> The end state will be the fully autonomous module with no capability for the driver to exercise command. You will call for it, it will arrive at your location, you'll get in, input your destination and go to the freeway.
Except it won't. You'll go to three Sponsored Locations that offer similar, but not quite the same, services as the destination you selected, while the windows are used as projection screens for advertisements related to your destination and locations you're passing.
- Me: "Take me to Central Park."
- Car: "I'm sorry Tom, I can't let you do that. Going to MOMA, the New Museum, and Battery Park."
- Car: "We'll be passing a Wendy's restaurant momentarily. Did you want to stop to pick up some chicken nuggets or a tasty hamburger? I can offer you a 2 for 1 deal expiring in 5... 4... 3..."
- Me: "We were just planning on pizza, thanks."
- Car: "A $2 non-subsidized convenience fee will be added to your total."
These transportation companies will be able to order modules of various sizes — short ones, medium ones, long ones, even pickup modules. But the performance will be the same for all because nobody will be passing anybody else on the highway. That is the death knell for companies such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi. That kind of performance is not going to count anymore.
If he's right, kill me now. I really don't want to live in that world.
That's exactly what's happening now. 37,000 deaths per year just in the US.
But it won't be the deaths that will cause the change to happen: if the US actually cared more about preventing fatalities than "freedom" it'd regulate guns. The trigger for outlawing manual driving in cities and on freeways will be the convenience factor: 150mph travel without slowdowns for congestion will cut travel time to less than half.
If you want to drive manually, go to the track, just like you do today if you want to drive over 100mph.
>> 150mph travel without slowdowns for congestion will cut travel time to less than half.
Yes, just as the shift to supersonic air travel radically reduced flying times.
>>If you want to drive manually, go to the track
"Take it to the track" has been chanted for decades. It has long been possible to build cars physically or electronically unable to break speed limits. No such product has ever been brought to market.
>>The trigger for outlawing manual driving in cities and on freeways will be the convenience factor.
No. The convenience of me parking my car 20feet from my door, being able to hop in and out of it without planning, is far more convenient than having to call a car via an app on my phone. The knowledge that I have a car available 24/7 cannot be replaced by a promised car delivered via a cellphone.
Driving is not hard. It isn't even remotely dangerous compared to many jobs (I'm wear camo to work). They will have to come up with something far better than a 0.01% decrease in my risk of dying before I trust Uber to get me to work each morning.
Counterpoint: Motorcycles are exponentially more dangerous than cars, yet they persist. Driving is not a purely rational act.
> Driving is not hard. It isn't even remotely dangerous compared to many jobs
Hate to point out the obvious, but 35,000 people die every year in US because of driving. That's a lot of deaths. I would vote for avoiding those deaths - even though I enjoy a recreational drive once a year or so (all other times for me driving is a blood-boiling waste of life called commute).
2,596,993 people die every year in the US. That number cannot really be changed. People have to die of something. 35,000 means my chance of death by car accident, over my lifetime, is about 1.3%. That's minuscule. That I don't drink, or drive a motorcycle (anymore) pushes my likelihood down further, far below 1%.
Driving is not statistically dangerous. Doing it wrong (drinking) can make it dangerous but compared to any number of other activities (light aircraft, horse riding, scuba diving etc) it is remarkably safe.
Nobody's saying your deathsport hobby is going to be made illegal, but you'll be outclassed by robots on the public thoroughfares, and possibly priced out of the artisinal motorcar market as the buyers dwindle.
> Driving is not statistically dangerous
Humanity is notoriously bad at making decisions regarding small probabilities, and tradeoffs between risk and money. We know that people give wildly different answers to the questions "how much would you pay to reduce your annual risk of death by X%" vs "how much would you charge to take on an additional annual risk of death of X%?" despite those being more or less mathematically identical. People have the freedom to make stupid, inconsistent choices of course, but that doesn't make them smart or consistent. Just freely chosen.
> 2,596,993 people die every year in the US. That number cannot really be changed. People have to die of something.
