Could he really say anything else given his current position? Car manufacturers and VCs have pumped enormous cash into this space for over a decade and have what amounts to vaporware to show for it. Assisted highway cruise and crash avoidance are very good features, but we are perpetually “a few years away” from the promise of significant autonomy.
To be fair, that was the state of speech recognition, too, until it wasn’t. We’ll get full self-driving eventually, but it may take 5-15 years. It’s hard but not intractable, like supersonic passenger air service.
"until it wasn’t" => After the AI winter, we had to wait for the phone revolution which enabled data collection at scale, and google et al's big ad dollars in order to fund speech recognition.
Moreover, speech recognition isn't a product you can't launch in a faulty state. You can sell a bad product, make a profit, and iterate without any consequence.
It's not the same with self driving cars, which won't be profitable till you get rid of the driver entirely. And you can't launch a ok product and iterate. It has to be almost perfect when it comes to safety.
Barring geofencing or legislative changes, you have to get it in a perfect state before you roll it out.
When the VC money dies down, and when such big companies are no longer optimistic at having a viable self driving car, the research is going to slow down drastically, till a new wave of funding comes along from some other boom to resuscitate the research.
I think Tesla is doing just this. They are putting self driving features on their cars, putting the onus on the driver to supervise, and using the experiment to gather data. I don't expect their current hardware to ever be able to deliver full autonomous driving, but it will likely provide a useful stepping stone.
> To be fair, that was the state of speech recognition, too, until it wasn’t.
I regularly yell at Google when I ask it to play me a song, oftentimes even when I spell out words letter by letter, painstakingly slowly, and it still fails me.
Speech recognition doesn't work all that well for me.
Anyway, I think nuclear fusion is a much better comparison. There is an inflection point where it just works, and until you reach that it's not really useful to anybody except as a research problem. And based on what I hear from my peers who work on self-driving cars (including at Cruise), it's still decades away. Most of them already quit because they just stopped believing it was ever going to happen.
I think everyone here knows that speech recognition tech is pretty garbage, even today. I have trained myself to speak as clearly and plain as possible to (Siri / Alexa / random customer services) and they are still only so-so. Very annoying technology.
Speech recognition still sucks. I have a coworker whose name starts with “S.” Every time she calls on my desk phone and I pick up with “Hi S.” Siri on my iPhone kicks in. It can also never understand the simplest reminders I try to set.
Nah that's not speech recognition. That's Siri's owners dedicating only milliseconds of their server time to each request. To save a few bucks. Because they're cheap.
The state of speech recognition is still quite terrible. For limited domains and very clear diction it works most of the time. For random speech and the way people actually speak it still sucks.
I find it to be mindblowing how accurate youtube’s automatic captioning ends up being most of the time. I also remember all of the attempts in the 90s and early 2000s, and we are at a place now I never thought we would get to.
> The state of speech recognition is still quite terrible.
I think we should just "move fast and break things"... make all cars self-drivable via speech recognition. I mean that would would serve to limit car ownership... to those with a death wish.
I don't wish death, which is why I walked to the bus stop. Because of the busy roads I had to cross (without any traffic control) I'm the one who has a death wish. 3000lbs of metal would protect the driver very well when I'm hit, but just ensures I die.
> I don't wish death, which is why I walked to the bus stop
I live in NY. About 40 miles as the crow flies from NYC. Public transportation is unusable in my town... buses run about once an hour, give or take an hour on weekdays--forget about Sundays. How would you like trying get a sick child to a doctors appointment then going to a pharmacy? Need milk before a snow storm.. good luck. My point is the Vast majority of the USA is not geographically located in metropolitan areas.
As a side: Metro North which I used when I worked in queens... is fricken expensive as hell and slow as molasses.
There is no reason your city cannot have a good public transport system. However it is for practical purposes not possible to get there. If everybody would ride (other than jobs like plumber where having tools/parts in the truck is part of the job) there would be more than enough demand to support transport coming often and going to the destinations you need just based on fares - which in turn would be cheaper than owning a car. However it is difficult to get from where we are to there. (Note that density is NOT required - though this level of service would drive density)
> If everybody would ride (other than jobs like plumber where having tools/parts in the truck is part of the job) there would be more than enough demand to support
Oh and one more thing; there are no sidewalks nor lighting on any of the residential streets in our town. When you walk here after dark you better damn well have a flashlight in your hand (most cellphones don't throw enough light far enough), futhermore if its rainy and foggy like it often is in summer or late autumn--dude it's no joke. My main concern when I drive here after dark is to Not hit a pedestrian, they are few and far between but still. My point is; we need car ownership here, will it always be this way? IDK, but that is the current reality and you're not going to change that anytime in the near future without years long infrastructure projects.
He might be trying to thread a needle of sorts, ride the wave of recent anti-car articles in the press in recent weeks while still managing to get some good press for his start-up.
> Meanwhile, Cruise will miss its original goal to launch a self-driven ride-sharing service by the end of this year, something the venture now plans to introduce at an unspecified date.
They don't even know when they're going to launch after missing their public deadline (and certainly several internal deadlines). This is just more self-driving hype in a space where companies need to constantly raise money. Cruise has already raised billions outside of GM and will need to continue to do so since they have no revenue.
EDIT: In case it was unclear, GM's Former President is now the CEO of Cruise.
I'm a big fan of reducing traffic and doing stuff that's good for the environment, but ..."Hey, everybody! Let's stop doing stuff that I used to tell you was a good idea and make money off of and do this new thing that I think is a good idea so I can make money off of it. Also, you should stop owning things because those don't provide me with a constant revenue stream, and for the good of the planet you should pay me all of the time. Public transportation is bad, mmmkay?"
A smaller group of cars getting replaced faster due to greater use, potentially with recurring subscription models reducing the amount of long term financing people have to get stuck with for the same amount of cars produced (or less) which they rarely use is still better than a glut of cars filling up parking through out a city and rusting out needlessly.
It’s more efficient by fully utilizing each vehicle efficiently for the environment and economically for customers in many ways when debt loads are the biggest issue in recent times...
Uber and Lyft certainly did not decrease congestion in cities. The idea that ride-hailing services would decrease congestion already has not panned out.
You need at least a $45,000 car to equal paying uber to drive you everywhere.
The ride share services haven't made a dent in the transportation needs of the world.
You know what's necessary? On demand minibusses that go everywhere and are routed to riders along the route to the destination to keep them full. Uber isn't that.
We're not anywhere near what the GM is talking about. He's not talking about how Uber and Lyft are today. I also didn't mention congestion in my comment.
Soon we’ll hear from the construction industry, don’t buy houses, let and rent your next domicile, we’re building apartment buildings like crazy. House ownership is over, except for us builders, you will rent from us.
Builders don't mind handing over all the risk to banks, real-estate speculators and developers. Developers on the other hand, would love to have you rent indefinitely. At least until their speculation pays off and they can flip you and the house to the next developer.
