5 ms·

In a self-driving future, we may not even want to own cars

22 points by davidiach 12y ago

Havoc 12y ago
Makes sense from an efficiency point of view. Not exactly keen on the hygiene aspect of shared cars though.
- petercooper 12y ago
  We (mostly) resolved the issue with things like hotels. A car or bus could essentially become like a tiny, travelling hotel room and return to base for "housekeeping".
  - schoen 12y ago
    I guess if it were designed appropriately inside, you could actually use it as an accomodation and plan to sleep in it during an overnight trip, much as we've had night trains with beds onboard.
    - bentcorner 12y ago
      In the far future we'll see the inside of cars the same way we see the waiting room at a restaurant or doctor's office. A common place that we all don't mind sitting in for awhile, but it's really not ours to do with as we please.
      - toomuchtodo 12y ago
        Like a bus or a train?
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  I lack a car and live on taxis in China. Hygiene is definitely something you notice, but I doubt would be a big problem for non-hypochondriacs.
  - incompatible 12y ago
    I just walk everywhere. Hygiene is good if you live in an area with low pollution. I haven't owned a car for many years.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      Well, Beijing isn't exactly a city with low pollution [1] :). I also live pretty far away from work (live on the east side, work on the west side). Thankfully, taxis are affordable, and there is also a subway if you want to brave it. I didn't own a car when I lived in Switzerland either: I walked or biked around my little town, it was awesome. But now my license has expired and I can't even drive if I need to (e.g. to rent a car). [1] http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/ http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/
    - selectodude 12y ago
      That really limits the places that you can live, though.
- kemiller 12y ago
  I suspect there will be classes. I.e. "first class" cars akin to Mercedes/Lexus/BMW which would have a different kind of clientele. And, probably, penalties or expulsion for damaging or soiling the interior.
MarkPNeyer 12y ago
if you own a self driving car, you could either have it sit in your driveway doing nothing - or you could hook it up to an api provided by uber to put your car to work. if everyone does that with their self-driving cars, the cost of transportation will go down. it'll change the economics of car ownership; the cost of using a car will go down because the cars that exist will be put to greater use - so why bother buying one? that whole thing could precipitate a sea-change in how the auto industry works. we'll see far fewer cars, built to be maintanable with easily replaced parts, sold to people who use them as investments that generate returns. it's even going to change the _retail_ model if you think about it. couple the ability to see anythign you want with an occulus-rift headset, and lower traffic (thanks to fuller cars driving smarter) means it'll take less time to get where you want to go, and the model of 'a target every 1 mile' will just stop making sense. the FUTURE!
- srs0001 12y ago
  This is interesting. I've assumed ride-sharing services would benefit self-driving cars, but the thought that individuals could own cars and rent them out in an AirBnB like manner is something I hadn't considered. That's very cool, considering that today cars are a pretty poor investment.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  > You could either have it sit in your driveway doing nothing Driveways are such an American luxury! There are many places in the world that lack these. One reason I don't own a car in Beijing...where would I park the damn thing? A parking space is a comparable expense to my apartment rent. The real value of self driving cars is (a) optimizing road bandwidth and (b) getting rid of the need for parking everywhere. I can't imagine people owning their own cars as densities increase (which invariably will happen, even in the states), especially if they don't need to.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    I've always been fascinated with the thought of driveways disappearing from new homes in America once self-driving vehicles take off. Future generations will see garages as a decadent luxury, akin to an indoor swimming pool or a private, on-property tennis court.
mikerichards 12y ago
More likely is that the government will (via regulations) make it very hard to own cars. There are downsides to self-driving car though. Eventually you will have to give up anonymity and the freedom to go where you want, when you want. The government will surely "own" the system that runs the self-driving cars network. Self-driving cars aren't autonomous.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Many governments already make it hard to own cars: Beijing as a lottery for the privileged of owning a car, given the traffic problems we have here (too many cars, not enough road, horrible smog). But I think I'm OK with that, it is necessary. Self driving cars could be autonomous, unless you believe that technology freezes in time from today and won't get better in the future. But the main value of self driving cars is optimizing road bandwidth, especially in dense cities like the one I live in, and it makes sense that they would be coordinated rather closely. It is unclear that the government would own the cars themselves though...just like governments often don't own taxi companies.
  - mikerichards 12y ago
    It is unclear that the government would own the cars themselves though...just like governments often don't own taxi companies The government doesn't need to own the cars, since government will own the kill switch so you can't go anywhere. Oh, and nice downvotes for not going with the anti-car hive mind that infests HN.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      They already own the kill switch. Haven't you ever been subject to a road block before? Beijing was closing down a bunch a ring roads a couple of weeks ago because of visiting dignitaries; and there is always the occasional land slide/avalanche backing up traffic when travelling between cities through mountains.
      - 12y ago
bentcorner 12y ago
