
Self-driving technology is going to change more than cars - bookofjoe
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/self-driving-technology-is-going-to-change-a-lot-more-than-cars/
======
tootie
There's going to be a tipping point in the near future. When autonomous
vehicles reach a big enough share of miles driven, there's going to be a
snowball effect. All of our roads and infrastructure are built for human
drivers. Robot-only roads could far cheaper and more efficient. No more signs
or lights. No more lanes. Not even partitions. You can dynamically adjust your
8-lane freeway to be 6 lanes one way and 2 the other and flip it morning and
evening.

Once the tech is proven and accepted by enough people, it will become
mandatory and we're going to rebuild everything with a much smaller footprint.

~~~
rayiner
> There's going to be a tipping point in the near future.

I'm not holding my breath. I grew up hearing people talk about how we would
have Mars colonies by now. Imagine my surprise a couple of decades later when
the shuttle program ended and the U.S. lost the ability to send people into
space for a time.

The way I see it, the clock is ticking. If self-driving cars don't reach a
certain level of capability soon, I suspect they simply won't; the technology
will have plateaued at a point where it will not be viable in the foreseeable
future. It'll be like supersonic flight: full of promise in the 1960s and
1970s, but mothballed for decades after that waiting for some engineering
breakthrough to make it commercially viable.

~~~
monkeynotes
Another problem is consumer confidence. Self driving accidents have a much
higher impact in the news and people's minds than human error accidents.

The perception problem is the same as air flight. If self driving cars can't
be essentially accident free passengers will be filled with the anxiety of
lack of control. Even if the self driving car is 99% safer than human operated
cars it's a hard sell to the buyer when you face that 1% risk that the
consumer doesn't perceive as being a mitigation toward their own driving
safety skills.

Apologies for the incomprehensible last sentence, hope you get the gist
though.

~~~
bluGill
Government investigators will not have that bias. I expect in ~10 years it
will be illegal make a new car that is not self driving because self driving
cars will be statically safer. Some years (10?) after that and human driving
cars will be limited to parades.

Note, I include in self driving cases where there is a human seemingly in
control, but the computer will override bad input and even take over all
driving as needed..

Edit: originally this implied that it would be illegal to posses a manually
driven car. Governments will not remove all the existing cars from the road
that quick.

~~~
tudelo
You think all cars that are not self-driving will be illegal in 10 years
?!?!?!

------
white-flame
What's going to be more interesting:

\- Police departments won't get revenue from traffic violations anymore.

\- Police won't have the source of suspicious, law-ignoring driving to find
people who need to be found.

\- Towing & crash repair shops will drastically drop in business (maintenance
will probably increase, but not commensurate).

\- Auto insurance won't be able to justify high premiums anymore.

~~~
polloslocos
\- transplant patients won't have access to as many organs if vehicle
fatalities drastically decrease

~~~
repsilat
There's a hypothetical world in which organ distribution is so efficient and
prevalent that the average fatal car crash saves net lives. What a strange
kind of "trolley problem" that raises...

------
gehwartzen
What will really change is your ability to hop in a car and literally drive
anywhere you want; be it some random corner of your yard, backing down a boat
ramp, or some unmarked gravel road deep in the country side. Not to mention
the day companies and governments have the ability to electronically restrict
where you or the population at large can visit. It will become trivial to look
down entire cities and road systems.

I think people will under-appreciate this incredible freedom in travel which
we have now until it's gone.

------
rdiddly
Interesting read, though I think they're overestimating the cost of the human
driver in relation to the total cost of running a route/taxi/shuttle/bus/etc.
If you go completely autonomous, maintenance costs don't go away. (And in fact
vandalism probably goes up.) Fuel costs, which at some point are going to
become a big deal again, don't go away. And permitting fees either stay the
same, go down or go up, depending on how local governments handle it.

~~~
harperlee
I guess we can approximate vandalism very easily through both shared car
platforms such as car2go (for vandalic users that are left alone in the car),
and vandalism against taxi substitutes such as uber (for rage against
displaced driver jobs).

It doesn't seem that car2go-style cars get vandalized a lot; next-user
reporting controls most of what goes above a level of vandalism (smoking users
and some trash in the car is normally not reported).

Rage against uber by taxis has been more rampant (imho); so if we add bus
drivers, lorry drivers, taxi and Uber drivers, etc. there might be a lot of
damages on the short term. But once these displaced workers find another job
that vandalism will disappear, so it will be transient during adoption times
only.

