exactly as badly as it works now. My three nearest neighbors work in different TOWNS, not only different buildings or neighborhoods. So I jump on Google Taxi, log in, reserve a car to show up and ... it says "next available taxi arrival, 2 hours before or after desired time". So I either get up at ass-oclock in the morning, or am chronically late for work. </rant>

AJ007 15y ago

And Google could probably provide the service for dirt cheap or even free by charging commercial venues per person delivered (at least if your business wants to be at the top of the list for "sushi.")

stretchwithme 15y ago
More likely is that hot meals will be delivered by a robotic transportation system. The same thing thats happened to a night out at the movies will happen to eating out at a restaurant. Except instead of a disc being delivered by snail mail, tiny robotic vehicles will text you when your meal arrives at the front door.
- seanp2k2 15y ago
  Or we could stop wanting to live out in the boonies and actually build things that people can walk to, then stop being so lazy.
  - stretchwithme 15y ago
    I would prefer to be able to walk to everything I need. But unfortunately, that usually comes with a lot of other problems I'm not interested in. The fact is that in a modern economy many things are shipped from business to business and from business to individuals. Laziness has nothing to do with it. Everything thats available in local businesses also has to come from somewhere. Many things must go through many hands before they become available across the street. There's no reason a human being has to chauffeur things from place to place.
icebraining 15y ago
Or you'll watch a couple of ads during the trip ;)
- danssig 15y ago
  Only if there's an option to pay for that not to happen.

Cushman 15y ago

I love this future because it completely routes around the public transportation dilemma we have in the US. The fact is that automated electric vehicles on paved roads would work perfectly here, could completely replace personal cars, would provide huge cost savings, not to mention saving thousands of lives a year from traffic deaths alone. And this is something we could actually do. The government could take $X billion, get a cost-effective robotic car platform off the ground, start replacing vehicles on a 1-to-1 basis, and outlaw manual driving on public roads inside of 20 years. It would make existing electric vehicle technology perfectly suitable for trips of any length, since you can simply change cars at the charging station and be on your way inside of a minute. Completely feasible. But alas... Inertia.

repsilat 15y ago
Automatic, cooperative routing also has great benefits over greedy time-minimising routing. In addition to the micro-level benefits (no stopping at traffic lights, fewer traffic waves) there are network-level benefits because the Nash equilibrium of user-optimal routing can be really crappy. I highly recommend reading about Braess' Network Paradox for a great illustration of this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
brc 15y ago
Well, the benefits of a private fleet of robotic cars is the ability to have many different providers - so I wouldn't want the government to have anything to do with it, save for setting safety standards for robotic vehicles. There is no need to try and dictate the type of fuel, either. But I'm interested to understand why people think a robotised taxi service would be much cheaper than human-driven taxi service. Is the driver really the highest marginal cost in the system? Does removing a driver really drive costs down that much? I wouldn't have thought so. Oh, and your desire to ban manual driving is never going to fly. The most you would want is perhaps dedicated driverless roads where you aren't allowed to drive - much like bus lanes are now. That would allow for higher speed possible if computer systems can show they can safely transport occupants (or goods) at speeds higher than human drivers.

stretchwithme 15y ago

I think a lot of that will happen. But what technologies power the vehicles or enable the roads are secondary. The efficiencies gained by reducing vehicle size will slash costs. A great many people will commute in a single seat vehicle with 50 horsepower if its a quarter of the cost per mile. Especially if they aren't stuck with it the rest of the time. As long as they can just as easily get larger vehicles for other occasions. As far as alternatives to conventional roads, we already have them in major cities. Some are elevated and some are underground. Today only mass transit uses them, but I fully expect robotic cabs to destroy mass transit. Even people who don't value convenience will ultimately go for them. So subways and elevated railways, once abandoned by trains, will be converted so they can be used by individual vehicles.

FrojoS 15y ago
This is a great point that I haven't heard yet. Reducing the cost by a factor of 4 might be a bit to optimistic though.
- stretchwithme 15y ago
  It may very well be overly optimistic. But many features of today's automobile are there because of human needs for performance. Optimize for efficiency for a moped-like 3 wheeled vehicle and you may get something completely different. http://www.niutoday.info/2011/09/14/supermileage-team-proves-nation’s-best-again/ I'm not saying cars will actually be like this, but robotic vehicles won't need mirrors or more than one seat or even a steering wheel. A lot of things are could change.
seanp2k2 15y ago
I disagree. See "one lane road" problem. Throughput will be very low and average speeds for urban areas will be close to that of bikes, at best, unless you're doing on/off ramps. Also, re: many smaller cars... who will purchase/maintain all those? We don't have the infrastructure to support that on many levels. Personally, I think a system like that in /I, Robot/ is much more likely.

jberryman 15y ago

Absolutely. And your comment doesn't even mention the tens of thousands of lives that could be saved yearly, nor the millions of acres of paved wasteland that could be re-claimed for use by humans and real human communities. I hope someday an america jammed to the gills with empty, idle hunks of steel looks as bizarre and wasteful as it actual is.

