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How Uber’s Autonomous Cars Will Reshape the Economy by 2025

39 points by cryptoz 12y ago

pwrfid 12y ago
This is certainly plausible. Nevertheless, the resulting changes in economy would drive more inequality and reward people with capital and/or technology
- captk 12y ago
  I think that's kind of the point of the article - there's going to be a massive shift in the structure of the economy when 10 million jobs disappear. That being said, I think pretty much all of silicon valley is built on the principle that the future will "reward people with access to capital and/or technology."
thewarrior 12y ago
I feel that autonomous cars are extremely oversold and cannot operate in many real world conditions like snowy roads and places with obscured road signs. Maybe it can drive around some of the roads in the US after it has been fed with detailed 3D maps of the whole area along with road signs. But how about in other places ? Could it ever drive in a place like India ? I don't think so. Autonomous vehicles could completely take over in closed areas like Open cast mines , vast factories and on farms where companies could profit by cutting the driver out of the loop. From there we would see the technology slowly improve to start getting traction in the real world. Even then the vehicle wouldn't be fully automated , it would be a more advanced form of the cruise control we have today with it falling back to the manual driver especially in crazy places like India. Also we'd need laws forbidding people from jumping in front of self driving cars etc just to f@#$ with them. This is also a trend with automation stories in general , with several publications already predicting doom and gloom and claiming that most people would end up unemployed because of automation of their jobs. The fact is we don't even have an AI good enough to impersonate a tele marketer yet and it's decades away at best. I'm not denying that thesis in the extremely long term but AI and machine learning are in a very primitive state for any of this to materialize any time in the next two or three decades.
- click170 12y ago
  If you haven't heard of it before I would encourage you to check out the DARPA Grand Challenge, IIRC teams create vehicles which must navigate a course without a 3d map provided ahead of time. Granted I don't think it would work as well in driving conditions like those found in other parts of the world, but I still think they're rather advanced in their abilities. I was impressed at least.
- untog 12y ago
  I agree that they won't be everywhere, but I can see them changing inner cities very quickly. Where I am, in NYC, your bang for buck (in terms of people per square mile) is huge, the street grid system is clear... it could change the taxi and parking industries very quickly. The only problem is a legal one - it's inevitable that at some point a driverless car will hit someone. Even if the total number of pedestrian collisions drops dramatically (which I'm sure it would) the questions of responsibility and culpability become a problem.
  - divegeek 12y ago
    I've read that Google's position on liability is that it should be on the maker of the autonomous car, which makes perfect sense to me. Traffic accidents (including with pedestrians) rarely involve criminal culpability anyway, except when alcohol or drugs are involved, or when there's clear evidence of gross negligence, so it's really a question of civil liability. Putting that liability on the maker of the machine aligns the interests correctly and ensures that the liability is well-funded. So, I really don't think it's as much of a problem as you think it is.
  - tom-lord 12y ago
    I don't think the culpability problem is that hard to solve... Surely all that would really change is when buying a new car, you are purely insuring the vehicle and not the person! The whole notion of "no claims discount", or sexist/ageist insurance rules would become obsolete. And the vehicle manufacture would only be considered "at fault" if the vehicle fails safety regulations. The only time the consumer (driver) would be at fault is if they tampered with the vehicle, or entered it knowing it was damaged.
deleted 12y ago
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xivzgrev 12y ago
This is really bullish. I wonder what skin he has in game? As author states, uber can do best where owner drives fewer than 10k miles per year. What about all the rural locations, or people who like to go on long trips? And I think 50 cents per mile is extremely generous I think uber will charge more than that. Isn't IRS reimbursement rates something like 55 cents per mile? That's basically to cover costs not make any profit.
- gaius 12y ago
  It's a big assumption that Uber will be around next year, let alone in 10.
- jerf 12y ago
  Just strip out the word Uber. I wouldn't assume it will be "Uber" that wins either. Once the self-driving space heats up it's going to be piled into by a ton of entities and there's no guaranteeing the outcome. For that matter I won't promise you 2025. But I will say that if self-driving cars truly do become practical it will rewrite the economy in a lot of ways, and that if you stop and think and analyze, a lot of them aren't that difficult to guess, IMHO. For instance, that the nature of the capital expenditures will heavily favor "renting" over "owning" once we can easily rent on-demand is just obvious. A lot of this other stuff is too, really. Of course, painting a full picture or correctly guessing timelines is essentially impossible. But some of the broad sketch isn't that hard.
