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The Unintended Effects of Driverless Cars

• piinbinary 15y ago
  I expect that at peak use (rush hour), the total number of cars needed would not be so substantially lower than the current number of cars owned. Perhaps a factor of 2 or 3. Of course, with driverless cars, people may begin to stagger the starting / ending hours of the work day to allow for owning fewer cars.
  • askedrelic 15y ago
    But again, the consequence of a driverless car is that the steering wheel could be removed and fitting 4 strangers comfortably in a car becomes much easier. I would argue that carpooling/ridesharing would increase and ultimately decrease the number of cars needed.
  • kkowalczyk 15y ago
    That's true but consider that most of those people go to/from the same place. If entity that provides those cars is big enough, they can match up the destination and optimize the traffic so that people going to the (roughly) same place share a car. When I was commuting from SF to MV for work, I had to use the whole car. There were plenty of other people who were commuting at the same time from/to very similar destination and used the whole car. It's not hard to algorithmically put several such people into the same car. Today cars are 4/5 seaters so you get at 3x reduction compared to current levels (taking into account that not everyone drives by himself today) but you could easily redesign the cars to not be much larger and taking 8-10 people. Or make them straight up buses. Google already does that with their shuttles where they pick e.g. people from SF and drive them in big buses to MV, except it would be much more efficient because the potential pool of people transfered would not be just "people who work at Google and live in SF" but "every person who lives in SF and works somewhere in MV", which is a much bigger number.
    • danking00 15y ago
      Although I agree with your argument, I think it actually is algorithmically hard to do this. Isn't this the travelling salesman problem? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem Of course, a non-optimal, but good enough routing is probably fine. EDIT: Added last sentence.
      • kkowalczyk 15y ago
        As hard as it might be, it's a solved problem. FedEx is doing it. Uber is doing it. And I'm sure there are plenty of others out there, I just don't know about other industries.
        • emplynx 15y ago
          "It's a solved problem"? I'm not sure what that even means. There are algorithms for finding solutions, and if you have enough time and storage space, you can solve it. In any case, the problem more likely to be used in delivery is the VRP or a variety: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_routing_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_routing_problem.
        • Dinoguy1000 15y ago
          If I'm understanding the relevant WP articles correctly, the travelling salesman problem is not solved, since a solution for it would also imply a solution for all NP-complete problems. What these companies have therefore cannot be an absolute solution, but rather an optimal approximation which may or may not (but probably isn't, and probably can't be proved to be in polynomial time) equal to the absolute solution. Of course, I don't have much firsthand knowledge of computational complexity myself, so someone else who know better should call me on any nonsense above. =D
          • maaku 15y ago
            There's a huge difference between mathematically solved and practically solved. This one's the latter.
• codelion 15y ago
  The post is misleading, people do not have multiple cars because they cannot drive, it is because they have to use it for multiple things at the same time. Morning going to work, dropping kids etc. will happen all at the same time. Peak car usage will not be affected by self driving cars.
  • dantheman 15y ago
    That is true, but the times can be shifted if the car can drive back after dropping you off. For example: 1. Drive to work 2. Drive home 3. Drive to school 4. Drive home 5. Drive to store ... Many parents already drop their kids off @ school and thus are adjusting their schedules appropriately.
    • MichaelApproved 15y ago
      You're going to increase your fuel bills dramatically driving ack and forth like that.
  • _delirium 15y ago
    I don't think peak usage is equal to the total number of owned cars; that would imply that there's some time of day at which every single car is simultaneously being driven, which is pretty hard to believe. It'd require inter-household car sharing on a significant scale to take advantage of that, though.
  • jerf 15y ago
    So your hourly car rental rates will go up during peak usage until it balances out peak usage. While car rental companies may decline to change their rates on a minute-by-minute basis the only reason is to prevent customer confusion, nothing technical will stop it. Supply, demand, and price information can optimize a system like nothing else. And even during peak times, car rentals will be augmented by a suddenly-reinvigorate public transport system; your car may take you to a bus, to be picked up by a car on the other end. The only missing bit of tech is the actual self-driving car. Everything else is simple and obvious extrapolation from brain-dead simple Economics 101 and already-existing network technology. Modern car usage will be seen as only an incremental improvement on horse-drawn buggies, with the real revolution happening much later.
• dmnd 15y ago
  I don't agree these effects are unintended rather than highly desirable benefits.
• cellis 15y ago
  [3] - Is all that matters. The industry and their constituents could easily push back driverless cars 20 years, and this is without any catastrophic accidents happening. So I'd say about 35 years before we see driverless cars disrupting anything.
  • Turing_Machine 15y ago
    Insurance companies matter a lot, too, though they don't get much coverage in the article. Like others, I don't find the arguments for lower overall usage very persuasive, but I could buy them being significantly safer. If enough statistical evidence accumulates to demonstrate that these are safer than manually controlled cars, look for the insurance companies to impose a severe cash penalty on driving the car yourself. If the difference is large enough, you might find yourself unable to purchase insurance for a manually controlled vehicle at any price.
    • mangodrunk 15y ago
      But couldn't these be safe to the point of you not needing insurance?
    • tobtoh 15y ago
      The movie iRobot was an interesting take on such a future. In a few scenes in the movie, the female lead (the robot psychologist?) reacts in horror to Will Smith manually driving his petrol driven motobike because it has not auto-pilot and 'you realise petrol is explosive don't you?!?' And after Will Smith has the forced accident in the tunnel (when attacked by the robots), his boss accuses him of unsafe driving because the blackbox reported that he had disengaged the auto-pilot. So quite conceivably we'll end up in a future where manual car driving is seen in the same light as drink driving or speeding is seen today.
• VladRussian 15y ago
  like any progressive technological development it will bring only improvements, including refusing to go to specific places specified by a transmission from central traffic control or automated blocking of doors and delievering you to court/jail/administrative hearing ...
• modeless 15y ago
  There's another unintended effect I haven't seen talked about anywhere: when cars no longer require human drivers, the cost of driving in human terms (time, frustration, danger) will be drastically reduced, but the energy cost will only be reduced by a small amount. The logical consequence of this is that cars will be doing a lot more driving and as a society we will spend a lot more energy on transportation overall.
