Exactly. She thought the road was more slick than usual, but in our hour-long wait, no one else even had trouble stopping.
In this era of cell phone cameras you should just take photos of everything, exchange insurance and ID info and move along.
Waiting for cops (unless someone is hurt) is pretty much a total waste of time.
Guess I’ll share my accident story as it fits here more than anywhere else and corroborates the idea of filing with insurance.
Not long after I got a new car (of course!) I got rear-ended by a young guy in a truck that was missing a front bumper. Almost no damage to his truck and he dented in my hatchback (Mazda CX-5). No one is injured. We exchange information and I don’t get a police report because the police in Houston are overloaded enough that unless it’s serious you’re unlikely to get much help. I do take photos of the accident and since he doesn’t have a front bumper I go to the rear of his truck to get a snap of the license plate. I did not realize how important that cast-off picture would become. The guy seems nice and doesn’t look like he’s going to cause any problems (famous last words, right?) so we both drive off.
I file a claim with his insurance company and also notify mine. A couple weeks pass, during which an agent from his insurance calls me to ask if there were other cars involved. I say no, because there weren’t any. Kid was just moving quick, the car in front of me unexpectedly jams the breaks, which leads to me doing the same, and he just didn’t stop in time. Really pretty simple. I await word that they’ll be paying for the repairs.
I then get a notification that his insurance is denying my claim because he says he was pushed into me by another car. My insurance says, ok no problem, just file with us and by the way if you have pictures of the accident please upload those with the claim on our site. My insurance says to go ahead and get the car fixed and initially I’ll pay the deductible. They’ll go into mediation with the kid’s insurance and if they win I’ll get my deductible back. I groan that if the kid just told the truth we’d get to the same conclusion faster and with less cost to everyone. My insurance says, dude you’re right but this happens all the time.
A couple months later I get a reimbursement for my deductible and all is well. But damn it, why did that guy have to lie about it? I guess in one case I appreciate that his insurance stood by him, but when I had the photo showing no damage to the rear of his vehicle, that should have settled it. Instead, his dishonesty causes several other people to have to get involved. What a pain in the ass.
It’s common to hear complaints about surveillance being some great evil against personal privacy and there’s truth to that. But freedom is a double-edged sword, isn’t it? It means the bad guy can do what he wants too, so how do you reconcile that? With the truth. A traffic cam video would have helped in this situation too. So that brings me back on topic, cause I’ve been thinking about getting a front/rear dash cam ever since my incident but you’ll see about two dozen of them on Amazon and most look cheap, complete with fake reviews.
Here’s a link to Wirecutter’s review of dash cams.
For the initial post, the only thing I would add is that if you have damage to the car and you DON’T call the insurance company, they sometimes can drop you from coverage later on when they DO find out about it through car telemetry or whatever – most of the big insurance firms have a clause in your contract that obligates you to report an accident to them even if you don’t end up filing a claim.
Now on to self-driving cars.
You probably won’t have to. Just like Lyft or Uber today, if you want a private vehicle and are willing to pay that premium, then you’ll be sent a dedicated vehicle. For most folks, sharing a car with another person or two in order to pay a reduced cost will be worth it, especially during the rush.
Very likely it will end up being the same people each day.
Since the cars will almost certainly have surveillance cameras inside them (for face-recognition if no other reason), I suspect that assaults between strangers in the auto-cars will be rare… though I can appreciate why someone would want to spring for the additional cost late at night.
Not really. If you’re doing an unplanned trip to gandma’s, you’d probably have to use an app to call for a car.
But the cars will probably end up using a predictive algorithm and/or a schedule that you share with the company… or simply using your habits as guides.
If little Jimmy has soccer practice every day at 3:30, you may soon find an auto-car loitering outside your house at 3:15 every day without having to specifically call for it. Little Jimmy would walk up to the auto-car, do his phone/retina/thumb scan to authorize the trip and be off. After the third time he wouldn’t even have to specify the destination; the car would ask “the usual?”, Jimmy would say “yes” and then go back to playing on his phone.
Your daily commute routine would be similar.
If you’re at the grocery store, you probably won’t have to ever call a car. There will almost always be two or ten auto-cars queued up in a small still-paved part of the grassy field that used to be the parking lot and four or five queued up in front of the doors. You’ll hop in one, do the phone/retina/thumb thing, say “home”, and off you’ll go. A new auto-car will be pulling into the queue as you leave… at least during busy hours.
