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The article might not but I think that it would totally happen. My assumption here is that there would emerge a big car provider who would provide those cars,

The article might not but I think that it would totally happen. My assumption here is that there would emerge a big car provider who would provide those cars, similar to how there's only few major car rentals, or how ZipCar is leading in its category or even how Uber emerges as a single taxi-like provider. The economies of scale are very big here. Given that, some things you have not accounted for: Higher average utilization per car. I don't know how much commute traffic accounts for total traffic, but by judging rush traffic on 580, it's quite a lot. Most of those people go from the same location (e.g. SF) to the same location (e.g. Mountain View) and today most of them drive alone. Today 4 or 5 of them would be scheduled by an algorithm to use the same car. Because of that the cars would get re-designed for a higher capacity (at least 8-10 people) or even straight up buses. A big provider would have so much data that they could optimize the hell out of sharing cars. Similarly, the cars would utilized, on average, much better. Again, a company with enough data could really optimize for a lifetime of a car and they would have economic incentives to do so (unlike a single customer for whom even gathering the necessary data would be cost prohibitive). Our cars are, without a question, utilized very inefficiently. Someone operating a fleet of tens of thousands of cars would have not only economic incentive but also necessary data and necessary transaction volume to optimize per-car utilization, because for them it would translate directly into large savings.

learc83 15y ago
I can't upvote this enough, people seem stuck in their concept of what a car is. Without a driver we are free to redesign cars in so many ways. We no longer need to worry about designing it so that the driver can see every angle, so we can design more efficient seating layouts. We can even add partitions so the 10 passengers don't have to see each other. Long distance deliver vehicles can operate at lower fuel efficient speeds. We can combine delivery and passenger vehicles. The list is endless.
- wcarss 15y ago
  In fact, many transit systems do combine delivery and passenger vehicles -- greyhound has a package delivery service. To your other point: I think that assuming we'll go off the wall and design wacky new vehicles is too optimistic, akin to the "cities of the future" envisioned during the past hundred years. People's sensibilities of "what makes a car look nice" and "what is a metal box I'd like to sit in" seem to be pretty set, and we don't have a very different experience in a train or on a bus today than in a car. Face forward or backward in a seat with big windows and high visibility. Part of that is for your senses to not freak out, part of it is just that it's cheap and easy, and part of it is that experiments in the form-factor don't need to be done, so they aren't done. I expect the same trend will continue unless flukes occur.
  - learc83 15y ago
    >In fact, many transit systems do combine delivery and passenger vehicles -- greyhound has a package delivery service. I didn't know that about greyhound. I'm aware that airliners routinely carry packages. I was thinking more, you've got a car coming to your house every morning, let's throw your Amazon.com orders on it. >design wacky new vehicles I'm not thinking wacky designs. A car is usually designed to be sat in for a certain length of time. They aren't really designed for very long trips without stopping frequently, since driverless cars make long trips much more appealing, they'll have to be redesigned to an extent. A fleet of rental cars would be much more efficient if each car held say 10 people instead of 4, so another natural redesign. > "what makes a car look nice" To many people, a car becomes part of their identity, not so much with a temporary rental, so I think function starts to trump form >don't have a very different experience in a train or on a bus today than in a car I think the experience in a long distance train is very different than in a car. The main difference is compartments, and that's what I envision for cars. I'm not talking anything radical, just what I think would be natural progressions when you remove the need for a driver.
    - brc 15y ago
      A 10 person vehicle necessarily needs to be larger and have a more powerful drivetrain so it would be less efficient in the dead miles it has to drive to get around and pick people up. So I don't see that 10-person vehicles would become the norm. I would actually see it going the other way, and that 2 person vehicles the size of a smart would actually become the norm. Most people currently have excess seating capacity (5) for the few occasions when they need it. But with driverless cars, you don't need that, because you can spread the load over several cars. Why drive a 10 capacity car around for the odd case where 10 people need to go to the one location, rather than 5 2 person cars that can assemble when needed to cart 10 people on the same trip.