I'm not sure if you are talking about some local builders you know, or big construction companies in general?
I know lots of people who rent or buy-a-share-in apartment blocks. Each apartment block is owned by a company spun off of the construction company that built it.
There are all in a particular european city I am familiar with, but I imagine that system works in other countries too.
I work in building design in the US and that's not what I've seen here. There are investment companies that finance building / renovating buildings. They might hold onto it until they get it filled with tenants then they sell it to a different investor who runs it. The construction company that does the building is unrelated to either of these. They specialize in construction, which is a completely different skill set from property management.
The real fear is the potential lifespan of electric cars. IC cars already last decades in private ownership. With fewer moving parts, electric cars could last even longer. They need to keep everything in fleets, where cars can be forced off the road after a specific timeframe, if they want to maintain sale/replacement rates long term.
Electric cars will fail just as soon as IC powered cars because the engine hasn't been the limit in years. The power source has no effect on how fast the seats wear. The power source as no effect on the rubber door seals failing. The power source has very little effect on how long before the suspension wears out. The power source has no effect on how long before the "new car" smell goes away. The power source has no effect on changing styles. The power source has no effect on when an accident destroys the car.
IC cars do last decades if you care for them. Very few people do.
Try getting an old car past new emission standards. A new cat converter on a 15yo Honda isn't cheap. A tranny rebuild isn't cheap. I don't know of any cars junked for lack of new car smell.
>Try getting an old car past new emission standards.
Outside of California and a couple other states making a car pass emissions until it ages out of the emissions testing program at 15-25yr is not cost prohibitive.
>A tranny rebuild isn't cheap.
Transmission replacement is of similar cost and happens around the same mileage as a battery pack replacement.
>I don't know of any cars junked for lack of new car smell.
His point was that the people that buy new cars typically trade them in and buy another new one for reasons other than it being no longer economically viable to run.
Engines, transmission, emission systems / catalytic converters, timing belts... there are dozens of components in an ICE which start failing or performing badly around 80k-120k which contribute to maintenance fatigue at that point. When you start spending $3-5k per year making all these expensive repairs to an old ICE car it feels like throwing good money into a pit.
The other big item is the software in the car becomes slow, dated, and no longer inter-operates properly with the latest phones.
Both of these factors are significantly mitigated with an EV with OTA updates.
Particularly when the manufacturer makes their latest generation hardware field upgradable, you can buy a new MCU and slot it into a late-model car and get all the latest features and performance.
The Model 3 in particular has an esthetic which IMO is particularly timeless and will not feel dated in 10 or even 20 years.
No car is maintenance free. The question is predictability and TCO. If A) maintenance is predictable, B) TCO remains low, and C) performance is consistent, then people will hold onto their EVs for more miles than their ICE equivalents.
Every car I own has > 140k miles with no such problems. The timing belt is a maintenance item. It isn't $3-5k/year it averages out to about 1.5k/year - some years it is 5k, but other years it is much less. Most people give up on the car at the first 5k estimate not realizing they just fixed/replaced the expensive parts which are now good for more years.
> The Model 3 in particular has an esthetic which IMO is particularly timeless and will not feel dated in 10 or even 20 years.
Maybe the physical appearance of the car, but I guarantee the interior and infotainment system will age poorly in 10-20 years, just like any other car. In fact, it might even age worse.
Try using a 5 year old Android tablet and you'll see what I mean.
> people will hold onto their EVs for more miles than their ICE equivalents
Some people, but there are a lot of people who buy cars for status, and they won't want to be driving a 10 year old car whether it's financially practical or not.
This aspect will not change just because the cars are more reliable.
The "fewer moving parts" myth needs to die. IC engines themselves are extremely reliable, it's usually something else that finally kills an old car.
Just think about it: a very high mileage car does maybe 300 000 miles. At an average speed of 30 mph that's only 10 000 hours of running, or 420 days continuously. IC engines in generators, excavators, ships, trains, heck even in aircraft routinely do many many multiples of this before they are scrapped.
For any part on a vehicle, IC or EV, it's possible to make it last fifty thousand hours no problem. But value engineering is a thing, so companies will make stuff cheaper and cheaper until it lasts only for 10k hours, or maybe 2k for a "regular replacement part". There is absolutely no reason they won't do exactly the same value engineering on an EV car as an IC car.
> With fewer moving parts, electric cars could last even longer
Judging by what is happening right now with EV cars already produced long time ago [1] general outcome and EV cars lifespan will be lower than IC cars due to non-available batteries, there are already people who are seriously disappointed [2] and I think that it is going to be worse because lack of affordable batteries replacement is in best interest of car maker companies.
I don't think there's anything wrong with making money. Consider the average personal car is only in use 5% of the time. People are paying an enormous amount to own, house, and maintain a car that they are barely using.
If they could instead just pay for the 5% of when they are using it and have it go off and be used by other people the rest of the time, it would probably ending being less expensive overall. There would also be fewer cars around.
Yeah, maybe the GM president once told people to own cars. Maybe that was the right thing at the time. Now circumstances have changed and something else makes more sense. Updating your views to account for new information is not a bad thing.
It would be less expensive but that isn't why we own cars. It would also be less expensive to buy cheap fuel efficient cars.
We buy these cars because we are buying flexibility and time. Even public transportation can take lots of extra time if you aren't in the center of dense service. With my car, I don't have to wait for an Uber, I don't have to plan, I can just go whenever and wherever I want. It also doesn't get exponentially more expensive if I want to go somewhere 1+ hours away. Obviously if you never leave a three block radius, a car would be pretty silly. I'm just trying to say car ownership isn't generally about cost.
Jeez, it seems every time in these threads there's someone who comes in like "Hey I live 40 miles from the nearest paved road, I need my own car!!!"
Nobody is saying it's going to be illegal to own your own personal car or anything. Sure, if you want to live in the middle of nowhere then you'll probably need your own transportation. For a lot of people it's not going to be as necessary to bother owning your own car when you can call one whenever you need it and it will be there in 5 minutes.
If you can get 90% of the flexibility and time for 10% of the cost that is going to make sense for a lot of people. Not owning a car at all is a much larger difference in savings than owning one that gets 30mpg rather than 20mpg.
I think you're missing the point. For the last 70 years American politics has promoted a set of policies that have made cities hard or impossible to navigate without cars. You don't have to be "40 miles from the nearest paved road" to experience this.
Now a lot of the same people that promoted and lobbied for these ideas are trying to sell a "quick fix" in the form of car sharing and other recurring revenue models.
There is no quick fix. The US needs a lot of public infrastructure investment before not owning a car is viable for the majority of people. Uber is not affordable compared to buying a $500 used car from Craigslist if you commute every day and does not solve the problem of navigating big box store "shopping centres" as a pedestrian.
We don't know yet what the cost of something like Uber is going to be if the car can drive itself.
I don't know what city you live in, but where I live the city is pretty difficult to navigate with a car. This is because of all the other cars clogging up the road.
