The impetus to use autonomous vehicles, from an industry perspective, is cost cutting and efficiency. Having to pay humans to essentially do nothing 90% of the time is not going to fly. Ergo, I doubt we’ll see anything like this unless the Teamsters negotiate it as part of the deal to allow the trucking industry to get rid of most drivers.
The bigger problem for me though is that period between now and full autonomous operation for 99% of the vehicles on the road (something I personally hope never happens). When you mix computer controlled and human controlled vehicles things are going to get messy, fast, I think. Also, if you start adding cars with varying degrees of autonomy to the mix, people are going to get in a semi-autonomous car and think they’re in a fully autonomous car, and again, bad things are going to happen. It’s already happening with people relying on technical nannies and not paying any attention to what is going on around them.
In the end, though, yeah, I’m sure autonomous cars are safer than human driven cars. What really bothers me though is the underlying assumption that everyone views driving as a chore, and wants no part of it. That is probably true for a large part of the population, that lives with bumper to bumper traffic jams and long commutes or simply views cars as appliances. For those of us who like to actually, you know, drive–getting in my car in the morning and when I leave work starts the two best parts of my working day, 100%–the idea of getting in some transport pod and doing what we’d be doing at home or at work is not only not appealing, it’s downright sickening.
Right now driving is for many of us one of the last vestiges of things we can have some control over, and where we can engage in a viscerally entertaining activity that stimulates multiple senses and at the same times fulfills a useful purpose. It’s not that I’m upset about “technology” or whatever. I’m upset at the blithe, smug assumptions of people like Musk and the other champions of autonomous cars that everyone is a Silicon Valley commuter who hates cars and traffic and wants to have more time to do work rather than driving. I’m not too fond either of the people who are championing autonomous cars simply because they hate the idea of cars, driving, and hate people who love cars and driving, usually for ecological-ideological reasons.
Huh, you’re the third person I’ve met now that really likes driving. Everyone else ranges from “meh, whatever” to “please make it so I never have to do it again”.
Personally, I’m totally sold on autonomous vehicles and can’t wait, but I also don’t know anyone who is angrily saying people shouldn’t ever be allowed to drive again. I’m sure they’re out there, the world is big, but it sucks that you feel that sort of pressure. :/
It’s not what other people say or feel, it’s the inevitability of the process. You cannot, in my view, have widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles and still have an environment where anyone who wants to can still drive themselves. For one, the safety issues around mixing self-and AI drive cars will push people to legislate–or insurance companies to effectively mandate–that all cars be autonomous, IMO. For another, once you hit a certain threshold, it will become economically infeasible for car makers to make human driven cars in anything like the variety currently available, or for affordable costs. Again, just my opinion; it could very well shake out differently.
Admittedly, I live in a low-population state with zero traffic jams, and short commutes (or for those who have an hour or so, all highway, no slowdowns). For people who did what I had to do back in the eighties–commute say in the DC area, or Atlanta–I can well imagine “driving” is a different experience. And the auto industry has, for decades, been pushing cars as spaces not as machines, and they certainly know what they are doing in terms of how that message resonates.For me, though, I’ve always loved operating machinery like a car. I have a manual transmission, performance-oriented (though AWD) car, and always have chosen my vehicles with driving dynamics first, everything else second, when I had the leeway to do so. I frequent car forums, and do some (minor, for want of facilities and skill) car modifications as well. I’m not a typical driver, for sure.
And I work at a college where 90% of the people view cars as something on the par of Nazi zombies in terms of the evil quotient, so it does get wearying.
Even if autonomous vehicles become so ubiquitous that it becomes illegal (or super expensive via insurance rates) to drive manually, I have to believe recreational driving will always be available. You might not do it every day back and forth to work, but it’ll be available in some form or another.
Well, there’s also rural America. You know, the places the Democrats forgot about this last election, and where none of the bi-coastal elites running the economy every visit? Trucks in particular are vital parts of the economy and culture, the roads and infrastructure suck, and weather is often abysmal. Autonomous vehicles may be quite viable in, say, the area bounded by a beltway or perimeter highway surrounding a big city, but out in the boonies? Not so much. And pushing recreational driving into a high-cost sport for elites isn’t much of a solution; those of us who love driving get to indulge ourselves while doing something that is essential for our lives anyhow, thus making a virtue of necessity. It would be vastly different if we had to pay the equivalent of what it costs to say own a boat or a plane just to occasionally drive.