- prawn 15y ago
  For peak times, I'm imagining 8-12 seater vehicles where people sit in pods facing outwards, with dividers that could be retracted if you were speaking with your partner in the same vehicle. Pick-up points would be very near to your home, and drop-off very near to your work. No parking to worry about. Something in between a regular driven commute and walking three blocks to wait for a bus. Software would decide routes and timing to best service as many people as possible.
- joe_the_user 15y ago
  Now wait a minute... While I'm all for your point that drivelessness will allow an incredible re-imagining of the automobile, considering the gp responded my original post, I just want to bring things back to the question of resource utilization. The automobile today is half efficient transport and half personal expression/personal entertainment. And the personal expression/personal entertainment part is where the massive resource utilization comes in. So, sure, you could reimagine the automobile for super-efficiency with four-people per car whenever you're driving and the resource utilization goes away - so does the personal entertainment/personal expression stuff. So you could go multiple ways. Towards a super-efficient taxi and towards an office/living room on wheels. The first way would involve less resources consumed, the second would involve less resources consumed. It is hard to be certain what the net outcome will be.
  - learc83 15y ago
    I think the natural progression of driverless cars is away from individual ownership. Why own a car when you can have near instant availability of a much cheaper rental. To many people, a car becomes part of their identity, or like you said >expression/personal entertainment I'm sure that there will still be people for whom this is true, but for most of us it won't matter b/c the efficient always there taxi will be so much cheaper. For most middle to lower-middle class Americans I think current cars are really out of their comfortable price range, they own them b/c they view them as a requirement. If you give them an alternative that is just as convient, but cheaper, and without the maintenance hassles, it's no contest.
wcarss 15y ago
Good point about efficiency gains becoming a more direct incentive; I look forward to it. However, I doubt that optimization would trend solely toward high capacity vehicles - think of taxis airport taxis as two classes of hireable fare, divided into single user single destination and multiple user single destination. What we need is a multiple user multiple destination system. Taxis are for in-city travel and occasionally nearby inter-city travel, and the regular car has ended up being fine. They do have a few larger vehicles for big groups, but those are special case vehicles. On average, they tend to get 1-2 people at a time wanting to go places. Airport taxis tend to be closer to a commute-oriented vehicle. Several people are going from here to somewhere else, so they tend toward 5-6 person vehicles which operate through the night on >1hour long trips. Corporate transit systems like Microsoft's Connect system are essentially multi-user multi-destination. Those make buses make sense, but there are a relatively small number of buses making set route transfers while a hive of taxis provides last-mile service. The "Future of Transportation" article from a few days ago [1] suggests that the average vehicle has 1.2 people in it, and that apparently takes commuters into account. Now we must consider: will behaviour change to increase carpooling? Specifically, what is presently preventing people more people from taking buses to work? (lots do take buses and trains already, but many people drive 10 to 100 minutes) It could be that a bus doesn't get you /right/ to work. It could be that you would never think to contact everyone in your neighbourhood and figure out that you could buy a bus and run it just for you guys. It could be that the cost of owning and using a car is just low enough that it doesn't really save you anything. It could be an aesthetic sense of independence. My bet is that this will work out like Microsoft's system. Major transit routes can scale passenger levels up and move efficiently between well placed bus-station/pickup hubs, and armies of taxis will shuttle you to your final destination. Google's bikes are nice, but last-mile service will have to deal with a broader sprawl. Most of them will be focused on getting from hub to delivery and vice versa during morning and evening, but then, what happens during the day? Even weirder: what happens at night? 1. http://swiftprt.com/blog/2011/12/the-future-of-ground-based-transportation-systems/ http://swiftprt.com/blog/2011/12/the-future-of-ground-based-...