free2rhyme214 12y ago
Do you trust software with your life? Obviously 2025 software will be better than 2015 software but this question will still have to be answered strongly for mainstream adoption.
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
  > Do you trust software with your life? That depends on what the alternative is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...
- sek 12y ago
  There is already a ton of software in your car that can theoretically just steer in the other direction and accelerate.
  - free2rhyme214 12y ago
    Not cars made in 1999.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Coincidentally, the capital of my country has just banned those :) Regardless, how many cars without software do you think there will be by 2025?
    - lumpypua 12y ago
      There are other drivers. You're on the road with cars that are substantially driven by software... You're still trusting your life to software.
- jat850 12y ago
  We already trust software with our lives. Transit, medicine, navigation, finance. People have died because of software failure in the past, but it hasn't deterred adoption or advancement.
dpflan 12y ago
Yes, an interesting prognostication: a future with 'Total Recall' Johnny Cabs, a transportation circulatory system for cities. The gradual adoption would make most sense through the growth of closed systems where there are almost zero human drivers. Will the cars be like small public transit or are they single ride and not picking up random passengers along the way for the sake of efficiency (for the companies providing the rides surely electric cars and more single rides will yield greater monetary gains)? The social impact would be interesting - I've had good experiences meeting and talking with Uber drivers. That human element would certainly be removed, and now I am alone and robotically chauffeured around town staring at other people through the window. I'm intrigued at how it would feel to use such a system.
free2rhyme214 12y ago
Do you remember toll takers at the golden gate bridge? Replacing them was slow because of the government. The private sector will have no problem replacing taxi drivers when the technology is available from Google and every car manufacturer.
saosebastiao 12y ago
I agree that self driving cars will be a huge savings in terms of resources spent on cars and the ecosystem surrouding them, but it won't be a huge benefit to disposable income. With cars taking up a huge chunk of the expenditure of humans, and with Inflation metrics being primarily driven by past concerns as opposed to future concerns (it took complete extinction of VHS for VCRs to be removed from the CPI), and with the general pervasiveness of monetarism (which, for some odd reason associates 0.0000001% deflation with the apocalypse) in central banking institutions, there is little doubt that any improvement in the average person's finances will be promptly inflated away.
FrankenPC 12y ago
"It is exciting to be alive, isn’t it?" It is for those of us who don't rely on the service industry for a living. 10 million jobs lost. A self driving car is an amazing feat of Human engineering. What would be an even more amazing feat would be what to do with humans thrown under the bus of progress. Capitalism is great for anyone with enough mental agility to stay in the technology power curve, but it's really terrible for everyone else who simply want to live their lives, raise their family and be happy. What are we going to do with all those humans displace by automation?
- tommoor 12y ago
  Driving won't be the first job to be displaced by technology, other jobs will appear - possibly one's we can't even imagine now.
  - potatolicious 12y ago
    This is a cop-out - the entire "people will find other things to do" argument is a total cop-out. Yes, in aggregate, over long timespans (read: multiple generations), people will figure out other things to do. But as we've seen from the automation of manufacturing jobs in the US, a huge number of people haven't retrained, nor have magical jobs "we couldn't even imagine" erupted en masse to absorb a chronically un- or under-employed work force. I submit that the oversimplified notion that people who lose their jobs to technology will be fine and find something else to do is mainly a device to make people like us feel better - it isn't a notion that actually helps the displaced.
    - tommoor 12y ago
      I don't believe it is, history has this repeated this playbook over and over, from horse power, steam power, electric power - labour intensive repetitive works have been slowly replaced by automation for hundreds of years now - driving is just the next in a long list. My personal long-term view (beyond just automated cars) is that we will automate away millions of jobs - but that's fantastic as it probably doesn't make sense for everyone to work anyway, a basic income guarantee can allow people to live lives with much more time for leisure, creativity and enjoyment.
FrankenPC 12y ago
