
Self-Driving Electric Cars Will Dominate Roads by 2030 - edward
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/rethinkx-selfdriving-electric-cars-will-dominate-roads-by-2030
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aidenn0
Is anybody else worried that a security-vulnerability in a popular family of
internet-connected self-driving car could allow a worm that could cause
casualties on the order of millions? I mean how many people would die if e.g.
every late-model Ford in the US started aiming for pedestrians?

~~~
aetherson
I think that there are a bunch of ways that you could make this very difficult
for teenage idiots to manage, and if you're talking well-funded, highly
competent state actors, they probably don't want to do terror attacks like
this (and if they did, they could probably cause comparable harm today. Always
remember how easy it would be to get a few sticks of dynamite into most US
trains or subways).

~~~
wfunction
> they could probably cause comparable harm today. Always remember how easy it
> would be to get a few sticks of dynamite into most US trains or subways

That's localized death on the order of thousands at most, not global death of
millions like the parent post was suggesting. Still obviously horrifying, but
doesn't really compare in terms of the threat.

~~~
aetherson
Well, one bomb would be, yes.

A sufficiently hypothetically scary driverless car attack might manage to do
more deaths (though it'd be really hard, even for a state actor). But I think
it wouldn't really get to the level of "more capable of causing terror." If
you could cause let's say 15,000 deaths by a well-coordinated one-day bombing
attack, and 80,000 deaths by a well-coordinated one-day driverless car attack,
do those two things actually differentiate themselves in terms of your
nation's agenda? I'd think they'd cause more-or-less identical amounts of
terror, and the only purpose of such attacks are terror.

Ultimately, I don't think it's important. Nobody who's resourced well enough
to pull this off is interested in doing it.

~~~
aidenn0
If I understand correctly, your claim is that only well-resourced (e.g. state-
level) attackers will be able to pull this off.

It is extremely clear to me that today both desktop computers and IoT devices
do not require a well-resourced attacker to compromise (can we agree on
this?).

The point where we disagree is that I see little evidence that driverless car
companies are investing in defense in depth that is at a level significantly
higher than either IoT devices or desktop operating systems. Indeed, there is
such a race to be first-to-market that the companies are incentivized to _not_
spend resources on it.

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harshaw
I would like to see a real study that says people are comfortable with level 5
autonomy. When I ask my 40 something friends their response is "no way". And
these are engineers. So maybe a generational thing. It's not that there won't
be adoption - but to say you will have sea-change style adoption?

People who write these reports seem to be ignorant of the diversity of the
automobile owning public. Does no one live in suburbia or have kids? The idea
of sharing a car just doesn't make sense. it's part home / workshop / storage
area. Maybe innovation solves this. Your rental minivan will dump its pod of
crap at your house when it drops you off and picks it up when you call it.

Yes, if you live in a dense area this stuff makes great sense. But how do you
deal with these use cases:

1) Follow behind your kid on halloween 2) Casually drive anywhere and pull
over to watch the view. "Alexa - pull over at that little turn off." maybe?

~~~
sporkenfang
> Does no one live in suburbia or have kids? The idea of sharing a car just
> doesn't make sense. it's part home / workshop / storage area. Maybe
> innovation solves this. Your rental minivan will dump its pod of crap at
> your house when it drops you off and picks it up when you call it.

Ok, so this is in no way a criticism of you or your kids, but having kids
doesn't have to mean that (e.g., would you let your kid leave her crayons on
the subway? in the public library?). Sure, kids anywhere could occasionally
mean kid vomit, but that's what damages fees are for, right?

Lots of people, my sister included, have kids and don't even own cars, today,
right now.

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aetherson
You didn't understand him. He didn't mean that your kids will mess up the car,
he meant that when you have kids, your car fills up with kid paraphernalia
that you don't want to constantly load and unload.

My car has in it:

1\. My daughter's carseat.

2\. About three kleenex-box-sized volume worth of her books and toys.

3\. Wet wipes and diapers and changing equipment.

4\. A booster seat.

5\. A box of food and eating stuff (bibs, etc.)

Those all live in my car permanently. I don't want to take them all out and
put them all back every time I go to the store.

~~~
tmh79
Things will change, people raised kids for thousands of years before the
automobile. To some extent, the reason you carry around all of that stuff is
because you have the car, and the current state is the best of all possible
alternatives for you and your family. In the future, the best of all possible
alternatives might change, and the conditions that lead you to having made a
choice to live a car centric lifestyle may change such that future parents of
young children will do it differently.