That's really, really not the case. Yes, all who live must die, eventually. But there's no conservation of annual human death that means that eradicating smallpox means an equivalent number of people die of choking on pretzels annually. I figure the proper number to track is not percentages, or minimorts, but average longevity.
"No. The convenience of me parking my car 20feet from my door, being able to hop in and out of it without planning, is far more convenient than having to call a car via an app on my phone. The knowledge that I have a car available 24/7 cannot be replaced by a promised car delivered via a cellphone."
Nothing in the article or in my reply said you cannot have that. You'll still be able to buy self-driving cars. They'll cost tens of thousands of dollars, just like cars do today.
if the US actually cared more about preventing fatalities than "freedom" it'd regulate guns
Guns are regulated in the US. See: Gun Control Act of 1968, Volkmer-McClure Amendment, mandatory Instant Background Check for most gun purchases, etc.
That said, I don't understand your mindset. Why do you think that we'd want to "care more about preventing fatalities than 'freedom'"?
From where I'm standing, it seems that Freedom is the most fundamental principle of all. What's the point of living without freedom? Maybe you've heard the phrase "live free or die"? That's more than just some marketing slogan to a lot of people.
Well there are no guarantees in life; except that if you do it long enough, you die. So no, I can't guarantee that someone won't kill you with a gun... but I also can't guarantee that they won't drive a car into the sidewalk where you're standing, fly a plane into the building you're in, release Sarin gas on your subway car, etc.
What we can do though, as a society, is try to maximize personal Freedom while acknowledging that no system is perfect. We can certainly make sure that your right to be armed, in order to protect yourself in many situations, is respected. We can also ensure that The People are armed as a final, last-ditch check on unrestrained exercise of power by the State.
In the end though, bad things sometimes happen. And I don't see the justification for running rough-shod over people's rights, in an attempt to prevent some potential, may-never-be-realized, harmful scenario.
Being alive means that you have a random chance of being killed multiple ways including choking, a heart attack, tripping and hitting your head, a medical mistake, killed by an improvised explosive device, etc. Welcome to life. The best way to not have bullets in your body is to just go about your daily life because it is more likely you will be killed by lightning from the sky or a transformer from a pole hitting you.
The best way to not have guns on your person is to just go about your daily life because it is so unlikely you will ever be in a position where you will need to use one.
I suppose people that were into horses felt the same way when automobiles were first introduced. They knew the bloodlines and "genetics" of a good horse. The emergence of autos made that knowledge less valuable and/or relevant.
I do want to live in that world and I live in the suburbs of vanilla tract homes, charter schools, and club soccer.
Vehicles are expensive in either time, money or both... I recently did the brakes of both our vehicles. It was super inexpensive compared to what I was quoted in price, but it cost me some time. I am looking at replacing one of our vehicles soon as the cost of repair may overshadow the vehicles worth. In all cases... it is a hassle and I would rather not deal with it. The alternative, public transportation and/or Uber is either too expensive (Uber) for our use case or inconvenient (public trans)...
If these self-driving vehicles get to parity with owning a vehicle in terms of cost of ownership and convenience. I will be standing in line to get rid of my cars.
I suppose people that were into horses felt the same way when automobiles were first introduced.
But nobody was told "you have five years to trade your horse in on a car, or send it to the glue factory". Horse are still legal and used to this day, they just mostly lost out to market forces... that is, cars are simply a better mode of transportation for most people most of the time.
But you can still ride a horse if you want to (albeit probably not on freeways, but certainly on country roads). Now, if the proposal was that certain limited access, high-speed highways are restricted to only self-driving cars, I might be able to accept that, even if somewhat grudgingly. But outlawing human driven cars completely, even on backroads? I just can't see it.
I saw a guy in line at a fast food drive-through on a horse a few months back. I don't know if there's laws against it but he was just riding around town like it was car (small town). Haven't seen him since so IDK what the outcome was.
Isn't that an overly broad statement? I believe hunting in Norway, Finland and Sweden is often if not mostly done on land not owned by gentry.