And besides, the entire point here is that you still have access to a car. You are not facing the problem of navigating a car based infrastructure without a car. The entire idea is that there are cars available on-demand!
I guess we could do nothing and hope that at some point governments figure out to build public transportation in a reasonable time frame for a reasonable amount of money, but I'm not going to hold my breath for that. There is zero reason we can't simultaneously work on more efficiently using the infrastructure we already have.
> I guess we could do nothing and hope that at some point governments figure out to build public transportation in a reasonable time frame for a reasonable amount of money...
Non-US governments already have. This isn't incompetence, it's intentional policy.
> This is because of all the other cars clogging up the road.
Ride sharing has only made this problem worse[1]. Is there any evidence that even more ride sharing will improve the situation? The basic problem is that everyone needs to get into or out of a few central locations at around the same time (typically 9am/5pm). Solving this requires moving people more efficiently (as in more people/m^2 of roadway) than cars, even ride sharing cars, would allow.
Nobody is saying not to invest in public transportation. I'm for that 100%. I sincerely hope the US develops the political will to do it.
But even if everyone agrees to do it tomorrow, we're talking decades to completely rebuild infrastructure of major cities.
I don't know why this is framed as an either/or choice. Build better public transportation, sure. How about we also use cars more efficiently. Why are you against that?
would the car last as long as it lasts when you use it 5% of the time? From what I have heard its common to replace company fleets after 5 years or so...
> Consider the average personal car is only in use 5% of the time. People are paying an enormous amount to own, house, and maintain a car that they are barely using.
This statistic is silly. It's like the "you only use 10% of your brain!!1" meme.
I don't disagree with the overall premise and there's definitely cases where it makes sense (especially in cities), but there's a real trade-off being made.
> Consider the average personal car is only in use 5% of the time.
I only use my toilets a small fraction of the day as well, would you suggest we crowdsource them for greater efficiency too?
Also this statistic presumes that cars work better with higher utilization and that's muddy at best. Sure, greater utilization is more efficient but it also means the cars go through parts much faster, require more oil, more fuel obviously. And of course the ride share companies aren't paying to maintain the cars that they are running into the ground.
You notice that when you go out in public there are shared toilets everyone uses and you don't have to lug your own toilet with you everywhere you go, right?
> Consider the average personal car is only in use 5% of the time.
Freedom to choose has value. Convenience has value.
I keep my cleats in the car, so that I can just pick which day I want to play ultimate frisbee on the spur of the moment. I don't have to decide in advance and pack something. That freedom to make up my mind on the spur of the moment is worth something.
I can be at home, and decide I need something from the grocery store, and just go get it. I don't have to order a car and wait for it to arrive. Once I'm done at the store, I don't have to order another car for the trip back. That "it's ready right now" convenience is worth something. (Yeah, I know, in a decent urban world, the grocery store would be within walking distance. I don't live in that ideal urban world.)
And if you really want the have a car payment and insurance payment and deal with parking and everything else so that you have a 2000lb box to store your cleats in and can avoid waiting five minutes for a car share, I won't stop you from doing that. I doubt anyone else is going to either.
The point is a lot of people are going to decide that maybe they can plan a little in advance on when they want to play ultimate frisbee if it helps them avoid the myriad hassles and expenses of owning a car and that's probably going to be good.
You don't live in a bubble. What you do affects other people. I don't even mean your next door neighbour.
Large scale carbon emitters like the u.s. can have a global effect.
It global temps continue to rise it will have major negative effects on smaller countries. It has already started with my home country.
You don't pay a tax that goes towards mitigating that... unfortunately.
I am not saying taking away cars but we should be more responsible where it comes to owning or making the decision of owning one.
Historically the trend of things we don't/won't own:
land, house, data, right to have kinds, your body.
Why? One argument that is cooking right now: "you don't know how to properly manage these things to support sustainable progress of humanity (and because you are broke)"
I have similar outlook at the future, we already have poor voting on people that have clearly no interest helping the poor.
I used to be really excited about tech prolonging life, but now i think it will be artificially made prohibitively expensive so the rich cast can hold on to their power even more.
Currently the power was lost when next generation was bad at managing their parent's empires... well I think we are quickly approaching techno dystopia.
The 'electric' part of the article here is fluff. Electric cars already exist and will take over the market within a similar time frame to any proposed self-driving car takeover (it's primarily a matter of manufacturing capacity, which affects this company too, and waiting for older cars to die out at this point).
Aside from that, there are three main ways I can think of that a self-driving car could reduce pollution.
a) More people fit in the same car and an intelligent mechanism can pair riders. This exists today in the form of things like Uber Pool. Without a driver you might get one additional passenger in a car.
That's the main mechanism. In the best case it can reduce energy use per passenger by around 20-25% - in a realistic case it would be more like 10% or less.
b) Cars can drive closer together and with more intelligent traffic lights. I think this is incredibly overblown - pedestrians exist and cars are already pretty close together in cities.
I doubt this will make much difference especially given that electric cars use ~zero energy at idle.
c) Over a long time-frame, cities are redesigned such that parking spaces don't exist and so things are closer together.
This is both a multi-decade (possibly even a century) change, and likely to just result in people commuting further - the 1 hour sweet spot isn't going anywhere, all people won't stack in cities unless they're forced, if we're being charitable, say, 50% of people actually prefer that lifestyle.
It also works for taxis.
Basically, the whole thing is nonsense.
What I see as being more likely if self-driving takes off is crackpots sitting at desks in the back of their van, or chilling on a sofa watching movies, and doing multi-hour commutes, offsetting the savings.
I've not even mentioned here the fact that a significant amount of people just like to own their own car and have the funds to do so. Particularly if you're in a rural area, the idea of some SV startup self driving to your ranch is absurd, you're almost certain to either be priced out or just directly geofenced out.
> a) More people fit in the same car and an intelligent mechanism can pair riders. This exists today in the form of things like Uber Pool. Without a driver you might get one additional passenger in a car. That's the main mechanism. In the best case it can reduce energy use per passenger by around 20-25% - in a realistic case it would be more like 10% or less.
And it would reduce the number of cars on the road, the number of mechanics shops needed to service those cars, the number of insurance companies, most of the infrastructure around licensing, etc. Lots of knock-on effects that would also impact emissions, and a fleet of self-driving cars permit a lot more vertical integration, which reduces TCO.
A fleet of self-driving cars will simply be more cost effective and reduce emissions. Car ownership becoming a luxury is probably inevitable. It will become a collector's hobby, like old sports cars are today.
Only if self driving cars are legally required and expensive. If self driving cars are not legally required (ie because they are that much safer), or they are cheap people will continue to buy and own cars. The convenience of a personal car with your golf clubs in the trunk is worth it.
Don't forget that the self driving world you imagine is worse for the environment: all those cars going empty to a distant parking lot until you are done with work eat up a lot of energy.