Maybe the design of cars radically changes. Maybe the design of spaces in
which we live changes to accommodate a more car free/car subscription but not
ownership lifestyle. Parents are a large market and people will make money by
solving these problems, but the first step before that is autonomy.

~~~
aetherson
Between the alternatives of:

1\. Pay a bit more for a car you own (I mean, this isn't THAT expensive. A
good used car costs maybe $8,000 and can last for five years).

or

2\. Fundamentally restructuring your life to a pre-modern approach of
childcare

Which one would _you_ do?

~~~
tmh79
From what I see, you're looking at the current set of
constraints/opportunities and then just inserting a self driving car, the
reality is that autonomy and the way people live is going to change things in
many hard to predict ways. You're heuristic is probably applicable for the
first ~5 years, but after then all bets are off.

A few things that I think you are assuming that will not change are:

1) High availability of free/cheap parking at all of your destinations
including your home.

2) high availability of autonomous cars actually for sale to end users. Due to
the odd liability of an autonomous car (is the owner responsible for a crash?
how do you insure against that) I anticipate most/all L5 autonomy to be
subscription based, not available for purchase.

3) Prohibitively expensive congestion/registration/etc charges for owner
occupied cars in order to reduce the number of cars on the road

4) car ownership remaining legal (unlikely to change, I admit)

There is a lot that can happen. You will probably own a car for the rest of
your life, your children probably will never own a car.

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YSFEJ4SWJUVU6
I'll believe it when I see it. To me it seems much more believable by that
time that kind of cars won't dominate even streets around Google HQ.

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elihu
> And while 40% of the cars in 2030 will still be of the old, internal
> combustion variety, they'll represent just 5% of the consumer miles driven.

> compared to the internal-combustion standard, self-driving EVs will
> represent, “a 90% decrease in finance costs, an 80% decrease in maintenance
> costs, a 90% decrease in insurance costs and a 70% decrease in fuel costs.”

> Car subscription services will increase utilization of a vehicle from
> 16,000-32,000 kilometers per year to 160,000 kilometers or more. And that
> reduces the number of years the car is in service (and thus interest paid on
> any financing plan) as well as increases the amount of use wrung out of it
> per year.

These seem like wildly optimistic projections based on an assumption that a
single self-driving car can take the place of 5-10 conventional vehicles. This
could possibly work if commuters don't all need to use those cars at the same
time (maybe a wider prevalence of non 9-5 work schedules) or that a
substantial portion of autonomous vehicles will be high-occupancy minivans and
the vast majority of commuters are willing to carpool with random strangers. I
don't expect either of those things to happen.

I do think self-driving cars will be successful and widely used, but it's hard
to imagine them having a 95% share of passenger miles when there's plenty of
manually-driven cars still on the road.

> The savings represent some $5600 per consumer per year or $1 trillion in
> additional disposable income in the U.S. alone by 2030.

According to the first thing I found on Google[1], average consumer spending
on transportation was about $9503 per year in 2015 (which is a lot higher than
I would have guessed. Apparently I'm an outlier). I think it's unrealistic to
assume that lower vehicle maintenance and insurance costs are going to be
passed on directly to consumers rather than shareholders. I know that's how
efficient markets are supposed to work in general when you have multiple
competitors, but I'll believe it when I see it.

[1]
[https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm)

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frgtpsswrdlame
I think it's ridiculous to espouse something like this when we have no real
comparison of the safety of self-driving versus human driven cars as they
exist right now.

~~~
xbmcuser

      Level 5 autonomous driving means driving better than most humans so it automatically means safer.

~~~
Spivak
Which is a vacuously true statement because level 5 automation is practically
defined as being better than human drivers.

The problem is that they basically have to perform better than humans in all
situations. As soon as someone dies from a crash that a human could have
prevented -- like the Tesla that plowed into a semi because it was white and
it couldn't distinguish it from the sky -- it's basically game over for
consumer trust.

If all we care about is safety then total automation is going to be fighting a
losing battle against a machine assisted human drivers for a long time.

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srcmap
Since I am not going to be driving it, do I still need car insurance?

Shouldn't the company who develop the Self-Driving tech be liable for any
accidents/damages its tech might cause?

If so, great deal for consumers, but I doubt the developers of the Self-
Driving Tech would agree pay for the insurance for everyone

~~~
randyrand
At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. The car owner will still pay
either indirectly or directly. There is no other choice.

If the software developer is liable, then the software developers will just
include that extra cost upfront when you purchase the self driving
software/vehicle, or more likely as a monthly subscription to continue using
their software, just like insurance!

If the customer is liable, then customers will just purchase separate
insurance like we already do.

At the end of the day it's pretty much the exact same system. My 2 cents is we
should just keep our current system and let people buy insurance from a third
party instead of having to go through the software developer.

~~~
Spivak
It's not just about who pays for the policy, its about all the other insurance
things.

