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It seems obvious to me that industry outsiders are going to have a drastically different road map for self driving cars than the entrenched players. Clearly th

by ryandvm 12y ago

It seems obvious to me that industry outsiders are going to have a drastically different road map for self driving cars than the entrenched players. Clearly the end game for self driving automobiles is far, far fewer cars in the world. In 25 years, relatively few people are going to be owning cars at all. You'll subscribe to a self-driving car service (or maybe your government will run it) and whenever you want to go somewhere, you'll enter your automotive needs into your mobile device and five minutes later the appropriate self-driving cycle/car/truck/van will pick you up in front of your house. There won't be a need for every family to own 3 cars that spend 90% of the day turned off and taking up parking space. Of course Google and Detroit aren't going to see eye to eye on this...

6d0debc071 12y ago
There may not be a significant reduction in cars if everyone wants to travel at the same time. Say morning and afternoon rush hours.
- x1798DE 12y ago
  If you assume the point that people would prefer to use self-driving car services over having their own vehicle, then I imagine this wouldn't be as big a factor, since we already have a ton of unused vehicle capacity (with most people driving around with 1 or 2 people in a car that seats 4). You can imagine that modern car services with a significant customer base would be able to coordinate "carpool" type situations to significantly decrease spare capacity.
  - 6d0debc071 12y ago
    If I assumed that, sure. However, I'm not sure that I should. We're now talking about a situation that contains a highly social aspect. Are you comfortable travelling with others who you don't know? I know many young women would be somewhat uncomfortable about climbing into a vehicle with some random stranger. Even without that aspect, you've got to be around people you may not get along with. On buses people can mostly keep to themselves, and it's more or less expected; at least in my society; that they will - how much of that would be true in the tighter confines of a car? And are you prepared to keep to someone else's schedule? A mismatch of five minutes may be more significant than we expect. I'm not saying it won't happen. What I am saying is that I wouldn't care to make a strong commitment to the idea that in twenty five years or so most people won't have a car, or that there'll be fewer cars on the road. I can easily imagine a future in which most people decide that it's worth owning a car, even a self-driving one, for the privacy and convenience aspects.
    - x1798DE 12y ago
      Well, I mean, I'm on your side, I don't think that self-driving cars are going to cause a huge spike in people using car services because having a car you don't have to personally drive is not new technology at all. This may be somewhat cheaper than having a person driving you around or something, but I really think that on balance people will end up having their own personal vehicles. All I was responding to was that if you grant the parent comment's assertion that people will move to car services, it's very likely to me that rush hour will be the one problem that is very easy to solve, because you would have such a large volume of people all going to the same place. Even the issues with personal space and shared vehicles aren't that big of a problem - self-driving cars don't need to look the way they look now. You could have 4 separate compartments in them, so that it's not possible to touch or interact with the other passengers, for example. (Also, I've participated in casual carpool in both New York and San Francisco, and it works remarkably well - many people, including young women, do travel every day in the car of a complete stranger that they don't know - and it's even more dangerous, because it's controlled by a human driver!) My guess is, however, that in the future the hardware costs of under-utilized vehicles will be considered to be much lower than the "inconvenience costs" of not having your own vehicle, and rates of car ownership won't be dramatically affected by the advent of the self-driving car.
x1798DE 12y ago
I'm really not sure that this is the case at all. Taxis already exist in basically every city in the US, as do vanpools, bus services and heavily subsidized public transportation, but we still have significant rates of car ownership. Self-driving cars do improve on the "human-driven-car" model because they have faster reaction times and the like, but the aspect of self-driving cars where you don't have to be in control of the vehicle isn't anything new. It's certainly possible that cost was the major driver of these sorts of things, but my guess is that the convenience of having your own car ready at all times will remain paramount. It's also plausible to me that airbnb-like services renting out self-driving cars will be common, which would simultaneously alleviate the need to own a car and reduce the cost of car ownership. I imagine the switch to primarily self-driving car services will have a greater impact in cities, where the density will be high enough that the latency between wanting a car and getting one will be smallest. If a car has to drive for 20 minutes just to pick you up and take you to the store to get some milk, you'll probably just want your own car.
- abruzzi 12y ago
  I've frequently heard the idea bounced around that self driving cars will eliminate the need for ownership. I'm glad you mentioned taxis, because it brings up something that has bugged me about this idea for a while. I live in a metro area of 200,000. This metro area has exactly zero taxis. (We do have a free ride services that is funded by the local city for getting the elderly and disabled around, which probably has six cars.) The three reasons are size density and wealth. As density goes down, mileage to get from point A to point B goes up, which means costs go up. It also means that cars are potentially occupied for longer periods, so you would likely need more cars to service the same population in denser areas. So ultimately taxis are not economically feasible here. So because you don't have to hire drivers, those costs go down and potentially lower the barrier to entry, but you have potentially more expensive vehicles, and higher maintenance costs that may somewhat offset the savings. So you could charge more for the service here, but being a poor city, would anyone here pay the extra costs? Enough to sustain the business model? Or will we have to suffer with significantly worse service--wait an hour to get picked up. I'm sure the business model would work in SF, NYC, Chicago, but here it will have to come down a lot in cost. Also (to the parent poster,) I just see the possibility that a migration like this could take place within 25 years just ludicrous.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- roc 12y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if there were. There are plenty of up-and-coming cities with relatively low car ownership (and lots of growth) today. An autonomous-zip-car-ish offering wouldn't have to displace existing motorists to become dominant in such cities. It would just have to outgrow individual-ownership, which would seem more likely than not. Particularly as it subsumes the entire cab and rental industry. It's just a question of "at what point do the consumer-facing products actually exist?" over that 25-year scale.
