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Industries that will be disrupted: - Taxi, shuttles, buses and limo services - Truck drivers, Delivery, Food delivery (auxilary: train and air transportation as

• citricsquid 14y ago
  Please can you explain how each of those will be affected in a big way? I can't think of ways that most would be affected in a real tangible way. I use taxis because I don't own a car (edit: ignore this one, I wasn't thinking straight, hah), my deliveries (groceries, items from online) are manned because there is management of the delivery needed, not because someone needs to drive. I can see how the insurance industry will be affected in a large way though.
  • ChuckMcM 14y ago
    I believe he was implying that the humans would be impacted. Taxis that drive themselves don't get tickets, don't forget to turn on the meter, and don't need to be paid part of the fare. Basically any people moving services are made more economical by removing human labor, insurance risk, and traffic liability. It remains to be seen if those savings can actually be realized of course.
  • rogerbinns 14y ago
    There is no need for the delivery to be manned. The vehicle can pull up, you enter a code and it provides the goods vending machine style. (Note Amazon already has these in several cities.)
    • jacalata 14y ago
      I have no intention of being home every time I get a delivery.
      • rogerbinns 14y ago
        At the moment the delivery drivers have all these work rules and health and safety regulations (eg 9-5, limited hours per day/week, holidays off etc). It makes sense to schedule deliveries around their convenience trying to get as many deliveries per driver hour possible. But robotic drivers don't care. You can dick them around as much as you want (tell them you'll be home at 6, then tell them 7, then tell them 2am). It doesn't bug them having to wait around for you. Consequently the vast majority of the time deliveries will happen around your availability. That is probably good enough 99% of the time. As to what happens when you are out of town, the delivery can just wait till you get back.
• ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Not to mention the huge revenue shortfall when parking meters and public parking lots are no longer used. You tell your car, orbit the building for a while I'll be about 40 minutes.
  • dag11 14y ago
    That's a waste of gas. Parking will still be needed as much as ever. The exception to this will be autonomous taxis, of course.
    • ChuckMcM 14y ago
      My car can idle and drive slowly, for an hour on less than 1/2 a gallon of gas (have to watch it more closely the next time I'm stuck in traffic trying to get across the Bay bridge). That is $2 in California today. It costs $3 - $5 for an hour of time on some downtown parking meters, can cost $5 per 20 minutes in the parking garages. Trust me, gas is cheaper, and with a hybrid doing the driving, I could see the 'hover' mode being like 50 cents of electricity.
      • khuey 14y ago
        It's only cheaper because the cost of the space you're taking up on the road and the cost of the traffic you're causing is not accounted for. The solution to this is a VMT tax that accounts for that cost.
        • ChuckMcM 14y ago
          Perhaps, San Francisco policy is to use parking prices to discourage vehicle use. They haven't gone the London 'congestion tax' route yet, perhaps they will. There is a difference between what "is" and how the system responds to what "is". In this case I don't doubt for a moment that drivers of self driving cars would use this technique to economic advantage, and yes if it got too bad it would invoke a response (much like the $5 parking meters with credit card readers in them was a response to cars in general).
    • 14y ago
• jwb119 14y ago
  > The regulations would allow vehicles to operate autonomously, but a licensed driver would still need to sit behind the wheel to serve as a backup operator in case of emergency. That alone limits the potential "disruptiveness" quite a bit.
  • khuey 14y ago
    For now. That will change eventually.
  • tobyjsullivan 14y ago
    I'm very annoyed by this requirement. It doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny as being necessary yet completely hinders most opportunities for true disruptiveness.
    • DannoHung 14y ago
      You don't think the novelty and risk associated with a fully automated system that's still in the experimental stages warrants any immediate caution? Commercial planes have had autopilot for years, but they still require at least the pilot or co-pilot to sit behind the yoke. When driverless cars have had a few million or billion hours without statistically significant incidents, I think we'll see the laws adapt to not even requiring a human fail-safe.
      • neurotech1 14y ago
        Actually, for commercial airliners its "worse". They require both a pilot and co-pilot behind the yoke, even in autopilot. If an airliner is flown with less than two crew in the cockpit, even for a short period of time, the remaining pilot/co-pilot must wear a mask when flying above 25,000ft.
        • waterlesscloud 14y ago
          Airliners used to have a third crew member, the Flight Engineer, but that job has been automated into oblivion.
• cabalmoose 14y ago
  The auto industry itself; a family will far more easily be able to get by on a single car: "Take Little Joey and Little Suzie to work, drop dad off at the office, go pick mom up at home, then at 3:30, pick the kids up at school, drop Suzie off at soccer practice, and have dad home in time for dinner at 6." For that matter, shared, scheduled cars on a neighbourhood scale would be pretty great.