The 6D exponential growth pattern is appearing everywhere. Once a market becomes "Digitizable" or under computer control, it appears to grow slowly then it hits the elbow of the exponential growth curve and becomes Distuption. From there, old analog business artifacts are digitized (Dematerialization) and monetarily re-adjusted to compensate for the much cheaper costs of production (Demonitization). Then it's a simple matter to connect the service to everyone through the web and social media (Democratization). Goodbye cars. Heloooo profit opportunity.
krschultz 12y ago
I think it's unlikely that an autonomous car will be $25,000. It is far more likely early autonomous vehicles will be $150,000. However, this just slants the playing field in favor of an Uber-ish business model even more. When the utilization of the car nears 100%, you can justify that capital expense. It doesn't make sense for the average person to own a very expensive autonomous car, because they probably only use it two hours a day at most. When it is running 24/7 except for maintenance, that is a totally different story.
SEJeff 12y ago
Everyone talks about passenger vehicles as the killer market for self driving cars, but it isn't. One of my friends is a Paramedic and he told me the overwhelming majority of traffic fatalities he sees are a result of big rig truck drivers falling asleep. It would suck to put a whole industry of workers out of a job, but if you could reliably and cheaply transport large amounts of cargo with a self driving vehicle which never slept, that is pretty amazing. It would certainly up the profit of the distributors moving tons upon tons of cargo around the world every day.
- datasage 12y ago
  I think this is where we will see strong adoption first. Although it will probably not do much to increase profits as its a commoditized industry, but it will bring prices down for those who use it.
- mercer 12y ago
  You're probably right. If I understand correctly, they recently passed laws that make it easier to test self-driving vehicles in Holland, and one of the first experiments will be 'convoys' of self-driving trucks.
  - Someone 12y ago
    http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/technology/dutch-approve-large-scale/1611880.html http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/technology/dutch-approve... The law hasn't passed yet, but apparently, Scania will start testing trucks in February. I am not sure that will be fully autonomous vehicles, though. It may be trucks that can follow a lead truck driven by humans.
- greenyoda 12y ago
  I suspect that citizens and regulators are going to be scared of unleashing autonomous 18-wheelers on the roads until autonomous cars have been around for several years and they're confident that the bugs have been worked out. The consequences of a fully-loaded semi - 40 tons - going out of control and hitting something are much more serious than a car hitting something. They also take more distance to stop, have a much wider turning radius than a car, and are prone to mishaps like jack-knifing that don't affect cars. Also, lots of trucks carry flammable or toxic materials: gasoline, heating/diesel oil, propane, pesticides, etc. These will probably be required to have human drivers for a long time to come.
downandout 12y ago
"PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the number of vehicles on the road will be reduced by 99%, estimating that the fleet will fall from 245 million to just 2.4 million vehicles." This isn't remotely close to possible. While it is technically true that cars spend most of their time sitting idle, the demand for transportation is lumpy. A huge percentage of the population works, sleeps, shops, and eats at approximately the same time. That means that with only 2.4 million cars available for use at any one time, the US economy would almost completely shut down. If the majority of those were Uber cars, surge pricing would be in effect most nomral hours....literally only the reviled "1%" could afford to go to work or do anything else from sunrise to sunset.
- monk_e_boy 12y ago
  Wouldn't supply and demand smooth this curve out? $50 an hour at 8AM - 10AM, $1 an hour from 10AM to 3PM... I'm sure PricewaterhouseCoopers must have thought about this.
  - downandout 12y ago
    That statement seems to be based on this: http://www.detroitchamber.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/AutofactsAnalystNoteUSFeb2013FINAL.pdf http://www.detroitchamber.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Aut... I have no idea what they were thinking. What I do know, however, is that there are more than 2.4 million people in the US expected to be at work or school between 8-9am. Using your example, there are few people that can afford $50 to and from work ($100/day - $2,000 per month for those on a 5 day work week - around the cost of leasing a very high end Mercedes).
- rogerbinns 12y ago