Most public places will be like that, with more cars during (predictive) busy times and fewer during “off” hours.
Most cars will only be parked for long enough to recharge them, and those shifts will be (ideally) staggered. There may indeed be large parking areas off in industrial zones to do this, and it may or may not cause new build-outs. Whatever the solution that develops will be, it will almost certainly be more efficient than our current one where each owned car has two or three spots dedicated to it: your garage, the parking spot at your work, and a retail spot for shopping.
Likely most homes will convert their existing garages into living pace and possibly turn their driveways into more lawn. New homes won’t have garages.
That’s pretty easy – it’s the same reason why elementary schools and high schools don’t have dedicated buses. An auto-car that is not out on the roads transporting someone or something is a car that is not earning money or providing value for the owner.
During the morning commute it should be out picking up workers based on where they live and where they are going such that each trip is the shortest possible in aggregate, and ideally it would transport dozens of people per rush. After the rush, it should be heading out and transporting kids to school. After that it should be delivering freight for the various businesses or else grabbing opportunities to take people to or from the grocery store or the museum or whatever. The afternoon will be the reverse. The evening will be spent taking kids to practice, adults to grocery stores or other non-delivery shopping, or else shipping freight for delivery-shopping.
At night there will be a reduced ROI on trying to find the ephemeral passengers (at least on weeknights), so the typical auto-car will probably return to “base” to recharge.
I would love in 15 years to see grassy parks where all the parking lots are. What an amazing side benefit of automated cars.
With the facial recognition/linked credit card thing, non payment won’t be an issue either, just like with Uber. So no Johnny Cab trying to run you over if you skip out.
Depave parking lots, and put up paradise!
You really think parents are going to be cool with little Jimmy getting in a car by himself with no driver and just disappearing. These are the same parents who will not let little Jimmy walk around the block to visit his friend?
And per my objections, I think eventually the auto cars will dominate, but just not in the 5 years mentioned above. Not in 10 years. But eventually. And probably not for quite a while in some places.
Except the auto cars would need parking lots since during rush hour there will need to be many more of them available.
If this is paradise I wish I had a lawnmower!
No no no
Don’t it always seem to go,
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Til its gone
Yeah, where are those bastard kids gonna skateboard when all the wal-mart parking lots are prosaic paradisaical parkland?
Keep up man, all boards will be self-skating within the next five years.
Don’t leave me standing here, I can’t get used to this lifestyle!
Won’t the kids be riding Back To The Future style hoverboards in 5 years??? No asphalt needed!
I will be going to work using my jet pack in 5 years.
Don’t laugh (too much) but i have a daydream where i somehow become CEO of Apple (just because they have a ton of cash on hand to use, it could be any company), use all that money to invent a hovercar, have a series of ads showing a pair of zoomed in shoes/boots/higheels framed by a perspective of a camera under something flat that looks like ‘car bottom’ plane but no wheels in frame, then introduce the car during on of those WWDC style shows, where at the end of the presentation the screen above pans up to a commercial showing the amazing flying Apple Car where the end shot is a digitally altered interstate covered in healthy grass while thousands of hovercars fly silently above. True story!
See, this is why visionaries like you change the world, while I dream about 1996-era Jennifer Love Hewitt.
I think most parents will be, yeah… especially since I reckon kids would get no-fee auto-car rides to school just like they can ride the school bus for “free” today. Helicopter parents would be free to order a “premium” dedicated auto-car for precious little Jimmy if they wanted to, just like they can drive him to school themselves today.
Yeah, it’ll be a phased thing. I think Stusser’s timeline might be optimistic… but not unreasonably so. I think within 5 or 10 we’ll see a radical (but not total) shift. I’m virtually certain that my kids will be the last generation that routinely gets driver’s licenses.
Not really b/c more people will be carpooling. Today carpooling is a novelty because it’s too much of a hastle to coordinate, but when you have a computer figuring out who is going to ride-share today and at a specific time, I think you’ll actually halve or even more reduce the cars on the road during rush hour.
I think you are not taking into consideration of the trades. I have a side-business of woodworking. I can’t imagine ever relying on automated cars. Going out to look at, purchasing, hauling back to my shop. No way this will be done automated. Same thing for electricians, plumbers, handyman, carpet layers, roofers, etc.
but I do think for the vast majority, we will see automated cars.