
Three areas where self-driving cars will bring new opportunities - wglb
https://medium.com/@patelaniket/self-driving-cars-will-affect-everything-you-know-6d7f0a22c3c1
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ChuckMcM
Such a powerful sense of Deja-vu. I'm old enough to remember in 1998 when
everyone was saying "The Internet will effect everything you know" and yet
lots of people would say "Really? I get along fine without email, I just use a
FAX machine. And everything I want to buy is right down at the mall or in one
of the mail order catalogs on my shelf. Internet hah! All that so I can get a
chain letter of jokes I learned in middle school. No thanks."

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joe_the_user
Well,

It's true that self-driving cars will/would change a huge amount. But the
article seems to make a lot of assumptions that may or may not be warranted.
Will this facilitate population spread or population density? I think there
are a lot of paradoxical factors which may come up.

One change someone pointed out here a while back is self-driving-ability
increases the willingness of people to idle their cars in traffic. It stands
to reason that an owner would have little disincentive to send their car out
to idle in traffic and pick them up a few hours later, if it was convenient.
It seems the final result would be gridlock.

Roads today are a free or low priced good whose use is limited by the ability
by each person's ability and willingness to drive. Driverless cars could
consume this good with fewer limits creating a "tragedy of the commons" type
situation.

So it seems like either you will have regulation or you will have an
unregulated situation where traffic grinds to even more of a halt than it is
at today in major metropolitan areas.

If you have regulation, you may find eventually everyone forced into an
Uber/Lyfte situation (self-driving cars become smart-buses) since that would
optimize the use of street space. This would facilitate density imo.

If you have no regulation, you might find some folks going further out despite
the time and because of the not having to do their driving. But that seems
hard to know.

And generally, the change would be big enough that indeed predicting all the
results seems hard. What level of autonomy is achieved when is a big factor,
etc.

~~~
Tiktaalik
The availability of self driving cars will significantly remove some of the
biggest disincentives to car use, such as licensing and parking costs. The
immediate impact of this would be a stronger incentive to drive a car over
other alternatives and more cars on the road.

This change in balance between transportation options will have significant
negative impacts on cities, many of which are already actively engaged in
encouraging people to choose other transportation options than the car.

A collision between self driving car share companies and city governments
seems likely. As self driving cars become more prevalent, we may see cities
enact more anti-congestion regulations as a result.

~~~
justinjlynn
If self-driving vehicles become common, there is no real reason to own a
vehicle besides extremely heavy utilisation or aesthetics. A public grid of
transport is a natural outcome of removing the transport driver bottleneck.
Heavily travelled routes will see buses and mass options dynamically (why
bother with routes and schedules?) and requests not efficiently served could
be handled by unit transport. One might pay extra for direct per-unit
transport or pay less for hub-spoke transfer routing. The options are quite
intriguing.

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Tiktaalik
There are already examples of routeless public transport, which is in third
world countries with private, relatively poor quality mini bus based public
transport. As transit systems become more developed they graduate toward fixed
routes with larger capacity buses because it is the most efficient way of
transporting people. This is why we've seen Lyft move toward this as well
(reinventing the bus).

It will be interesting to see how autonomous vehicles change public transit as
the technology develops, but I would not be surprised if the utopian vision of
public transit that delivers the user to their exact destination never becomes
a reality.

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icebraining
Ah, but _why_ is it more efficient? Sure, there's some energy savings, but not
that much. The main reason is having fewer drivers per passenger. But when
there are no drivers, that doesn't apply.

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Tiktaalik
The main efficiency comes from simplifying the route. Routing to the exact
final destination takes too much time.

People seem to think algorithms and computers will change this fact, but this
hasn't appeared yet and is unlikely to.

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icebraining
Who cares if it takes time, if car time becomes cheap? That's the whole point.
Time is not a cost in itself, the cost comes from the resources being spent
during that time. If the resources/time ratio drops, the total cost remains
the same even as you expand the time used.

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AndrewKemendo
I just don't see it. I mean these three things aren't "everything you know."