  • jacques_chester 15y ago
    This sounds to me like the Jevons Paradox. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
    • brianbreslin 15y ago
      interesting link, do you think this increased use could go hand in hand with increased efficiency? think about it. if every car drove optimally, they would meet their planned MPG. Now no one gets the listed MPG as they all drive like, well humans.
      • jacques_chester 15y ago
        The point here is that very efficient driverless cars may encourage more travel than driver cars do. The increase in total miles travelled may more than offset the savings for any given passenger mile. The key to the Jevons paradox is that first order estimates of the effects of efficiency are misleading. You must also give regard to how the increased efficiency will change buyer preferences.
      • artsrc 15y ago
        Computers that communicate could draft really well at highway speeds, and get awesome MPG. They also would rarely need to brake.
  • invalidOrTaken 15y ago
    While I suspect you're right in that the # of miles driven would increase, I suspect that automated hypermiling would more than compensate for it, leading to a net decrease in energy usage.
• joshu 15y ago
  Cars aren't engineered for high use. We'd have to radically redesign the car itself to go 250k miles/year.
  • ScotterC 15y ago
    the flip side is that if they might do better with constant use. Diesel engines for instance, do better under constant, consistent load. Engines would remain lubricated and heated. Stratification and temp changes would have less effect, etc.
  • wtallis 15y ago
    Are you sure about that? If it's the norm to pay for a share in a fleet of cars, then those cars will probably be owned and managed by a company that will ensure that they get timely preventive maintenance. Yes, there will be changes in how much is reasonable to pay for added durability, but do you have any evidence that cars need to be radically redesigned?
    • joshu 15y ago
      Ever been in a taxi with 300k miles on it?
      • wtallis 15y ago
        What's that got to do with anything? Why should driverless cars be expected to last as many years as current cars? If you're only paying for 20% of the car's lifetime cost, then you're not going to mind if it has to be replaced five times more often. In fact, you'll probably like it - that's why anybody ever leases cars. It's quite reasonable to expect that it will be economical to pay something like 20% more for the drivetrain to make it more durable, but that's not a radical re-design.
  • rdouble 15y ago
    not looking forward to the autonomous volvo 240 future
• there 15y ago
  sending your car home for your spouse to use and then back again to pick you up at the end of your day means it's using twice as much fuel on wasted trips with no occupants.
  • tobtoh 15y ago
    Well by the time we get driveless cars, we'll probably be on the tenth generation of 'Prius' technology and the wasted fuel cost will be marginal compared to the cost of a car.
    • philwelch 15y ago
      Using a 2000 pound block of steel to transport one human being at high rates of speed is fundamentally energy intensive. Even with rainbows and pixie dust it would waste lots of energy.
      • tobtoh 15y ago
        As the article stated, the automated feature reduces the need for multiple cars, it enables better car pooling options - so yes, if you want to look at it by narrowly isolating one aspect of the scenario, sure, it uses more fuel to drive a car anywhere. But as a complete solution - which is what the article talks about - the cost of 'wasted' fuel is negligible given the change in behaviours and travel methods that automated cars may bring about.
  • dr_rezzy 15y ago
    You arent seeing the bigger picture here. If you choose this level of efficiency, after getting dropped off at work, 'your car' will simply locate the next closest customer. If you want to spend the resources on your own private car or a more available one, more power to you.
    • drewcrawford 15y ago
      But people tend to live in the suburbs and work downtown; so the net traffic in one direction is much greater than the net traffic in the other direction.
• joe_the_user 15y ago
  I don't think the article's argument justifies the idea that fewer cars will be sold. Cars wear out primarily through driving. If you simply switched to automatic driving, what you would have is fewer cars being driven more often and so being worn more quickly. If car-mile consumption stays the same, new-car production would stay the same. On the other hand, if the auto-drive cars increased carpooling, then you'd see a decrease in car-miles consumed and so a decrease in production. But if auto-drive cars drove around empty more, you might have even more car-miles being consumed. Moreover, you'd have a "big bang" where people decide to mostly stop driving the old, non-automatically-driving cars and so there'd a huge spike in consumption at that point. The space saved by avoiding parking could be really large, still. A nice thing would be that at the start, a person might be able to finance their self-driving car by renting in out when they didn't need it. Those economies might make the phenomena spread really quickly.
  • prophetjohn 15y ago
    If you simply switched to automatic driving, what you would have is fewer cars being driven more often and so being worn more quickly At the very least, I expect that would be offset by some amount by the fact that automatic cars are going to be driven in a much more efficient and car-friendly manner than they are when a human is operating it with their imperfect motor skills, their ego, their laziness, etc. The way the cars operate would be (or at least could be) algorithmically optimized so that all those little things you're encouraged to do (like pretend there is a glass of water on the dash when you're driving, etc.), actually happen.
    • fragsworth 15y ago
      Also, once Jiffy Lube starts accepting driverless cars, you would see oil changes and maintenance done on a more regular basis since you wouldn't have to drive it to the shop, further extending the lifespan of the vehicles.
      • toomuchtodo 15y ago
        Oil changes can easily be automated. Electric vehicles? All they need is a parking spot to automatically pull into and charge at until required to move to their next waypoint.
• 9999 15y ago
  Unfortunately there are a few assumptions being made here that don't really jive with car usage in practice. 96% usage? People's schedules aren't that flexible, my spouse and I commute at the same time to different places, and a large chunk of the people in my apartment do as well. This is known as rush hour.
  • ImprovedSilence 15y ago
    Not to mention that driving places, without actually driving people places (ie, back home to drive the wife) effectively doubles the mileage, and thus my gas (or the energy source du jour's) consumption. edit: Also, to build on the above comment, the benefit of having a car is having the freedom to use it when you want, it's always there. Driverless cars always in motion are basically public transit. Just take the bus/taxi/subway already.
    • learc83 15y ago
      >Driverless cars always in motion are basically public transit Minus the cost of the driver. The point of ubiquitous driverless cars, is that one could get to you so quickly that for all intents and purposes it would always be there. Also they don't always have to be in motion. Just give people a discount on service if they let cars park in their driveways while waiting for instructions.
