
If all cars were autonomous - osrec
https://www.volvocars.com/en-om/about/our-innovation-brands/intellisafe/intellisafe-autopilot/changing-the-world/if-all-cars-were-autonomous
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tarr11
My immediate thought is a dystopian version of this article:

 _If all cars were autonomous, society, the economy and the environment would
all suffer. Here is how…_

* You will be forced to watch non-stop ads in these automotive cars, similar to how some taxi services work today. You can turn these off for a fee of course.

* Hackers or bugs in softawe may easily cause global traffic jams

* Congress will pass laws controlling when, where and how you may travel

* You may be blacklisted from traveling in any autonomous by corporations, governments, police etc.

* The aggregate amount of automotive travel will increase exponentially, causing more carbon emissions and even worse traffic since more people will have access to travel

* Sprawl will get worse, as people move further away from urban areas since they can do other activities in cars.

* Investment in mass transit will diminish, since funds will move towards automatic cars.

~~~
userbinator
Exactly. Don't forget the inevitable regulations on the software too, or even
restricting/banning non-autonomous cars completely. I'm glad there are others
out there who also see autonomous cars as a threat to freedom.

It is said that driving is one of the most dangerous activities we do, but I
think it's no coincidence that it's also one of the most liberating. It's a
very pleasurable feeling to be able to get into a car and drive, controlling
it as if it were an extension of your body.

The phrase "If all cars were autonomous" has a similar feeling to others like
"if there was no crime" \--- sounds good on the surface, but also has deeply
authoritarian and dystopian implications.

Edit: there's also this, which is basically like Stallman's "Right to Read"
but for self-driving cars: [http://this.deakin.edu.au/lifestyle/car-
wars](http://this.deakin.edu.au/lifestyle/car-wars)

~~~
bognition
> It is said that driving is one of the most dangerous activities we do, but I
> think it's no coincidence that it's also one of the most liberating

I experienced this to an amplified degree the first time I rode a motorcycle.
I now commute almost everyday on a motorcycle and my commute has transformed
for a soul sucking hell to one of my favorite parts of the day.

------
CoryG89
This is something I often thought about as a child. I didn't imagine self
driving cars as they are being developed today. Rather, I thought about what
it would be like if all cars were controlled by a common system. I would
imagine cars all taking off together in unison from a stop at traffic lights,
cars being merged together from two separate lanes without bringing everything
to a crawl.

Maybe we'll get there one day.

~~~
Turing_Machine
The problem with a centralized system is that is a single point of failure. If
the central system went out, things would get Very Bad, Very Fast.

~~~
nealabq
It doesn't have to be centralized. If you think of the cars as data packets
and the roads as cat-6 cables, then you can see how redundancy and alternate
routing can be built in.

~~~
csours
You'd want that protocol to be EXTREMELY collision resistant.

~~~
stevekemp
Indeed, and you would also want to avoid fragmentation of packets (cars).

------
11thEarlOfMar
Last week, I got an e-mail from Subaru telling me my windshield washer fluid
was low (it was). The e-mail provided information on how to refill it, and, a
link to make an appointment for service if I felt something else needed
attention.

If, instead, my brake pads were worn and the car were fully autonomous, I
could have scheduled it for service while I am at work and it could have
driven itself in, got new brakes and driven itself back to my office. No
loaner car, no time off from work, no hassle waiting in line for a service
adviser, ....

File under the 'productivity' column, and I expect cars will be better
maintained than now, since we procrastinators will be able to simply click a
link and forget about it.

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gumby
They miss the point of not owning a car (partially mentioned in both "economy"
and "environment"): the car is usually the #1 or #2 (after house, if you own
one) household expense; it's a depreciating asset with a terrible utilization
rate (typically less than 5%). Bought by individuals, who typically have much
worse credit than corporations.

If you pay by the drive for a car service operated by a large company that
borrows at the prime rate, your cost per mile is liable to be _much_ lower.
Given the huge costs of car ownership, it's hard to believe any residual
emotional bond of owning a car could trump the economic benefits.

And as for electric: knowing aggregate demand means you never have "range
anxiety", and the charging infrastructure can be much less obtrusive.

Social consequences? Well, when you take that Google-operated car to Manresa
it will likely detour past MacDonalds and offer you a 2-for-one discount on
Big Macs if you go there instead. And there will be no ad blockers...

Oh, and you want to take that car to where there will be an alt-right rally?
Oops, no cars allowed to drive there (either by government edict or because
the car owners don't want to risk their cars being destroyed).

The self-driving fleets can't arrive soon enough for me, but I am aware of
some of the malign risks as well...

~~~
username223
You miss the point of owning a car: it's space that's yours. You only use your
bed 1/3 of the time, and your toilet for less than 5%. Why not hot-sheet it
and use a shared toilet down the street? Because you're willing to pay more
for personal space, where you can leave your stuff and maintain your preferred
level of hygiene.