~~~
rdiddly
You haven't captured every motive for vandalism, but I agree with you that
it's probably mostly transient. Kind of like how the people who go crazy with
drugs & prostitution in Amsterdam (well with pot legalization I probably no
longer have to travel quite so far to fetch this example, but anyway...) are
mostly visitors for whom such a thing is novel. Most Dutch natives are pretty
blasé about having access to those things.

I notice the Car2Go (or e.g. Zipcar) next-user reporting system depends on
their knowing the identity of each user at every point in time. Which is
presumably also true if you've used an app to hail or summon an autonomous
vehicle... Still I guess I was nostalgically imagining something like the
relative anonymity of today's cash-fare bus services. (Though even those are
loaded up with surveillance cameras.)

------
patrickg_zill
I think that a large amount of skepticism is justified... There's a reason
that all self-driving car trials are running in states with mostly sunny
weather and no snow.

Let me know when a self-driving trial is being run in Vermont or New
Hampshire. In November.

~~~
maxsilver
> all self-driving car trials are running in states with mostly sunny weather
> and no snow. Let me know when a self-driving trial is being run in Vermont
> or New Hampshire.

Would Detroit Michigan's snowy winters count? Google, Ford, and Chevy already
do routine winter testing there :
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-26/alphabet-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-26/alphabet-
s-waymo-will-test-self-driving-cars-in-wintry-detroit)

~~~
patrickg_zill
Thanks for that link, I hadn't seen any info about wintertime testing. Sadly
the article has no info on the results of the testing.

------
wnmurphy
When this starts scaling, there is definitely going to be a culture clash
between these autonomous vehicles which follow the exact letter of the law,
and the human drivers who routinely don't.

When you get stuck in the line of cars behind one of these things in the fast
lane, and it's not going 3-8 mph over the posted speed limit like everyone
else...

I'd bet that they are going to have dedicated lanes.

~~~
whatshisface
The letter of the law in many states says that if you are not passing you must
use the rightmost lane. So, these cars should pool up in that lane while human
drivers zip by to the left of them. There are humans that go the speed limit
today, and this is usually what happens.

~~~
treerock
In my experience, the cars in the slow lane are often going well below the
speed limit. So you could easily have self-driving cars, driving at the speed
limit, in the passing lane.

I'm curious if they would be programmed to 'move in' to allow a faster
(exceeding speed limit) car to pass.

------
parvenu74
I can't help but think there are going to be significant unforeseen
consequences of this -- consequences that will give rise to business models we
haven't even begun to consider yet. Off the top of my head: why have retail
stores to which you have to drive 5 to 15 miles? Put a densely packed
warehouse (one that looks more like a large home than a warehouse going ten
levels below grade) of the most commonly needed groceries right in a cluster
of neighborhoods and orders can be made online, picked by robots, and
delivered by autonomous vehicle (and restocked from larger, more central
warehouses in a similar manner).

And kicking it up a notch: how about the domestic robot signing for the order
and beginning dinner preparations with the just-in-time delivered products
while the humans in the house... well, play video games....

~~~
currydove
While I am enjoying the Jetsons-like future that is envisioned in your post,
I'm quite curious how we can maybe do simpler solutions. For example, we used
to have a milkman who just dropped off milk on our front door. I can easily
imagine dairies owning their own regional distribution networks with
autonomous vehicles performing milk deliveries for much cheaper. No domestic
robot really needed to sign for the order.

Same goes for groceries, I suppose. A co-op of farms operate an automated
warehouse together whose responsibility is to consolidate the various fruits
and vegetables and distribute via autonomous vehicles to homes. It gives a
competitive advantage to regional farms so they can actually still do things
at a reasonable economy of scale.

Just my two cents. Also, yes, video games all day. :)

~~~
parvenu74
The domestic robot and video games part was tongue-in-cheek but your idea of
locally-sourced, fair-trade, free-range, antibiotics-free, non-GMO, brownie-
points-loaded options could greatly benefit from this type of logistics setup.
Really what this does is make it a lot easier to never have to leave your home
for any reason if you don't want to. There are some people with this type of
phobia now who can work from home and have everything they need delivered to
them, but they are an abnormal exception. As the cost over going out to get
your own stuff versus staying at home and having it all come to you drops
toward zero I wonder if anti-social reclusion might become an unintended
consequence.