  • brc 14y ago
    I've made this point many times on driverless car threads. The auto industry sells cars on the basis of miles driven, not number of families. As the passenger miles will increase with driverless cars, the car makers have absolutely nothing to be concerned about, and much to be delighted about driverless cars.
• olalonde 14y ago
  It's fun to speculate on what will happen when driverless cars become mainstream. Essentially, the question boils down to: "What would happen if every car owner in the world suddenly had a 24/7 personal driver?" - 7 year old kids can now own and "drive" a car. - Need a lift? Ask your dad/friend to send his car to pick you up. - Forgot your laptop at home? Send your car back and ask your flatmate to put your laptop in the car. - Leaving New York for some vacations in Miami? Take the plane and pick up your car whenever it arrives. - Want to take a nap? Pull down the windows and windshield curtains. - Traveling abroad for a few weeks and don't know what to do with your car? Set it to taxi mode and profit.
  • tobyjsullivan 14y ago
    Assuming 6315 waking hours per year and 540 hours a year spent in a car, I would say a 9% increase in productivity for the average American. Numbers from: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=392456 http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=392456 http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/PatrickLi.shtml http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/PatrickLi.shtml
    • modernshoggoth 14y ago
      Averages are nice, but I'll be interested to see what happens to the workforce that depends upon them entirely, as mentioned above: truckies, taxis, FedEx, etc. I say, leave it for a year to lull the companies into a false sense of security, then tax the hell out of companies using them for a few years to pay for some re-education for the old employees.
      • tetomb 14y ago
        Why on earth should the responsibility (of those that will become redundant) fall on the early adopters of a new technology? If I had become a fax machine expert would it be fair to charge a tax on those that began to use email to support me? People should take responsibility for themselves and their own actions.
• deleted 14y ago
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• hnriot 14y ago
  I seriously doubt this will disrupt any of those industries, except possibly shuttle buses that cover very restricted routes. It will be years before these get past the handful of people that will likely rush out to buy one (Woz, for example, if they put the tech into either a Prius or Hummer) The technology pundits are ignoring the human factor, giving up control, trusting your kid's lives to a computer, the same technology that crashes on the desktop, and on our smartphones. What happens when the first car has a BOSD and the backup human driver isn't paying any attention and the accident happens within seconds of the crash? These things will likely kill a bunch of people and will go the same way that the C-5 or the Segway did. Maybe I'm too cynical, but until we have HA computers that exist outside of a datacenter, I doubt a proof-of-concept by Google will go anywhere in this or the next decade, let alone disrupt anything. The idealism and flying cars optimism is well placed and I'd love to see it happen, but the future nearly always takes much longer to happen than people predict...
  • waterlesscloud 14y ago
    If they actually work in real-world conditions and if they can be made to be reasonable in cost, I can see the conversion happening in a very short time frame. A few years. But given the conditionals of my first sentence, the conversion may not start in earnest for a decade or more.
  • kooshball 14y ago
    >trusting your kid's lives to a computer, the same technology that crashes on the desktop, and on our smartphones This is all math here. If a computer is statistically better at driving than a human you can ask the same question as "Would you give up control to decrease the chance of an accident? Or would you risk your kid's life just to feel in control?" >What happens when the first car has a BOSD and the backup human driver isn't paying any attention and the accident happens within seconds of the crash? People will probably die. The the same thing that happens when a human crash a car which is already happening everyday.
    • truebecomefalse 14y ago
      While I agree, the problem lies, as in most cases, with our education system in this country. The general public has proven time and time again to have a very tenuous grasp of mathematics.
• dawernik 14y ago
  Challenges it will face: - insurance regulation, moral dilemmas (decision to make when confronted with living hazards), drinking and riding, more time for advertising, and a rash of start-ups pitches that mash up concepts like Uber & Kozmo because they can. Still seems worth it.
• bicknergseng 14y ago
  While it won't go away, the auto insurance agency will certainly change. I wonder if liability will shift from driver (passenger?) to manufacturer/Google. I for one can't wait until we see car fatalities drop to the hundreds per year if not 0.
• mayneack 14y ago
  Anything related to a gas station. No need to go with the car to fill up.
• fffggg 14y ago
  Here's one for you: City real estate dips in price. Suburb real estate rises, especially at the fringe of the suburbs. A self-driving car with a LTE wireless hotspot would make a previously absurd commute manageable. Heck, you could sleep during your drive in to work.