  You are thinking of one person per car per commute. And also cars only. As a simple example lets say you commute 30 miles to work and it costs $10. Shortly after your journey starts the car can say: "Would you accept a 3 minute longer journey in return for a discount of $3?" Instant on-demand car pooling as it picks up someone else. Similarly the car can take you to some point 3 miles away, you switch to a larger car ("bus"), get within a few miles of your destination where another car takes you to you final destination. The wait times can be very small, and again you'll have a financial incentive (discount) or can pay full whack for a completely private experience. The time and places where there are the highest demands on transport are the ones where self driving vehicles and financial incentives will be most effective. Deliveries will become way cheaper too. Instead of each place managing their own delivery as currently happens, a delivery company can pick up things from multiple unrelated places. Suddenly there is no need for businesses like fast food to all be in high traffic areas.
andyidsinga 12y ago
I might be driving around in autonomous cars by 2025 - but they won't be uber autonomous cars (assuming it still exists as a business). My impression of Uber and how it conducts business is not good - and that connection with a company and it's brand will be important when people start putting their lives in the hands of its software and hardware. Tesla -- now thats another story (for me).
Someone 12y ago
"PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the number of vehicles on the road will be reduced by 99%, estimating that the fleet will fall from 245 million to just 2.4 million vehicles." I do not believe that. For freight, more efficient use of freight vehicles will decrease the number of vehicles needed, but I guess that will be compensated for by more demand for freight transport because it will get cheaper. As to personal transport: http://traveltrends.transportation.org/Documents/CA10-4.pdf http://traveltrends.transportation.org/Documents/CA10-4.pdf, page 5 shows that about 120 million people travel to work by car each day in the USA. To get them there in those 2.4 million vehicles, each vehicle would have to drive 50 people to work each morning and back each evening. Picking a optimistic average car sharing load of 2 persons (the PDF puts carpooling at about 10%), that would be 25 trips. At a moderate 5 minutes a trip, it would take those cars 250 minutes to do that. That's about 4 hours, so the first people would arrive at work at 07:00 and the last ones at 11:00. With realistic figures, those number will easily blow up to over 8 hours. So, it will require huge other changes (job los, working from home or highly increased car sharing) to get down to that 2.4 million number. I also think those who can afford a car now will want to own a driverless car, too. Reason? If you do not need to drive, your car can become more of a living room: you will want to keep your favourite books and games in it. That in itself will slow down a decrease in the number of vehicles, but there is a second factor: once your car is your living room, chances are people will be less bothered about long commute trips.
brighten 12y ago
Some of the numbers in this article don't make sense to me. Today "cars are driven just 4% of the time". If you assume for a moment that people's transportation usage time stays the same, and "the number of vehicles on the road will be reduced by 99%", then the average car must be used 400% of the time. That would be possible if every self-driving car is carrying 4 passengers 100% of the time, 24 hours a day 7 days a week, which seems very unlikely. What am I missing? I also don't see the justification for saying "90% reduction of vehicles in operation would reduce our overall emissions by" 90% of their greenhouse gas emissions. There might be 90% fewer vehicles, and you certainly save on environmental impact of vehicle production, but they will be used more per vehicle. In fact, per-person transportation usage time may increase. If catching a ride is easy, fast, and cheap and allows us to work, sleep or play while riding, then many people will ride more often, or might buy a house that means a longer commute.
- zkanter 12y ago
  We're going to see an increased average number of passengers per vehicle. Current average in a city like San Francisco is 1.3 passengers/vehicle. An average of 4 is conceivable (67% decrease in number of vehicles on the road). Autonomous vehicles will likely be electric - this is the other component that will reduce our need for fossil fuels.
  - brighten 12y ago
    Autonomous cars probably make transit optimization easier, but there's a tradeoff here that doesn't have very much to do with autonomy: The more people in the car, the less convenient for each rider, both because of comfort and delaying the trip with stops. It's basically the difference between a cab and a shared ride van today. It's certainly conceivable that cabs mostly disappear and are replaced by shared ride vans, but lots of things are conceivable... Autonomous vehicles will be electric but so will some (perhaps a smaller fraction of) non-autonomous vehicles. Anyway, that doesn't save the calculation. It's clear all these benefits are there but maybe not to the degree you claim, at least not in such a simple way.
srinivasan 12y ago
It's not just Uber that will kill jobs. This video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU - explains how many others jobs will be eliminated. Re this article, I think the numbers are a bit drastic, but using less drastic numbers does not weaken the central point of the argument.