    • buff-a 15y ago
      It is a tragic failure of imagination to believe that a driverless car will offer the same opportunities as a bus or subway. Yes, I'm sure there will be a public transit version of them. Yes, I'm sure that you'll occassionally have to reject one because there's a pool of vomit it in it. But, no, it'll be nothing like walking down the street for a bus, or, for a young woman, hailing a taxi driven by a stranger, at night.
  • gwern 15y ago
    Assuming usage does not go from 4% to 96% and he is only partially right, will there still be no interesting societal transformations along his outline due to an increase to, say, 50%?
• skizm 15y ago
  My first thought about driverless cars is that stock in alcohol companies would skyrocket. I know a good many people who would go to the bar on a more regular basis and now that they have a driver for the ride home. Also on a week day after work, why not have another beer? No risk of hurting someone or a DUI, right?
  • rubashov 15y ago
    America needs to get back to its roots as the premier boozing nation. We were long known for this. Hell, there was practically a civil war over the whole whiskey rebellion thing.
• mousa 15y ago
  How about employment? It will make millions of jobs disappear. Truckers/taxi drivers/bus drivers/etc. make up a pretty huge group of people.
  • melling 15y ago
    Aren't you making a Luddite argument? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite Different jobs will take their place. There are a lot fewer farmers these days, for example. The real trick is to find effective ways for people to get the training.
    • throwaway64 15y ago
      if somebody has worked most/all of their life in a low-education unskilled labor job (the kind that are most likely to be disrupted by computers), who says they even have the ability to become a robotologist or something very intensively knowledge based? In the future these will really be the only kinds of jobs computers cant do. The problems here are much more complex than the Luddite issues of yesteryear, and its disingenuous to write somebody off as a dumb Luddite.
      • philwelch 15y ago
        While technology makes easy jobs disappear, it also makes hard jobs easier. The advent of calculators means grocery clerks can be completely innumerate.
    • marvin 15y ago
      The Luddite argument is going to become obsolete one day. There are only so many iGadgets and squeaky plastic toys people are able to pay for. Just because an argument has been correct for along time, doesn't mean it will always be correct. This is the wrong place to make this argument (it should probably be made at length) but I think the only real solution when we have a super-efficient, highly automated world is to drastically increase taxes to the super-rich and subsidize people with obsolete skillsets. But regardless, we'll no doubt see more interesting developments here in the next ten years. The current unemployment situation is just the beginning, although a lot is going to happen in the meantime. (This is from a country where about 10% of the population is currently on welfare and we almost de-facto already have the economic subsity system I'm describing)
• joshsharp 15y ago
  Ars Technica did a good series on self-driving cars where they came to many of these conclusions already. http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/10/future-of-driving-part-2.ars http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/10/future-of-driving...
• moultano 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox As the efficiency with which a resource is used increases, the tendency is to use more of it rather than less. Concretely, if I don't have to drive the car myself, I wouldn't hesitate to drive anywhere. I'd go to the city every day if I could read on the way, and sleep on the way home.
  • nostromo 15y ago
    With shared resources, this might not be the case. Today, car owners have already spent $x on their cars -- so they have an incentive to use their investment to the fullest. Compare that with a shared-car system like ZipCar. ZipCar is generally much more efficient than owning a vehicle (if you don't use it to commute) -- however, since you pay per hour, you have an incentive to skip the car when it's not necessary. By removing the sunk-costs of ownership, you could incentivize conservation rather than consumption.
    • EGreg 15y ago
      With ZipCar, you have to first get to the car, and then also get back from the car. For most people, the car they own is in their driveway or parking spot.
      • erikpukinskis 15y ago
        With a model more like Car2Go (pick up the car wherever you can find one, leave it wherever you want to) this isn't as much of an issue. In Austin there's pretty much always a car within a few blocks... almost "driveway-level" accessibility. And if even 10% of drivers switch to using this model, then there's always going to be a car on your block. That's pretty competitive. With driverless cars it's even less of an issue, because the car will literally drive from the end of the block (where it's waiting) to your door.
        • FrojoS 15y ago
          Thanks, I wasn't aware of Car2Go. Their price rates http://www.car2go.com/sandiego/en/affordable-rates/ http://www.car2go.com/sandiego/en/affordable-rates/ might give a good idea about how expensive using a driverless car would be if it existed today. Assuming, that the San Diego prices can be applied to Francisco, it seems like taking such a car from downtown to the airport would be about the same as the BART subway. I assume, that would be too expensive for a daily commute.
• namank 15y ago
  This is a far down the road vision. It calls for a huge shift in the mindset of the consumer AND the manufacturer, to say nothing of the society. Then there is the infrastructure and error handling - what happens when it gets a flat tire on its way to pick up the kids after dropping you off? Lets give it 15 years. 15 years is a long time for technology but not so much for societal evolution. I can see the driverless car being on the road in 5 years and I see it being used for carpools. But the vision as painted in the post? Yes, I'm a skeptic. Very interesting stuff though...I can't wait till they hit the road.
  • apike 15y ago
    I think the legal issues are underestimated here. Who is liable if your driverless Civic drives you into a tree? What if it runs over a pedestrian? Honda? Google? You? Driverless cars could dramatically reduce the dangers of driving, but it's a lot more complicated if a machine learning algorithm kills somebody than if a mistaken human being does.
    • blrgeek 15y ago
      That's a poor argument. All it needs is for someone to take liability. If you own the driverless car, then you buy the insurance. If it's leased from a pool, then they buy the insurance. The software vendor for their part take an over-arching insurance on software errors across thousands of cars. Done deal. Today if you have a 20 year old your premium is higher. Tomorrow if you have a driverless car, your premium might be low even if you have a 16 yr old. Parents buying a first car might just buy a driverless car for a lower insurance premium & the safety of not having the kid drive!
• benihana 15y ago
  It seems that to most Americans, the draw of the driverless car won't be "hey, this is more efficient and is costing me less overall." Rather, I think it will be, "hey I don't have to pay attention in the car anymore, I'll be on my phone playing on the internet the entire way home!!!!!!!" Followed shortly thereafter by, "hey why doesn't this car have the internet in the front seat?"
• yuxt 15y ago
  According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, Americans spend more than 500 million 'commuter hours' per week in their automobiles. Once driverless cars take over this time can be spent on browsing web (clicking ads)
  • philwelch 15y ago
    That's the most backwards-ass business model I've seen. Google could probably make more money by selling the damn technology.