I'm really excited about this aspect of self-driving cars. In the future, one day a father may need to schedule a doctor's appointment for his son. He will schedule it after his son's school, and a self-driving car will pick up his son in the pick-up loop (just like how he's dropped off in the morning). Dad will also schedule a self-driving car to meet his son at the doctor. He will receive notifications and photo/video of the pick-up of his son at the school. They will arrive at the doctor's office at the same time. There's way more things that will change, but I think family planning and dynamics around travel will be one of them.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Wouldn't your intelligent agent (Google Now, for example) schedule the necessary legs of the trip with your preferred mobility provider, and keep both parties updated about location and arrival time? "Google, make an appointment with Tony's doctor for $datetime, and arrange transportation for both of us there."
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
During the War of 1812, word reached the East Coast of the U.S. that there was going to be a battle near New Orleans. There was a guy who _ran_ all the way from the East Coast to New Orleans. When he got there, the battle was already over, so he ran back. My point is this: technology is not just making us live happier and healthier lives. It's also beginning to raise a generation who won't be able to self-propel themselves over long distances, whether by foot, horse, car, plane, or whatnot. This is going to have implications for the way cities handle disasters. I love this tech, but it stands to change the nature of what it means to be human almost as much as the electric light did.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Are we destined to turn into the version of humans depicted in Wall-E? Unable to self-propel and requiring the assistance of machines for the simplest of tasks? Doubtful, but anything is possible.
  - DanielBMarkham 12y ago
    How do you think that guy would feel if he was told about healthy people who feel like walking a mile to work or the store is undoable? To him, we're already there. Related: http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3883/14742634290_ae3baeefc0_o.jpg http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3883/14742634290_ae3baeefc0_o....
    - Broken_Hippo 12y ago
      The picture you provided was originally a group of graphics depicting how far parents allowed children to roam as they grew up. AS time has went on, parents aren't allowing children to go out. This isn't the result of tech: this is a societal issue and doesn't follow through everywhere. And honestly, most places in the states, walking is downright dangerous. I enjoy being able to walk to the store in Norway (well, weather depending). There are safe paths and pedestrian/cyclist paths that make it shorter. Laws are designed to protect pedestrians. In the states, much shorter distances were stressful and often without sidewalks or much of a shoulder on the road.
walterbell 12y ago
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/google_self_driving_car_it_may_never_actually_happen.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/... "But the maps have problems, starting with the fact that the car can’t travel a single inch without one ... all 4 million miles of U.S. public roads will be need to be mapped, plus driveways, off-road trails, and everywhere else you'd ever want to take the car. So far, only a few thousand miles of road have gotten the treatment .., The company frequently says that its car has driven more than 700,000 miles safely, but those are the same few thousand mapped miles, driven over and over again. ... Safety is at stake here; Chris Urmson, director of the Google car team, told me that if the car came across a traffic signal not on its map, it could potentially run a red light, simply because it wouldn't know to look for the signal. Urmson added, however, that an unmapped traffic signal would be "very unlikely," ... MIT roboticist John Leonard says it goes to the heart of why the Google car project is so daunting. "While the probability of a single driver encountering a newly installed traffic light is very low, the probability of at least one driver encountering one on a given day is very high," Leonard says. The list of these "rare" events is practically endless, said Leonard, who does not expect a full self-driving car in his lifetime (he’s 49). ... "None of this reasoning will be inside computers anytime soon," says Raj Rajkumar, director of autonomous driving research at Carnegie-Mellon University, former home of both the current and prior directors of Google's car project."
- icebraining 12y ago
  Google's car is just one approach to the problem. Not every autonomous car project out there relies on pre-mapping.
- pikachu_is_cool 12y ago
  This is kind of irrelevant. Sure, these are problems that will prevent the technology from existing for at least another 10-20 years probably. But there definitely is going to be a future with self-driving cars. These things just need to perform better than a human, which isn't that hard all things considered.
codingdave 12y ago
Maybe it is because I live in a small town on a small hobby farm, but it seems to me that the vision of self-driving cars is very much a city thing. I can't see self-driving cars being used to drive around my fields, picking up rocks, towing farm equipment, hauling hay, or any of the other things that pickup trucks are used for. Maybe they will be able to navigate 4WD roads to get up into the mountains or out into the desert, but I'm not sure that would offer as much benefit as it would in city traffic. The visions people just look to me a lot like the future of public transportation, and not at all the future of motor vehicles in general.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  I think this is right: people living in rural areas will probably be driving on their own for a long time to come. But the world is increasingly urbanizing at high densities, and this is probably the future of personal transport for the majority. It is not really "public transportation"; taxis are not public transit even though they are pretty ubiquitous in cities (less so in the US, but more so everywhere else).
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  Probably true, but you'll have very heavily "assisted driving", with the computer controlling a lot of things while you retain overall control. It's a continuum.
- icebraining 12y ago
  I'm sure the US rural demographic is different, but around here (Western European country), the rural population is on average much older than city population. Having (reasonably priced) self-driving cars would be a boon to the millions of elderly folk who can't drive anymore and have to rely on inflexible and often expensive transportation services.
- markdown 12y ago
  > I can't see self-driving cars being used to... Your kids will be saying things like "I can't see self-driving cars driving me all the way to Timbuktu across land and sea." They'll be wrong too.

