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The End of the Auto Era as We Know It May Be Approaching Faster Than You Think
Bob Lutz is a former vice chairman and head of product development at General Motors. And in this essay for Automotive News, he declares the end of the auto industry as we know it:
It saddens me to say it, but we are approaching the end of the automotive era. The auto industry is on an accelerating change curve. For hundreds of years, the horse was the prime mover of humans and for the past 120 years it has been the automobile. Now we are approaching the end of the line for the automobile because travel will be in standardized modules. The end state will be the fully autonomous module with no capability for the driver to exercise command. You will call for it, it will arrive at your location, you’ll get in, input your destination and go to the freeway. . . .
Most of these standardized modules will be purchased and owned by the Ubers and Lyfts and God knows what other companies that will enter the transportation business in the future. A minority of individuals may elect to have personalized modules sitting at home so they can leave their vacation stuff and the kids’ soccer gear in them. They’ll still want that convenience. The vehicles, however, will no longer be driven by humans because in 15 to 20 years — at the latest — human-driven vehicles will be legislated off the highways. The tipping point will come when 20 to 30 percent of vehicles are fully autonomous. Countries will look at the accident statistics and figure out that human drivers are causing 99.9 percent of the accidents. . . .
CNBC recently asked me to comment on a study showing that people don’t want to buy an autonomous car because they would be scared of it. They don’t trust traditional automakers, so the only autonomous car they’d buy would have to come from Apple or Google. Only then would they trust it. My reply was that we don’t need public acceptance of autonomous vehicles at first. All we need is acceptance by the big fleets: Uber, Lyft, FedEx, UPS, the U.S. Postal Service, utility companies, delivery services. Amazon will probably buy a slew of them. These fleet owners will account for several million vehicles a year. Every few months they will order 100,000 low-end modules, 100,000 medium and 100,000 high-end. The low-cost provider that delivers the specification will get the business.
Of course don’t forget the second half of the phrase “creative destruction”:
Published in Culture, Economics, TechnologySo auto retailing will be OK for the next 10, maybe 15 years as the auto companies make autonomous vehicles that still carry the manufacturer’s brand and are still on the highway. But dealerships are ultimately doomed. And I think Automotive News is doomed. Car and Driver is done; Road & Track is done. They are all facing a finite future. They’ll be replaced by a magazine called Battery and Module read by the big fleets. The era of the human-driven automobile, its repair facilities, its dealerships, the media surrounding it — all will be gone in 20 years.
What button would you push to program a car to illegally double park in front of a restaurant on a tight busy city street while some disabled elderly restaurant goers are helped into a car. Not to mention city valet parking and the crazy park jobs those guys have to perform.
I think we will discover that as flawed as humans are, it is next to impossible to program in every variable and nuance that happens when we drive that we as humans encounter and react to instinctively to our benefit (ie: turning off a major street onto a side street when we see an accident is stopping traffic ahead).
This financing problem will be solved by 1> randomized “speeding events” and 2> mandatory cigarette purchase quotas for riders of self-driving cars.
That’s right! Will driverless cars respond to a “ramming speed!” command?
Ummmnnn…..this seems, somehow, evidence for the other side?
Personally, I’m looking forward to naps, reading and knitting.
Neither legislators nor think tanks consider reality when they dream their robot dreams.
The market will never demand we get rid of human-driven cars. Just like the market never demanded that we legislate away the 75-watt incandescent bulb. Instead, it will be the corporate rent-seekers paying off legislators to do their bidding.
You betcha. If I’m going down, it’ll be in a Charger SRT 392. Top O’ the World, Ma!
Silly person. Driverless cars won’t take you to church. That would require the use of the National Robot Car Auto Control Grid, and using that to take you to church would violate the separation of church and state.
Think like a Democrat and the abuses are myriad.
I detect sarcasm. : )
Or maybe not. Uber doesn’t own vehicles now. It’s business module requires their drivers to own, insure and maintain the vehicles. For this and a modest fee, Uber finds and connects them to customers and handles the money. The power of this concept is its ability to provide additional surge resources when demand increases.
Sure there’s the potential for abuse; drivers who shouldn’t be drivers for example. But the taxi industry has the same problem. And because customers don’t generally rate the drivers, and the drivers the customers, I think the potential for abuse is worse in the traditional taxi business.
I’ve used Uber a few times when I was medically unable to drive myself and found the service to be exactly what I needed.
Very very good point.
automated sarcasm detection system? check.
I love the fact that some critics call electric cars: coal-powered cars.
Wait until we have autonomous vehicular terrorism, i.e. navigation systems that produce a single day of spectacular carnage. Then, when people refuse to ride them and the economy takes a massive hit the man with antique car will make a mint.