~~~
gumby
I agree that certain cases will remain, such as for, say, a plumber, though in
theory the ubiquity of autonomous vehicles means that a plumbing supply
company could provide JIT service.

But although I don't blindly believe in _homo economicus_ , I wasn't kidding
when I said that the car is an (or for many the most) enormous expense for
most people, and the size of that expense will aggressively drive the adoption
rate. The ability to have a box of Kleenex or your gym bag will become a nice
to have when the price of that convenience doubles or triples your
transportation costs. The difference in price might allow you to _afford_ gym
membership in the first place.

It's also a generational thing. My 19 yo kid and his friends are pretty
uninterested in cars. A bunch of them don't even have licenses (which is
common in some big cities like NYC but uncommon out here in the sub urbs).
They care about phones though.

In the case of the toilet and bed, those are typically bundled, but even then
some people do make the economic choice to have only a shower rather than a
bathtub just like they make such a choice for a normal car vs paying extra for
automatic transmission.

(there are also transitional and special cases; it's hard to hail a car where
there is no phone service!)

------
osrec
I stumbled upon this when searching for "what if all cars were self driving".
I really feel that a great deal of the problems with making self driving cars
more prevalent are related to the human-driven cars that are on the road along
side these autonomous vehicles. Having only autonomous vehicles on the roads
seems to have some powerful advantages, including lighter vehicles. I would
love to see a region or city go totally driverless to empirically test whether
autonomous vehicles really can provide the added benefits mentioned in the
article.

~~~
kps
> including lighter vehicles

 _Much_ lighter. All the people driving alone could be in cars one-quarter the
size if they didn't have to worry about being crushed by Canyoneros. Aside
from the cost savings, half-width cars can offer a traffic volume / speed
improvement by sharing a lane. (Ultimately though lane markings can go away
along with traffic lights and signs.)

~~~
osrec
Yeah. I've always found it strange that to move an 80kg human from A to B, we
also have to shift a couple of tonnes of metal. Seems really excessive!

~~~
ocdtrekkie
One often ignored thing in this conversation is we often use the ability to
carry more. I keep my emergency kit in the back (I'm part of a CERT team) as
well as spare chargers and cables and stuff. I keep telling myself I should
stock a spare change of clothes too. Obviously sometimes I drive with friends
or family, load up my car with groceries, occasionally move furniture or
computers.

The car is a relatively reasonable standard for covering an individual's
regular use cases for transportation.

~~~
Turing_Machine
I wonder if some kind of detachable "trailers" might be the answer here. For
normal driving, you'd have a single-passenger pod (with maybe enough cargo
space for a bag of groceries or whatever), but you could hook on extra
passenger or cargo pods as needed.

------
aerovistae
There is a small portent here of something I think we should be cautious of:

> The space that is currently used for car parks could be used for something
> else.

We should be careful that this space does not uniformly end up being used for
yet more skyscrapers and office buildings, but open space and parks instead. I
feel like this is a major decision moment for ending up with beautiful cities
or dark cyberpunk monstrosities.

~~~
rwmj
Why's that a bad thing? Increased density in cities means more space for
nature in the countryside.

~~~
majewsky
1\. Green areas in the city improve air quality.

2\. I don't want to have to travel 30+ minutes to see more than a single tree
in one place. Frequent access to nature (or a sufficiently advanced facsimile)
is life quality.

3\. If a city is sufficiently large, traveling to its outside may be
prohibitively expensive for poor people who are thus barred from experiencing
nature. (This concern affects developing countries and sci-fi dystopias more
than current developed countries.)

~~~
arkades
It’s not like #3 hasn’t happened before. Central Park is so far north in
Manhattan because it was originally meant to be inaccessible to those without
the means to afford a carriage.

------
Apreche
Everyone is waiting for autonomous cars to be near-perfectly safe before
accepting them.

The thing is, let's say that autonomous cars are only 0.25% safer than the
average human driver. That means switching to them will reduce accidents by
0.25%. That's a significant amount considering how many traffic accidents
there are.

Considering that traffic accidents result in the actual death of human beings,
it is morally imperative that we require as much autonomous driving and reduce
as much human driving as possible. Even the far-from-perfect autonomous cars
we have now are safer than continuing to let humans drive.

~~~
sithadmin
Something you're neglecting to account for is that there's more to driving
than simply moral hazards and safety. There's also the matter of liability and
financial risk.

While it may be arguable that it's _morally_ preferable and _safer_ to adopt
self-driving cars if they can be shown to reduce the incidence of accidents by
_any_ amount compared to human drivers, it isn't desirable for the corporate
entities producing vehicles capable of fully autonomous operation to make them
a mass market product until it is _remarkably_ safer to ride in an autonomous
vehicle compared to a human-operated vehicle.