• luigi 15y ago
  I brought this up in Matt Maroon's post about the topic back in January, and he brought up a good point: People like to own their car because it's a moving storage locker. http://mattmaroon.com/2011/01/03/google-will-become-an-ai-company/#comment-20313 http://mattmaroon.com/2011/01/03/google-will-become-an-ai-co...
  • eurleif 15y ago
    The use case I'm imagining is people going shopping, and wanting to put bags from one store away in their car before going into another. So what if you could summon up a self-driving car, put your stuff in its trunk for a fee, and then call back the same car later with your stuff still in its trunk? It could go be a taxi while you're busy shopping, and not allow other customers to unlock its trunk.
    • shasta 15y ago
      Or we'll get a car design with a removable trunk.
      • frankus 15y ago
        I think you're spot on. But I think the removable trunk will be combined with a passenger-less unit that carries the trunk back to your house and drops it off. Sort of a tiny version of container shipping.
        • eurleif 15y ago
          That sounds like something that might happen in the farther future, but I expect there will be a lot of general-purpose auto-driving cars made before companies start making super-specialized models like that.
  • rdl 15y ago
    This is probably one of my favorite things about owning a car, and why I have a sedan vs. a hatchback. Being able to store emergency supplies (couple cases of water, a backpack, ...), personal tech supplies (spare mbp charger, cable toolkit, etc.) in my car makes life much easier. Realistically this is 100-200 pounds of stuff, and I wouldn't want to have to carry it to/from a car myself every time I got a robot car.
• napierzaza 15y ago
  So the effect of a driverless car is going to be a driverless taxi. Why doesn't everyone use a taxi now? I'm sure it would cost less than cars do. But nobody really does the cost-benefit analysis of these sorts of things.
  • UrbanPat 15y ago
    Eh, that's doubtful actually. In most US cities (other than, say NYC, SF, and a handful of others), taxi service is expensive and slow to arrive. Parking is free, and cars can be obtained relatively cheaply.
  • mbrubeck 15y ago
    Taxis today aren't driverless, and paying a human driver is a significant cost, especially in any country with a relatively high cost of living (and therefore high labor costs). Driverless taxis could change this significantly. Lots of people do already use mass transit every day, which has a cost structure closer to driverless taxis (because the labor cost of a bus or train driver is amortized across more passengers).
• MichaelApproved 15y ago
  "And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold." Incorrect conclusion. Cars being used 20 times more will break down 20 times faster. Less might be needed on the road at the same time but they'll break down and need to be replaced at a much faster rate. Over a serval year timeframe the amount of cars turned over will remain roughly the same. I also wouldn't send my car home to pick up my wife and drive her to work because my fuel bills will skyrocket through all the extra driving around. The shared resource makes sense. It'll be similar to taxi services that exist now. You call for a driver and the closest shared car will come to pick you up.
  • rsheridan6 15y ago
    >Cars being used 20 times more will break down 20 times faster. Not true if they're owned by big players who professionally maintain them. Want to buy a used LLV (postal truck from the eighties/nineties)? You can't, because they haven't been surplused yet. Also, cold engines wear much faster than hot engines, so an engine that runs all day does not wear out as quickly per mile as one that's driven a few times daily.
    • MichaelApproved 15y ago
      Sure, they haven't been surprised but they surely have had enough parts replaced that we can consider then new cars several times over. You make a good point that a fleets maintained better than the average citizen but they will still break down and still need to be replaced faster that the author is stating. We will still have roughly the same amount of turnover over the course of a decade.
• nl 15y ago
  I'm not sure if anyone else has realized it yet, but driverless cars will have to be taxed on a time-on-road basis, rather than at a flat rate. The reason? The economics of electric cars and parking. Initially it seems that they will fix the parking problem - driverless cars can be sent to park outside the CBD, reducing traffic and freeing up space. But the problem is that people/software will optimize for price, and for electric cars the cheapest scenario is for them to be stuck in a traffic jam on a public road. Instead of going to a parking bay, the software will route them to the nearest traffic jam, where the car can sit with the electric motors off for a large amount of time. Inevitably, some software will misjudge how long their charge will last, their batteries will run flat and the traffic jam will get worse. As far as I can see the only way around this is to increase the cost of being on the road.
  • zasz 15y ago
    What does CBD stand for?
    • nl 15y ago
      Central Business District
  • rottencupcakes 15y ago
    Who exactly will do this? No major car company would risk their reputation selling a car with that programmed into its software. Even if groups of hackers installed this on their cars, I can't imagine this movement gaining enough critical mass to honestly be a concern.
    • nl 15y ago
      Who exactly will do this? No major car company would risk their reputation selling a car with that programmed into its software. What's the risk, exactly? Our car has an "ultra-economy mode" where the motor turns off when stationary - many cars already have this. Our car can park itself - many cars already have this. Our car will find a parking space, optimizing the route to and from the parking garage - that seems logical, why would a company not do that? Our company will optimize the route to and from the parking garage, and the time spent in the garage vs on the road based on price vs economy of the car - why would a company not do that? The problems only occurs when hundreds of cars independently make their own decision to drive as slowly as possible to and from the parking space. (Edit: someone else pointed out that UPS routes their trucks to avoid left turns. This isn't too dissimilar to that - they do it to improve fuel economy, this would be done to improve costs too)
• zohebv 15y ago
  Interesting post. However, I think the primary consequence of driverless cars could be more mundane - everyone will end up using cabs/taxis far more often. This is the life I lived in Bombay a decade ago. The parking, cost overhead of a car is so high and rickshaws/cabs are so cheaply and plentifully available, that walking out of your home and hailing a cab to go wherever you want is the best option. Cabs in the West are expensive because drivers need to be paid more and cartels are at work. If both these costs are eliminated then what works in a country like India is, suddenly, the best option for commuters in the West. Realtime pooling of cab passengers is a possibility, a traveler could be offered a choice of picking a co-traveler for a reduction in fare(or even cash back!) when already travelling in the car. Families could still own cars, but they will probably pay for insurance on a per-mile basis, rather than a per-month basis, so that the incremental cost of owning a car is minimal. Effectively, you end up owning a cab that only you use and pay cab fare to the insurance company :-) The ratio of cabs to private cars would then be an interplay of insurance costs/parking costs and ride sharing benefits, with cities leaning towards cabs to escape parking costs. So, things wouldn't be too different :-) One unfortunate consequence could be the increase in suburban sprawl and traffic congestion with driverless cars as people start caring lesser about longer commute times. Automated cars will probably be better behaved in traffic, but the road capacity will be pushed to its limits.