I also wonder how this will all shake out economically. Full-on autonomous cars means the death of the traditional auto industry. I say this because with full autonomous driving, the only thing that makes sense is cars as service, not cars as owned property. Coupled with the huge shift towards leasing already in place, that’s how I see it going. No one is going to update a car every three or five years if it’s an autonomous people pod, at least not as many as upgrade now. And autonomous cars will almost by default last longer, be better maintained (centralized maintenance as part of service, etc.) and will make the problem of selling new cars even more acute than it is today. You also won’t be able to differentiate market segments except by interior features and a modicum of external appearance. Without the sort things that people lust after in cars now–because they won’t be using those things which will all be automated–no one will want to buy a car any more than they absolutely have to–and they won’t have to at all because they can probably rent it as needed.
Plus, with cars as a service, you’ll see things like much less land devoted to things like parking spaces, downtown and individual garages, and auto associated hangers on like auto shops on every block. Plus in theory at leas, less pollution due to cars. I look forward to that future.
I understand this view, I really do. I just don’t share it. Cars have always been an important part of my life, for a variety of reasons. And I have usually lived, in this country at least, where there was zero public transport, and where I could trade lower costs and more land for more distance from urban areas. I have zero interest in renting a transport pod. I reject, as well, the idea that getting someplace is necessarily a lesser value experience than being someplace (especially when that someplace is work).
I do get the resource saving and pollution arguments, but you’re kidding yourselves if you think autonomous cars are going to do that much in that regard. Taking the rest of the world into account, you’re going to eventually see more cars, not less, once the requirement to buy them and operate them goes away. And celebrate all you want the demise of the auto industry; the tech overlords that will replace it are if anything even more rapacious and anti-social than the auto barons ever were.
I don’t see my feelings as any sort of hillbilly elegy, either. I do feel that the general attitude about this is often quite smug and condescending, viewing people who like cars and driving as dinosaurs akin to people holding on to horse and buggies. Maybe we are, I dunno. But I do know that without the psychological safety valve of grinding the gears and operating a fast car each day, I’d be in much worse shape.
Personally, I see it as the end of parking spaces and lots. Which is a good thing, since that is probably the least productive area in the USA and usually smack in middle of cities or retail areas. It can be repurposed as new green spaces, more store front space or larger industrial areas.
Hell, we can convert them all to shotting ranges just to mess with rednecks.
Before I get into this, my previous posts were absolutely meant as some gentle ribbing and I very much appreciate you taking them in the intended spirit.
I get this. Cars are very much tied into big parts of the American psyche today; simply owning one enables one to have the freedom to travel just about wherever you want, in safety and comfort. It unlocks job opportunities, social constructs, and is a hell of a class marker.
But it’s fucking ridiculous in so many ways. For one thing, owning and operating a personal vehicle is only something afforded to lower-middle-class and up (to be super-reductive about it) in America, and higher economic tiers elsewhere. It’s cool that the zoom zoom is a release for you, but it’s just not something that most of humanity has access to. Because it’s crazy fucking expensive.
Personal autos are subsidized to an absolutely absurd extent here. It’s a massive distortion to the economy that has disastrous consequences for land use, resource allocation, and urban planning. I mean, if the death of personal autos means the death of bedroom-community exurbs…very much a feature, not a bug.
Oh, I hear you; I just hope it happens after I’m dead and gone! Because, in a way, I agree with you. But it’s not as simple as a choice we make. It’s the sum total of choices we as a society made over many, many years. Our entire culture is based on personal mobility, from the geography of our living communities, to our work locations, to our commerce. There are huge parts of the country, probably all of it outside of some metro areas (I say some because many have bupkis in terms of mass transit that actually works for most people), where not having a car means not having a job, not having anything remotely like what most Americans would call a decent life. And yes, it’s kind of dumb that a huge chunk of the wages of lower-income Americans has to go to paying for transportation and its associated costs.