One of the biggest boons for automakers in the status quo is that the
liabilities associated with operating their products is mostly distributed to
the users. From a financial risk perspective this is a massively preferable
operating model (and not dissimilar from what you see with 'disruptors' in the
consumer space like Uber, Air BnB, etc). When we remove the primary cause of
faults while driving from the picture (the human agent operating the vehicle),
the distribution of risk that has generally protected automakers in the past
disappears. When an autonomous vehicle crashes, the automaker now must fend
off claims about vehicle features (sensors, software, etc.) that will in some
way be directly responsible for causing traffic accidents.

------
legulere
Cars dropping you off autonomously reduces the demand for parking, however it
will also double traffic. This leads to worse traffic flow and more
congestion, contrary to the claimed positive benefit.

A lot of things on the list are also almost completely orthogonal to
autonomous driving, like electric cars and flexible ownership models

~~~
manmal
If autonomous cars are operated by centralized services (Uber/Lyft/...), then
they can offer cheaper rides if you are willing to share a car with different
people. Especially when congestion is at its worst, chances of matching people
with the same destinations are also the best - the daily morning jam on
highways is mostly caused by people driving alone in their cars. Why not share
90% of the way with X other people, if it lasts only 2 minutes more for
changing from/into a small first/last-mile vehicle. And why not deploy lots of
small buses which carry 10+ people through the congested areas? This could
even be encouraged by lawmakers; but I think this group rides would be so much
cheaper that many people would use them whenever possible. Just like you don’t
use your car if you live next to a subway and your destination is also right
next to a station.

------
naskwo
Here's a classic joke:
[http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pnw/microsoftjoke.htm](http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pnw/microsoftjoke.htm)

------
TwoBit
The way my Tesla auto drives, traffic jams would be worse. It's slow to
respond to speedups and keeps too far a distance, even at its lowest setting.

~~~
throwaway2016a
My Volvo (XC90) is the same way. It's not as advanced as the Tesla but it has
a traffic jam assist feature. If the traffic goes from almost full stop to
moving along I often have to override it and accelerate manually to avoid
someone cutting me off or honking at me.

~~~
shiftpgdn
Ah yes! Just the other week I turned on Pilot Assist on our XC90 during a long
road trip and people playing on their phones in left lane stabbing their
brakes make for a very rough ride as the car keeps braking and then re-
accelerating to try to keep a constant distance.

Not to mention all of the people cutting you off because you've left enough
space for them to jam their car in front of you. I had to intervene a number
of times and reposition myself in traffic to get away from "non-smooth"
drivers,

------
hennsen
... all communicating via the cloud...and if the network or cloud has an
outage we have a million accidents at once, or just stand still.

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praveenster
This TED talk provides some interesting insights about self driving cars of
the future:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/wanis_kabbaj_what_a_driverless_wor...](https://www.ted.com/talks/wanis_kabbaj_what_a_driverless_world_could_look_like)

------
bluedino
>> The car could become an extension of the office and allow commuters to
arrive at work less stressed and better prepared.

Wouldn't it be far easier for companies to embrace telecommuting than to have
a worldwide network of autonomous vehicles?

~~~
BurningFrog
Those two things are entirely independent.

------
rustoo
An alternate, better version: If all mass transit was autonomous

~~~
osrec
My issue with mass transit is destination granularity. I can imagine having
individual cars that can "clump" together to form a mass transit system, and
then break off as and when required to arrive at specific destinations.

------
beefman
Most cars won't have people in them.

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jotm
Wait Volvo, where's the millions of people starving, on benefits and/or
smashing your brand new cars because they have no job?

------
mtgx
Isn't Volvo planning on using Chinese self-driving software? As with the vast
majority of Chinese software, I wonder if it will also contain a backdoor for
the government.

~~~
shiftpgdn
Volvo has a partnership with Mobileye (based in Israel.)

~~~
icebraining
Isn't it with Autoliv?

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15878900/volvo-nvidia-
sel...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15878900/volvo-nvidia-self-driving-
car-partnership)

------
nealabq
If all cars were autonomous you could change how roads are built. They could
become more like sewer pipes, sunk at least partly into the ground. Car
designs would change and become more cylindrical and without windows. The car
interior would be covered with displays. Travel videos will become a thing.

You can see why you might want to start practicing with boring machines and
hyperloops. These things aren't just for Mars.

~~~
rwmj
How would you drain these pipe/roads? Most current roads have a positive
camber to aid drainage.

~~~
louwhopley
You could do the same in a pipe. I'm sure this problem has already been
solved, given the thousands of road miles in tunnels that already exist. :)

~~~
gaius
_given the thousands of road miles in tunnels that already exist_

The Big Dig in Boston cost what, $20Bn? For less than 4 miles of road tunnel?
The maths just doesn't work. What does average road cost per mile?

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rthornton
> Less congestion.

I don't think that this is obviously true, especially in cities. When the cost
of taking an autonomous car from door to door is comparable to the cost of
public transport, there would likely be more traffic on the road, not less.
We've already started to see this to some extend with Uber in big cities