22 points by davidiach 12y ago

Havoc 12y ago

Makes sense from an efficiency point of view. Not exactly keen on the hygiene aspect of shared cars though.

petercooper 12y ago
We (mostly) resolved the issue with things like hotels. A car or bus could essentially become like a tiny, travelling hotel room and return to base for "housekeeping".
- schoen 12y ago
  I guess if it were designed appropriately inside, you could actually use it as an accomodation and plan to sleep in it during an overnight trip, much as we've had night trains with beds onboard.
  - bentcorner 12y ago
    In the far future we'll see the inside of cars the same way we see the waiting room at a restaurant or doctor's office. A common place that we all don't mind sitting in for awhile, but it's really not ours to do with as we please.
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      Like a bus or a train?
seanmcdirmid 12y ago
I lack a car and live on taxis in China. Hygiene is definitely something you notice, but I doubt would be a big problem for non-hypochondriacs.
- incompatible 12y ago
  I just walk everywhere. Hygiene is good if you live in an area with low pollution. I haven't owned a car for many years.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Well, Beijing isn't exactly a city with low pollution [1] :). I also live pretty far away from work (live on the east side, work on the west side). Thankfully, taxis are affordable, and there is also a subway if you want to brave it. I didn't own a car when I lived in Switzerland either: I walked or biked around my little town, it was awesome. But now my license has expired and I can't even drive if I need to (e.g. to rent a car). [1] http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/ http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/
  - selectodude 12y ago
    That really limits the places that you can live, though.
kemiller 12y ago
I suspect there will be classes. I.e. "first class" cars akin to Mercedes/Lexus/BMW which would have a different kind of clientele. And, probably, penalties or expulsion for damaging or soiling the interior.