If your car is 'at fault' in an accident and you weren't driving do your rates
go up? What does that even mean?

~~~
randyrand
I imagine your rate would be the same as everyone that uses your self driving
software version.

In fact, your rate could go up because _other people_ with your software are
getting into accidents? Sounds crazy right? But it makes complete sense.
Eventually it'd encourage you to switch to a safer self driving car system,
which is good.

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ThomPete
The real test of self driving cars are place like Mumbai where you are
litteraly 6 vehicles on a 2 laned road. These includes cows, motorcycles,
electrical rickshaws, normal cars and trucks, plus pedestrians who just walk
in between them. The distance is often not more than a couple of inches.

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Animats
When self-driving cars take over, traffic will look very different. More like
this: [1]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm_rlLyelQo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm_rlLyelQo)

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Animats
Self-driving cars, yes. Car-sharing, probably not. There are many car rental
schemes now, but they're a niche market. Zipcar is not going to take over the
world.

~~~
KevanM
I don't know - why do you need to own a car 100% of the time?

Why not have a car drive to pick you up for your commute maybe with someone
else heading your way - then it goes about and picks up people who are heading
to the shops, have doctor's appointments, are heading to the airport.

You might even part-own that car - you get priority on your travelling hours -
and the lease company does a daily valet before the car comes to pick you up.

~~~
takk309
An example for full time ownership is chaining trips together. If I am
planning to go to multiple stores over the course of the day (one before work,
two at lunch, and one after), I don't want to have to load and unload my
purchases each time I have to get a different car. Or if I plan to do an
activity after work that requires lots of equipment home is not along the way,
I will bring the gear with and leave it in my car for the day.

These are just two examples from my own life but I am sure there are other
reasons to own a private car.

~~~
chii
It could be a time based rental, rather than trip based. If you think you'll
need it for several trips, you should have the option to do that, rather than
having to swap cars between trips.

~~~
aetherson
To the extent that that's cheap, you'll see the utilization of the rental cars
go down. To the extent that it's not cheap, why are people using this service?

There is some kind of happy-ish medium there, but it's another chip away at
the claims of the omnipresence of rides-for-hire.

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soperj
>1) Follow behind your kid on halloween

Seriously? Fucking walk.

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asn0
Um, there are reasons other than laziness.

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ThomPete
Such as?

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Namrog84
Various forms of disabilities, injuries, other conditions that walking isn't
great for.

Personal: My mom has CRPS and walking around causes a great increase in pain
for her(painkillers, even morphine level have almost 0 effect), even being in
a car can be very difficult for her, but a vehicle she is able to better
position herself than in a wheelchair. She can't drive because of it, but an
autonomous car would make it so she could potentially go places (or follow the
grand children around at Halloween). Both my parents are in their 60s and 70s
and are super excited about level 5 self-driving cars.

Random other example: Parent is on crutches from injury, insurance didn't
cover wheelchair, or perhaps live in area with poor wheelchair
accessibility(bad/no sidewalks). But crutches are too slow to keep up with the
kids, they could easily just sit in a self driving car and keep up. But not
having to focus on driving and hitting other kids night, can focus on watching
their kids and hanging out the window to interact with them.

~~~
Namrog84
ThomPete,

Sure these aren't necessarily applicable to ALL people, but you asked "such
as?" to "Um, there are reasons other than laziness."

I gave you at least 2 specifics such as. There are plenty of laziness reasons,
but doesn't mean there aren't potential valid reasons besides laziness.

I also generalized the "Various forms of disabilities, injuries, other
conditions that walking isn't great for." in the beginning. And there are
literally tens of millions of Americans that have at least 1 disability
(approximately 20 percent of the US population). And lots of other countries
like Japan has an aging population which are likely to have various mobility
issues. Not including injuries, or potentially other issues. So I would say
that is fairly generalizable.

~~~
ThomPete
Didn't mean to diminish the burden for those in the specific situations. Just
mean that we can't have a discussion about self-driving cars by using
anecdotes and anomalies, we have to talk about the general issues.

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nether
Self-driving, plug-in Tacoma = dream car.

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decayofprivacy
Ridiculous. I would never allow it. I think that autonomy and freedom triumph
in America at the very least (Europe is hopeless)

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lucasmullens
You won't allow what? People to have the right to choose to use a self-driving
car? How is that support freedom and autonomy?

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codecamper
Let's hope they are electric. Because self driving cars will obviously make
single person in a car transit cheap. And therefore cities will be chock-a-
full of these things.

I think there should be a law that these cars are no bigger than a Fiat 500 (a
little bigger than a bumper car).

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elihu
I'm not looking forward to the streets being crowded with zero-occupant
vehicles on their way to pick someone up or driving home after dropping
someone off, or just circling the block all day because it's cheaper than
paying for a parking spot.

~~~
codecamper
If they are self driving you can just step in front of them & they stop,
right?

