Posted on 06/06/2017 6:39:32 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The race to create self-driving cars is on—but what happens when they’re everywhere and nobody has to drive?
That could lead to a “passenger economy” worth $7 trillion by 2050, according to a new report by Intel and analyst firm Strategy Analytics.
While the name of the potential new market is lame, the amount of cash it's estimated to drive is not: the study predicts self-driving cars will free up 250 million hours of commuting time per year, providing the backbone for a thriving $800 billion industry by 2035, when the study predicts fully autonomous vehicles will begin to proliferate globally....
(Excerpt) Read more at mashable.com ...
Look at how much trouble you're seeing here in the NYC region with public agencies that can't operate a rail system safely and efficiently. And trains on a closed rail system are much easier to operate than cars on an open road.
You've cited some good example of technological innovations that have become ingrained in our lives, but history is also filled with innovative inventions that never went anywhere because they were too impractical, too expensive, or too difficult to develop for a mass market. In the case of self-driving cars, it's not the technology that's really holding it back. It's the complexity of implementing it in an environment where there are already hundreds of millions of "regular" cars on the road.
People can already do this now, and the average household in the U.S. owns something like 1.9 personal vehicles already. What's going to change with self-driving vehicles that is suddenly going to make people want to travel more?
Telecommuting may not replace conventional work in all industries, but there are more and more industries where irregular work arrangements have become the norm. The office real estate market has changed dramatically in recent years because of this.
It will never fly unless it has a full bathroom. If you could shower and shave etc on your commute it would save a person time. Don’t forget to install curtains.
Some hacker kid would have fun reprogramming cars to jump over a cliff.
It will likely be the same way with the self-driving cars. There are several companies (Apple being one of them) that are investing billions in this. They would not be doing so if they were not absolutely sure this is where we are heading.
The technology of self-driving cars today is probably as primitive as cell phones were 20 years ago. We will likely be astounded to see the technology in this space that will be soon brought to bear.
By the way, I don't envision a scenario where self-driving cars are just thrown out there on the roadways with regular cars at the beginning. I see lanes on highways dedicated to the self-driving cars with maybe jersey barriers separating them from the rest of the cars. Drivers will still need to take over to merge with the regular traffic. Over time, probably within the space of 10 years, it will be deemed safe to co-mingle the two and then the regular cars will quickly get squeezed out of the picture entirely.
You may be right about the process for adopting automated-vehicle technology, since that would be the most feasible and practical way to do it. This is one area of automated technology that could probably be implemented today, if the infrastructure was in place to deal with it. In theory, you could drive from the center of New York City to the center of Chicago in a car that operates most of the distance in "self-driving" mode on a separate roadway on the interstate system, but must be operated in conventional mode on the local streets. What's interesting about this is that it means a self-driving car isn't really competing against a conventional car as a mode of transportation, but against intercity trains and passenger airlines.
Something else to keep in mind is that the research being done doesn't necessarily have to culminate in a fully operational highway system for self-driving cars. Much of the technology under development has practical applications both inside and outside the auto industry, regardless of how far advanced the autonomous vehicle world gets.
I don't share your vision this will be popular on a grand scale simply because most people have to drive to work and run errands. It might work for big city millennial types that work near where they live and can't afford to maintain AND park their cars.
7 Trillion is not unreasonable.
When you consider all the hours that people spent driving when now be converted to time that they can use productively, or rest, so they can be refreshed for work when they arrive.
When you consider when perfected the number of car accidents will be reduced by 99%, which reduced time spent in traffic (possibly thousands of hours for commutters per accident), the lives and hospital bills saved, the savings in less auto repairs, and the savings in lower insurance rates for all drivers. ‘
And the savings for people having to own fewers cars because they can be shared. Think of a husband and wife where the wife stays at home and he drives to work. Now they both need cars because she needs a car to get around during the day. But with driverless cars the car takes him to work and auto-pilots home, and is ready for her to use during the day before it auto pilots to work to pick him up.
I think driverless cars will be transformative for society, as much if not more than the smartphone.
They can travel more simply because the cost of time spent in travel is now reduced. I think cars will be fundamentally redesigned where it functions as a mobile office, with a TV/Computer screen and a place you can sleep.
If I wanted say to go to the beach for the weekend and I live say 7 hours from the beach, it’s a huge hassel for me so I probably do it once or twice a year.
But with driverless cars I can get in the car every friday night, and by the time I wake up in the morning on Sat I’m at the beach, and I can spend 2 days there and depart on Sunday night, and by Monday morning I’m back at home ready for a trip to the showers and show up at work.
The cost of travel time would be reduced to almost zero, and encourage people to actually live more spread out rather than squeezed together in cities.
