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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.
And let’s face it – about half the people on the road don’t appear to have the skills to have ever passed a drivers license test anyway.
Sorry, Kate. I apparently misread your comparison.
The car company here is the government or a heavily-subsidized rent-seeking corporation. Neither will be denied their income. The subsidy amount (and hence the amount we are taxed) will simply increase. You’ve seen city buses operating nearly empty? I’ve never known one to close down for lack of ridership even when there is lack of ridership.
Same deal with these vanity trains. There’s no customer base clamoring for the trains. Rather, there’s this belief from urban planners that “if you build it, they will come.” Except they don’t.
What if they build an autonomous car network and nobody wants to use them? Have you ever known a government to say “Well, that didn’t work. Might as well shut ‘er down?
No. Rather they look for ways to force (in government speak, “incentivize”) people to use them. And maybe they do that with a higher gas tax, or higher license fees, or anything that makes using your own personal vehicle cost-prohibitive.
So boycotting a government program in order to make it go away will not make the program go away. It will, rather, make the government find new ways to force people to use it.
Can you tell I have a dim view of government? That’s an issue for another thread.
It depends on who you talk to.
I would love a driverless car experience for exactly the same sorts of reasons you describe, except knitting would be replaced with either playing computer games or writing code. And this was the image of driverless cars that was originally presented; a convenience for the indvidual owners of cars. I don’t have to drive if I don’t want to.
Sometime in the past year or so, this fantasy vision of the future changed scope. Instead of being about solving the problem that Joe, Kate, and millions of other people would prefer to do other things while they are now driving, now we’re going to stop all traffic and congestion because our cars are going to be smarter than we are. And they’re going to be electric. And they will be constantly on the road while we’re doing all of the things that we do when we’re not in them. And we will not own them. And we will ban manual driving of cars because it will be so much more dangerous than automatic driving. And someone will figure out how to make money doing all of this in some way nobody has clearly articulated. And it’s going to enable the construction of newer, denser cities. And we’re going to have new, totally different modes of living that will be more efficient than our current modes of living. As long as we let some computer in the cloud be the central authority that decides how you get to where you are going, and forbid the alternatives.
I think I like your version of driverless cars. That sounds like a new dream. The other one sounds like a nightmare that the human race has been having on and off since Marx wrote Das Kapital.
This isn’t centralizing solutions. That’s the key point.
It keeps coming back to big brother but there isn’t a central directive orchestrating all cars. All cars are self-owning individual actors. But, unlike humans, they have awareness of all other cars.
Well the good new is you won’t need either pretty soon, rendering you more free.
Relevant to this are the two podcast episodes of EconTalk that discuss in detail how the private, profitable bus system of Santiago, Chile was made illegal and replaced with a public system that was an unquestioned, absolute failure, yet no political will exists to go back to the old system that everyone agrees was better than the new one.
They don’t have independent “awareness of other cars.” That’s provided by a central server somewhere.
All the cars have a GPS reciever. GPS receiver reports to a server farm at Google the car’s location. The server does the computationally expensive work of figuring out what the best route is and sends it to the car. The awareness and the computational work required takes more computing power than you can fit in a moving car, especially a moving car needs its independent computing power to figure out whether or not the shape in front of it is a car, a human, a squirrel, or an old cardboard box.
I mean, this is supposed to be like having Google Maps drive your car for you, right? Your phone doesn’t know what the traffic is by asking every phone in 30 mile radius. Google’s servers give the phone the answer to the question you ask it.
The information is centralized yes. But each car is independently giving and using that information
Ha! Freedom is slavery.
Will insurance coverage be prohibitive to driving ones own car?
Stop giving them ideas.
See the light in the window? That’s where they monitor the internet. Credit cards, debit cards, EZ Pass, Amazon, Email, Frequent Shopper cards… They see all. But you know not to worry…. not yet anyway… it’s the driving!
It’s best to take a both/and approach.
I think many who have concerns about the ubiquitous use of driverless cars, and expected government interference are most horrified that this control of the faucet, the flow of traffic, will be governed by judgements deemed appropriate by the government.
Horrifying. Simply horrifying.
When you type a question into Google, how confident are you that you get the unadulterated “top responses”. YouTube is not a government entity yet somehow a PragerU video on racism is blocked for causes counter to a acceptable narrative. Society is not government, but many of the same impulses to direct the actions of other people are still there.
