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I can see the attraction for a truly urban dweller, where parking is scarce and/or expensive. And someday, hopefully in the distant future, when I'm ready to turn in my keys it would be nice.
For now, though, I can't see why I would choose to live within the constraints of a car service, pay as much or more per mile, and have to wait every time to get picked up. My car is always waiting for me. I don't have to check an app to see how close it is nor guess how much in advance I should order it. It does not care how long I spend in a store, nor how many stops I make. It doesn't care if I load up the dogs, or a few pieces of lumber. I can take it far out of the city if I like and spend the night sleeping under the stars.
I can see the attraction for a truly urban dweller, where parking is scarce and/or expensive. And someday, hopefully in the distant future, when I'm ready to turn in my keys it would be nice.
For now, though, I can't see why I would choose to live within the constraints of a car service, pay as much or more per mile, and have to wait every time to get picked up. My car is always waiting for me. I don't have to check an app to see how close it is nor guess how much in advance I should order it. It does not care how long I spend in a store, nor how many stops I make. It doesn't care if I load up the dogs, or a few pieces of lumber. I can take it far out of the city if I like and spend the night sleeping under the stars.
You're going to have some pretty good tales to tell your grandkids someday when they ask you what was it like driving your own car?
I can see the attraction for a truly urban dweller, where parking is scarce and/or expensive. And someday, hopefully in the distant future, when I'm ready to turn in my keys it would be nice.
For now, though, I can't see why I would choose to live within the constraints of a car service, pay as much or more per mile, and have to wait every time to get picked up. My car is always waiting for me. I don't have to check an app to see how close it is nor guess how much in advance I should order it. It does not care how long I spend in a store, nor how many stops I make. It doesn't care if I load up the dogs, or a few pieces of lumber. I can take it far out of the city if I like and spend the night sleeping under the stars.
And most importantly your car is never driving around empty.
For environmental and traffic purposes, an empty car driving to pick someone up is adding to the problem. A car parked in your garage is one less car clogging up the roads and consuming fuel.
You're going to have some pretty good tales to tell your grandkids someday when they ask you what was it like driving your own car?
I wouldn't count on that happening any time soon, although I don't have objections to the autonomous vehicle as a general concept. The problem, as I see it, is that a gullible, non- or anti-technical public is being led to believe that the transition will be far faster, and more "seamless" than is likely to be the case.
For openers, it still isn't clear whether the new vehicles will rely exclusively on on-board sensors, or be backed up by a database, or series of databases archiving local conditions, If the former scenario prevails, then the vehicle would likely be better-suited to localities with a uniform street pattern, and some provision would have to be made for overlying streets and highways that don't fit the equation.
On the other hand, an "open highway" oriented system has to take in factors unique to each section of road, such as degrees of curvature, and whether that factor changes in the middle of a turn (there's one near me, and on a numbered state highway, which has been fooling visitors, newcomers, and novices for as long as I've been around -- fortunately with few injuries due to the necessity for low speeds); grades, and whether a turn is banked, flat, or crowned can also "throw a curve of their own" -- and we've yet to discuss the possible effects of weather conditions.
And it's worth noting that the trucking industry, which would stand to reap huge productivity gains and put the railroads out of business for all but the least-desirable freight, has shown little interest, even though the closed environment of a terminal ought to be the ideal place to develop a simple algorithm for tasks like spotting trailers at dock doors, or in storage lots. Once those challenges were mastered, moving toward line-haul on the relative handful of toll roads allowing very large vehicles (what motor dispatchers sometimes refer to as "trains") ought to be a natural progression. But I tend to think that a security-obsessed public won't be eager to embrace this.
If the railroads, who have a far-smaller route network and far-better-defined means of traffic control (railcars can't arbitrarily jump to an adjacent track) have yet to develop an autonomous train (save for a handful of urban subways and mineral-hauling lines in remote locations), I fail to see how the "George Jetson" fantasies depicted in the "popular" press can be so quickly and easily adapted. Popular Science and "hard science" are still a long distance apart, and I fail to see how the twain can meet anytime soon.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 10-17-2017 at 08:45 PM..
Well, according to this industrial innovation analyst, it would be about $.35 a mile for self driving cars versus about $2.86 a mile for the current human drivers only cars. So, it's in the ballpark. Obviously there should be a huge savings simply based on self driving cars efficiency, not to mention the labor savings.
Which brings up a good question. How do you calculate the "MPG" of an electric car? I assume most of these cars will be fully electric.
.35 a mile MIGHT cover costs......maybe. Probably not. .35 a mile is $35k over 100,000 miles. That doesn't even cover the price of the car. That doesn't cover maintenance, insurance, cost of electricity, labor, etc. Then you need to add profit.
I support electric. I got to ride in a self driving Tesla a few weeks ago. It was really cool. It could park itself better than I could. My car will park itself but the idea of simply snapping your fingers, having a car show up and it being cheap is fantasy.
And it's worth noting that the trucking industry, which would stand to reap huge productivity gains and put the railroads out of business for all but the least-desirable freight, has shown little interest ...
Perhaps that's because few trucking companies could afford tens of billions of dollars of liability insurance.
Trucking companies aren't interested because we are still a long ways off in technology to make it work. Electric trains could be done far quicker.
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