Even then I have a major issue with the concept that people are going to be
reading Ulysses, or watching a movie on the drive. Car sickness is a real
thing and affects a sizeable enough portion of the population that it's not
going to overhaul entertainment.

I think what it is going to do is make people who drive for a living obsolete
and have better flexibility in transportation for the working class and poor,
making it into a better version of the bus.

~~~
Judgmentality
There will also be people that have a good reason to own cars - like if you
have a dog, or a baby (so you essentially keep baby stuff in your car nearby),
or just need to lug large amounts of stuff around that you need handy.

That said, I do believe - if the technology proved successful - it will have
an enormous impact.

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cletus
I'll first state my opinion that I too believe that (to use a different
cliche) self-driving cars will be transformative.

That being said, I just don't think they're as close as many think.

What is coming and will continue coming is assisted driving. These cars will
be designed for human drivers but the car will just do more of the driving.
This will have an incremental increase in safety. I imagine too that bugs will
cause deaths and even though this will pale in comparison to the number of
motor vehicle deaths we have now, alarmist concerns will stymy automation
here.

The holy grail here however isn't assisted driving. It's self-driving and you
shouldn't confuse the two. A self-driving car in my mind will not be designed
to be driven by a human at all.

There is a lot of low hanging fruit for this but the low hanging fruit isn't
that low and there is a long tail of situations a car will need to deal with.
I actually wonder if we can design a self driving car without first creating
what I can only describe as a "general AI". Anticipating what the other meat
bags will do is a huge part of this.

Once this happens (and, again, I think we're talking a long time still) I
don't see private ownership of vehicles going away. People like to own things.
What you'll see is car ownership disappear in highly urbanized places helped
I'm sure by punitive taxing of car ownership ("punitive" here means not
subsidizing car ownership like we do now).

I suspect such cars will allow people to live even further from cities when
you can work in your car. More people doing it still means a lot of cars on
the road.

Self-driving cars just aren't the end of private car ownership. If anything
they'll likely be a death blow to taxis. It might be a huge problem for mass
transit too.

~~~
tachyonbeam
IMO, what has even more transformative potential is human-carrying drones.
Flying, self-driving taxis. That could really shorten commute time, and allow
people to live very far from work. You could easily live 100KM away, and make
that commute in 30 minutes. It would completely change urbanization and
population density. It's maybe not that far away either. Self-driving air
vehicles is in many ways simpler than making something that can understand
driving on the road and interacting with human drivers. The main limitation
right now is that we aren't quite there yet on battery tech, we maybe need a
factor of 2 or 3 improvement in power density for this technology to become
inevitable.

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MagnumOpus
> The main limitation right now is that we aren't quite there yet on battery
> tech

That might be the main tech limitation (don't agree with that either because
flight coordination is actually a bigger problem.

The actual MAIN limitation is that in an urban area (where 95% of jobs are) no
resident is going to stand for helicopter noise by thousands of commuters at
all hours. And creating a drone/copter that is quiet while transporting
people-sized payloads is a much bigger challenge than creating one which is
fuel efficient.

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FussyZeus
I can say this: if my car is now going to be throwing ads at me as well, I'm
going off grid. I have enough information pollution that I have to deal with.

~~~
grecy
> _I can say this: if my car is now going to be throwing ads at me as well, I
> 'm going off grid_

You are already the frog slowly boiling in the pot, and you have not noticed
it has already gotten extremely hot.

I live in the Yukon, and spend weeks at a time in the wilderness near the
Article circle in Yukon and Alaska. I do that for a year or two, then maybe
take a flight to Vancouver. Before I even leave the airport I am utterly
dumbfounded at the amount of advertising people put up with daily. And phone
use. And restaurants, and well, basically just everything.

Sometimes I think it's healthy to come back to "the world" occasionally, other
times I say good riddance.

~~~
FussyZeus
There is nothing inherently wrong with the modern world, including smartphone
usage. The fact that you don't choose to use one (or as often, or whatever)
doesn't make it wrong that I do.

