Ben Evans, writing for his blog:
No more worrying about parking. If you don’t need to worry about parking yet can be driven there directly and affordably, how much travel shifts from public transport to cars? How many people visit a busy central area they might previously have avoided for that reason (the West End of London, for example)? But then, where does that car go afterwards – does it drop you off for dinner and drive off to a cheap carpark, or does it spend the next few hours driving other people around for a fee? The more autonomous cars there are, the more appealing on-demand becomes. Quite where the second-order effects end up is hard to predict – for example, where does it leave public transport if routes start emptying out, and what does that mean for people on very low incomes? What does it do to cycling?
This is just a tiny point in a post chock full of them. There is just so much richness in this writing.
There’s the sea change coming to the way cars are built, as they move from complex transmission and combustion engines to far simpler electric motors, with the commoditization of parts that makes cars simpler to build and enhances competition.
Take the time to read the whole thing. It makes me excited about the future of cars and helps me understand why Apple would and could get into this market.
Busy central areas will only get more congested if people decide that they’ll go in via an autonomous car when they wouldn’t have otherwise because they didn’t want to have to find parking.
Sure, over time the cars coming in and going out of a busy central area would balance each other, but traffic flow isn’t even like that. Instead it’s an alternating sequence of high-congestion peak times, like rush hours, and low-congestion off-peaks, like in the middle of the night.
On the other hand, reliable on-demand autonomous cars are liable to make more people willing to take a train somewhere because they know they’ll be able to get around from point to point more easily in that “last mile” without having to take (and park, etc.) their own car, or hail a cab, or figure out a bus route/schedule. Similarly, people might be more willing to take a short flight rather than a six to eight+ hour drive in their own car, because on-demand autonomous cars at their destination are sure to be much cheaper than rental cars. (Plus they can use an on-demand autonomous car to get them from home to the airport, without having to deal with extended parking for their own car, or an expensive shuttle or cab ride.)
Note that there’s a difference here between bringing in more cars to a busy area from outside, vs utilizing the existing, circulating autonomous cars that are already in that busy area.
maybe by 3050 we will have “flying cars” … i mean the technology is almost there – yet software – for the most parts sucks and redunacy, speed, cost and safety are always a concern… maybe electric motors will give way to electric wings.
Also, nobody talks about cleaning these things – as when someone is not in or on their moving property – it is often treating like dirt – and if you need any example just check some cabs (some cabbies have no standards) or the light rail cars in some metro areas – are absolutely disgusting … and that can be on a good night – not Saint Patty’s Weekend, Halloween or New Years…
I think garages are the future – almost everyone forgot.
Autonomous cars is public transport. You are not talking about a new kind of car that may obsolete public transport. It is the other way around. Autonomous cars are a new innovation in public transport that is going to be yet another nail in the coffin of the car*.
The reason a bus is big is to enable the single human driver to carry as much passengers as possible. If the bus is driven by a computer, you can make 10 small buses that carry 6–8 people each, and co-ordinate it moving around the city, constantly picking up a passenger on this corner or dropping off a passenger at that corner, and every passenger would be guaranteed by the algorithm that is choosing the bus routes in real-time that they would not to be driven more than 25% out of their way as compared to be driven directly there. And in slow times, 5 of those mini-buses can go park somewhere, just like big buses do now in slow times. Ultimately, the 10 mini-buses could use less energy per day by far because half of them might spend most of the day parked. Think about getting on a big bus today at 10 PM at night and there are 3 people on there with you. In the future, the bus would effectively shrink and grow as required by the number of passengers, because more mini-buses would just come into or go out of service as required.
A much bigger driver of transportation trends is the portability of work. 10–20 years ago, for most people, a 1 hour bus ride to work in a Google bus -type shuttle bus would be wasted time, not work time. Now, you can have a MacBook and iPad and iPhone and get your first hour of work done on that bus, so that your travel time is work time. Now you don’t want to do the work of driving. You want that to be done by a professional so that everybody on the bus is working as it travels. Or, a robot driver at some point. So what? No difference to the trend towards public transport.
Think about a person who drives themselves to work in 1 hour, works 8 hours, then drives themselves back for 1 hour. They did 8 hours of work and 2 hours of driving work and were gone from the house for 10 hours. Now compare to a person who takes a shuttle bus for 1.5 hours each way to the same office, works on the bus, stays at the office for 5 hours in-betweeen. They did the same 8 hours of work and were only gone from the house for 8 hours, and they did not have to do 2 hours of wearying driving.
Autonomous cars = bus or cab. Buses and cabs are already on the rise right now. The autonomous thing hanging there in the future is only adding to the rise of buses and cabs. The computerized dispatch and management of buses and cabs is already here and already affecting the way buses and cabs operate today. There is a Zip Car and some kind of scooter version of a Zip car right outside my house on the street right now, and I can use them whenever I want by going to a website and signing up. All this stuff is already killing the car.
That is an example of how wrong-headed this article is. Parking for autonomous cars is not a concern because they will almost certainly not park.
When the car drops you off at the airport or office or theater or hospital, it will pick somebody else up who is there and take them where they want to go. Any other idea is absurd. You can’t have cars doing laps around the block for 2 hours while somebody eats at a restaurant on that block. That wastes road space and fuel and causes wear and tear on the car.
So we are almost certainly talking about the future of public transportation, not the future of car ownership. Owning your own car is going to be seen as a weird thing that people did in the 20th century because they didn’t have computers yet. People are going to tell their phones where they want to go, and their phone is going to ping out to other computers and a car is going to pull up in front of you and take you where you said you wanted to go. Just like people are doing now.
CD to MP3 is the same as car to smartphone-hailed cab or bus. In 1995, you had your own copy of “Houses of the Holy” but now you are listening to one public copy of “Houses of the Holy” along with all the other Spotify users. And all from your phone, same way you get your Uber.
The thing that is misunderstood about flying cars is that when they were predicted as coming soon in like 1940, we thought that we would very soon have a practical understanding of how to manipulate gravity. But it turns out that in the intervening time, we have hardly gained any real knowledge about gravity, let alone figured out how to manipulate it to make a car lighter than air.
So it wasn’t supposed to be about wings or motors — that is a plane. The original idea was to simply that once we had mastered gravity to the extent we have currently mastered electromagnetism, then it was going to be totally painless to make your car lighter than air and so why not fly it around?
The most interesting thing about Apple getting involved with autonomous car design and manufacturing is this is typically too early in the game for them. Apple usually jumps in at the deep end when there is a product or two out there, and even doing ok. There were MP3 players before iPod, tablets before iPad, smartphones before iPhone, etc. In each case, Apple entered not only a viable technology sector but a proven market (albeit one not having reached its potential). Currently, there is no autonomous car market. There are many, many legal and political hurdles. So I wonder …
Well, it’s entirely possible that Apple is not getting involved with autonomous car design and manufacturing–at least not at first. They could simply start with regular human-driven vehicles, which is certainly already a proven market, and would give them experience with drivetrains, chassis design, etc. etc. before they later go full autonomous. This would not be at all out of character for Apple. Most everything they’ve done has been an evolution, refinement, and/or exploitation of previous technology. (For example, Firewire was a key enabling technology for the original iPod. It’s UI was also just like the column mode in Finder Windows and iTunes, with only a single column visible at a time.)
How many more cars would you put on the road in big cities during rush hour if buses or trains are eliminated?
Agreed. I’m guessing a lot of the nerds who’re salivating over this new paradigm have never had to commute daily to a big-city desk job. If autonomous cars eliminate buses and trains, even more small-capacity cars will be on the road at the precise hours when fewer would be better.