danssig 15y ago
Surely that material can be recycled?

jarek 15y ago

> I mean hell, I know I wouldn't want a car if I could just have a subscription to a car. Especially if it wasn't just like Sedans. Imagine being able to rent a truck immediately at a moment's notice, then ride back home in a Sedan, all without having to worry about driving anywhere? It's called Zipcar or your local equivalent.

sanjiallblue 15y ago
Zipcar isn't prevalent in the US outside of major cities. But I've used it and it is similar to what I'm talking about, just imagine that but fully automated and run by fewer hipsters.
- jarek 15y ago
  > Zipcar isn't prevalent in the US outside of major cities. Neither will any robotaxi or robocar system initially. I suppose some will view being run by nerds as an improvement over being run by hipsters.
- rdouble 15y ago
  The definition of hipster has inverted if grey haired guys with MBAs are now hipsters.

hammock 15y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit

trussi 15y ago

Car-as-a-service. Nice.

brc 15y ago

You can do all of this right now either using a shared vehicle service (you drive) or getting a car + driver (whether limo or taxi). I'm curious as to why people think that robotising a car would lower the cost of hiring dramatically to the point where you were using it to get to work? It's my understanding that a taxi driver isn't the major cost in a taxi fare, and that fuel, capital cost + licence costs are the principal component in a taxi fare. I doubt this sort of thing would make much of a dent in car sales, at least that wasn't offset by sales of the automated cars. The biggest category for sales of cars is for people who regularly feature a combination of long & short drives in their life. This is typically not your average city-dweller, despite having larger numbers of people within cities. The average mum+2 kids isn't going to trade the family car in any time soon for this type of service, not when the cost of keeping and running an average family car isn't really that burdensome.

natrius 15y ago
Automated taxis will be cheaper and more convenient than owning a personal vehicle. The taxi driver is a significant cost. If you're sharing a car, you're paying a smaller share of the capital costs. Most people don't do that today because it's inconvenient. If cars drove themselves, it'd be convenient.
quatrevingts 15y ago
A 3 mile cab fare in Berkeley is $20+. The all-in cost of driving a basic private car is around 55 cents a mile (or 90 cents for a BMW). That only leaves license cost, so unless you need a $500,000 medallion, the rest goes to the driver. (And as long as the driver works for himself, the medallion is a capital investment which he can sell later.)
- brc 15y ago
  But the cost of taxi licences is significant in many cities. I doubt any local/state/federal government is going to let the possibility of driverless taxis proliferate without similar licensing schemes. I agree that having a car running privately is a lower per-mile cost, but that discounts the number of 'dead' miles that a for-hire car drives - the private car always takes the person where they want to go, while ordering one up via the internet is going to at a minimum double the per-mile cost, because only half the miles (as an average) will be utilised. The car will also not always be in use because demand will never be that smooth, so the in-demand times have to be priced higher to make up for the quiet times. Then there has to be a higher insurance cost, plus a margin to cater for damage to the cab, booking systems, marketing, etc etc. It's not that hard to see where a cost goes from the 50c/mile to the ~$4/mile which isn't far under the taxi cost. Taxi drivers make just over minimum wage in most places. While the taxi (plate) owner does make a decent return if run well, it's not like there are a pile of taxi billionaires around. I'm just not convinced removing the driver is going to change the cost by an order of magnitude.

quatrevingts 15y ago

Once you switch over to autonomous taxis, so many possibilities open up: Imagine eliminating most visible parking. A small fraction of the world's vehicle fleet is in use at any given time; the rest of the time it's taking up a parking spot. Remove that and we can have wide sidewalks and bike lanes, parks and new development. Suburbanites get an extra room in their house and a bigger yard. Buses and light rail become obsolete, but heavy rail transit becomes much more practical, because the door-to-door problem is solved. A virtuous cycle of improved convenience, leading to greater ridership, leading to more trains and shorter headways could result. It makes a lot more sense to ring the bay with a 150 mph train when getting to and from the train is easy. (Then again, it might be easier just to run the taxis at 150 mph on dedicated roads.)

danssig 15y ago
You could get rid of passenger trains and just have the cars drive right in when they chose a train route. Also, for parking, we can take advantage of LIFO. Today, every single car has to be able to get out independent of the others. With robot cars only the last one of a given type (e.g. van, pickup, sedan).

suivix 15y ago

A problem with automated vehicles is that tons of youngsters will pull pranks on them, and would never be caught. I bet it would actually be a large problem.

JoeAltmaier 15y ago

I love hunky-doodle blue-sky plans too - they don't have to deal with reality. In reality, most people leave for work at the same time. So they all need a car at the same time. So we need the same number of cars as we have now. Carpool? Did I hear somebody say carpool? With robotic drivers that works ... exactly as badly as it works now. My three nearest neighbors work in different TOWNS, not only different buildings or neighborhoods. So I jump on Google Taxi, log in, reserve a car to show up and ... it says "next available taxi arrival, 2 hours before or after desired time". So I either get up at ass-oclock in the morning, or am chronically late for work. </rant>