Avshalom 12y ago
The only way the wait is going to be 5 minutes is if its already in your driveway.
- Estragon 12y ago
  In my experience, it's already less than 5 minutes for Lyft in SF.
  - thefreeman 12y ago
    So are we only talking about Major metropolitan areas? Because to completely displace car ownership I think it will take more then that. Also I would guess that the percentage of people who own cars in large cities is already significantly lower then most other places.
    - recursive 12y ago
      No, we are talking about examples for which it would take less than 5 minutes to show up.
infogulch 12y ago
I wanted to take this further to get some utilization numbers. 1. In 2012, Americans spent 1 hour/day travelling (where work travel is about half of that). That's about 4% of their time. [1] 2. There were 253M registered vehicles in 2012 [2]. 3. There were 313M people in the US in 2012 [3]. So a first-order approximation of vehicle utilization: (253M vehicles * 1 year) / (313M people * 4% time travelling * 1 year) = 2.2 trillion vehicle-hours / 110 billion travel hours = 3.4% utilization. So that "90% of the day turned off and taking up parking space" is more like 96%. It would be interesting to take this further to expenditures. Consumers spent an average of $9,000 on transportation in 2012 [4]. If we increase vehicle utilization to, say, 21% from 3% using a subscription/micro-rental service like parent described, and assuming per-vehicle costs are constant, how much would the average consumer save on transportation costs? And how much would we save on parking space? [1]: http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/most-time-spent-daily-activities-1 http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/most-tim... [2]: http://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicles-in-the-united-states-since-1990/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicles... See also for similar 2009 data: https://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1096.pdf https://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1096.... [3]: http://www.census.gov/popclock/ http://www.census.gov/popclock/ [4]: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm
- Donzo 12y ago
  I suppose one of the larger hurdles would be that during this 4% time that you calculated, a majority of the vehicles are in operation. If "everybody" still has to go to and from work between the hours of 8-10 AM and 3-6 PM, pretty much everyone's going to want their own car.
  - derefr 12y ago
    Mind you, self-driving cars can find computing traveling-salesman routes slightly less of a hassle than humans do—and so punching into your phone that you'd be willing to carpool if it meant arriving faster would likely mean a car (whose occupant had expressed the same preference) immediately stopping on its way to wherever it was going and picking you up. Only the people who want complete privacy will have to wait. Extend this thought to its logical conclusion, and you realize that (self-driving) commuter busses and light rail can be programmed into the network as plain-old cars that happen to have high occupant capacities. You set that you're willing to take a bus (and one is en route), it'll stop for you. You set that you want a less noisy/drunk/homeless-filled experience, and you get a car instead. You could also set a price threshold, where everyone in the car must already be willing to pay as much as you are to be picked up there and then. Low threshold—a taxi-like sedan comes. High threshold—a limo.
jiggy2011 12y ago
Cars have more functions than purely transport. They are great containers of stuff, you can leave tools, laptops , spare clothes etc in them without having to load and unload every time you want to go to work. They're also status markets, so I suspect the rich will want to keep their own cars for this purpose which will lead to the middle class also being hesitant to give them up. You also have logistical problems like what if I take an autonomous car for the day and decide I need to take a long cross country trip in it? You also have special requirements for some cars, like perhaps I need access to a car with a lot of seats or I want to be able to carry a trailer and I can't guarantee that a car fit for this purpose will always be available.
- josteink 12y ago
  Them you do what people already do today with rentals: you check for availability and plan accordingly. Slightly inconvenient compared to ownership, but much cheaper. Some people will side with convenience, others with economics.
eftpotrm 12y ago
Far fewer cars possibly, but a big increase in vehicle miles. At present cars largely follow us round. If they're not doing this but are instead moving on to the next occupant, the odds are that that person won't be in the exact same location, and the next journey, and.... (Also bear in mind a huge amount of the demand clusters around start and finish times for offices and schools. The possible utilisation is significantly lower than one might think.) If self-driving cars working on a taxi model rather than a personal chauffeur model become a thing, we're going to get used to seeing traffic jams consisting significantly of empty autonomous cars. That won't be especially popular.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  > If self-driving cars working on a taxi model rather than a personal chauffeur model become a thing, we're going to get used to seeing traffic jams consisting significantly of empty autonomous cars. That won't be especially popular. Autonomous cars that are "deadheading" (traveling empty to their next point) could be ushered into segregated high speed lanes/corridors (100+ mph), as no passenger means no safety issue.
- fredophile 12y ago
  I'm pretty sure it would be easy to predict the spikes in usage. In the mornings people mostly want cars near their homes to take them to work. In the afternoon/evening they want cars near work to take them home. Even without knowing this it's pretty obvious that if you have a large portion of users heading to one area (increasing the density of users in that area) they'll probably want to leave that area or move around it so you should have a higher density of cars in that area even if they aren't all being used.
_greim_ 12y ago
> Clearly the end game for self driving automobiles is far, far fewer cars in the world. [...] Of course Google and Detroit aren't going to see eye to eye on this. Arguably, reducing the number of cars in existence at any given time doesn't reduce the number of cars sold. Rather, you'd have to reduce the rate at which they wear out and/or reduce peoples' reliance on transportation.
foobarian 12y ago
I'm skeptical about the ownership projections. It's very hard to beat the latency of owning a car that sits ready to go in the garage. Owning a self-driving car could be interesting though. Perhaps you could let it participate in a ride provider while you're at work or sleeping, having it return well before you may need to use it. Also, it enables some interesting new activities such as you drive to a boat launch, take off in a canoe, and have the car drive downstream and wait for you.