My phone is an iPhone, and I make great effort to only use apps that are paid
and without ads. You get a ton of utility usage out of these things (and yes,
they help you kill time waiting for your doctor or your train too) and the
only way it's a billboard constantly shouting bullshit into your face is if
you allow it.

I do agree though, the amount of advertising people are subject to is
egregious. I have a feeling that's a bubble that will be bursting soon.

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JumpCrisscross
I've stopped thinking of them as cars. They're "thing movers".

Consider how much of the speed, size and load constraints of a lorry are
driven by the needs of the tiny human at the front. Self-driving trucks make
possible a slow-moving vehicle trucking super-heavy stuff across the country
at cheap rates because it only operates at the most-efficient speed its engine
drives at. Or very-small trucks. Or cars that seat configurations and numbers
of people that don't make sense given the constraints imposed by a human
driver (who must be entertained or paid for their time).

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twothamendment
"It’s estimated that there are as much as 2 billion parking spaces in the US
alone and a third of them are in parking lots! That’s over 42 billion square
feet of space..."

That seems to be off by about a factor of 5 - or it is too late for me to do
math. The article seems to be using 21 sqft per space. A typical space might
be 8'x14' or 112 sqft each.

If we can eliminate some parking spots that will free up alot of space for
something else.

~~~
nkoren
That's roughly correct for on-street parking. In a parking lo or garage, the
parking space + associated room for lanes and turnarounds works adds up to
about 330 sqft per space.

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gumby
About five years I thought of buying up some parking lots in manhattan
figuring I could make a killing when AVs made it unnecessary. The economics
were unfortunately out of my reach (and in many cases the air rights had been
sold off).

I looked at some other places like St. Louis but the long term economic
prospects werent encouraging.

~~~
benjaminjackman
I'm probably up too late, but why would falling demand for an asset cause that
asset's price to rise, shouldn't it be the opposite?

~~~
sowbug
It gets used for something more valuable than parking. (One might question
that premise; unless there were zoning reasons the land had to be used for
parking, you'd expect the free market to have already found the most valuable
use for it.)

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cheetos
When I read this, I can't help but think of the enormous promises that came
with the computerization of medical records versus the reality that we have
today.

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chiefofgxbxl
David Dudley (CityLab) offers a unique perspective worth considering:

"A decade hence, we might find ourselves even more beholden to automotive
infrastructure, as city streets swell with the dread “zero-occupancy”
vehicles—empty cars roaming about running errands for their affluent owners.
And those left behind by the first car revolution—those whose paychecks are
already consumed by automotive expenses or who rely on increasingly shaky
public transit networks—will be even more hopelessly marooned in the mobility
deserts that remain." [0]

I'm growing more concerned that self-driving cars will actually increase
traffic. There is an equilibrium found based on a driver's willingness to
drive. Once we eliminate that need for a driver, that equilibrium disappears.

For example, if I have a sudden urge for ice cream and I see that my freezer
is empty, I have to make a decision whether it's worth driving all the way to
the grocery store just to buy a single item. Suppose I decide, no.. it's not
worth the hassle.

Now introduce an app that allows me to send an autonomous car to the store,
have the employee fulfill my order, and the car brings back my ice cream. What
you'll have is a horrible gridlock of people using these cars to buy single
items at a time, out of impulse. Before, the hassle of me having to drive to
the store stifled that impulse. Without having to drive to get the items I
want, I no longer have stake in that matter. _Who cares if traffic has gotten
worse? I 'm not in it._

[Edit - add another scenario:] Consider another scenario. My friend wants to
borrow an item X from me. He doesn't need it immediately, so I may decide to
drop it off at his house next week when I drive over to visit. Now with a
self-driving car, heck... why not just send the item X over to him now? It's
no hassle to me since I don't have to drive, and he gets it sooner. But now
I've just placed more burden on our roads and our environment.

This also spells a bad scenario for climate change, if it increases the amount
of vehicle-miles traveled and CO2 emissions.

While it's possible for autonomous vehicles to reduce sprawl by eliminating
vast parking lots and road space, I think a more plausible scenario is that
people use self-driving cars as their own personal butler, picking up items
here and there from stores, increasing the strain on our roads. After all, if
you had an app on your phone that allowed you to order a vehicle to pick up
items from a store, all in the comfort of your own home, wouldn't you make a
butler out of this car?

[Edit] Perhaps what self-driving cars will enable is a plethora of what
amounts to useless and wasteful voyages.

[0] [http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/30/biggest-
ch...](http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/30/biggest-challenge-
american-cities-policy-experts-215308) (the section titled "Self-driving
cars")