------
mromanuk
I like the concept car of Nuro, looks like a moving shelf, maybe could be
possible to scale that to a bigger size. Where each customer, can pickup his
groceries. random thought: an autonomous milk car with fresh diary from your
local farm

~~~
no1youknowz
In the not too distant future. It will be something more akin to:

1) Fridge finds several items low and proceeds to order groceries.

2) Website schedules car to be driven to store.

3) Store Robot packs groceries and finds car in car-park.

4) Negotiation between Car and Robot occurs, groceries placed in trunk.

5) Car drives off home.

6) Car notifies domestic robot that groceries have arrived.

7) Groceries put into fridge by domestic robot.

8) Lazy human requests that domestic robot gets them a can of beer. Unaware
that the whole process occurred.

~~~
fegu
A lot of efficiency and responsibility/insurance issues will be solved if the
store used its own fleet of delivery cars. Other than that, we can hope this
materializes. Domestic robots will be a revolution.

~~~
bluGill
I'm not sure. I'm thinking it will be on my way home my car stops at the
grocery store for a few minutes to fill my trunk, thus saving the energy to
drive my car and their car to my house.

------
monk_e_boy
Living in a popular rural area with a lot of seasonal tourists ... I see the
future of self driving cars as mobile homes and hotels. Sort of like a mobile
air-b-and-b. A lot of my friends chase wind, waves and events around the area.
So they pack up a caravan or home made camper van and drive to the location
and party and surf. There is a crowd of 20 or so who share van space and give
lifts. I can only see this getting more popular. They already rent vans out.
When these become custom self driving surf wagons complete with shower kitchen
etc people will live on the move. Travelling at night while the passengers
sleep.

~~~
bluGill
They don't even need the kitchen/shower. When traveling I tend to eat at
restaurants, or find a park with a grill (sometimes I bring a camp stove).
Truck stops already have showers - they will need new users for them as there
are no longer truck drivers.

I've long wanted this, travel for 10 hours at night while I'm asleep, check
out a historical museum in middle of nowhere Kansas, drive an hour, have
lunch, and check out some county park (again in the middle of nowhere), then
have supper, drive a bit and watch the sunset over some historical marker and
the process repeats until I'm at Grandma's house. Much better than the current
plan of watching cotton fields go by.

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homero
The first thing that will happen is self driving trucks.

------
petermcneeley
Not mentioned here but likely highly dependent on Self-driving technology is
all the various forms of flying vehicles (example
[https://lilium.com/](https://lilium.com/)). The advantages are endless, 3d
traffic, zero road cost, direct line flight, speeds exceeding highways.
Primary real downside is energy cost.

~~~
ggg9990
Energy cost is only worse for quadcopters. A small fixed wing airplane gets
roughly the same gas mileage as a car in traffic.

------
armenarmen
Self Driving RVs and Bay Area rent/realestate prices. Imagine being able to
wake up in front of your office, then walk the 10 feet back "home" at the end
of the day. Then after an hour or so of hanging out in your mobile home's
living room walking outside to your spot in the Muir Woods.

------
mkstowegnv
Integrate into this mix all the future possibilities created by new materials
and AI including better drones, flying cars, advanced forms of collapsible
bicycles, and new forms of intercity transport including self carrying luggage
and we can expect churn in the ways we transport ourselves and our stuff for a
long time.

------
arto
See also Ben Evans's:

[https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars-
and-s...](https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars-and-second-
order-consequences)

------
bluGill
Somebody needs to start working on the last 10 meters problem: from my
driveway to the fridge.

~~~
Ciantic
It won't be an issue if your fridge is inside the autonomous vehicle, that
just parks to your kitchen wall.

~~~
bluGill
Interesting idea, but I don't think it works in practice.

I have foods and spices scattered across many cabinets in my kitchen - just
like every other family in the world (except for a few hunter/gather
families). Making them all autonomous vehicles would be expensive.

I also sometimes come in at random times and snack - the fridge with the snack
I want better be there, not out to the store to be refilled. This again is a
situation that every family in the world faces some variation of.

------
jellicle
Narrator voice: It won't.