Autonomous cars, though, ain’t gonna help with this. Autonomous cars as currently envisioned, are for the elites. Even though the mass market automakers are getting into the act, ain’t no way folks in East Bumblefuck are going to be able to ditch their old truck for an autonomous hay hauler or whatever. And no way they’re going to be able to ditch their ancient Dodge Neon for a new Tesla, or Leaf, or Prius, or anything like that. This is above and beyond the difficulties of even having autonomous operation where the infrastructure is close to non-existent (unnamed roads, dirt roads, poorly marked roads, mud, snow, extreme temps, no cell coverage, whatever).
You say “Yay!” to the death of suburbs and bedroom communities. I hear ya, to some degree; many of these communities are blights on the landscape. Yet, what’s the alternative? Urban arcologies? Not everyone wants to live like ants in a huge communal pile. A lot of Americans in particular really value some open space, cheaper housing, and a modicum of what passes for nature these days. Hell, I only have an acre, but it’s a godsend for my dogs and me to romp on, and I could never, ever afford a fraction of that in town. And I’d go freakin’ nuts living, as I have in the past, in some high-rise apartment/condo in the middle of a bajillion other people. We have a tremendous amount of space in this country, which is one reason why our human geography grew up the way it did. To advocate in effect abandoning the hinterlands and re concentrating everyone in urban centers so no one has to drive anywhere, and we all live where we work, sounds pretty grim to me, sort of like one of those dystopian futures we see in movies all the time.
I’d much, much rather see us disperse even further, into many, many much smaller communities powered by renewables and linked by efficient, clean, and affordable personal and mass transit and high-speed communications links. Let folks live in cities, or not, as they see fit, but make it a lot more equitable, so cities aren’t binaries of $20 million apartments and slums, and the exurbs aren’t binaries of trailer parks and McMansions. You can’t do that by simply axing cars. I agree the subsidization is problematic, but I’d also argue that given our history–cities that grew up centuries after most other cities in the world, really, with vast available land, and a culture for good or ill steeped in individualism and wanderlust–it was sort of inevitable.
Can we reverse that? Should we reverse that? If we can and do, what do we put in its place that won’t just be a further division of the country into elites in deluxe urban arcologies on the one hand, and everyone else in the tenements on the other?
On one point, though, I would differ with you. Increasingly, cars are accessible to more and more people world wide. As electrics become more prevalent and particularly as we get more affordable and preferably renewable-based electrics, you’re going to see more, not less, car use across the globe. I would argue that automobile ownership is, for better or arguably worse, no longer a characteristic of elites.
Much of what humans do is not “optimal.” There’s always someone that wants to make us “optimal.” Usually, that means changing the behaviors of people who don’t have the same values or act in the same way you do, in the name of efficiency. As much as I love internal combustion engines, I do see that, in time, probably a relatively short time frame, they will go the way of the dinos. I can live with that; you can make performance electrics that will scratch the driving itch, I am confident of that. But the social engineering of getting rid of personal transport is, to me, chimerical and ill-advised. It’s one part of a hugely complicated problem that does not lend itself to reductive solutions, because to me at least all of the alternatives I’ve seen boil down to a preference of elites to live in high-end urban settings where they can do high-end urban things, and who in essence can’t see that many people either have no interest in that sort of life, or feel (with reason) that the quality of life they would live would be markedly diminished by such a social and cultural shift.
I’m more than willing to entertain all sorts of discussions of current social, environmental, and economic problems, and possible solutions. What I don’t find terribly useful is the general strain of argument (not specific to anyone here really, just in general) that simply assumes that of course cars are evil, and of course everyone wants to live cheek to jowl with their neighbors, and of course time is much too important to spend in transport (usually this last is from workaholics; I have zero interest in working on a bus, train, or autonomous car, thank you very much).
Completely autonomous driving wont ever hit the middle of the country. It might be viable in large coastal cities, but if you think it will ever hit say Iowa outside of shipping, you’re fooling yourself. Some people might try it, but take a shit infrastructure, add extreme weather and you’ll get nowhere fast.