MarkPNeyer 12y ago

if you own a self driving car, you could either have it sit in your driveway doing nothing - or you could hook it up to an api provided by uber to put your car to work. if everyone does that with their self-driving cars, the cost of transportation will go down. it'll change the economics of car ownership; the cost of using a car will go down because the cars that exist will be put to greater use - so why bother buying one? that whole thing could precipitate a sea-change in how the auto industry works. we'll see far fewer cars, built to be maintanable with easily replaced parts, sold to people who use them as investments that generate returns. it's even going to change the _retail_ model if you think about it. couple the ability to see anythign you want with an occulus-rift headset, and lower traffic (thanks to fuller cars driving smarter) means it'll take less time to get where you want to go, and the model of 'a target every 1 mile' will just stop making sense. the FUTURE!

srs0001 12y ago
This is interesting. I've assumed ride-sharing services would benefit self-driving cars, but the thought that individuals could own cars and rent them out in an AirBnB like manner is something I hadn't considered. That's very cool, considering that today cars are a pretty poor investment.
seanmcdirmid 12y ago
> You could either have it sit in your driveway doing nothing Driveways are such an American luxury! There are many places in the world that lack these. One reason I don't own a car in Beijing...where would I park the damn thing? A parking space is a comparable expense to my apartment rent. The real value of self driving cars is (a) optimizing road bandwidth and (b) getting rid of the need for parking everywhere. I can't imagine people owning their own cars as densities increase (which invariably will happen, even in the states), especially if they don't need to.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  I've always been fascinated with the thought of driveways disappearing from new homes in America once self-driving vehicles take off. Future generations will see garages as a decadent luxury, akin to an indoor swimming pool or a private, on-property tennis court.

mikerichards 12y ago

More likely is that the government will (via regulations) make it very hard to own cars. There are downsides to self-driving car though. Eventually you will have to give up anonymity and the freedom to go where you want, when you want. The government will surely "own" the system that runs the self-driving cars network. Self-driving cars aren't autonomous.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
Many governments already make it hard to own cars: Beijing as a lottery for the privileged of owning a car, given the traffic problems we have here (too many cars, not enough road, horrible smog). But I think I'm OK with that, it is necessary. Self driving cars could be autonomous, unless you believe that technology freezes in time from today and won't get better in the future. But the main value of self driving cars is optimizing road bandwidth, especially in dense cities like the one I live in, and it makes sense that they would be coordinated rather closely. It is unclear that the government would own the cars themselves though...just like governments often don't own taxi companies.
- mikerichards 12y ago
  It is unclear that the government would own the cars themselves though...just like governments often don't own taxi companies The government doesn't need to own the cars, since government will own the kill switch so you can't go anywhere. Oh, and nice downvotes for not going with the anti-car hive mind that infests HN.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    They already own the kill switch. Haven't you ever been subject to a road block before? Beijing was closing down a bunch a ring roads a couple of weeks ago because of visiting dignitaries; and there is always the occasional land slide/avalanche backing up traffic when travelling between cities through mountains.
    - 12y ago

bentcorner 12y ago

I'm really excited about this aspect of self-driving cars. In the future, one day a father may need to schedule a doctor's appointment for his son. He will schedule it after his son's school, and a self-driving car will pick up his son in the pick-up loop (just like how he's dropped off in the morning). Dad will also schedule a self-driving car to meet his son at the doctor. He will receive notifications and photo/video of the pick-up of his son at the school. They will arrive at the doctor's office at the same time. There's way more things that will change, but I think family planning and dynamics around travel will be one of them.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
Wouldn't your intelligent agent (Google Now, for example) schedule the necessary legs of the trip with your preferred mobility provider, and keep both parties updated about location and arrival time? "Google, make an appointment with Tony's doctor for $datetime, and arrange transportation for both of us there."