  • learc83 15y ago
    Most traffic is caused by the delay in human reaction times, and driverless cars can operate safely at much higher speeds and at much higher densities. Roads could handle massively more traffic if they were only packed with driverless cars.
    • maximusprime 15y ago
      Where the hell do you get that idea? Most traffic in the US is caused by the lack of roundabouts.
      • praptak 15y ago
        Even if this is so, a computer-driven cars can certainly use normal junctions much more effectively than humans. Robots could do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vnba7Y86jC4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vnba7Y86jC4 [lucky driver goes full speed through dense traffic] on routine basis.
• EGreg 15y ago
  I agree with everything except the last part. Cars will still wear out after the same number of miles.
• wavephorm 15y ago
  If you can just network the driverless cars up to the existing public transportation systems then we'd have a truly useful device. Just walk outside your house and a car drives on up, opens its doors, and takes you to the most convenient location to transfer to a public bus, or if economical to pick up other passengers going near your destination.
• ccc3 15y ago
  A couple of comments: And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold Actually, no it wouldn't. If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now. That means cars will have to be replaced much more frequently. There would be fewer cars sold than there are now, but it wouldn't be 20x fewer. The operating percent of a car will go from 4% to that 96% This seems wildly optimistic to me. The driverless cars may be capable of driving around 96% of the time, but that doesn't mean they can be carrying people 96% of the time. No matter how efficient the system, if there are enough cars to handle peak traffic during the day, then a lot of those cars will be sitting around doing nothing at night.
  • shasta 15y ago
    Not to mention the immediate efficiency hit of the car driving empty between rides.
    • bigiain 15y ago
      I wonder what sort of population density and usage pattern you'd need before that worked in your favour? If my apartment complex had a few dozen cars shared between a few hundred apartments, perhaps the car I take to go shopping could pick up the next door kid from soccer on the way back, then a different car might pick me up at the shops when I'm done, after dropping some other neighbour at the movies... (I guess I'm now describing taxis. I wonder what the difference between this, and a taxi network of driverless cars is?)
      • bigiain 15y ago
        Responding to my own comment here... Anybody got both Travis Kalanick and Elon Musk's numbers in their speed dial? What if a "disrupt the cab industry" company got together with a "low moving part, high reliability electric car maker" to do an end-run around the expected auto industry opposition... A fleet of driverless electric taxis, all routed by smartphone apps and behavioural prediction...
• redthrowaway 15y ago
  The biggest opportunity I can see here is Cars as a Service. Basically an automated taxi service you pay $50/month for to use a car whenever you want. You fire up the caas app,order a car, and the nearest one comes and grabs you. The best part: not location dependent. Your membership is good in any city (heck, even any country). It would be the end of taxis and even public transportation.
  • majmun 15y ago
    I imagine this is already possible but with people as drivers instead of machines, you just need some badass coordination in your cellphone app service.
    • redthrowaway 15y ago
      Possible, yes, but you have to both buy the cars and pay the drivers, one of the reasons taxis are so expensive (the other being licenses running in the hundreds of thousands of dollars). If we project 5 years down the road to a time when gas prices are even higher, electric vehicles are cheaper and more reliable, and the technology is ready for prime time, I could easily see cars as a service working.
      • deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
• UrbanPat 15y ago
  Here's a related question: What will cities look like with driverless cars being shared by groups of people? Parking needs will diminish significantly, allowing cities to become more dense, yet because the cost of driving will be reduced (by splitting the ownership costs of cars, by increasing the rate of shared commuting, and by allowing commuters to spend their transit time being productive), demand for urban land for residential areas may decrease overall. So my best guess is that in many cities commercial areas will become more dense, but residential areas could enter a decline. Any other ideas?
• nostromo 15y ago
  Another unintended (or maybe intended) effect: cheap cabs. Without cab drivers, there's no reason for the antiquated medallion system. That would lead to more cabs. Without medallion costs, drivers, tips, presumably cheaper insurance, and more efficient route-finding -- it should also be much cheaper. With cab-bots, you could also do some awesome things like model the areas and times of greatest demand and make sure they are there immediately. Or, similar to UPS, route to avoid left turns to increase fuel performance.
• frankus 15y ago
  When I was young and naive I used to dream about how a Personal Rapid Transit system that would whisk people around in private little pods along elevated monorail tracks could work. Clearly the answer is "it couldn't", not so much technically but economically and politically. But it turns out we already have a really comprehensive network of ground-level "tracks" that lead up to nearly every residence and business on the planet. The missing ingredient thus far has been the ability for a vehicle to stay on this "track" without a driver, but it looks like Google and friends might have cracked that nut. A second impediment might be powering these cars in an efficient manner, but batteries have vastly improved over the last decade, and as they are standardized, battery swapping and even third-rail-type power (at least on limited-access roads) become possible. The land use implications alone are going to be huge, but I'm not entirely sure which way they'll flip. On the one hand, we will no longer need vast parking lots adjacent to activity centers like malls, stadiums, office complexes, big-box stores, and airports. That means that stuff could be built in those parking lots, which could potentially greatly increase the density of current cities and suburbs. On the other hand (h/t Karl Smith at Modeled Behavior) driverless cars would dramatically lower the cost of living in exurban areas, so people interested in peace and quiet would no longer have to compromise as much as they do now.
• johnwall 15y ago
  he forget to mention the ability to drink and drive legally.
• clistctrl 15y ago
  Another unintended effect of driverless cars is more fuel efficient practices. If you have shared cars, then you can just order the car for your needs. No longer will people be driving huge SUV's to work when the only reason they needed the SUV is for that weekend trip to vermont. Recreational cars would be less common too. If you're not the one driving, the fun of a sporty car tends to be reduced.