It might be an option for like interstate travel or the like, which honestly would be fairly handy at times. Roads that are nearly always clear and pretty well maintained, but outside of that it’s unlikely. Even electrics are iffy in places that get really shitty weather, when it hits 20 below I don’t see those things being reliable. Internal combustion is barely reliable when it gets shitty enough. Now add in that most people pretty much need vehicles to survive and I can’t see it. There is basically no public transportation and the little there is usually shuts down when it gets shitty out anyway. People’s employers don’t give a shit and I doubt we’re going to enter some socialist Nirvana where they do anytime soon.
In any event, I appreciate these discussions. Civil discourse where people have very different views is useful, and essential. Hell, I think Adam_B and I could, if we were politicians (God forbid!) actually come to a fair degree of compromise in terms of legislation and programs. Neither of us would be totally happy, but that’s the nature of good political dialog.
And really, we don’t have crystal balls. Well, I mean, the type you gaze into for prognostication; your personal biology is, well, your personal biology. But I digress. We can’t foresee what will happen, except in vary general ways. I do think that urban centers will eventually get the equivalent of Total Recall’s Johnny Cabs or whatever they were. I do think that autonomous electric vehicles as a service will be a reality in some locales, and be extremely helpful for some populations. I also think human-operated vehicles will be around in various forms for a long time, particularly in areas outside of urban cores. One big challenge will be interfacing human-driven transport with AI-controlled transport, as when Ma and Pa Kettle drive their truck to urban LA from East Lizardtoe, California, or whatever. Will we have vast lots where people park their vehicles and switch to public transit or pods of some sort? Interesting stuff.
Oh, I am going to have to disagree with you here. If cars become easier to drive, there are going to be more miles driven. Consider the most basic requirement, a person in the car. In theory self driving cars do not require that. So, there can be cars on the road NOT driving people. More cars or more miles driven will mathematically mean more infrastructure supporting driving.
Now, take your cars as a service idea. Assume I live in a dense city and need to get to work, so I plan to order a car for work. Before I do, I scan the list of services to see which one can get me a car the soonest. Which means, all the companies will have excess cars nearby and ready to serve me or will lose out to those that do. When the car arrives, I put in my destination and start up my future laptop. Even though the commute is long, say 2 hours, I do not mind because I’m getting some work done or get to watch a couple of episodes of the hit 1990’s period drama. I arrive at work with a bunch of coworkers also riding autonomous cars. Now, the demand for cars is greatly reduced since morning rush hour is over. Since I work in a downtown district with high rent making parking spaces economically inefficient, some cars stick around to handle extra commuters, the rest will drive 10 or 20 miles to a massive parking lot. Those cars are serviced, given gas, and at around 2 or 3 are sent back into the city to pick up the coming surge of rush hour commuters. I get into one and begin my commute home. While riding my son ten year old son calls and says he needs to get to future baseball practice. I order him his own autonomous ride, which of course arrives within ten minutes because there were several cars waiting in the neighborhood for such demand. Upon arriving home, the car drives off, maybe to pick up miscellaneous evening traffic, or it does another long drive back to a distant storage lot to sit until morning and the next rush of commuters.
That is a hypothetical I came up with, but I think at least a few things about it are going to hold.
People will buy a better driving experience if they can afford it. That means driving solo… or rather riding solo.
Making driving easier will mean rides previously not taken will now be taken. The incentives to find carpools and other efficiencies are reduced.
The current “peak” demands of rush hour transportation are not going to change, which means cars sitting and doing nothing for a good portion of the day.
To better service riders, vehicles will need to be competitively placed, which will mean cars removed due to automation will be to some degree offset by cars added to compete for automation.
You might be right that the number of parking garages and auto shops will diminish, but if so they are only being replaced by much larger parking and service locations, which means cars are driving more miles to reach them and their destinations. The obvious parallel is package delivery like FedEx.
Nice analysis, Greatatlantic. I suspect that the only real way to fully transition to cars as service is to remove the need for most cars, that is, reconcentrate population in urban cores and depopulate the countryside, effectively. At which point, really, you might as well not have any cars because with that concentrated a population you just can rely on mass transit, as everything will be pretty close together.
There are really several issues intertwined here. One is cars per se, that is, transportation at the beck and call of individuals, for their own use, when they want to use it. Whether autonomous or user-driven, it’s structurally the same basic idea. Another is environmental, economic, and social costs of said transportation. A third is human geography–where people live, where they work, where they shop and play, and the relationships between all of these considerations. Put this all together and there’s really no one size fits all solution.