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

During the War of 1812, word reached the East Coast of the U.S. that there was going to be a battle near New Orleans. There was a guy who _ran_ all the way from the East Coast to New Orleans. When he got there, the battle was already over, so he ran back. My point is this: technology is not just making us live happier and healthier lives. It's also beginning to raise a generation who won't be able to self-propel themselves over long distances, whether by foot, horse, car, plane, or whatnot. This is going to have implications for the way cities handle disasters. I love this tech, but it stands to change the nature of what it means to be human almost as much as the electric light did.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
Are we destined to turn into the version of humans depicted in Wall-E? Unable to self-propel and requiring the assistance of machines for the simplest of tasks? Doubtful, but anything is possible.
- DanielBMarkham 12y ago
  How do you think that guy would feel if he was told about healthy people who feel like walking a mile to work or the store is undoable? To him, we're already there. Related: http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3883/14742634290_ae3baeefc0_o.jpg http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3883/14742634290_ae3baeefc0_o....
  - Broken_Hippo 12y ago
    The picture you provided was originally a group of graphics depicting how far parents allowed children to roam as they grew up. AS time has went on, parents aren't allowing children to go out. This isn't the result of tech: this is a societal issue and doesn't follow through everywhere. And honestly, most places in the states, walking is downright dangerous. I enjoy being able to walk to the store in Norway (well, weather depending). There are safe paths and pedestrian/cyclist paths that make it shorter. Laws are designed to protect pedestrians. In the states, much shorter distances were stressful and often without sidewalks or much of a shoulder on the road.

walterbell 12y ago

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/google_self_driving_car_it_may_never_actually_happen.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/... "But the maps have problems, starting with the fact that the car can’t travel a single inch without one ... all 4 million miles of U.S. public roads will be need to be mapped, plus driveways, off-road trails, and everywhere else you'd ever want to take the car. So far, only a few thousand miles of road have gotten the treatment .., The company frequently says that its car has driven more than 700,000 miles safely, but those are the same few thousand mapped miles, driven over and over again. ... Safety is at stake here; Chris Urmson, director of the Google car team, told me that if the car came across a traffic signal not on its map, it could potentially run a red light, simply because it wouldn't know to look for the signal. Urmson added, however, that an unmapped traffic signal would be "very unlikely," ... MIT roboticist John Leonard says it goes to the heart of why the Google car project is so daunting. "While the probability of a single driver encountering a newly installed traffic light is very low, the probability of at least one driver encountering one on a given day is very high," Leonard says. The list of these "rare" events is practically endless, said Leonard, who does not expect a full self-driving car in his lifetime (he’s 49). ... "None of this reasoning will be inside computers anytime soon," says Raj Rajkumar, director of autonomous driving research at Carnegie-Mellon University, former home of both the current and prior directors of Google's car project."

icebraining 12y ago
Google's car is just one approach to the problem. Not every autonomous car project out there relies on pre-mapping.
pikachu_is_cool 12y ago
This is kind of irrelevant. Sure, these are problems that will prevent the technology from existing for at least another 10-20 years probably. But there definitely is going to be a future with self-driving cars. These things just need to perform better than a human, which isn't that hard all things considered.

codingdave 12y ago

Maybe it is because I live in a small town on a small hobby farm, but it seems to me that the vision of self-driving cars is very much a city thing. I can't see self-driving cars being used to drive around my fields, picking up rocks, towing farm equipment, hauling hay, or any of the other things that pickup trucks are used for. Maybe they will be able to navigate 4WD roads to get up into the mountains or out into the desert, but I'm not sure that would offer as much benefit as it would in city traffic. The visions people just look to me a lot like the future of public transportation, and not at all the future of motor vehicles in general.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
I think this is right: people living in rural areas will probably be driving on their own for a long time to come. But the world is increasingly urbanizing at high densities, and this is probably the future of personal transport for the majority. It is not really "public transportation"; taxis are not public transit even though they are pretty ubiquitous in cities (less so in the US, but more so everywhere else).
waterlesscloud 12y ago
Probably true, but you'll have very heavily "assisted driving", with the computer controlling a lot of things while you retain overall control. It's a continuum.
icebraining 12y ago
I'm sure the US rural demographic is different, but around here (Western European country), the rural population is on average much older than city population. Having (reasonably priced) self-driving cars would be a boon to the millions of elderly folk who can't drive anymore and have to rely on inflexible and often expensive transportation services.
markdown 12y ago
> I can't see self-driving cars being used to... Your kids will be saying things like "I can't see self-driving cars driving me all the way to Timbuktu across land and sea." They'll be wrong too.