• iandanforth 15y ago
  How has no one mentioned EC2 in this whole thread? Automation, centralization, capacity planning, many of the problems are the same. Now IF that analogy is correct I propose: 1. A few large entities will dominate the automated car business while enthusiasts and finicky users will happily continue to buy their own. 2. Manufacturers will see demand explode for a small set of highly efficient commodity vehicles. 3. Excess capacity will be resold for new businesses. - Package delivery - Mobile Advertising - Portable infrastructure. (Need wifi coverage at an outdoor event? I'll send over a half dozen networked cars) - Portable storage (Think of those delivered storage pods, but that only were there when you called) - Entertainment (Rent a dozen cars and have them do some sweet driving) Also, though this doesn't fit into the Amazon analogy, talk about a captive audience! Imagine, you're puttering along on a family trip to Yellowstone in your rental, it's around lunchtime, and the car suggests stopping at Burger King .. out loud ... with your kids listening. Can you imagine what BK would pay for that privilege?
• ccourteau 15y ago
  I wonder what the potential would be for vehicles to be hacked and their destinations rerouted by third parties. Would there be a centralized automation system or would the cars be independently smart and networked?
• Natsu 15y ago
  Driverless cars are a great idea and I really want to see them succeed. But I can see more than a few problems. As they say, there are entrenched interests that won't like that. For example, if you can rent cars that way, I don't see the people with those very expensive taxi medallions being any too happy about that. Yes, getting rid of that would be a good thing, but the people who own them won't be any too happy about the value of their investment vanishing. Also, there's what happens with accidents. For example, look at that story we have right now about the autopilot flaking out for what? A minute? Only to have the pilots get confused and crash the plane. People underrate intentional risks because they feel that they have control. Conversely, they overrate risks where they do not have that feeling. Driverless cars are firmly in the "don't have control" pile. Sure, the computer is likely to be a much safer driver than most people, but that also means being a nicer driver (which will really piss off some people, passengers and other drivers alike), and people with low skill overrate their abilities. Throw in any actual programming errors into the mix and I just have to hope you have good insurance and a good PR department.
• tryitnow 15y ago
  The value proposition here is basically replacing cab drivers. This offers some really interesting challenges because there should be some sort of optimal routing algorithms that would allow a car to carry more than one passenger at a time. I am sure Google is already working on something amazing in this regard. The most exciting thing is the potential to radically reduce transportation costs. The cost reduction won't be an order of magnitude but it would probably be at least half the total cost of transportation we incur now.
• orijing 15y ago
  Guys, some of you who are criticizing the precise "assumptions" are missing the point! He's not saying that utilization will go up to 96% precisely, or that there will be 20x fewer cars. He is challenging us to imagine the possibilities ourselves, seeding it with some immediate (potential) implications. On first sight his assumptions seem reasonable, and it's up to us individually to determine what the ramifications are. Indeed the potential is enormous for freeing up a lot of human time/etc. We will need less parking certainly, cars will be running newer models (since they're used more, they'll likely last less time) with better technologies, and potentially there will be more efficient routing algorithms to save energy, time, etc. I like how HN is often first to criticize, but sometimes you're just missing the point. The point is to imagine for yourself the possibilities. For me, it's enormous.
  • fleitz 15y ago
    Fully agree, just had the critic argument with my roommates about this. It doesn't really matter if everyone gets on board this plan, what matter is that with a 90% utilization rate and cars that can move themselves, someone like ZipCar/Uber or whoever can offer something like $30/month for unlimited car usage within 40KM. It doesn't matter to me if everyone else doesn't get on board what matters to me is that a service at those rates may be possible in the near future. People still have phones that only text and call, but it's becoming a rarity.
    • maximusprime 15y ago
      You're assuming that having driverless cars is more desirable than having human controlled cars. I doubt most people see it that way.
      • ryusage 15y ago
        Why not? I'm seeing numerous, huge advantages to the driverless cars. The only advantage to a normal car is that sometimes they can be fun to drive. Frankly, I'd be more than happy to make that tradeoff, and I suspect I'm not unusual in that regard.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• ldng 15y ago
  Ford is kind of already aware of this, see Bill Ford's TED talk : http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_ford_a_future_beyond_traffic_gridlock.html http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_ford_a_future_beyond_traffic_g...
• majmun 15y ago
  I love driving car. Only problem that I have and this could solve is parking in zone where it is expensive and somehow park car somewhere else. But I could possibly solve this problem NOW by paying students or someone to park, and get your car for you. The prize has to only be cheaper than parking expanses. driverless car cost will be higher than this I imagine.
• izend 15y ago
  The largest unintended effect will be the massive loss of employment in the transportation industry.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• naa42 15y ago
  All these economic points can be applied to public transportatipon (i.e. trams, trolleys, subway). They also have much higher utilisation of equipment and number of drivers is negligible comparing with the number of passengers. So the problem is the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... Well, maybe Google can introduce public transportation once again.
• b1daly 15y ago
  While this is a fascinating thought experiment are there really so many people who think there will be mass adoption of driverless cars in the near to mid term? The technical, political, socialogical, and psychological barriers to the OP vision seem huge. Just to mention one that I haven't seen mentioned: winter driving. In snowy climates the driving conditions are very unpredict able. Cars get stuck and require all sorts of creative driving techniques. If the sort of seamless automatic driving doesn't work in such an environment then human driven vehicles will still be on the road in large numbers. Being on the road means they can be driven to the dense, warm urban areas where automated driving might work better. You could outlaw human driven vehicles in certain places, but it highlights the need for the creation of parallel infrastructure to be created in areas where land is scarce. The transition period would be stretched out and chicken vs egg type problems could be insurmountable for the foreseeable future.
• switz 15y ago
  A [nice] motorhome that's driverless would be awesome. Have to be in New York at 9, but live in Philadelphia? Fall asleep in your motorhome the night before and wake up at 8 a.m. already in the city. Not to mention the gas/electricity/emissions benefits from a machine controlling the acceleration and motor.
• choxi 15y ago
  post is so good, read it 3 times
• ajuc 15y ago
  It's not about average throughtput, it's about peak throughtput (during rush hours). Big percentage of families will want their cars at 8-9 and 16-17. So utilisation of cars will never be 90%, more like 45%, which is still big change, I agree. It's also possible that companies will do the sensible thing and adopt adjustable working hours (many software companies do this already here).