~~~
aantix
Smart consolidation will happen. E.g. People with a similar route will share
the vehicle retrieving the item, or a single designated car will pick up
multiple items from that store and intelligently deliver..

~~~
maxxxxx
This would be nice but is it really where things are going?

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IanCal
That's how things currently work with deliveries, so personally I'd guess that
would continue and delivery companies probably have a greater push to optimise
costs than you do personally.

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siliconc0w
Once we have the technology for level 5 automation we'll probably sensibility
arrive at the conclusion that it makes little sense to ferry people across
geographies so they can share information in the same room when we already
have pretty good technology for doing that without everyone being in the same
room.

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Smaug123
It took until I became a private tutor before I realised just how difficult
some things are to do remotely. There are many subtle cues I pick up from a
tutee in person which are either not conveyed, or are really hard to pick up,
when the person is on the other side of a screen. Probably mitigated by larger
and higher-fidelity telepresence rooms, admittedly, which might have been
where you were going with this.

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CalRobert
This person barely touches on what seems like the biggest problem - autonomous
cars (especially electric ones) could make 100-mile commutes the norm,
massively speeding the conversion of agricultural and wild land in to housing
and asphalt, and further destroying this already rather strained planet. All
of the harm wrought with automobiles will have the two things tempering it
(monetary and time cost) removed.

Oh, and they're hell on Earth for walking, cycling, motorcycling, or vibrant,
human-scale neighborhoods.

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roadbeats
> it won’t make sense for people to own cars in the future because ride-
> sharing apps like Lyft and Uber will be our go-to when it comes to moving
> from point A to point B.

Is there anyone left who hasn't heard this Silicon Valley cliche ?

Even outside the SF, most people own bicycle and cars to get around. I lived
in Oakland for 5 years and rarely took Lyft (never used Uber for known
reasons). I can count a lot of reasons to own a car, for example, you would
never call Lyft to go to a waterfall or visiting Yosemite.

If the case is owning car only for navigating in the city, bicycle combined
with good public transportation solves that problem already in a much better
and healthier way.

~~~
gumby
Economics will drive this. The car is the most, or second most, expensive
investment most people make, yet it has anutilizatio rate of only a few
percent. And big corporation s can borrow at a much more preferential rate
(prime, basically).

~~~
syrrim
You could say the say about renting vs buying houses, and yet many people
still buy. The only reason a rental service is funded is because investors
think they can make more money than by selling mortgages. This will continue
to be true for cars.

~~~
tachyonbeam
There is a big difference between cars and houses, which is that houses tend
to gain value over time, whereas cars drastically decrease in value. Driving
is also time consuming and stressful. Dealing with maintenance, licensing,
refueling, etc. are also annoying burdens.

~~~
nradov
_Land_ tends to gain value over time. Houses depreciate just like cars.

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chrismealy
The tooth fairy will change everything too.

It's vaporware. People are getting themselves tied up into knots over
vaporware.

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frik
> In an ideal world, where no one owns a car, everyone requests a ride through
> their phone. This means that the ride-sharing companies would own the cars
> themselve

Who said people want such an disruption? They want electric cars. They want
self-driving cars. They want to own OR lease OR rent cars. Have you missed the
"own car" portion? I for one want to own my car, as I can do the math, it's
cheaper and I can sleep in peace. This smearing campaigns to lobby for change
society to take them away cars and promote "cars as a service" (aka rent) as
only option is very disgusting. I know it's their wet dream - just go away.

~~~
infogulch
> I can do the math, it's cheaper

You're basing your math on the state of cars today. This will change
drastically. A self driving fleet will be very cheap to order compared to
current taxis or ride sharing services.