by ryandvm 12y ago

6d0debc071 12y ago

There may not be a significant reduction in cars if everyone wants to travel at the same time. Say morning and afternoon rush hours.

x1798DE 12y ago
If you assume the point that people would prefer to use self-driving car services over having their own vehicle, then I imagine this wouldn't be as big a factor, since we already have a ton of unused vehicle capacity (with most people driving around with 1 or 2 people in a car that seats 4). You can imagine that modern car services with a significant customer base would be able to coordinate "carpool" type situations to significantly decrease spare capacity.
- 6d0debc071 12y ago
  If I assumed that, sure. However, I'm not sure that I should. We're now talking about a situation that contains a highly social aspect. Are you comfortable travelling with others who you don't know? I know many young women would be somewhat uncomfortable about climbing into a vehicle with some random stranger. Even without that aspect, you've got to be around people you may not get along with. On buses people can mostly keep to themselves, and it's more or less expected; at least in my society; that they will - how much of that would be true in the tighter confines of a car? And are you prepared to keep to someone else's schedule? A mismatch of five minutes may be more significant than we expect. I'm not saying it won't happen. What I am saying is that I wouldn't care to make a strong commitment to the idea that in twenty five years or so most people won't have a car, or that there'll be fewer cars on the road. I can easily imagine a future in which most people decide that it's worth owning a car, even a self-driving one, for the privacy and convenience aspects.
  - x1798DE 12y ago
    Well, I mean, I'm on your side, I don't think that self-driving cars are going to cause a huge spike in people using car services because having a car you don't have to personally drive is not new technology at all. This may be somewhat cheaper than having a person driving you around or something, but I really think that on balance people will end up having their own personal vehicles. All I was responding to was that if you grant the parent comment's assertion that people will move to car services, it's very likely to me that rush hour will be the one problem that is very easy to solve, because you would have such a large volume of people all going to the same place. Even the issues with personal space and shared vehicles aren't that big of a problem - self-driving cars don't need to look the way they look now. You could have 4 separate compartments in them, so that it's not possible to touch or interact with the other passengers, for example. (Also, I've participated in casual carpool in both New York and San Francisco, and it works remarkably well - many people, including young women, do travel every day in the car of a complete stranger that they don't know - and it's even more dangerous, because it's controlled by a human driver!) My guess is, however, that in the future the hardware costs of under-utilized vehicles will be considered to be much lower than the "inconvenience costs" of not having your own vehicle, and rates of car ownership won't be dramatically affected by the advent of the self-driving car.