Probably other countries as well. (I found that hunting is popular in France, Germany, and Austria, but I wasn't able to figure out if the landowners were mostly gentry or not. I got the strong sense that they were not.)
Self-driving cars are inevitable, but I still feel like everybody is focusing too much on the vision of them being the primary mode of transportation well into our future.
Cars as transportation should be dead in the next 50 years, outside of fairly niche (relatively speaking) use cases like construction/maintenance/etc. workers who need to carry large loads or people who live or need to travel well outside of city limits. Research into self-driving vehicles is an important part of improving road safety, but I think we need to focus more on public/mass transit rather than "everybody gets a self-driving pod to go from Point A to Point B".
As someone who loves to go outdoors, and regularly visits family a couple hundred miles away I can't see my families need for a personal vehicle completely going away. But 99% of our road time could just as easily be served with a couple trains and busses instead, freeing up valuable land that is needed by our massive road network as well as the horrendous city designs that have spawned from the assumption that everybody has their own personal vehicle.
Why? Mass transit is an industrial age solution to the congestion problem, when we couldn't plan for demand in real-time. Mass transit means that there need to be a lot of people who want to go from the same place, to the same place, at the same time. This is never true, so you have to relax the assumptions: they aren't coming from the same place, so force them all to walk to a stop. They aren't going to the same place, so force them to walk from a stop. They don't want to go at the same time, so force them to wait for the next bus/train. If you're in a very dense city at a busy time of day, this isn't too bad, you don't have to walk too far, and you don't have to wait too long. Otherwise, it's not possible to get enough people that want to make the same trip at the same time without making people walk long distances or wait a long time. On demand Lyft Line style routing, automatically driven, with variable sized vehicles depending on demand in the area, is going to completely replace mass transit in twenty years. The cost will be the same, and the travel time will be half or less.
This will happen within 15-20 years? I don't think so. Maybe the self-driving tech will be there, but the infrastructure overhaul required to support these "high speed trains" would be massive and produce traffic delays in the existing system. Not to mention the cost of testing this at production-scale.
Okay, Mr. auto nerd alarmist guy. We still have freaking firearms everywhere even though they're proven to be dangerous, since putting holes in people and things are their purpose. There will be absolutely no political will to limit people from driving their own vehicles.
Ridiculous predictions. Human drivers legislated away in 20 years max? Please, as if the police or public services would trust their transportation to an algorithm, publicly.
More likely the insurance companies will aggressively raise premiums on drivers who insist on retaining their option to drive themselves. Markets will price people out of the driver’s seat and into the passenger’s.
And the idea that people wouldn’t buy their own cars or that luxury cars would fall by the wayside is ridiculous. The FIRST major self driving cars are going to be in the luxury market, and the companies doing so are already there (Tesla, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz). Having a self-driving car will become the ultimate status symbol among the upper middle class. And you can bet that Hollywood and Madison Avenue will inundate the populace with scenes and ads of attractive young people stepping out of luxurious autonomous cars as soon as they’re on the market.
And of course no discussion whatsoever on rural areas or even people that don’t want self-driving cars. Personally I hate driving but most people I know do enjoy it and wouldn’t fully trust a self driving car not to get hacked and fling them off the nearest cliff.
Something the article absolutely misses is that cars are not simply a means of transportation. They are also a moving storage shed: Umbrellas, rain boots, an extra jacket, diapers, child car seats...
For an article chock-full of futurism, it was surprisingly low on genuine imagination...or even robust analysis.
"More likely the insurance companies will aggressively raise premiums on drivers who insist on retaining their option to drive themselves. Markets will price people out of the driver’s seat and into the passenger’s."
The dedicated self-driving lane with its 150mph speed limit beside the manual drive lane with a 60mph speed limit will also convince a lot of people to buy/rent a self-driving car.
>More likely the insurance companies will aggressively raise premiums on drivers who insist on retaining their option to drive themselves. Markets will price people out of the driver’s seat and into the passenger’s.