learc83 15y ago

I can't upvote this enough, people seem stuck in their concept of what a car is. Without a driver we are free to redesign cars in so many ways. We no longer need to worry about designing it so that the driver can see every angle, so we can design more efficient seating layouts. We can even add partitions so the 10 passengers don't have to see each other. Long distance deliver vehicles can operate at lower fuel efficient speeds. We can combine delivery and passenger vehicles. The list is endless.

wcarss 15y ago
In fact, many transit systems do combine delivery and passenger vehicles -- greyhound has a package delivery service. To your other point: I think that assuming we'll go off the wall and design wacky new vehicles is too optimistic, akin to the "cities of the future" envisioned during the past hundred years. People's sensibilities of "what makes a car look nice" and "what is a metal box I'd like to sit in" seem to be pretty set, and we don't have a very different experience in a train or on a bus today than in a car. Face forward or backward in a seat with big windows and high visibility. Part of that is for your senses to not freak out, part of it is just that it's cheap and easy, and part of it is that experiments in the form-factor don't need to be done, so they aren't done. I expect the same trend will continue unless flukes occur.
- learc83 15y ago
  >In fact, many transit systems do combine delivery and passenger vehicles -- greyhound has a package delivery service. I didn't know that about greyhound. I'm aware that airliners routinely carry packages. I was thinking more, you've got a car coming to your house every morning, let's throw your Amazon.com orders on it. >design wacky new vehicles I'm not thinking wacky designs. A car is usually designed to be sat in for a certain length of time. They aren't really designed for very long trips without stopping frequently, since driverless cars make long trips much more appealing, they'll have to be redesigned to an extent. A fleet of rental cars would be much more efficient if each car held say 10 people instead of 4, so another natural redesign. > "what makes a car look nice" To many people, a car becomes part of their identity, not so much with a temporary rental, so I think function starts to trump form >don't have a very different experience in a train or on a bus today than in a car I think the experience in a long distance train is very different than in a car. The main difference is compartments, and that's what I envision for cars. I'm not talking anything radical, just what I think would be natural progressions when you remove the need for a driver.
  - brc 15y ago
    A 10 person vehicle necessarily needs to be larger and have a more powerful drivetrain so it would be less efficient in the dead miles it has to drive to get around and pick people up. So I don't see that 10-person vehicles would become the norm. I would actually see it going the other way, and that 2 person vehicles the size of a smart would actually become the norm. Most people currently have excess seating capacity (5) for the few occasions when they need it. But with driverless cars, you don't need that, because you can spread the load over several cars. Why drive a 10 capacity car around for the odd case where 10 people need to go to the one location, rather than 5 2 person cars that can assemble when needed to cart 10 people on the same trip.
prawn 15y ago
For peak times, I'm imagining 8-12 seater vehicles where people sit in pods facing outwards, with dividers that could be retracted if you were speaking with your partner in the same vehicle. Pick-up points would be very near to your home, and drop-off very near to your work. No parking to worry about. Something in between a regular driven commute and walking three blocks to wait for a bus. Software would decide routes and timing to best service as many people as possible.
joe_the_user 15y ago
Now wait a minute... While I'm all for your point that drivelessness will allow an incredible re-imagining of the automobile, considering the gp responded my original post, I just want to bring things back to the question of resource utilization. The automobile today is half efficient transport and half personal expression/personal entertainment. And the personal expression/personal entertainment part is where the massive resource utilization comes in. So, sure, you could reimagine the automobile for super-efficiency with four-people per car whenever you're driving and the resource utilization goes away - so does the personal entertainment/personal expression stuff. So you could go multiple ways. Towards a super-efficient taxi and towards an office/living room on wheels. The first way would involve less resources consumed, the second would involve less resources consumed. It is hard to be certain what the net outcome will be.
- learc83 15y ago
  I think the natural progression of driverless cars is away from individual ownership. Why own a car when you can have near instant availability of a much cheaper rental. To many people, a car becomes part of their identity, or like you said >expression/personal entertainment I'm sure that there will still be people for whom this is true, but for most of us it won't matter b/c the efficient always there taxi will be so much cheaper. For most middle to lower-middle class Americans I think current cars are really out of their comfortable price range, they own them b/c they view them as a requirement. If you give them an alternative that is just as convient, but cheaper, and without the maintenance hassles, it's no contest.

wcarss 15y ago

Good point about efficiency gains becoming a more direct incentive; I look forward to it. However, I doubt that optimization would trend solely toward high capacity vehicles - think of taxis airport taxis as two classes of hireable fare, divided into single user single destination and multiple user single destination. What we need is a multiple user multiple destination system. Taxis are for in-city travel and occasionally nearby inter-city travel, and the regular car has ended up being fine. They do have a few larger vehicles for big groups, but those are special case vehicles. On average, they tend to get 1-2 people at a time wanting to go places. Airport taxis tend to be closer to a commute-oriented vehicle. Several people are going from here to somewhere else, so they tend toward 5-6 person vehicles which operate through the night on >1hour long trips. Corporate transit systems like Microsoft's Connect system are essentially multi-user multi-destination. Those make buses make sense, but there are a relatively small number of buses making set route transfers while a hive of taxis provides last-mile service. The "Future of Transportation" article from a few days ago [1] suggests that the average vehicle has 1.2 people in it, and that apparently takes commuters into account. Now we must consider: will behaviour change to increase carpooling? Specifically, what is presently preventing people more people from taking buses to work? (lots do take buses and trains already, but many people drive 10 to 100 minutes) It could be that a bus doesn't get you /right/ to work. It could be that you would never think to contact everyone in your neighbourhood and figure out that you could buy a bus and run it just for you guys. It could be that the cost of owning and using a car is just low enough that it doesn't really save you anything. It could be an aesthetic sense of independence. My bet is that this will work out like Microsoft's system. Major transit routes can scale passenger levels up and move efficiently between well placed bus-station/pickup hubs, and armies of taxis will shuttle you to your final destination. Google's bikes are nice, but last-mile service will have to deal with a broader sprawl. Most of them will be focused on getting from hub to delivery and vice versa during morning and evening, but then, what happens during the day? Even weirder: what happens at night? 1. http://swiftprt.com/blog/2011/12/the-future-of-ground-based-transportation-systems/ http://swiftprt.com/blog/2011/12/the-future-of-ground-based-...