If you want to solve environmental problems from cars invest in public transit. The biggest problem in modern cities is neighborhood designs that make public transit too slow. (you need to have a short walk to the stop, and then the vehicle not make many twists and turns along the way to where you want to be). Density is useful for transit, but suburbs already have the minimum density required, they lack the ability for transit to be fast though.
> If self driving cars are not legally required (ie because they are that much safer), or they are cheap people will continue to buy and own cars.
They will be cheaper. No licensing, insurance, maintenance, fuel, but still almost all of the convenience of a personal vehicle requiring only a short wait time.
> Don't forget that the self driving world you imagine is worse for the environment: all those cars going empty to a distant parking lot until you are done with work eat up a lot of energy.
That's not how it would work. If parking becomes necessary because network capacity is too high and utilization too low, the car would park in its immediate vicinity. We have lots of parking everywhere to accommodate far more cars than would be needed in a world with mostly self-driving cars.
Why wouldn't their be licensing? Insurance maybe. Maintenance is a requirement - the tires will wear out if nothing else. Fuel is still a factor - it might not be liquid, but you need some sort of energy.
The advantage of a personal vehicle is 0 wait time. If you are willing to wait the bus is cheaper because you can share the ride with so many other people.
Sure we have parking everywhere. However at that point there is essentially one car per person anyway, so it may as well be your personal car so you can leave the golf clubs in the trunk.
Do you need a license to hail an Uber? If that Uber became self-driving, why would you need a license? Certainly Uber cars would need to have some kind of inspection, but that's just an extension of whatever inspections exist for road-worthiness.
> Maintenance is a requirement - the tires will wear out if nothing else. Fuel is still a factor - it might not be liquid, but you need some sort of energy.
These are no longer costs born by the driver/rider, but are now aggregated by the car service. Aggregating yields considerable cost savings.
> The advantage of a personal vehicle is 0 wait time. If you are willing to wait the bus is cheaper because you can share the ride with so many other people.
A bus wait takes a minimum of 15 minutes. An Uber arrives within 5 minutes, and with self-driving cars and capacity planning, this can be brought down to some arbitrarily small number if needed. A bus also requires walking to and from stops, which also adds at least 5-10 minutes for most people. That's a big difference, not to mention these are multiplied considerably in rural areas or areas with considerable urban sprawl. And the first few minutes of waiting for an Uber I'm putting on my shoes, jacket, etc.
Walking down to your car takes at least 3 minutes in a condo. If you own a home with driveway, it will still take you 1 minute to walk to your car and start it up (and a few minutes to warm it up if it's winter).
So the advantage of ownership amounts to about 1 minute in winter climates, and maybe 2-3 minutes in warm climates. That's perfectly reasonable tradeoff considering the expected cost savings.
> However at that point there is essentially one car per person anyway
I don't know what this means. My point was that we don't need to build huge parking lots outside of the city for idle self-driving cars to which they would drive to/back when utilization is low, we already have a glut of parking available for a transition to a self-driving world, and all localized within our cities. A self-driving car service would just use all the parking scattered everywhere throughout the city and so have cars available nearby, no matter where you are.
There is still license fees on the car - aggregated, but still there.
I already aggregate the cost of maintenance across all my personal driving: there is no cost savings. (if you do your own work it is more expnesive)
A bus wait can be as little as 3 minutes max (q.5 minutes on average). If it isn't the is the fault of lack of ridership. Walking counts as exercise, like it or not your doctor wants you to get more.
Rural areas yes - but rural areas have a lot longer to wait for a shared car.
> I already aggregate the cost of maintenance across all my personal driving: there is no cost savings.
No, aggregated across all drivers, not just aggregated across your driving. As in, 1 million drivers insuring, licensing and maintaining 1 million cars costs far more than 1 million riders sharing 200,000 cars whose insurance, licensing and maintenance is aggregated by a riding sharing service like Uber, and those savings will show up in your final bill, ie. total cost of ownership of your own car will exceed using ride sharing services with self-driving cars for virtually all people.
> A bus wait can be as little as 3 minutes max
It can be as little as 0 minutes if you get there at the perfect time. That's irrelevant though. Worst case and average case wait times are what's important.
> If it isn't the is the fault of lack of ridership.
No, it's the lack of sufficient incentive and benefits to use transit. America is not Europe.
It won't be 1 million riders sharing 200,000 cars. It will be 1 million sharing 900,000 cars at best. There is a reason a single occupant car is by far the most common - for the individual it is the easiest, most convenient choice. No waiting for a shared car, leave when you want, keep your personal things in the car for latter.
The same lack of incentive and benefits to use transit applies to shared cars.
That's all conjecture. Queueing theory can plan spare capacity for any level of utilization. The higher the utilization, the lower the cost to the individual rider, ie. the more sharing that's allowed or encouraged, the lower the cost. The sharing equilibrium is almost certainly not 10%.
> The same lack of incentive and benefits to use transit applies to shared cars.
Sure, but the increased convenience of not needing a shared meetup/dropoff of transit is considerable. The biggest cause of traffic into and out of a city is the 1 driver commute from the outlying regions. If car ownership were more expensive than ride sharing, most of these people would use ride sharing because it has the convenience benefits of car ownership with the efficiency benefits of transit. The ride sharing equilibrium in this model would be upwards of 70% for rush hour, at least.
Non-rush hour times would have fewer cars on the road because the cars would park themselves when utilization falls. This is more efficient and more convenient than transit.
> A fleet of self-driving cars will simply be more cost effective and reduce emissions.
How? I drive from point A to point B in my car. I'm there for a while, then drive from point B back to point A. Meanwhile, someone else drives from point C to point D, is there for a while, then drives back to point C. Total trip legs: A->B, B->A, C->D, D->C.
Now a self-driving car takes over. It drives me from A to B, goes to C, drives the other person to D, gets me at B, takes me back to A, goes back to D, picks up the other person, and takes them back to C. Total trip legs: A->B, B->C, C->D, D->B, B->A, A->D, D->C.
There is no world in which the second set of trips emits less than the first, given equivalent vehicles. It's simply not possible.
(Note that this is different from the have-everything-delivered scenario. The old way was you drive from A to the store at S, then drive back home to A. Someone else drives from B to S, then back to B. Delivery drives from S to A to B to S, which can be more efficient.)
> There is no world in which the second set of trips emits less than the first, given equivalent vehicles. It's simply not possible.
Firstly, you completely neglect to consider ride sharing, where multiple people are heading in roughly the same direction and so a portion of the trip reduces from 2 legs to 1, ie. the simplest case from your examples would be A->C->B->D(wait)->B->C->A. The more people that use the service, the more likely this is to happen, and the more emissions are reduced. It's the exact same aggregation argument supporting the use of transit.
Secondly, you're only focusing on specific local effects rather than systemic effects. The number of cars on the road would be dramatically lower [1], so we're manufacturing, maintaining, licensing and insuring fewer cars, all of which counts towards reducing emissions.