• jsvaughan 15y ago
  One unintended effect is that accidents are going to be quite different. Although driverless cars are bound to be safer, I wonder what people's reaction will be to computer error causing death. The style of computer error is not likely to correspond to reasonable human factors (like bad conditions, icy roads etc - all that can be programmed in), but bugs / bad radar echo zones / new roads not yet mapped etc - there are going to be deaths caused by circumstances that a human would have easily, safely dealt with.
• danssig 15y ago
  Once we have automated cars why would anyone own one? Cars are the biggest waste of money we have right now. On a house you spend more but you have the potential to get it back or even make a profit. Not so with a car, it's just loss and a lot of that. The sensible thing to do would be to have cars as a service. Why tie yourself to one type of car when you can just order what ever you need for that specific trip? Why does every family need 2 cars when nearly all our time is spent in one place (e.g. home, the office, the golf course). Cars as a service can enjoy the same kinds of economies you have with e.g. the phone network. You don't have to have enough for everyone because everyone won't be using them at the same time. You need only worry about peak time, which you even have some control over since you're making the driving schedules.
• Papirola 15y ago
  read some sci-fi: last chapter of flashforward (the book)
• Tichy 15y ago
  Unintended? For me, those were always the main motivation for driverless cars.
• maximusprime 15y ago
  Driverless cars will never go mainstream. It's not something the masses want or need. Just a project for techies to have fun doing for the sake of doing it.
• lasonrisa 15y ago
  Nah, people will sell their houses and buy a truck with their home which would follow them around. What we will actually rent is the parking space.
• eftpotrm 15y ago
  What this seems to ignore for me is the car-as-status / car-as-identity case. Speaking personally when I had to trade from a rather nice executive saloon to an MPV / minivan, much as I knew it was sensible I hated it because of the self-image connotations. Which is possibly why I've now got a 350Z ;-) Why does anyone buy a BMW or a Mercedes when a Ford is substantially cheaper for the same space and performance? Image. That's a sector which is always going to buy their own cars rather than leasing one from a pool, because even a shared 'prestige' car (a rather meaningless tag given current BMW sales figures, but I digress...) starts rapidly losing its lustre. Which then may well mean that we gain a new social stratification - prestige car, own car, driverless pool car. Which could well see older used cars and taxis dropping out of the market, but I doubt it'd have an effect on the general car market on quite the same scale that the writer envisages.
  • GFischer 15y ago
    Make owning your own car a luxury and tax it to hell :) I hope they do that AFTER the driverless cars gain traction (not before as here in Uruguay where the president thinks that choosing not to use the mediocre public transportation is a "luxury").
  • frobozz 15y ago
    Maybe, but I suspect that the order of adoption might change that. I agree that there will probably always be a segment of personal cars, but that segment will be small and shrinking. Speaking from the other side of the fence: if I still lived in a zipcar city, I'd be rid of my car in a heartbeat. I always considered my lack of car ownership as a positive status symbol. One sort of person who buys prestige cars* would be the same sort of person to be an early adopter of personally owned driverless cars, after all, being equipped with the latest magical technology is one of the things that confers prestige. Once that has happened, membership of an exclusive car-sharing club might become desirable, offering the opportunity to network and do business on the move. After all, people do buy first-class tickets on trains, despite the massive expense, regardless of the fact that it gets you there at the same time as standard class. I could also envisage a future in which personal car ownership is often seen in the same light as the ownership of certain models of car (e.g. porsche boxster) are today - i.e. a gauche attempt at a status-symbol by a nouveau riche oik. *(The other kind, who wouldn't go driverless, are the kind of petrolhead who relishes the man-machine hybrid that they become when they get behind the wheel, but they will eventually be restricted to racetracks)
• maigret 15y ago
  Two unrelated comments: - The most massive impact of driverless cab will be to send all taxi and truck driver to unemployment all of a sudden. Many post workers and pizza guys also nearly after. - Google is not the only one working on that. Audi has some very nice driverless tech going on, as do a few other universities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car Edit: formatting
• drblast 15y ago
  Cars will be designed so as not to run over children. Children will stand in front of cars as a prank to cause massive traffic jams and make the evening news. People will use cars as advertising. You will receive free cars as "samples" and this will cause problems because it will happen too often. Automotive spam and script kiddies would not be pretty. I'm pretty sure a driver will always have to be behind the wheel.
  • matthiasl 15y ago
    If kids causing traffic jams was a real problem, why doesn't it already happen all the time on pedestrian crossings?
    • rafcavallaro 15y ago
      Because human drivers have the ability to exit the vehicle and "dissuade" the obstructionist child. In fact, the mere threat of exiting the vehicle has been known to send children running.
• wtvanhest 15y ago
  Airplanes are not utilized 96% of the time. Most are sitting on tarmacs all night long. Just like cars will be sitting when it isn't rush hour. There may be a few less cars sold on the margin, but this will not impact things as much as you think. I could possibly see more rental/share programs, but those exist in big cities and are called cabs. Which, brings me to a bigger problem which is cabs, those guys are definitely not going to have jobs.
• JulianMorrison 15y ago
  I have said before, driverless cars will end the private car. First you get your car doing taxi work for money while it would otherwise be parked in your workplace. Then you get a social stratum of people who only ever use other people's cars, because it's simpler than buying one. Then you get commercial fleets of driverless taxis out-competing the per-individual car in the taxi role, until it's not economic to run one. Then you get the collapse of the economic/logistic infrastructure for per-individual cars. And yeah, driverless taxi fleets will only park to fuel, be serviced, or wait on a fare.
• Aissen 15y ago
  Hacker News side note: it's time to show plus.google.com instead of google.com in the domain preview. Apparently it's already done with appspot.com, wordpress.com and others, so it shouldn't be too hard.
• supar 15y ago
  I'm all for driverless transportation, but let's face some important facts. Why didn't we _already_ remove the drivers on trains? The train/metro system is basically a closed system which is much easier to control than a car in traffic. This is a genuine question: why? It looks like a much easier to solve problem. Second problem will be certainly be fuel. A 20x increase in utilization means at least a 20x increase in fuel, unless the car is _transporting_ something at all times (which basically means car sharing). Sending your car home empty is crazy in terms of fuel. Legislation is also going to be a hell of a problem, at least in EU.