I view the software engineer who designed the emissions profile at Volkswagen as a hero. He produced a better car while subverting the regulatory paradigm of the Davos class. The punishment meted out to Volkswagen should be precedent enough to keep the innovations of driverless cars well within acceptable limits to the powers that be.
I’m not forced to use google. Eventually, the central planners will require us to use automated cars and they will control our movements.
I’m reminded of the issue of “smart” guns.
@casey You’ve alluded to this several times in this thread: are you suggesting that an automobile will be a self-aware, conscious entity, imbued with the same “inalienable rights” of personhood as a human? Do I understand you correctly?
If so, the legal and philosophical implications of self-driving cars have become exponentially more complex. For example, can one then say that a self-driving car can be “owned” by a person; wouldn’t that be slavery? Would a self-driving car be subject to taxation on any profits resulting from its trade (carrying passengers in exchange for money)? Would the self-driving car have the rights to political franchise; surely if taxed, it has a right to vote?
If this is the case, what would prevent GM form manufacturing tens or thousands of “self-aware” cars whose only real purpose is to register to vote and then vote as programmed by GM in favor of politicians who promise to favor GM’s business interests?
Perhaps this all sounds silly and paranoid (I’ve been accused of “thinkin’ too much” before…) But what appear to be a relatively simple technological advance with lots of potential upsides might have some very serious unintended negative consequences.
No. anonymous argues this. I find the argument ludicrous.
I’m just saying self-owning. John and I agree up to that point.
The entity of the car buys a physical car on a 60 month loan. It registers with Uber. It picks up fares and uses that money to pay its loan, gas, oil, repairs. At the end of its life it trades itself in for a new itself.
But in the sense that that would be true it is true of everything already.
In the horrifying sense, it’s just not reasonable. This is all technology that already exists and we’re already using daily. If it was so horrifying we should already be horrified. I can’t understand why applying this technology to cars make it suddenly horrifying.
I’m not afraid of the technology.
I am afraid of the government’s misuse of technology.
Because cars=freedom
But that already exists.
I guess us rubes could go back to riding horses, ifn we don’t like headless cars .
?
And you’ll still have cars. So there you go.
Yes.
I know.
Hence my well-placed fear that expanded misuse will appear at first opportunity.
If it makes you feel any better, the people who actually know how to accomplish these things tend to choose being billionaires over government pensions.
You’re imagining a world that doesn’t exist anymore, a world where innovation was beneficial to individuals. We should assume nowadays that anything that can be used against our individualism will be, to the nth degree.
I think that the discussion has gotten way ahead of itself. There are too many steps along the way to the near 100% driverless scenario that @casey envisions to have any degree of certainty about how it will play out. It’s an interesting discussion but, if we look a little more near-term, I see this working best on our Interstate Highway system in the form of dedicated lanes.
Much like HOV lanes that we see now, I could see lanes for self-driving cars that would have specialized interchanges to mix back into regular traffic. Maybe these lanes have fewer exits and maybe there is a fee for using them. That would be driven by any market force that makes this attractive enough. Personally, I could see getting into the express lane in a self-driving car for the 8 hour trip to Orlando to see Grandma and being able to read or watch a movie. It would essentially deliver for me the one lingering attraction to having a passenger rail line from here to there. It would also be a lot cheaper than a train ticket and I wouldn’t have to arrange a ride from the single train station in the area to where I’m going. The dedicated lanes may not be strictly necessary in the technical sense but they may be in a cultural sense.
I’m sure that there is a much greater business case to be made for hauling freight this way. At any rate, it just seems to me that interstate limited-access highways are the easiest entry point for seeing self-driving cars/trucks entering into the picture compared to the vagaries of surface streets, neighborhoods, county/state roads, etc.
Not really related, But I’ve long had a theory that we really screwed up when we built the Interstate Highway system because we only built the divided highway with 2 sets of lanes. It should have been built with three sets of lanes. Then you could have one set “actively” going in each direction, with the third set of lanes used for maintenance: i.e. you always have one set of lanes that’s not in use, so you can patch/repair/rebuild without disrupting traffic, then switch another set of lanes onto that one, patch/repair/rebuild, and repeat.
Imagine driving coast to coast on the Interstate without ever enduring lane closures or seeing Orange barrels on the side of the road. Plus the roads would be in better shape because they could be worked on proactively without disrupting traffic.
I tell you, there is no off position on the genius switch…
I like that idea a lot. I also have always thought that mixing heavy freight traffic with passenger cars was mistake. Trucks create a number of more fatal hazards and much more wear and tear than cars do. A separated lane for trucks is appealing to me.