x1798DE 12y ago

I'm really not sure that this is the case at all. Taxis already exist in basically every city in the US, as do vanpools, bus services and heavily subsidized public transportation, but we still have significant rates of car ownership. Self-driving cars do improve on the "human-driven-car" model because they have faster reaction times and the like, but the aspect of self-driving cars where you don't have to be in control of the vehicle isn't anything new. It's certainly possible that cost was the major driver of these sorts of things, but my guess is that the convenience of having your own car ready at all times will remain paramount. It's also plausible to me that airbnb-like services renting out self-driving cars will be common, which would simultaneously alleviate the need to own a car and reduce the cost of car ownership. I imagine the switch to primarily self-driving car services will have a greater impact in cities, where the density will be high enough that the latency between wanting a car and getting one will be smallest. If a car has to drive for 20 minutes just to pick you up and take you to the store to get some milk, you'll probably just want your own car.

abruzzi 12y ago
I've frequently heard the idea bounced around that self driving cars will eliminate the need for ownership. I'm glad you mentioned taxis, because it brings up something that has bugged me about this idea for a while. I live in a metro area of 200,000. This metro area has exactly zero taxis. (We do have a free ride services that is funded by the local city for getting the elderly and disabled around, which probably has six cars.) The three reasons are size density and wealth. As density goes down, mileage to get from point A to point B goes up, which means costs go up. It also means that cars are potentially occupied for longer periods, so you would likely need more cars to service the same population in denser areas. So ultimately taxis are not economically feasible here. So because you don't have to hire drivers, those costs go down and potentially lower the barrier to entry, but you have potentially more expensive vehicles, and higher maintenance costs that may somewhat offset the savings. So you could charge more for the service here, but being a poor city, would anyone here pay the extra costs? Enough to sustain the business model? Or will we have to suffer with significantly worse service--wait an hour to get picked up. I'm sure the business model would work in SF, NYC, Chicago, but here it will have to come down a lot in cost. Also (to the parent poster,) I just see the possibility that a migration like this could take place within 25 years just ludicrous.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

roc 12y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if there were. There are plenty of up-and-coming cities with relatively low car ownership (and lots of growth) today. An autonomous-zip-car-ish offering wouldn't have to displace existing motorists to become dominant in such cities. It would just have to outgrow individual-ownership, which would seem more likely than not. Particularly as it subsumes the entire cab and rental industry. It's just a question of "at what point do the consumer-facing products actually exist?" over that 25-year scale.

Avshalom 12y ago

The only way the wait is going to be 5 minutes is if its already in your driveway.

Estragon 12y ago
In my experience, it's already less than 5 minutes for Lyft in SF.
- thefreeman 12y ago
  So are we only talking about Major metropolitan areas? Because to completely displace car ownership I think it will take more then that. Also I would guess that the percentage of people who own cars in large cities is already significantly lower then most other places.
  - recursive 12y ago
    No, we are talking about examples for which it would take less than 5 minutes to show up.

infogulch 12y ago

I wanted to take this further to get some utilization numbers. 1. In 2012, Americans spent 1 hour/day travelling (where work travel is about half of that). That's about 4% of their time. [1] 2. There were 253M registered vehicles in 2012 [2]. 3. There were 313M people in the US in 2012 [3]. So a first-order approximation of vehicle utilization: (253M vehicles * 1 year) / (313M people * 4% time travelling * 1 year) = 2.2 trillion vehicle-hours / 110 billion travel hours = 3.4% utilization. So that "90% of the day turned off and taking up parking space" is more like 96%. It would be interesting to take this further to expenditures. Consumers spent an average of $9,000 on transportation in 2012 [4]. If we increase vehicle utilization to, say, 21% from 3% using a subscription/micro-rental service like parent described, and assuming per-vehicle costs are constant, how much would the average consumer save on transportation costs? And how much would we save on parking space? [1]: http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/most-time-spent-daily-activities-1 http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/most-tim... [2]: http://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicles-in-the-united-states-since-1990/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicles... See also for similar 2009 data: https://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1096.pdf https://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1096.... [3]: http://www.census.gov/popclock/ http://www.census.gov/popclock/ [4]: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm

Donzo 12y ago
I suppose one of the larger hurdles would be that during this 4% time that you calculated, a majority of the vehicles are in operation. If "everybody" still has to go to and from work between the hours of 8-10 AM and 3-6 PM, pretty much everyone's going to want their own car.
- derefr 12y ago
  Mind you, self-driving cars can find computing traveling-salesman routes slightly less of a hassle than humans do—and so punching into your phone that you'd be willing to carpool if it meant arriving faster would likely mean a car (whose occupant had expressed the same preference) immediately stopping on its way to wherever it was going and picking you up. Only the people who want complete privacy will have to wait. Extend this thought to its logical conclusion, and you realize that (self-driving) commuter busses and light rail can be programmed into the network as plain-old cars that happen to have high occupant capacities. You set that you're willing to take a bus (and one is en route), it'll stop for you. You set that you want a less noisy/drunk/homeless-filled experience, and you get a car instead. You could also set a price threshold, where everyone in the car must already be willing to pay as much as you are to be picked up there and then. Low threshold—a taxi-like sedan comes. High threshold—a limo.

jiggy2011 12y ago

Cars have more functions than purely transport. They are great containers of stuff, you can leave tools, laptops , spare clothes etc in them without having to load and unload every time you want to go to work. They're also status markets, so I suspect the rich will want to keep their own cars for this purpose which will lead to the middle class also being hesitant to give them up. You also have logistical problems like what if I take an autonomous car for the day and decide I need to take a long cross country trip in it? You also have special requirements for some cars, like perhaps I need access to a car with a lot of seats or I want to be able to carry a trailer and I can't guarantee that a car fit for this purpose will always be available.

josteink 12y ago
Them you do what people already do today with rentals: you check for availability and plan accordingly. Slightly inconvenient compared to ownership, but much cheaper. Some people will side with convenience, others with economics.

eftpotrm 12y ago

Far fewer cars possibly, but a big increase in vehicle miles. At present cars largely follow us round. If they're not doing this but are instead moving on to the next occupant, the odds are that that person won't be in the exact same location, and the next journey, and.... (Also bear in mind a huge amount of the demand clusters around start and finish times for offices and schools. The possible utilisation is significantly lower than one might think.) If self-driving cars working on a taxi model rather than a personal chauffeur model become a thing, we're going to get used to seeing traffic jams consisting significantly of empty autonomous cars. That won't be especially popular.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
> If self-driving cars working on a taxi model rather than a personal chauffeur model become a thing, we're going to get used to seeing traffic jams consisting significantly of empty autonomous cars. That won't be especially popular. Autonomous cars that are "deadheading" (traveling empty to their next point) could be ushered into segregated high speed lanes/corridors (100+ mph), as no passenger means no safety issue.
fredophile 12y ago
I'm pretty sure it would be easy to predict the spikes in usage. In the mornings people mostly want cars near their homes to take them to work. In the afternoon/evening they want cars near work to take them home. Even without knowing this it's pretty obvious that if you have a large portion of users heading to one area (increasing the density of users in that area) they'll probably want to leave that area or move around it so you should have a higher density of cars in that area even if they aren't all being used.

_greim_ 12y ago

> Clearly the end game for self driving automobiles is far, far fewer cars in the world. [...] Of course Google and Detroit aren't going to see eye to eye on this. Arguably, reducing the number of cars in existence at any given time doesn't reduce the number of cars sold. Rather, you'd have to reduce the rate at which they wear out and/or reduce peoples' reliance on transportation.

foobarian 12y ago

I'm skeptical about the ownership projections. It's very hard to beat the latency of owning a car that sits ready to go in the garage. Owning a self-driving car could be interesting though. Perhaps you could let it participate in a ride provider while you're at work or sleeping, having it return well before you may need to use it. Also, it enables some interesting new activities such as you drive to a boat launch, take off in a canoe, and have the car drive downstream and wait for you.