These cars could be so freeing for so many segments of society. I agree with everyone that reducing the commuting annoyance would be awesome - imagine not having to worry about parking your car in the city anymore. You drive in on a highway at 90mph, get dropped off and then the car goes home or onto another task or gets shared out. Amazing. I'm even more excited about getting the elderly out of their homes safely, and getting drunk people off the road altogether.
It's easy to play out the use cases and see why Uber is investing in this area and why it feels threatened by this technology advance.
I think Uber sees self-driving cars much more as an opportunity than a threat - unless they are afraid they won't be able to buy self-driving cars from anyone but Google, and Google won't sell to them. But I'm sure there will be quite a few suppliers by the time they need the cars [1].
Short term I agree with you, but longer term I'm not sure. Short term, they lower costs massively.
Longer term, a majority of people have self-driving cars. If I live in the suburbs, I either keep it all to myself, or loan it out when I'm not using it. If I live in the city, then I likely don't own a car - but instead call on a car as I need to. These probably come from both individual lending their car, and from groups/companies that are setup as a service.
Either way, these cars are likely to be network agnostic - meaning they'll lend themselves out to Uber, Lyft - whoever. So while costs will go down, it could lead to a big margin compression. Meanwhile, the arms seller (Google, whoever) makes money on each car being sold.
Makes sense, therefore, for Uber to continue to focus on capturing the market - their installed consumer base (and their brand) is their strongest asset going forward.
I think people focus too much on Uber replacing consumer transportation. I think they're going to branch out into transport of goods and eat into the trucking industry in a major way, in addition to whatever they do with consumer transportation. A lot of the commoditization concerns that you'd have with transportation don't apply as much to transport.
I could see people buying "priority" access to the self driving car fleet. People who don't mind waiting or don't need to move around during peak hours would just have lower costs.
Google Ventures and Google are separate arms of the same company. Ventures invested, but Google proper is working on their own service to compete against Uber.
Note how easy it'll be for Google to flip the "Uber" provider in Google Maps to their own service.
It's akin to single user vs time sharing OS back in the 60s. I wonder how more efficient would society be with fluid allocation of transport.
Many of us like the idea, I also talk about it to some people, surprisingly they have no knowledge of the SDV projects (Google or other), even driving instructors. So far it adds to the trust and legal issues, public awareness seem quite slow for such a thing.
That would be incredibly wasteful. Double the cost of gas, double the environmental damage, much worse traffic because cars are going home by themselves with no passenger, then returning to get the passenger later.
Not really. In a future of self-driving cars most people won't even own their own car so most of these cars will be shared - essentially automated taxis. So after the car drops you off it will go to its next call or park somewhere until someone calls it.
How is the car going to park itself? The grandparent's point was about how annoying trying to find a parking space is.
Can self-driving cars parallel park yet?
Can they detect a strip where parking is only allowed between 9-4 and it's 4:30? Can they detect fire lanes?
EDIT:
Also, are these automated taxis really going to be more affordable than owning your own car? Taxis are incredibly expensive today. Sure you save a lot of money when you don't have to pay a driver, but is it really enough to make car ownership undesirable?
> Can they detect a strip where parking is only allowed between 9-4 and it's 4:30? Can they detect fire lanes?
I don't have specific examples, but I know that it's possible to read signs easily, (as in you can write a program to do it yourself with no great techno-wizardry,) and I don't see any reason they couldn't use that data.
Yeah, sure, we can think of a far future where everything is automated but I think this discussion is more about the near future (near being when self-driving cars are for sale).
The logistics of parking go far beyond getting into the space. How does it pay the parking meter? How does it know if a parking lot is public or not, how does it pay for that? How does it know not to go into the unsafe neighborhood where wheels get stolen?
Compared to the logic involved in actually driving down the road safely these are all easy problems to solve.
But realistically they are problems that won't be had, because in the near future (and probably in the far future as well) most people aren't going to buy their own personal self driving car because not only are they expensive, but it is pointless to have a personal car when it is way more convenient to offload responsibility for the car ownership to someone else.
Instead they will use an app to summon an automated taxi car owned by a corporate entity (Google, Uber, etc), and when they are at their destination that car isn't going to park, it is going to be off to pick up another passenger.
The car owner will have designated secure parking lots for overflow cars that aren't needed out on the roads during non peak hours. The cars would return to that designated lot when not needed.
Sure, I might be overstated the problem of parking, but I still don't see how this is more economical than car ownership. If I have to summon a taxi for everywhere I need to go I need the taxi rates to be a fraction of what they are today.
I can't disagree with you on all of that, but I feel like you might be making the problem harder than it needs to be:
Almost any initial solution is going to be imperfect, and is going to involve mistakes if you try to solve for the entire problem space. Usually, the way to address this is to solve a small subset of the problem. If you don't know how to pay for the parking in a particular place, don't park there. Things like that. You limit the problems that you have to address, and the lessons you learn while applying that technology and the infrastructure that develops around its use alters the difficulty of refining it to address other cases.
I can easily imagine the way that I would solve the parking problem, at least initially: Set it up so that the car can pay wirelessly and make it so that people who own parking spaces can add their carpark to a database as enabled for wireless payment. There are even systems which already exist that do something similar to this; toll roads, toll bridges, et cetera: you put a little device on the front of your car and that records your usage of the relevant infrastructure, which is then charged to your account.
Put a bunch of image recognition for parking signs in the car - good parking space usually follow fairly straightforward formats; I'm not sure whether the signage is defined in statute or regulation, but generally they're much alike. Do some simple correlations on whether the person actually indicates they want to park there to refine the algorithm....
Crime figures are publicly available, so you can hook into that database for avoiding bad areas...
And have a rule that says not to park somewhere if you're unsure.
#
In the case of taxis, it's even easier: there are designated taxi ranks where they have to wait. And, considering there commercial enterprise, (there are two types of taxi regulation here, it's a bit weird,) you could rely on the taxi company to fill out a database themselves of other places that the car could wait - it's in their financial interest to do so.
>Taxis are incredibly expensive today. Sure you save a lot of money when you don't have to pay a driver, but is it really enough to make car ownership undesirable?
This seems to be a point that is often missed. In denser cities--where utilization can be relatively high--drivers make maybe $15 per hour. (Maybe a bit higher when actually carrying passengers which is probably the relevant metric.) So it's not clear to me how these hypothetical vehicles are going to so revolutionize the way people get around by cutting costs by maybe $15/hour (ignoring other labor costs associated with cleaning or any incremental cost of the vehicle).
The Google self driving car already relies on being fed a detailed map of everywhere it's going to drive. Adding things like fire lanes and parking restrictions to that should be relatively easy.
I think that will be the case for most families second car, but not their primary. People will own one family car, that's feels comfortable and contains personal items. The second car (today used largely for commuting) will be self-driving.
I don't know that the traffic would be much worse, because if you assume that a significant number of cars are self driving, then you eliminate many of the problems in terms of traffic flow that come from a human driver: maintaining a constant speed and distance from the car in front, aggressive driving, counter-productive driving habits, tragedy of the commons issues. It is possible to use the roads far more efficiently than we currently are capable of as humans.
There's also the point that it doesn't really matter how bad the traffic on the roads is if the only majority of the things suffering that bad traffic don't have any people in them.
Gas and polution:
If you can tell your car to go somewhere else when you are not in it, then electric cars and out of city parking lots - things like that - become a lot more feasible. You no longer need the infrastructure to be right next to your office to make effective use of it.
It's easy to play out the use cases and see why Uber is investing in this area and why it feels threatened by this technology advance.