Then the marginal reduction in convenience means some people would change their behaviour, ie. travel less and/or plan their travel better so they get more done in a single trip.
Frankly, it seems clear that there is no world in which people owning their cars would be superior or even equivalent to a fleet of self-driving cars when it comes to environmental impact, traffic or efficiency.
I guess what he has in mind is to follow the example of the software industry and use "car as a service" as a market disruption that will allow him to jack up prices.
It all depends on what the lawyers say. What happens when a self-driving car gets into an accident and possibly seriously injures someone? Who's responsible? The manufacturer of the vehicle or the owner? If it's the owner then yes, I'd prefer someone else own the car since I have no control over it. If it's the manufacturer then I'd prefer to own the car.
No thanks. I like that my vehicle is ready to go when I get outside. When my son had a seizure we were on the road within 5 minutes and on our way to the hospital. I don’t want my ability to get a ride to be based on the availability and proximity of an Uber-like service vehicle.
Yeah but, if I'm not mistaken, autopilot only works on highways. Self-driving in such an environment may be 'close' to a solved problem, but if we are talking about a service capable of picking people up at their door... yeah, I'm not convinced.
>I think AutoPilot will be a truly remarkable achievement — as in, approaching a watershed human achievement akin to spaceflight.
Just want to point out the irony in this statement. Ok sure, fully autonomous self driving may be a great technological achievement, but it will be an achievement that benefits rent-seeking corporations rather than humanity at large. Sure, the benefits of such a service could allow car-free living at a price cheaper than leasing/owning a car, but this is a benefit that will be reaped by those with means (middle class) while the poor will still be riding the bus or walking. It would also make investment in public transportation even less likely, which would actually result in a net benefit for all.
To say nothing of the tens of thousands of lives saved per year, or the trillions of dollars of economic damages avoided and productivity/value created.
Full autonomous driving will be a significantly greater accomplishment for humanity than you’re giving it credit for.
If car-sharing is cheaper & more convenient than car ownership, that means the demand is higher for it than private usage, which means that there will be more cars on the road rather than less. A significant majority of the environmental damage a car causes is in it's operation rather than it's creation & disposal, so realize that car sharing and autonomous cars are bad for the environment, not good. As long as the norm is still 1 person per car.
Autonomous raises the prospect of cars driving around with no people in them, doing even more environmental damage and causing even more traffic jams.
> the chief executive officer of a self-driving car startup...
No bias there!
I'm sure someday it will be a thing but the infrastructure is not there. Or not here in my neck of the woods yet. We only have two maybe three EV charging stations in my entire province. Not that autonomous vehicles are all EV but I'm sure that's the direction they industry is heading and wants.
But to realistic, on this -13C day with icy roads I am not looking forward to an autonomous vehicles. I can't see an autonomous vehicle driving me on slippery narrow winding country roads. Half the time maps don't have the roads correctly mapped here, the road lines are covered in snow, no paved shoulder, roads are infrequently plowed and salted.
They don't have an easy means to rid themselves of an excessive number of dealerships. However a sharing system can effectively do that; fwiw I have little if any issues with the dealership model and i drive a TM3!
it also insulates them from having to make appealing vehicles, they have already proven they cannot do so in the sedan market and have effectively abandoned it.
snark aside, they are already experienced in selling to rental fleets and have put together packages for cars that suit that market very well while not appealing to regular buyers
I think the ability of Americans to drive privately-owned cars in terrible states of repair will prevent this future.
I've known folks who limp along old cars for years, dealing with potentially dangerous issues with the transmission or suspension. And don't get me started on people who don't keep tires with sufficient tread.
But all these terrible cars are cheap to continue driving in a just-barely-works state. Folks are able to get to their jobs working daycare or fast food in a beat-up 15 year-old car because many places in the US don't require safety inspections, or if they do, only when the car is transferred to a new owner.
If individual car ownership ends, and all the cars are instead owned by large drive-share corporations, that's obviously going to be heavily regulated, cars will all be maintained on a best-practice schedule, etc. Similar to how rental car companies or Uber/Lyft today only use newer, reasonably-maintained vehicles.
If that becomes the reality for all cars in America, we might see a market sort of like Japan. They have a rigorous periodic safety inspection called Shaken, so cars in Japan mostly tend to be newer. Once cars get older and require more work, they're often seen as fairly worthless in Japan and exported to poorer countries with more lax vehicle requirements.
I personally like the Japanese system - it seems to make sense that cars on the road should meet a rigorous level of roadworthiness. But that's so different from the current reality in the US that I'm not sure society would go along with the higher costs that would come with these well-maintained shared vehicles.
Right on. Car sharing and gig economy ride services make sense to me.
I no longer own a car. I gave my last car to my granddaughter last spring. I do “cheat” a bit because I can use my wife’s car, but I find it liberating to not have a car. Living in a small town in the mountains of Central Arizona (Sedona), I can walk to our beautiful library in 25 minutes, to our local food bank where I volunteer one day a week in 15 minutes, and to our local movie theater and a grocery store in 10 minutes.
Except for writing I am now retired, so I can afford “wasting time” by walking.
My generation has done a horrible job living in an environmentally sustainable way. I want to take a 110 day around the world cruise, and roughly not buying a new car might offset the environmental damage of taking that cruise. Anyway, that is how I see it.
Dude. This is just never going to happen, maybe ever. Car ownership is baked into a core part of our identity, culture, and social norms. It's like saying we'll start renting toothbrushes instead of owning one.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadI’m not patient either.
Moreover, speech recognition isn't a product you can't launch in a faulty state. You can sell a bad product, make a profit, and iterate without any consequence.
It's not the same with self driving cars, which won't be profitable till you get rid of the driver entirely. And you can't launch a ok product and iterate. It has to be almost perfect when it comes to safety.
Barring geofencing or legislative changes, you have to get it in a perfect state before you roll it out.
When the VC money dies down, and when such big companies are no longer optimistic at having a viable self driving car, the research is going to slow down drastically, till a new wave of funding comes along from some other boom to resuscitate the research.
I think Tesla is doing just this. They are putting self driving features on their cars, putting the onus on the driver to supervise, and using the experiment to gather data. I don't expect their current hardware to ever be able to deliver full autonomous driving, but it will likely provide a useful stepping stone.
Yes you can, tesla and comma.ai doing it right now.
I regularly yell at Google when I ask it to play me a song, oftentimes even when I spell out words letter by letter, painstakingly slowly, and it still fails me.
Speech recognition doesn't work all that well for me.
Anyway, I think nuclear fusion is a much better comparison. There is an inflection point where it just works, and until you reach that it's not really useful to anybody except as a research problem. And based on what I hear from my peers who work on self-driving cars (including at Cruise), it's still decades away. Most of them already quit because they just stopped believing it was ever going to happen.
Well, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
I think we should just "move fast and break things"... make all cars self-drivable via speech recognition. I mean that would would serve to limit car ownership... to those with a death wish.
