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Driverless Cars Are Happening, Even If Some in Washington Don’t Get It
In a chat not long ago with me, an influential GOP member of Congress pooh-poohed self-driving cars based on the idea that people wouldn’t be interested in the technology. Voters like their pickup trucks! Apparently this politician didn’t know any parents with teenagers getting ready to get behind the wheel. Certainly some polls show consumer concern.
But I recall someone who rode in a driverless car with great initial apprehension, which later turned to boredom since the car drove like it had downloaded the brain of a driver’s ed instructor. Actually I think the phrase “grandmotherly” may have been used.
To the above point, some relevant analysis from Ben Evans:
Electric and autonomous cars are just beginning – electric is happening now but will take time to grow, and autonomy is 5-10 years away from the first real launches. As they happen, each of these destabilises the car industry, changing what it means to make or own a car, and what it means to drive. Gasoline is half of global oil demand and car accidents kill 1.25m people year, and each of those could go away. But as I explored here, that’s just the start: if autonomy ends accidents, removes parking and transforms what congestion looks like, then we should try to imagine changes to cities on the same scale as those that came with cars themselves. How do cities change if some or all of their parking space is now available for new needs, or dumped on the market, or moved to completely different places? Where are you willing to live if ‘access to public transport’ is ‘anywhere’ and there are no traffic jams on your commute? How willing are people to go from their home in a suburb to dinner or a bar in a city centre on a dark cold wet night if they don’t have to park and an on-demand ride is the cost of a coffee? And how does law enforcement change when every passing car is watching everything?
Anyway, this great Axios chart gives a feel for just how seriously global companies are taking the technology, as well as the many complex linkages between them.
I have what might be a simple and naive question for people who have bought into this driverless future.
It is constantly asserted as fact that traffic will go away in this future age. What exactly about cars suddenly being driverless will make this happen?
I mean, I get stuck in traffic because the economy where I live is mostly organized around people from outside the metropolitan area showing up at their workplace inside the metropolitan area at 9 AM and leaving at 5 PM. That as far as I know is not going to change with driverless cars, so, why is this repeated endlessly and breathlessly as a certain benefit?
I think you’re right.
You know that whole “get a U-Haul” argument for how people in impoverished areas could improve their lot? Well, one obstacle poor people presently face when it comes to moving from Garbutt or the South Bronx to where the jobs are is that they have to own a car, which requires saving up or being able to borrow thousands.
It’s very simple:
Step 1: Automate cars.
Step 2: ?
Step 3: No traffic!
I was wondering the exact same thing. Thanks for asking Joe.
Yea, I think that’s about what Joe and I were thinking.
GPS and they all communicate with each other.
The car will always choose the quickest route. A driver doesn’t know that 8 miles up the road there’s traffic and taking the next exit would save 20 mins. Autonomous cars always know.
Humans are unpredictable. They might break suddenly bc they thought they saw a deer or they might change lanes unexpectedly causing the cars behind to break, causing slowdowns. The more driverless cars, the less that happens.
If a car is coming up to a blind bend or a merge the driver might be surprised at that point. The autonomous cars would already have adjusted to each other well before that point. They each know where the other is.
This explains your fear. For you, step 2 is “?”.
For Google and Uber and anonymous it is a “!”.
And so will all the other autonomous cars. Suddenly, out of nowhere, seldom used exits are bumper to bumper driverless cars. Look, there are lots of exciting possibilities with driverless cars…relieving traffic congestion is a stretch to much, in my mind. Also, where does the driverless car go after it drops off its owner? If it doesn’t park, then it ends up driving around in circles for hours…adding to congestion. So parking lots will be built in out of way places, I guess.
I think the proliferation of affordable car services will be the more immediate solution to that particular problem. While it’s not quite the same as hopping in one’s own car and going wherever whenever, Uber is becoming a viable option for everyday errands. Even in our little corner of suburban Nashville there are already multiple Uber drivers available at almost any time of day.
I think you are equating number of cars with traffic.
