Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note:
As Benedict Evans surveys in his highly-recommended Cars and second order consequences, SD cars will change everything, from car design, urban planning, and insurance (I recall Warren Buffet saying SD cars couldn’t possibly be good for his huge insurance business), to shopping, drinking and dining, energy supply and consumption, and even tobacco sales… I would add mating rituals and work modes to the impossibly long list of activities, people, places, and habits that will be impacted by the SD car revolution.
This is a long piece on the players in the self-driving car space. It is fascinating and full of surprises. A few to look out for:
- Elon Musk on the incredible wealth of test data culled from the sheer number of autopilot miles driven by Tesla vehicles
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Google’s Waymo and the Uber hairball
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A chart laying out the six stages of self driving automation
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Why Google/Waymo is the Microsoft of this space
A fantastic, enjoyable read.
Good article with some interesting points. Personally, I can’t wait for full automation. The roads will be a safer, more enjoyable place.
I can see freeways being safer and more enjoyable, but pedestrian-heavy areas I’m highly skeptical can work well with self-driving cars.
No matter how much all the really smart people think about and predict the ways that self-driving cars will change things, they will change things more and in ways they never envisioned. In some ways it’s really scary.