I live in NY. About 40 miles as the crow flies from NYC. Public transportation is unusable in my town... buses run about once an hour, give or take an hour on weekdays--forget about Sundays. How would you like trying get a sick child to a doctors appointment then going to a pharmacy? Need milk before a snow storm.. good luck. My point is the Vast majority of the USA is not geographically located in metropolitan areas.
As a side: Metro North which I used when I worked in queens... is fricken expensive as hell and slow as molasses.
Oh and one more thing; there are no sidewalks nor lighting on any of the residential streets in our town. When you walk here after dark you better damn well have a flashlight in your hand (most cellphones don't throw enough light far enough), futhermore if its rainy and foggy like it often is in summer or late autumn--dude it's no joke. My main concern when I drive here after dark is to Not hit a pedestrian, they are few and far between but still. My point is; we need car ownership here, will it always be this way? IDK, but that is the current reality and you're not going to change that anytime in the near future without years long infrastructure projects.
They don't even know when they're going to launch after missing their public deadline (and certainly several internal deadlines). This is just more self-driving hype in a space where companies need to constantly raise money. Cruise has already raised billions outside of GM and will need to continue to do so since they have no revenue.
EDIT: In case it was unclear, GM's Former President is now the CEO of Cruise.
It’s more efficient by fully utilizing each vehicle efficiently for the environment and economically for customers in many ways when debt loads are the biggest issue in recent times...
The ride share services haven't made a dent in the transportation needs of the world.
You know what's necessary? On demand minibusses that go everywhere and are routed to riders along the route to the destination to keep them full. Uber isn't that.
I know lots of people who rent or buy-a-share-in apartment blocks. Each apartment block is owned by a company spun off of the construction company that built it.
There are all in a particular european city I am familiar with, but I imagine that system works in other countries too.
IC cars do last decades if you care for them. Very few people do.
Outside of California and a couple other states making a car pass emissions until it ages out of the emissions testing program at 15-25yr is not cost prohibitive.
>A tranny rebuild isn't cheap.
Transmission replacement is of similar cost and happens around the same mileage as a battery pack replacement.
>I don't know of any cars junked for lack of new car smell.
His point was that the people that buy new cars typically trade them in and buy another new one for reasons other than it being no longer economically viable to run.
The other big item is the software in the car becomes slow, dated, and no longer inter-operates properly with the latest phones.
Both of these factors are significantly mitigated with an EV with OTA updates.
Particularly when the manufacturer makes their latest generation hardware field upgradable, you can buy a new MCU and slot it into a late-model car and get all the latest features and performance.
The Model 3 in particular has an esthetic which IMO is particularly timeless and will not feel dated in 10 or even 20 years.
No car is maintenance free. The question is predictability and TCO. If A) maintenance is predictable, B) TCO remains low, and C) performance is consistent, then people will hold onto their EVs for more miles than their ICE equivalents.
Maybe the physical appearance of the car, but I guarantee the interior and infotainment system will age poorly in 10-20 years, just like any other car. In fact, it might even age worse.
Try using a 5 year old Android tablet and you'll see what I mean.
> people will hold onto their EVs for more miles than their ICE equivalents
Some people, but there are a lot of people who buy cars for status, and they won't want to be driving a 10 year old car whether it's financially practical or not.
This aspect will not change just because the cars are more reliable.
Just think about it: a very high mileage car does maybe 300 000 miles. At an average speed of 30 mph that's only 10 000 hours of running, or 420 days continuously. IC engines in generators, excavators, ships, trains, heck even in aircraft routinely do many many multiples of this before they are scrapped.
For any part on a vehicle, IC or EV, it's possible to make it last fifty thousand hours no problem. But value engineering is a thing, so companies will make stuff cheaper and cheaper until it lasts only for 10k hours, or maybe 2k for a "regular replacement part". There is absolutely no reason they won't do exactly the same value engineering on an EV car as an IC car.
Judging by what is happening right now with EV cars already produced long time ago [1] general outcome and EV cars lifespan will be lower than IC cars due to non-available batteries, there are already people who are seriously disappointed [2] and I think that it is going to be worse because lack of affordable batteries replacement is in best interest of car maker companies.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/leaf/comments/aocih1/battery_replac...
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/leaf/comments/b2etie/more_affordabl...
If they could instead just pay for the 5% of when they are using it and have it go off and be used by other people the rest of the time, it would probably ending being less expensive overall. There would also be fewer cars around.
Yeah, maybe the GM president once told people to own cars. Maybe that was the right thing at the time. Now circumstances have changed and something else makes more sense. Updating your views to account for new information is not a bad thing.
We buy these cars because we are buying flexibility and time. Even public transportation can take lots of extra time if you aren't in the center of dense service. With my car, I don't have to wait for an Uber, I don't have to plan, I can just go whenever and wherever I want. It also doesn't get exponentially more expensive if I want to go somewhere 1+ hours away. Obviously if you never leave a three block radius, a car would be pretty silly. I'm just trying to say car ownership isn't generally about cost.
Nobody is saying it's going to be illegal to own your own personal car or anything. Sure, if you want to live in the middle of nowhere then you'll probably need your own transportation. For a lot of people it's not going to be as necessary to bother owning your own car when you can call one whenever you need it and it will be there in 5 minutes.
If you can get 90% of the flexibility and time for 10% of the cost that is going to make sense for a lot of people. Not owning a car at all is a much larger difference in savings than owning one that gets 30mpg rather than 20mpg.
Now a lot of the same people that promoted and lobbied for these ideas are trying to sell a "quick fix" in the form of car sharing and other recurring revenue models.
There is no quick fix. The US needs a lot of public infrastructure investment before not owning a car is viable for the majority of people. Uber is not affordable compared to buying a $500 used car from Craigslist if you commute every day and does not solve the problem of navigating big box store "shopping centres" as a pedestrian.
I don't know what city you live in, but where I live the city is pretty difficult to navigate with a car. This is because of all the other cars clogging up the road.
And besides, the entire point here is that you still have access to a car. You are not facing the problem of navigating a car based infrastructure without a car. The entire idea is that there are cars available on-demand!
I guess we could do nothing and hope that at some point governments figure out to build public transportation in a reasonable time frame for a reasonable amount of money, but I'm not going to hold my breath for that. There is zero reason we can't simultaneously work on more efficiently using the infrastructure we already have.
Non-US governments already have. This isn't incompetence, it's intentional policy.
> This is because of all the other cars clogging up the road.
Ride sharing has only made this problem worse[1]. Is there any evidence that even more ride sharing will improve the situation? The basic problem is that everyone needs to get into or out of a few central locations at around the same time (typically 9am/5pm). Solving this requires moving people more efficiently (as in more people/m^2 of roadway) than cars, even ride sharing cars, would allow.
[1] https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/report-ride-sharing-inc...
But even if everyone agrees to do it tomorrow, we're talking decades to completely rebuild infrastructure of major cities.
I don't know why this is framed as an either/or choice. Build better public transportation, sure. How about we also use cars more efficiently. Why are you against that?