39 points by cryptoz 12y ago

This is certainly plausible. Nevertheless, the resulting changes in economy would drive more inequality and reward people with capital and/or technology

captk 12y ago
I think that's kind of the point of the article - there's going to be a massive shift in the structure of the economy when 10 million jobs disappear. That being said, I think pretty much all of silicon valley is built on the principle that the future will "reward people with access to capital and/or technology."

thewarrior 12y ago

I feel that autonomous cars are extremely oversold and cannot operate in many real world conditions like snowy roads and places with obscured road signs. Maybe it can drive around some of the roads in the US after it has been fed with detailed 3D maps of the whole area along with road signs. But how about in other places ? Could it ever drive in a place like India ? I don't think so. Autonomous vehicles could completely take over in closed areas like Open cast mines , vast factories and on farms where companies could profit by cutting the driver out of the loop. From there we would see the technology slowly improve to start getting traction in the real world. Even then the vehicle wouldn't be fully automated , it would be a more advanced form of the cruise control we have today with it falling back to the manual driver especially in crazy places like India. Also we'd need laws forbidding people from jumping in front of self driving cars etc just to f@#$ with them. This is also a trend with automation stories in general , with several publications already predicting doom and gloom and claiming that most people would end up unemployed because of automation of their jobs. The fact is we don't even have an AI good enough to impersonate a tele marketer yet and it's decades away at best. I'm not denying that thesis in the extremely long term but AI and machine learning are in a very primitive state for any of this to materialize any time in the next two or three decades.

click170 12y ago
If you haven't heard of it before I would encourage you to check out the DARPA Grand Challenge, IIRC teams create vehicles which must navigate a course without a 3d map provided ahead of time. Granted I don't think it would work as well in driving conditions like those found in other parts of the world, but I still think they're rather advanced in their abilities. I was impressed at least.
untog 12y ago
I agree that they won't be everywhere, but I can see them changing inner cities very quickly. Where I am, in NYC, your bang for buck (in terms of people per square mile) is huge, the street grid system is clear... it could change the taxi and parking industries very quickly. The only problem is a legal one - it's inevitable that at some point a driverless car will hit someone. Even if the total number of pedestrian collisions drops dramatically (which I'm sure it would) the questions of responsibility and culpability become a problem.
- divegeek 12y ago
  I've read that Google's position on liability is that it should be on the maker of the autonomous car, which makes perfect sense to me. Traffic accidents (including with pedestrians) rarely involve criminal culpability anyway, except when alcohol or drugs are involved, or when there's clear evidence of gross negligence, so it's really a question of civil liability. Putting that liability on the maker of the machine aligns the interests correctly and ensures that the liability is well-funded. So, I really don't think it's as much of a problem as you think it is.
- tom-lord 12y ago
  I don't think the culpability problem is that hard to solve... Surely all that would really change is when buying a new car, you are purely insuring the vehicle and not the person! The whole notion of "no claims discount", or sexist/ageist insurance rules would become obsolete. And the vehicle manufacture would only be considered "at fault" if the vehicle fails safety regulations. The only time the consumer (driver) would be at fault is if they tampered with the vehicle, or entered it knowing it was damaged.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

xivzgrev 12y ago

This is really bullish. I wonder what skin he has in game? As author states, uber can do best where owner drives fewer than 10k miles per year. What about all the rural locations, or people who like to go on long trips? And I think 50 cents per mile is extremely generous I think uber will charge more than that. Isn't IRS reimbursement rates something like 55 cents per mile? That's basically to cover costs not make any profit.

gaius 12y ago
It's a big assumption that Uber will be around next year, let alone in 10.
jerf 12y ago
Just strip out the word Uber. I wouldn't assume it will be "Uber" that wins either. Once the self-driving space heats up it's going to be piled into by a ton of entities and there's no guaranteeing the outcome. For that matter I won't promise you 2025. But I will say that if self-driving cars truly do become practical it will rewrite the economy in a lot of ways, and that if you stop and think and analyze, a lot of them aren't that difficult to guess, IMHO. For instance, that the nature of the capital expenditures will heavily favor "renting" over "owning" once we can easily rent on-demand is just obvious. A lot of this other stuff is too, really. Of course, painting a full picture or correctly guessing timelines is essentially impossible. But some of the broad sketch isn't that hard.

free2rhyme214 12y ago

Do you trust software with your life? Obviously 2025 software will be better than 2015 software but this question will still have to be answered strongly for mainstream adoption.

SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
> Do you trust software with your life? That depends on what the alternative is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...
sek 12y ago
There is already a ton of software in your car that can theoretically just steer in the other direction and accelerate.
- free2rhyme214 12y ago
  Not cars made in 1999.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Coincidentally, the capital of my country has just banned those :) Regardless, how many cars without software do you think there will be by 2025?
  - lumpypua 12y ago
    There are other drivers. You're on the road with cars that are substantially driven by software... You're still trusting your life to software.
jat850 12y ago
We already trust software with our lives. Transit, medicine, navigation, finance. People have died because of software failure in the past, but it hasn't deterred adoption or advancement.

dpflan 12y ago

Yes, an interesting prognostication: a future with 'Total Recall' Johnny Cabs, a transportation circulatory system for cities. The gradual adoption would make most sense through the growth of closed systems where there are almost zero human drivers. Will the cars be like small public transit or are they single ride and not picking up random passengers along the way for the sake of efficiency (for the companies providing the rides surely electric cars and more single rides will yield greater monetary gains)? The social impact would be interesting - I've had good experiences meeting and talking with Uber drivers. That human element would certainly be removed, and now I am alone and robotically chauffeured around town staring at other people through the window. I'm intrigued at how it would feel to use such a system.

free2rhyme214 12y ago

Do you remember toll takers at the golden gate bridge? Replacing them was slow because of the government. The private sector will have no problem replacing taxi drivers when the technology is available from Google and every car manufacturer.

saosebastiao 12y ago

I agree that self driving cars will be a huge savings in terms of resources spent on cars and the ecosystem surrouding them, but it won't be a huge benefit to disposable income. With cars taking up a huge chunk of the expenditure of humans, and with Inflation metrics being primarily driven by past concerns as opposed to future concerns (it took complete extinction of VHS for VCRs to be removed from the CPI), and with the general pervasiveness of monetarism (which, for some odd reason associates 0.0000001% deflation with the apocalypse) in central banking institutions, there is little doubt that any improvement in the average person's finances will be promptly inflated away.

FrankenPC 12y ago

"It is exciting to be alive, isn’t it?" It is for those of us who don't rely on the service industry for a living. 10 million jobs lost. A self driving car is an amazing feat of Human engineering. What would be an even more amazing feat would be what to do with humans thrown under the bus of progress. Capitalism is great for anyone with enough mental agility to stay in the technology power curve, but it's really terrible for everyone else who simply want to live their lives, raise their family and be happy. What are we going to do with all those humans displace by automation?

tommoor 12y ago
Driving won't be the first job to be displaced by technology, other jobs will appear - possibly one's we can't even imagine now.
- potatolicious 12y ago
  This is a cop-out - the entire "people will find other things to do" argument is a total cop-out. Yes, in aggregate, over long timespans (read: multiple generations), people will figure out other things to do. But as we've seen from the automation of manufacturing jobs in the US, a huge number of people haven't retrained, nor have magical jobs "we couldn't even imagine" erupted en masse to absorb a chronically un- or under-employed work force. I submit that the oversimplified notion that people who lose their jobs to technology will be fine and find something else to do is mainly a device to make people like us feel better - it isn't a notion that actually helps the displaced.
  - tommoor 12y ago
    I don't believe it is, history has this repeated this playbook over and over, from horse power, steam power, electric power - labour intensive repetitive works have been slowly replaced by automation for hundreds of years now - driving is just the next in a long list. My personal long-term view (beyond just automated cars) is that we will automate away millions of jobs - but that's fantastic as it probably doesn't make sense for everyone to work anyway, a basic income guarantee can allow people to live lives with much more time for leisure, creativity and enjoyment.