Or not. The people who want to stare at their phone will self select the autonomous option leaving only the "good" drivers
That right there is a problem I have with this glorious vision of an "autonomous module" transportation future. What if I don't know what my destination? What if I, GASP, just want to go out for a drive?
Some people (myself included) actually like getting in cars and driving. The destination is somewhat irrelevant. The feeling of control and freedom you get when you're at the wheel is not to be underestimated. The notion that human-driven cars will be outlawed at some point in the future scares me. Folks always think it's a good idea to outlaw stuff that's "bad" for people's health or whatever, but guess what? People still smoke, people still drink heavily, and people get high.
Maybe another way to look at it is there could be designated "autonomous module only" zones. Dense urban environments are of course a logical choice. If you want to drive around in the country or suburbs, that's one thing, but once you get towards the city center, human-driven automobiles are not allowed. That seems a more reasonable compromise.
Yes you are free to do things you want like smoke, drink, or drive a car manually. But you should also have to pay for the externalities you create. Hence why it makes sense that cigarettes are taxed so heavily.
If you want the "freedom" to drive yourself, you should pay for the extra cost you cause society (i.e. roads that wouldn't otherwise have to exist, hefty insurance premiums for accidents you may cause, etc.).
There will not be an on-demand service for everything. How would one load up trash in the back of a pickup truck to take to the landfill? How would you take a fishing trip off road to the edge of the lake? A lot of what I read would work fine for urban environments. It would not cover all the use cases we currently have for our vehicles.
"How would one load up trash in the back of a pickup truck to take to the landfill?"
The same way I do it now, rent or buy a truck or a trailer.
"How would you take a fishing trip off road to the edge of the lake?"
You rent or buy a manual drive car. It'd be illegal to use in manual drive mode on the freeway or in the city but off road or on the track or on your own property you can use it however you want.
I think people are relying too much on legislation to usher in this new utopia of self-driving
There will be no legislation outlawing the use of our current manually operated vehicles. Ever. To think that the whole of government would endorse such idiocy demonstrates how little one knows about bureaucracy.
I will love to see how these "smart" vehicles handle kids on top of overpasses dropping rocks and nails on them (which already happens way too frequently around here)
What's to "handle" about these? These vehicles should absolutely be able to detect and gracefully handle the failure of critical systems (sensors, drivetrain etc.) regardless of the existence of malicious children. And besides that, there will be an Emergency button (like in elevators) with which passengers can report things like rock-shaped dents in the car's body.
It's more likely that non-autonomous vehicles will be uninsured rather than legislated off the roads. Expect this to happen with new cars in less than 10 years.
Yeah, reading this article I get the feeling the author was raised in, and has only resided in, a major metropolitan era.
Sounds like they're just starting to work on inclement weather on pavement while I'm wondering how they're going to handle the farmer who wants to drive through that ditch with tall grass that will obscure the camera and 3d point mapping. Not to mention straddling that rock they know is there so it doesn't hit the pumpkin under the truck. Then backing up to the trailer of firewood which needs to be maneuvered slowly with one wheel going over a rock to narrowly avoid that tree on the other side.
Anyone who thinks manual driving is completely going away in the next 15 to 20 years either has poor grasp on the technical issues or is just failing to think of all the edge cases.
Except it won't. You'll go to three Sponsored Locations that offer similar, but not quite the same, services as the destination you selected, while the windows are used as projection screens for advertisements related to your destination and locations you're passing.
- Me: "Take me to Central Park."
- Car: "I'm sorry Tom, I can't let you do that. Going to MOMA, the New Museum, and Battery Park."
- Car: "We'll be passing a Wendy's restaurant momentarily. Did you want to stop to pick up some chicken nuggets or a tasty hamburger? I can offer you a 2 for 1 deal expiring in 5... 4... 3..."
- Me: "We were just planning on pizza, thanks."
- Car: "A $2 non-subsidized convenience fee will be added to your total."
This is my hell.