This statistic is silly. It's like the "you only use 10% of your brain!!1" meme.
I don't disagree with the overall premise and there's definitely cases where it makes sense (especially in cities), but there's a real trade-off being made.
I only use my toilets a small fraction of the day as well, would you suggest we crowdsource them for greater efficiency too?
Also this statistic presumes that cars work better with higher utilization and that's muddy at best. Sure, greater utilization is more efficient but it also means the cars go through parts much faster, require more oil, more fuel obviously. And of course the ride share companies aren't paying to maintain the cars that they are running into the ground.
Freedom to choose has value. Convenience has value.
I keep my cleats in the car, so that I can just pick which day I want to play ultimate frisbee on the spur of the moment. I don't have to decide in advance and pack something. That freedom to make up my mind on the spur of the moment is worth something.
I can be at home, and decide I need something from the grocery store, and just go get it. I don't have to order a car and wait for it to arrive. Once I'm done at the store, I don't have to order another car for the trip back. That "it's ready right now" convenience is worth something. (Yeah, I know, in a decent urban world, the grocery store would be within walking distance. I don't live in that ideal urban world.)
The point is a lot of people are going to decide that maybe they can plan a little in advance on when they want to play ultimate frisbee if it helps them avoid the myriad hassles and expenses of owning a car and that's probably going to be good.
Large scale carbon emitters like the u.s. can have a global effect. It global temps continue to rise it will have major negative effects on smaller countries. It has already started with my home country.
You don't pay a tax that goes towards mitigating that... unfortunately. I am not saying taking away cars but we should be more responsible where it comes to owning or making the decision of owning one.
Why? One argument that is cooking right now: "you don't know how to properly manage these things to support sustainable progress of humanity (and because you are broke)"
You cant have inverted wealth pyramid growing indefinitely, It will eventually crash, especially when instead of creating wealth you erode the bottom.
I used to be really excited about tech prolonging life, but now i think it will be artificially made prohibitively expensive so the rich cast can hold on to their power even more.
Currently the power was lost when next generation was bad at managing their parent's empires... well I think we are quickly approaching techno dystopia.
But its trivial to see the irony here. This salesman is too shallow to actually walk the walk, and is gonna get laughed at a lot for it.
Aside from that, there are three main ways I can think of that a self-driving car could reduce pollution.
a) More people fit in the same car and an intelligent mechanism can pair riders. This exists today in the form of things like Uber Pool. Without a driver you might get one additional passenger in a car.
That's the main mechanism. In the best case it can reduce energy use per passenger by around 20-25% - in a realistic case it would be more like 10% or less.
b) Cars can drive closer together and with more intelligent traffic lights. I think this is incredibly overblown - pedestrians exist and cars are already pretty close together in cities.
I doubt this will make much difference especially given that electric cars use ~zero energy at idle.
c) Over a long time-frame, cities are redesigned such that parking spaces don't exist and so things are closer together.
This is both a multi-decade (possibly even a century) change, and likely to just result in people commuting further - the 1 hour sweet spot isn't going anywhere, all people won't stack in cities unless they're forced, if we're being charitable, say, 50% of people actually prefer that lifestyle.
It also works for taxis.
Basically, the whole thing is nonsense.
What I see as being more likely if self-driving takes off is crackpots sitting at desks in the back of their van, or chilling on a sofa watching movies, and doing multi-hour commutes, offsetting the savings.
I've not even mentioned here the fact that a significant amount of people just like to own their own car and have the funds to do so. Particularly if you're in a rural area, the idea of some SV startup self driving to your ranch is absurd, you're almost certain to either be priced out or just directly geofenced out.
And it would reduce the number of cars on the road, the number of mechanics shops needed to service those cars, the number of insurance companies, most of the infrastructure around licensing, etc. Lots of knock-on effects that would also impact emissions, and a fleet of self-driving cars permit a lot more vertical integration, which reduces TCO.
A fleet of self-driving cars will simply be more cost effective and reduce emissions. Car ownership becoming a luxury is probably inevitable. It will become a collector's hobby, like old sports cars are today.
Don't forget that the self driving world you imagine is worse for the environment: all those cars going empty to a distant parking lot until you are done with work eat up a lot of energy.
If you want to solve environmental problems from cars invest in public transit. The biggest problem in modern cities is neighborhood designs that make public transit too slow. (you need to have a short walk to the stop, and then the vehicle not make many twists and turns along the way to where you want to be). Density is useful for transit, but suburbs already have the minimum density required, they lack the ability for transit to be fast though.
They will be cheaper. No licensing, insurance, maintenance, fuel, but still almost all of the convenience of a personal vehicle requiring only a short wait time.
> Don't forget that the self driving world you imagine is worse for the environment: all those cars going empty to a distant parking lot until you are done with work eat up a lot of energy.
That's not how it would work. If parking becomes necessary because network capacity is too high and utilization too low, the car would park in its immediate vicinity. We have lots of parking everywhere to accommodate far more cars than would be needed in a world with mostly self-driving cars.
The advantage of a personal vehicle is 0 wait time. If you are willing to wait the bus is cheaper because you can share the ride with so many other people.
Sure we have parking everywhere. However at that point there is essentially one car per person anyway, so it may as well be your personal car so you can leave the golf clubs in the trunk.
Do you need a license to hail an Uber? If that Uber became self-driving, why would you need a license? Certainly Uber cars would need to have some kind of inspection, but that's just an extension of whatever inspections exist for road-worthiness.
> Maintenance is a requirement - the tires will wear out if nothing else. Fuel is still a factor - it might not be liquid, but you need some sort of energy.
These are no longer costs born by the driver/rider, but are now aggregated by the car service. Aggregating yields considerable cost savings.
> The advantage of a personal vehicle is 0 wait time. If you are willing to wait the bus is cheaper because you can share the ride with so many other people.
A bus wait takes a minimum of 15 minutes. An Uber arrives within 5 minutes, and with self-driving cars and capacity planning, this can be brought down to some arbitrarily small number if needed. A bus also requires walking to and from stops, which also adds at least 5-10 minutes for most people. That's a big difference, not to mention these are multiplied considerably in rural areas or areas with considerable urban sprawl. And the first few minutes of waiting for an Uber I'm putting on my shoes, jacket, etc.
Walking down to your car takes at least 3 minutes in a condo. If you own a home with driveway, it will still take you 1 minute to walk to your car and start it up (and a few minutes to warm it up if it's winter).
So the advantage of ownership amounts to about 1 minute in winter climates, and maybe 2-3 minutes in warm climates. That's perfectly reasonable tradeoff considering the expected cost savings.
> However at that point there is essentially one car per person anyway
I don't know what this means. My point was that we don't need to build huge parking lots outside of the city for idle self-driving cars to which they would drive to/back when utilization is low, we already have a glut of parking available for a transition to a self-driving world, and all localized within our cities. A self-driving car service would just use all the parking scattered everywhere throughout the city and so have cars available nearby, no matter where you are.