FrankenPC 12y ago

The 6D exponential growth pattern is appearing everywhere. Once a market becomes "Digitizable" or under computer control, it appears to grow slowly then it hits the elbow of the exponential growth curve and becomes Distuption. From there, old analog business artifacts are digitized (Dematerialization) and monetarily re-adjusted to compensate for the much cheaper costs of production (Demonitization). Then it's a simple matter to connect the service to everyone through the web and social media (Democratization). Goodbye cars. Heloooo profit opportunity.

krschultz 12y ago

I think it's unlikely that an autonomous car will be $25,000. It is far more likely early autonomous vehicles will be $150,000. However, this just slants the playing field in favor of an Uber-ish business model even more. When the utilization of the car nears 100%, you can justify that capital expense. It doesn't make sense for the average person to own a very expensive autonomous car, because they probably only use it two hours a day at most. When it is running 24/7 except for maintenance, that is a totally different story.

SEJeff 12y ago

Everyone talks about passenger vehicles as the killer market for self driving cars, but it isn't. One of my friends is a Paramedic and he told me the overwhelming majority of traffic fatalities he sees are a result of big rig truck drivers falling asleep. It would suck to put a whole industry of workers out of a job, but if you could reliably and cheaply transport large amounts of cargo with a self driving vehicle which never slept, that is pretty amazing. It would certainly up the profit of the distributors moving tons upon tons of cargo around the world every day.

datasage 12y ago
I think this is where we will see strong adoption first. Although it will probably not do much to increase profits as its a commoditized industry, but it will bring prices down for those who use it.
mercer 12y ago
You're probably right. If I understand correctly, they recently passed laws that make it easier to test self-driving vehicles in Holland, and one of the first experiments will be 'convoys' of self-driving trucks.
- Someone 12y ago
  http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/technology/dutch-approve-large-scale/1611880.html http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/technology/dutch-approve... The law hasn't passed yet, but apparently, Scania will start testing trucks in February. I am not sure that will be fully autonomous vehicles, though. It may be trucks that can follow a lead truck driven by humans.
greenyoda 12y ago
I suspect that citizens and regulators are going to be scared of unleashing autonomous 18-wheelers on the roads until autonomous cars have been around for several years and they're confident that the bugs have been worked out. The consequences of a fully-loaded semi - 40 tons - going out of control and hitting something are much more serious than a car hitting something. They also take more distance to stop, have a much wider turning radius than a car, and are prone to mishaps like jack-knifing that don't affect cars. Also, lots of trucks carry flammable or toxic materials: gasoline, heating/diesel oil, propane, pesticides, etc. These will probably be required to have human drivers for a long time to come.

downandout 12y ago

"PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the number of vehicles on the road will be reduced by 99%, estimating that the fleet will fall from 245 million to just 2.4 million vehicles." This isn't remotely close to possible. While it is technically true that cars spend most of their time sitting idle, the demand for transportation is lumpy. A huge percentage of the population works, sleeps, shops, and eats at approximately the same time. That means that with only 2.4 million cars available for use at any one time, the US economy would almost completely shut down. If the majority of those were Uber cars, surge pricing would be in effect most nomral hours....literally only the reviled "1%" could afford to go to work or do anything else from sunrise to sunset.

monk_e_boy 12y ago
Wouldn't supply and demand smooth this curve out? $50 an hour at 8AM - 10AM, $1 an hour from 10AM to 3PM... I'm sure PricewaterhouseCoopers must have thought about this.
- downandout 12y ago
  That statement seems to be based on this: http://www.detroitchamber.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/AutofactsAnalystNoteUSFeb2013FINAL.pdf http://www.detroitchamber.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Aut... I have no idea what they were thinking. What I do know, however, is that there are more than 2.4 million people in the US expected to be at work or school between 8-9am. Using your example, there are few people that can afford $50 to and from work ($100/day - $2,000 per month for those on a 5 day work week - around the cost of leasing a very high end Mercedes).
rogerbinns 12y ago
You are thinking of one person per car per commute. And also cars only. As a simple example lets say you commute 30 miles to work and it costs $10. Shortly after your journey starts the car can say: "Would you accept a 3 minute longer journey in return for a discount of $3?" Instant on-demand car pooling as it picks up someone else. Similarly the car can take you to some point 3 miles away, you switch to a larger car ("bus"), get within a few miles of your destination where another car takes you to you final destination. The wait times can be very small, and again you'll have a financial incentive (discount) or can pay full whack for a completely private experience. The time and places where there are the highest demands on transport are the ones where self driving vehicles and financial incentives will be most effective. Deliveries will become way cheaper too. Instead of each place managing their own delivery as currently happens, a delivery company can pick up things from multiple unrelated places. Suddenly there is no need for businesses like fast food to all be in high traffic areas.