If your priority is to get rid of the (admittedly on one scale of things very wasteful and costly) paradigm of personal transportation, you either have to concentrate everyone so that mass transit will work, or build a vast network of, well, constantly running mass transit, which seems infeasible. Either way, you have to significantly recast lives and effectively force people into living one particular way. Not impossible, and you can argue it’s worth it or essential, but definitely not easy or something that is going to be universally lauded. It’s also almost certainly going to be something with a heavily class-based dynamic, with the lower end of the spectrum getting shafted hard.
If your priority is ecological and efficiency-based, electrics and other alt-fuel vehicles, greener manufacturing and recycling processes, and different paradigms for infrastructure are all possibilities. This approach would minimize impacts on the way people conduct their lives (swapping in unobtanium-fueled cars for ICE or whatnot), but would leave a patchwork of objectively inefficient dispersed communities, keep the need for people to have cars, and probably again hurt the lower income folks the most at least at first. It also requires more tech than we currently have, really.
If your goal is really to change how we live, though, it gets even trickier, because you have to change the way we do pretty much everything. And businesses have a lot invested in the status quo. The only way, for instance, that I see concentration of people so that they live where they work is the reconstitution of the company town concept, sort of like in Shadowrun with the megacorps arcologies. Not a very attractive vision, really. Not to mention that there’s a reason people really took to the industrial age’s concept of living somewhere not right where you worked. And it’s an open question whether highly concentrated populations are actually better than decentralized and dispersed living patterns.
Of course, we’re getting way ahead of ourselves with all this speculation. In the near to mid term, we’ll see more electrics, fewer pure ICE vehicles developed, and more options along the lines of cars as service for specific communities and specific populations. I suspect we will see zero practical movement towards any change in the broader living patterns of the nation, which means, to me, that we won’t and can’t see much movement towards the vision of a carless future some folks anticipate. I can definitely see some communities where owning your own human-driven car would be a rarity, but in general? Not in my lifetime, thankfully.
This assumes that rush hour is literally only one hour. I know in my city (Orlando) it most certainly isn’t and our main roadways have heavy traffic for at least 3+ hours before and after work. That’s significant because almost no one commutes here for 3 hours at a time (I’d estimate average is 30-40 minutes) which means 1 car can service 3+ work commuters before and after work. That means means instead of 3 cars being required to get people to and from work only 1 is required now, which means even if the car is doing nothing for a good portion of the day that’s now 1 car doing nothing for the portion of the day, not 3.
I agree, it’s sort of bizarre that we spend as much money as we do on cars, which realistically we use a mere fraction of the day. Assume you drive four hours a day on average (and many drive much less), that’s 16% use at most, when you consider weekends or what not.
Then again, there are a lot of people who own things they rarely use but who get pleasure from them that makes it worth the cost, so, I’m not sure this is all that earth shaking.
If you assume a person only has a car because they have to, and if you assume they spend as little as they can on the car because it is not intrinsically meaningful to them, then, yes, it’s foolishly wasteful to have the car also just sit there most of the time. And I’m sure many people feel just this way. Many, however, don’t. But it’s a solid point for sure.
Well, that’s because using a car costs more money than simply having a car. Gas, maintenance every 5,000 miles, wear and tear breaking down parts, greater likelihood of accident raising insurance, etc. Your average consumer would probably get a lot less utility out of a car by using it more for diminishing returns. Use a car lightly enough and keep in maintained, it can last you 15 or 20 years. Use it constantly and its going to have a shorter shelf life. Not that time on its own can’t cause wear, it just doesn’t make sense to use such an expensive item unless you are getting good value for that use. The time thing is, sorry, kind of missing the actual economic decision making.
I get life insurance through my work, and am not at all disappointed by the 0% utilization of that product.
That being stated, there aren’t a lot of alternatives to improved life quality and opportunity given by having a personal auto in America. There are exceptions, of course, but they don’t disprove the rule. Certainly, some people overspend on cars, be it buying a second car your family does not need, or buying an expensive car which is not that much better than an economical one.