I already aggregate the cost of maintenance across all my personal driving: there is no cost savings. (if you do your own work it is more expnesive)
A bus wait can be as little as 3 minutes max (q.5 minutes on average). If it isn't the is the fault of lack of ridership. Walking counts as exercise, like it or not your doctor wants you to get more.
Rural areas yes - but rural areas have a lot longer to wait for a shared car.
No, aggregated across all drivers, not just aggregated across your driving. As in, 1 million drivers insuring, licensing and maintaining 1 million cars costs far more than 1 million riders sharing 200,000 cars whose insurance, licensing and maintenance is aggregated by a riding sharing service like Uber, and those savings will show up in your final bill, ie. total cost of ownership of your own car will exceed using ride sharing services with self-driving cars for virtually all people.
> A bus wait can be as little as 3 minutes max
It can be as little as 0 minutes if you get there at the perfect time. That's irrelevant though. Worst case and average case wait times are what's important.
> If it isn't the is the fault of lack of ridership.
No, it's the lack of sufficient incentive and benefits to use transit. America is not Europe.
The same lack of incentive and benefits to use transit applies to shared cars.
> The same lack of incentive and benefits to use transit applies to shared cars.
Sure, but the increased convenience of not needing a shared meetup/dropoff of transit is considerable. The biggest cause of traffic into and out of a city is the 1 driver commute from the outlying regions. If car ownership were more expensive than ride sharing, most of these people would use ride sharing because it has the convenience benefits of car ownership with the efficiency benefits of transit. The ride sharing equilibrium in this model would be upwards of 70% for rush hour, at least.
Non-rush hour times would have fewer cars on the road because the cars would park themselves when utilization falls. This is more efficient and more convenient than transit.
How? I drive from point A to point B in my car. I'm there for a while, then drive from point B back to point A. Meanwhile, someone else drives from point C to point D, is there for a while, then drives back to point C. Total trip legs: A->B, B->A, C->D, D->C.
Now a self-driving car takes over. It drives me from A to B, goes to C, drives the other person to D, gets me at B, takes me back to A, goes back to D, picks up the other person, and takes them back to C. Total trip legs: A->B, B->C, C->D, D->B, B->A, A->D, D->C.
There is no world in which the second set of trips emits less than the first, given equivalent vehicles. It's simply not possible.
(Note that this is different from the have-everything-delivered scenario. The old way was you drive from A to the store at S, then drive back home to A. Someone else drives from B to S, then back to B. Delivery drives from S to A to B to S, which can be more efficient.)
Firstly, you completely neglect to consider ride sharing, where multiple people are heading in roughly the same direction and so a portion of the trip reduces from 2 legs to 1, ie. the simplest case from your examples would be A->C->B->D(wait)->B->C->A. The more people that use the service, the more likely this is to happen, and the more emissions are reduced. It's the exact same aggregation argument supporting the use of transit.
Secondly, you're only focusing on specific local effects rather than systemic effects. The number of cars on the road would be dramatically lower [1], so we're manufacturing, maintaining, licensing and insuring fewer cars, all of which counts towards reducing emissions.
Then the marginal reduction in convenience means some people would change their behaviour, ie. travel less and/or plan their travel better so they get more done in a single trip.
Frankly, it seems clear that there is no world in which people owning their cars would be superior or even equivalent to a fleet of self-driving cars when it comes to environmental impact, traffic or efficiency.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783531
>I think AutoPilot will be a truly remarkable achievement — as in, approaching a watershed human achievement akin to spaceflight.
Just want to point out the irony in this statement. Ok sure, fully autonomous self driving may be a great technological achievement, but it will be an achievement that benefits rent-seeking corporations rather than humanity at large. Sure, the benefits of such a service could allow car-free living at a price cheaper than leasing/owning a car, but this is a benefit that will be reaped by those with means (middle class) while the poor will still be riding the bus or walking. It would also make investment in public transportation even less likely, which would actually result in a net benefit for all.
Full autonomous driving will be a significantly greater accomplishment for humanity than you’re giving it credit for.
Autonomous raises the prospect of cars driving around with no people in them, doing even more environmental damage and causing even more traffic jams.
No bias there!
I'm sure someday it will be a thing but the infrastructure is not there. Or not here in my neck of the woods yet. We only have two maybe three EV charging stations in my entire province. Not that autonomous vehicles are all EV but I'm sure that's the direction they industry is heading and wants.
But to realistic, on this -13C day with icy roads I am not looking forward to an autonomous vehicles. I can't see an autonomous vehicle driving me on slippery narrow winding country roads. Half the time maps don't have the roads correctly mapped here, the road lines are covered in snow, no paved shoulder, roads are infrequently plowed and salted.
They don't have an easy means to rid themselves of an excessive number of dealerships. However a sharing system can effectively do that; fwiw I have little if any issues with the dealership model and i drive a TM3!
it also insulates them from having to make appealing vehicles, they have already proven they cannot do so in the sedan market and have effectively abandoned it.
snark aside, they are already experienced in selling to rental fleets and have put together packages for cars that suit that market very well while not appealing to regular buyers
I've known folks who limp along old cars for years, dealing with potentially dangerous issues with the transmission or suspension. And don't get me started on people who don't keep tires with sufficient tread.
But all these terrible cars are cheap to continue driving in a just-barely-works state. Folks are able to get to their jobs working daycare or fast food in a beat-up 15 year-old car because many places in the US don't require safety inspections, or if they do, only when the car is transferred to a new owner.
If individual car ownership ends, and all the cars are instead owned by large drive-share corporations, that's obviously going to be heavily regulated, cars will all be maintained on a best-practice schedule, etc. Similar to how rental car companies or Uber/Lyft today only use newer, reasonably-maintained vehicles.
If that becomes the reality for all cars in America, we might see a market sort of like Japan. They have a rigorous periodic safety inspection called Shaken, so cars in Japan mostly tend to be newer. Once cars get older and require more work, they're often seen as fairly worthless in Japan and exported to poorer countries with more lax vehicle requirements.
I personally like the Japanese system - it seems to make sense that cars on the road should meet a rigorous level of roadworthiness. But that's so different from the current reality in the US that I'm not sure society would go along with the higher costs that would come with these well-maintained shared vehicles.
I no longer own a car. I gave my last car to my granddaughter last spring. I do “cheat” a bit because I can use my wife’s car, but I find it liberating to not have a car. Living in a small town in the mountains of Central Arizona (Sedona), I can walk to our beautiful library in 25 minutes, to our local food bank where I volunteer one day a week in 15 minutes, and to our local movie theater and a grocery store in 10 minutes.
Except for writing I am now retired, so I can afford “wasting time” by walking.
My generation has done a horrible job living in an environmentally sustainable way. I want to take a 110 day around the world cruise, and roughly not buying a new car might offset the environmental damage of taking that cruise. Anyway, that is how I see it.