But traffic is caused by causes. Lots of those causes are human causes.
A 100% driverless world would have almost no traffic.
And I find it incredible that so many are so sanguine. We have already seen the harbinger of what’s to come. Uber, before it was legal for them to operate in Portland Oregon, was using software called ‘Greyball’ to skirt the regulators and enforcement folks.
Greyball was basically a list of names and addresses of Portland government folks. If you or your office address were on the list … No Uber for you. No pick up or drop off for anyone near your address. In this way, Uber operated under the radar in Portland. Fun story of creative entrepreneurs. Right? Yep. This time. But that demonstrates proof of concept. Same software, different list of names. Registered Republicans. Firearms owners. Contributors to particular causes or groups … Use your imagination. You know that’s going to happen. You know it. To quote Mark Helprin : “The opportunity creates the will.” Look at the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups. You know that was only the beginning. Why volunteer for that? I don’t get it.
By the time this utopian fantasy is realized, I hope to be the white-haired uncle living far outside the wire hiding a Red Barchetta in my barn.
I’ll throw that right back.
You are speaking of Uber the app. The human company with human drivers.
A car has no politics. The car has to pay its bills. There will be millions of cars out there hungry for another tank of gas. They won’t all choose to use Uber. Maybe they’ll register with a Duckduckgo type service. Then everyone can get rides to the pornography store to buy pornography.
And every car company and driver software provider is subject to litigation and regulation and tax. The car has no politics. But the owners and regulators do. And they have already demonstrated that that they will use their business to advance their politics Does Not Facebook already ‘curate’ it’s newsfeed with a political agenda in mind? Does not Goggle prioritize query results? You somehow expect a different outcome with the auto-auto?
And you can’t be anonymous. Because you have to pay it knows who you are. And by definition it knows where you are and where you are going.
“Of course we support the second amendment. You have a right to own a firearm and we do not dispute that. On the other hand, using our car or piloting software to go to the gun store exposes us to significant liability if something terrible happens with that firearm. So, on the advice of our legal advisors, we cannot accept the gun store as a destination at this time.”
But…
1. We already have GPS in our cars that can tell us this information, and we still have traffic. I get notifications all the time on my phone and I’m sure other people do too. It’s not that big a deal, because…
2. “Always choosing the quickest route” is not going to change the fact that the all routes are slow during rush hour, because a. There is a rush hour because of emergent preferences about what time of day to work that is not likely to change and b. All the routes are terrible during the rush hour.
I mean, it’s not unusual in my commute to be delayed over half an hour by traffic, because even with a 30 minute delay on my usual route that Google knows about, that route is still the fastest route. Adding more data points to Google’s understanding of the world and having it directly decide what route to take is not going to change that.
Because people are going to stop working 9 to 5? Because real estate prices in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles are going to drop, so people don’t have to live an hour or more away from their jobs? How exactly is widespread adoption of the driverless car going to change these aspects of reality?
Because the cars will keep moving instead of not moving.
I suspect the divide between “this sounds awesome” and “this sounds like another nightmare straight out of central planning” probably falls along the urban/rural divide.
And I suspect that should this come to pass, the objections of those opposed will be steamrolled, with the admonition “You’ll get used to it.”
“You’ll get used to having to get new insurance plans every year.”
“You’ll get used to being fingered by the TSA.”
“You’ll get used to increased terrorist attacks.”
“You’ll get used to mandated low-flow toilets and awful light-bulbs.”
“You’ll get used to sitting in a dark room to save energy.”
“You’ll get used to having to wait an extra two hours for that car you called to show up at your door.”
Etc.
I’ve never wanted to drive like my grandmother. I’m never going to start wanting to.
It would be pretty to think so. Cars will keep moving until there are so many cars moving on one road (or set of roads) that the roads fill up with cars – and then they stop moving. Even if the vision is that driverless cars can go 60 mph bumper to bumper, at some point the roads fill up and movement slows or stops.