• dman 15y ago
  What happens to people who want to drive the car themselves by choice. How long before the idea of a mere human driving the car is seen as too reckless because automated cars are doing lane merges at surgical precision at 120mph.
• rythie 15y ago
  You have to wonder if people would even learn to drive manually in a world of driverless cars, maybe only a minority of enthusiasts would want to (cost/time concerns). Also, if some enthusiasts were perceived to be driving dangerously compared to the computer controlled cars, that all manually controlled cars might be banned.
• michaelfeathers 15y ago
  Driverless cars seem like a great idea, but I've never seen anyone address the legal/insurance issues.
• ajays 15y ago
  Being nerds and geeks, we automatically focus on the numbers: is 96% utilization too high? Will there really be 20x fewer cars sold? Those exact numbers are beyond the point. But a more realistic number for utilization may be close to 50%: half the time, the car would be on the way back to the next pick up point (or home or office or ....). One of the main reasons planes have such high utilization is to recoup the high cost of the initial investment. You don't see _every_ plane being utilized 96%; heck, drive by any small airfield and you'll see lots of planes parked under a canvas, seemingly not going anywhere.
• politician 15y ago
  Speaking of unintended effects, what happens when the government begins to abuse its new capability to geo-fence areas that driverless smart cars aren't allowed to drive into? Like protest meeting areas.
• stevecooperorg 15y ago
  I think I've missed an important part of this discussion -- if driverless cars would be revolutionary, what do they provide that an existing taxi service doesn't? A taxi has many of the listed benefits; - you don't need to buy the car - you don't need to drive the car - it's available on demand through your phone - the utilisation of cars is very high So what is the functional difference between a shared-ownership, driverless car, and a standard human-driven taxi?
  • dr_rezzy 15y ago
    Nothing. You are correct in missing an important part of this discussion.
  • jomohke 15y ago
    You don't have to pay the driver. Currently it's more expensive for me to take a taxi (in Australia) because the wage of the driver outweighs the extra costs (and inefficiency) associated with running my own car. You see a lot more taxis in cities with lower human labour costs (such as Lima), or where the cost of parking outweighs the cost of the driver (such as Manhattan).
  • frankus 15y ago
    So what is the functional difference between a shared-ownership, driverless car, and a standard human-driven taxi? Don't underestimate the price difference. It's one of those things where a large enough quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference. In the US it costs around $15-$20/hour to hire a taxi driver (median wage is $11.20 per hour). Over the course of a month (24/7) that starts to approach the cost of the car. Granted, the taxi isn't used 24/7, but the operator still has to recoup the cost of having it available all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if about 90% of the cost of a taxi is due to employing the driver. Even if all you do is reduce the cost of a trip by a factor of ten, you're going to see big changes.
• ednc 15y ago
  Seeing this and the MythBuster's cannonball debacle next to each other gave me a scary chill.
• emehrkay 15y ago
  "Yeah, because cars aren't a personal item? why don't we just make it public transportation? oh wait, they already have that. It's called a bus, train, subway, taxi. Sorry I like my gas car, because I can modify it and make it go fast." What is wrong with people?
• afunguy24 15y ago
  I'm all for it. The fact the you gonna save more lives... Well, we got enough people on earth.
• georgieporgie 15y ago
  Why would a family need an entire car to themselves? Because sitting on your own child's vomit is less horrifying than sitting on your neighbor's child's vomit. I'm similarly excited for the arrival of automated cars (I'll be able to ride my motorcycle with a higher percentage of predictable drivers around me), but there's a point where personal property has a unique advantage.
• ondrae 15y ago
  The effects of 20x fewer vehicles in our cities will have enormous impact on urban design and planning. The very shape of our metropolises will be realigned away from the auto-dominated patterns of the last 60 years. Walkable, livable, green urban cores will become the new standard.
• niccl 15y ago
  There's an aspect of this that I haven't seen mentioned. It seems trivial but I think it's got to be solved before pooled vehicles like this can work: cleaning the vehicles. There's no incentive for the individual user to keep a shared vehicle clean. So what happens: squalor, or perhaps a new service industry of grooming self-driving vehicles?
• nickthorn 15y ago
  I can't believe this has so many upvotes! This is based on a silly assumption; aircraft are relatively more expensive than cars to buy, maintain, and use. So it is cheaper and affordable for more people if we time share them. Cars are much cheaper, so we don't - the value of having a personal car ready right now is worth more to people than taking public transport. If aircraft were as cheap/convenient as cars to use/maintain/store/etc, then I'd have an aircraft parked up outside my house! Driverless cars will have an enormous effect on society in lots of ways, but I highly doubt reducing the number of cars on the road will be one of them. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there are more cars on the roads, given that people who currently can't drive (because they're elderly/too young/disabled) will be enabled to.
• johngalt 15y ago
  Decouple the drivetrain from the cabin. The drivetrain is automated, and has standard connection types for the personal cabin. So you can have a mobile space that is "yours". Still has all the benefits listed in the article, and handles a few of the problems that "community car sharing" would create. If a bunch of people are all going the same direction you can pack them into a 10 cabin bus, or a 100 cabin train. When their paths diverge you can have single cabin drivesets routed in advance to the destination. Tailor the drivesets for their intended use/range; short range electrics for small commutes, long range diesels, catenary powered on high traffic areas, perhaps a large multicabin driveset with wings?
• idspispopd 15y ago
  I like the idea. If only we had a system of cars, that for a small fee could drive us anywhere we wanted. That fee could be based on the number of kilometres travelled and the time spent in the car. We could call that fare a "taximeter", based on the latin "taxa" and the Greek "metron" meaning measure, together as "taxed metre", as that's a bit long - in time we could shorten it to "taxi". Then we could have certain cities where only these "taxis" (and other kinds of public-transport) were allowed entry. Normal cars could enter, but would need to pay a special "congestion" fee. Maybe London could try this out as they have a problem with congestion.
• herval 15y ago
  It's funny to note that in the FlashForward novel, the author presents the exact opposite view of the "future world": people buy more and more cars, and since they're auto-piloted, they don't even bother about parking anymore: "drive around the block and pick me up in 30 minutes" Entire traffic jams made of "parked" cars. Amazing!