andyidsinga 12y ago

I might be driving around in autonomous cars by 2025 - but they won't be uber autonomous cars (assuming it still exists as a business). My impression of Uber and how it conducts business is not good - and that connection with a company and it's brand will be important when people start putting their lives in the hands of its software and hardware. Tesla -- now thats another story (for me).

Someone 12y ago

"PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the number of vehicles on the road will be reduced by 99%, estimating that the fleet will fall from 245 million to just 2.4 million vehicles." I do not believe that. For freight, more efficient use of freight vehicles will decrease the number of vehicles needed, but I guess that will be compensated for by more demand for freight transport because it will get cheaper. As to personal transport: http://traveltrends.transportation.org/Documents/CA10-4.pdf http://traveltrends.transportation.org/Documents/CA10-4.pdf, page 5 shows that about 120 million people travel to work by car each day in the USA. To get them there in those 2.4 million vehicles, each vehicle would have to drive 50 people to work each morning and back each evening. Picking a optimistic average car sharing load of 2 persons (the PDF puts carpooling at about 10%), that would be 25 trips. At a moderate 5 minutes a trip, it would take those cars 250 minutes to do that. That's about 4 hours, so the first people would arrive at work at 07:00 and the last ones at 11:00. With realistic figures, those number will easily blow up to over 8 hours. So, it will require huge other changes (job los, working from home or highly increased car sharing) to get down to that 2.4 million number. I also think those who can afford a car now will want to own a driverless car, too. Reason? If you do not need to drive, your car can become more of a living room: you will want to keep your favourite books and games in it. That in itself will slow down a decrease in the number of vehicles, but there is a second factor: once your car is your living room, chances are people will be less bothered about long commute trips.

brighten 12y ago

Some of the numbers in this article don't make sense to me. Today "cars are driven just 4% of the time". If you assume for a moment that people's transportation usage time stays the same, and "the number of vehicles on the road will be reduced by 99%", then the average car must be used 400% of the time. That would be possible if every self-driving car is carrying 4 passengers 100% of the time, 24 hours a day 7 days a week, which seems very unlikely. What am I missing? I also don't see the justification for saying "90% reduction of vehicles in operation would reduce our overall emissions by" 90% of their greenhouse gas emissions. There might be 90% fewer vehicles, and you certainly save on environmental impact of vehicle production, but they will be used more per vehicle. In fact, per-person transportation usage time may increase. If catching a ride is easy, fast, and cheap and allows us to work, sleep or play while riding, then many people will ride more often, or might buy a house that means a longer commute.

zkanter 12y ago
We're going to see an increased average number of passengers per vehicle. Current average in a city like San Francisco is 1.3 passengers/vehicle. An average of 4 is conceivable (67% decrease in number of vehicles on the road). Autonomous vehicles will likely be electric - this is the other component that will reduce our need for fossil fuels.
- brighten 12y ago
  Autonomous cars probably make transit optimization easier, but there's a tradeoff here that doesn't have very much to do with autonomy: The more people in the car, the less convenient for each rider, both because of comfort and delaying the trip with stops. It's basically the difference between a cab and a shared ride van today. It's certainly conceivable that cabs mostly disappear and are replaced by shared ride vans, but lots of things are conceivable... Autonomous vehicles will be electric but so will some (perhaps a smaller fraction of) non-autonomous vehicles. Anyway, that doesn't save the calculation. It's clear all these benefits are there but maybe not to the degree you claim, at least not in such a simple way.

srinivasan 12y ago

It's not just Uber that will kill jobs. This video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU - explains how many others jobs will be eliminated. Re this article, I think the numbers are a bit drastic, but using less drastic numbers does not weaken the central point of the argument.