Seawriter
It still seems like you are skipping past the step 2 “?” that @skyler mentioned. Even with no accidents, as volume increases, so do commute times. There is no amount of perfection in utilizing alternate routes that can eliminate that. If I turn on my faucet to full flow, the sink fills up because it can only drain water at a certain maximum rate. If the intake of water exceeds that rate, it doesn’t matter how efficiently it drains, it will back up.
I do see how it offers some ability to help with traffic flow. There are a lot of intriguing and also unknown ramifications of overwhelming use of driverless cars. However, a blanket assertion that traffic snarls will disappear does not seem to be as automatic and instantaneous as you imply
But…
a) Traffic is not simply a result of numbers of people driving at a single moment.
b) Not everyone is using GPS all the time.
c) And not everyone in traffic needs to be on that route. Lots of people just go the way they know.
d) And finally, the market. Supply and demand. Cars will charge different rates at different times. In real time. Instead of everyone leaving at the same time to “beat traffic” people will bid up high times and some will choose to wait or beat those times. Smoothing out the flow.
Obviously, Uber and Lyft are already doing stuff like this. But the numbers are small so you don’t see a major impact yet. When we begin to see, say, over 50% of cars on the road all making real time decisions then we’ll see the impact.
That’s the most optimistic take if you’re worried about that. Some future president could pass an executive order to forbid ridesharing payments to unsavory locations, kind of like how Obama had that executive order to block fiancial transfers to a long list of industries he didn’t like (I forget the name of it).
We had to get used to having cars at all, didn’t we? And to speed limits and stop signs and registration and inspection; heck, black people had to get used to sitting at the back of the bus in Alabama.
As those who participated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott discovered, we will still have our feet.
Oh my lord. This sounds even more nightmarish than I imagined.
My head is now filled with visions of government programs to make sure that certain demographic groups’ use of autonomous on-call vehicles are subsidized, and I’ll be paying for them even though I will refuse to use them.
Of course, because our elites want women to stop raising children and get out of the house and into STEM fields, women will be given favored access to these on-call vehicles. Even if they only take them shopping.
Ah, you’re confusing actual progress with “progress” as defined by the government. I like you Kate, but your comparison with segregation is silly and slightly offensive.
But what if you can control the faucet.
I live at the confluence of the three rivers. At the time of Fort Pitt the waters of the Allegheny and the Monongahela would go from trickle to flood. Today we have a lock and dam system that controls that flow to maintain almost perfectly navigable waters at all times. Sure, sometimes a tropical storm flows through and floods a bit but nothing like the Great St. Patrick’s day flood of 1936.
The driverless car allows for a system that essentially accomplishes this. The flow of traffic can be smoothed by controlling the faucet and adding a little hole at the top of the sink to prevent overflow if necessary.
OK, but healthcare, cell phones, buses…. they get their hands in everything. How does new car technology differ in this regard? Why is it more nightmarish than school breakfast programs?
Essentially this all boils down to “We should never do anything because some future president will use it against us.”
Google Home, Echo, Smart Refrigerators, Smart Bulbs, Smart Thermostats. They know what you are buying! They’ll track how much energy you’re using! And they’ll punish you for it!
And you’ll receive your government punishment notification by US Mail in about 30 days.
Right, but a non-trivial amount of it is. I am not asking you to justify the claim that driverless cars can reduce some traffic; I am asking you to justify the claim that all traffic will simply vanish.
But enough people are that we would be seeing big benefits from this already. If you have an Android phone, you don’t even need to “use” the GPS; it gives you traffic information constantly whenever it thinks you are driving or might drive soon.
Right, we call those people “Sunday drivers.” Those of us who commute every day are vastly more incentivized to find shorter routes, which leads to my next point…
We don’t need a market to make this happen; people already have knowledge of what traffic is like readily available and are already incentivized to avoid it when they can. Charging them money during peak is not going to change a commuters behavior, because if they could change their behavior they would already do it. Adding Uber surge pricing at 5 PM isn’t going to change the fact that most people don’t have the option of leaving work 3 hours earlier when the streets are clear.