If we ever get to the point where you can sleep comfortably in a car or have an office in a car, then you might be on to something. Personally, I think such a vehicle would be so prohibitively expensive that it would likely end up losing out to an interesting innovative Uber-like service with mobile "RV/motel" vehicles that can accommodate 12-15 passengers making on-demand trips in tour buses that have a wide range of amenities for passengers.
A $elf$erving “report” by tho$e expected to benefit greatly in and by the “$elf driving” agenda of the arrogant technology class - a class $triving to make it$elf the next privately run “deep $tate”.
Obviously the 7 hour scenario is not the most common sceanrio, although I would argue that when the cost of 7 hour trips is reduced that much it would become far more common than it is now.
But that was just one of many scenarios I contemplated. The most common is that 1-2 hour daily commutes will be essentially made costless, you can spend the that 2 hours working before you arrive and leave early to work in your car.
“The degree to which that desire for freedom survives is the degree to which people will want cars under their own control, at least when that is desired.”
True. Sometimes people just go for a drive. People do not always have a destination in mind. Sometimes they take a scenic route. I don’t know how this aspect will fit into the self-driving car scenario. But I imagine that if there is a demand the market will seek to meet that demand in order to compete.
“How can one reasonably expect to create and deploy a fleet of fully autonomous cars when we can’t yet approach passing the Turing Test ?”
Computers and software are superior to human abilities for many tasks. Whether computers will be able to become more intelligent than humans is debatable. But I don’t think driving cars requires human-level intelligence.
What it does require is breaking down the larger task into smaller pieces until every critical factor has been clearly defined. I think we will have self-driving cars that can drive better than any human within 5 years.
Further, the more self-driving cars are in operation, the more predictable other drivers will be. To a large extent, safe driving is defensive driving because there are so many bad drivers on the road.
“I advise my clients that they are not likely to see a dramatic leap in the automotive paradigm (i.e., fully autonomous vehicles on the road) for decades.”
The predictions on this are all over the board. You may be right. I suspect it will be less than ten years, but only time will tell.
The technology is not the biggest delay. There is infrastructure, public acceptance, legal and insurance issues to work out, etc.
Financially, how long would it take to fully transition to self-driving cars if they were rolling off the production lines today? We still have millions of cars on the road that do not have these capabilities that would have to be replaced or retrofitted. That can’t happen overnight.
“most people have to drive to work and run errands”
The ride sharing services are booming. The biggest cost is not the vehicle but the driver. When that cost is gone, big companies will be able to reduce the cost per mile to be far less expensive than private ownership. Then owning a car will become a luxury rather than a necessity. Maybe it will be a status symbol to own a car. But you will be able to do pretty much everything you do now with a car but for far less. Or, at least that is what I expect to happen. Prognostications are educated guesses at best.
One of the problems I see with your scenario is rush hour. A company needs enough cars to meet demand for rush hour and peak travel times. The rest of the time a sizable amount of the fleet would sit idle.
This argument, taken to its logical conclusion, would be used to ban non-autonomous vehicles.
I believe the leftists are trying (again) to ban private transportation via this backdoor method, do you have any concerns about this ?
P.S. I think Roborace is a good yardstick of where this technology is, which is not very far yet, since two cars can't complete a full lap without a crash.
“A company needs enough cars to meet demand for rush hour and peak travel times. The rest of the time a sizable amount of the fleet would sit idle.”
All businesses experience this. But cars will be far less idle than they are now. In a cost-per-mile scenario, peak miles will probably cost more, which will serve to increase non-peak usage.
Uber functions 24/7 in big cities around the world. They also do delivery during non-peak hours. A service like theirs will not be able to meet everyone’s transportation needs with self-driving cars, but they will probably put a big dent in it. And car sales to consumers will probably decline until that is a very small percentage of cars on the road.
“I believe the leftists are trying (again) to ban private transportation via this backdoor method, do you have any concerns about this ?”
Leftists will never ban private transportation entirely. The elite ones will always exempt themselves.
I don’t think this is a conspiracy to take away liberties as much as the logical outcome of market forces and a trajectory of continuous technological innovation.
And, yes. I have a concern any time, any liberal has a position of authority anywhere. Nothing good ever comes from that.
Liberals should go start communes somewhere on undeveloped land that no one wants and prove that they can accomplish something without highjacking the accomplishments, money, and property of others.
Conservatives COULD build a community using land no one wants. The only problem is that liberals would be rushing to take credit and steal whatever the conservatives built.
As far as self-driving cars go, I don’t feel threatened except when it comes to tracking and privacy. What is far more scary is technology designed to be implanted.
You may be right. But, I think there is more to it.
What if, as is often the case, the act of driving, of being in direct control of over a ton of steel, rubber, etc., is itself the goal, or at least part of it?
For many, driving is a chore, and for most, it is at least sometimes. But for just as many, driving is often a pleasure. In my own case, the latter is usually true.
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