John,
So, of course, you are willing to write that into a warranty, yes. Do you actually think that in any given situation when the autonomous car wrecks and kills people that the lawyer for the plaintiff won’t assert that a human driver could have avoided the accident? Juries aren’t insurance companies. I think you may be missing the fact that your evolution to a self-driving car superior to the mean human driver may be an evolutionary just-so story. The probability that everything will come together to form even your mean driver superior vehicle is far too remote to actually happen.
Meanwhile, when you fall short, predators will be around to devour your new, less than viable, automobile species.
Regards,
Jim
John,
Remember Chess? This is a simple game with a fixed little 2D universe of 64 squares and six different pieces. The list of the rest of the rules is rather short. This game starts in exactly the same position every time with no random variables to worry about. It took about 3 decades to slowly creep up on being better than humans. First, the software would improve and then the hardware would invest the major concepts from the software and then new concepts would be worked out in the software..etc. There’s going to be a lot of dying when it isn’t a stupid little chess board and human life will be at stake on every iteration.
Regards,
Jim
Here’s a case study on an interstection between transportation, automation, and bureaucracy: Blood on the tracks
I was wondering about that, too.
I recall one scholar (it might have been Peter Huber) saying that it would make more sense to embrace CNG for automobiles over electricity. The advantage of CNG is that existing gasoline engines can be converted to CNG for relatively little money. Also, the existing distribution system of gas stations could be used to sell the product. The conversions can also work for the “big iron” rigs that currently use diesel fuel. But there does not seem to be much interest in CNG.
John,
Go has fewer rules and fewer different pieces than chess. It is far less of a challenge. This is exactly the kind of hubris that makes me so repelled by this whole project. This is simply a fantastically hard application and human lives will be in the balance to a huge degree. Do you remember the integrity and work ethic of the 50s and 60s. I’m not sure we have that kind of integrity anymore. When the dying starts they’ll run for the hills. They just want to make a quick easy buck riding on the back of technology that they haven’t the slightest idea of the difficulty of making.
Why, John, you know that Mathematics itself is racist.
Regards,
Jim
As I’ve said before on the subject, the desire of the state to control mobility is a way of enforcing their preferred mode of urban organization: large concentrations of dense housing with small allotments of private space. The people who vote for such things do not want them for themselves; they want nice houses with lawns and gardens, or big lofts downtown in reclaimed buildings, overlooking the river. But they hate the suburbs, and believe everyone in general is better off if we (meaning, they) live in dense, “sustainable” developments, bike to work, or take the bus.
These are the people who will vote for “progressive” politicians who will legislative human-driven vehicles off the road. These voters are already intellectually predisposed to approve of altering other people’s behavior by coercion, if the outcome is nominally egalitarian.
By the time the first attempts are made, we’ll have heard “car culture” described in the same terms as “gun culture”; the arguments about freedom will be drowned out by angry recitations of highway fatality statistics. The first politician to get behind the idea will run ads that show him next to his prized BelAir, talking about how he loves to drive, and how his daddy was a shade-tree mechanic, and no one’s coming to take your keys away. “But it’s time to look to a cleaner, safer future.”
Ten years later a series of scandals and mishaps will lead to a push to define the transportation companies as public utilities, and they’ll be regulated to prioritize and ration certain types of travel.
It’s possible, no?
What if you only have to charge your car once a week? or batteries that last 30 days?
JamesL,
Gimme that old time megalomania.
Regards,
Jim
Mean people shouldn’t drive anyway. I know: let’s just outlaw mean people. Like guns, too.
Like this: It’s now against the law to be mean and if you are mean you cannot leave your home.
I think I just died a little inside.
Rico grasps the problem here. I suppose you could outlaw human operated vehicles. But the pedestrians would be even worse. Lutz needs to get out more. In San Francisco you can see pedestrians taunting cars, walking through red lights as a political statement.
And then there are the drunks and lunatics. The beggars will create impromptu toll booths. The only reason they have not brought traffic to a complete halt is the fear that some driver is texting and will run them over, or get so pissed off that they resort to violence.
This is utopian nonsense. Think Segway.
This is truly insightful.
So the computer can make stupid mistakes that much faster.
Had an email conversation with my brothers this morning, before this thread appeared. One of them recently recommended a book he had picked up in a used book shop: “There’s a war to be won: The United States Army in World War II”. Brother # 2 went to his local library to reserve a copy, and did a “search by title” in the catalog. He got two returns on the title search:
1: The book,
2: the DVD set for the second season of Desperate Housewives.
I replied to the two of them that this was more evidence that self-driving cars would not be widely available in our lifetime.
I know; I’m still waiting for the flying cars I saw on the Jetsons.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the car as we know it today will one day be gone. That’s how technology works – it keeps changing. However, I doubt it will disappear within the next 20 years. 50 to 100, maybe – but not 20.
I’m not convinced that the technology won’t advance to the point where self-driving vehicles and the future envisioned by the person interviewed will never happen. But you do bring up some excellent obstacles that will need to be overcome first.
These are reasons why I’m not willing to completely rule out the possibility of a future with only autonomous cars.