What will road transport look like in the future? A speculative thread of personal thoughts. Hint: The opposite of this picture.pic.twitter.com/PggWKDrF8m
You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more
See the keywords there? Faster and cheaper. Much of it driven by the production scale of smartphones. It’s good to keep in mind William Gibson’s advice about this all: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”pic.twitter.com/V2CYERgySz
Many of these wants and trends point to a clear direction: Self-driving, electric cars. For the sake of this discussion, we will assume full autonomy (level 5).pic.twitter.com/ChDIPMD0jC
Nobody agrees on a timeline yet, but the benefits of self-driving cars are obvious and the investments serious. These will be a thing. Well, maybe not the Google pods.pic.twitter.com/8x2MMlxgMQ
Electric cars have fewer moving parts, are more flexible as they are fully software-controlled, quieter, and more fuel cost efficient compared to gasoline cars.pic.twitter.com/67pXIefcSf
Self-driving cars will be safer, can go faster, drive closer to other cars, optimize fuel usage better, free up parking space in the city, and free up time compared to human-controlled cars.
“Software is eating the world“ (Marc Andreessen) and self-driving cars are a perfect example of that. Much of what will make a future car successful will be determined by how good the software is and the software companies of the world have noticed.
The software companies’ bet is that the value in the production chain will shift from manufacturing metal boxes to building software systems. Transport is a much larger business than phones (Apple) or advertising (Google).pic.twitter.com/tHzks8mLay
Who will own these self-driving, electric cars? If you own one personally, it could drive you to work and back. A great experience, but parking it during the night and day is inefficient. The car could drive around other people during the 95% of the time you don’t use it.
The trouble is: What if you decide to go home unexpectedly and the car is on the other side of town? Either your car is never allowed to go far away (inefficient) or you will end up taking another self-driving car. So why would you own one yourself in the first place then?
Once you don’t drive in your own car anymore, you need access to a generic one anytime anywhere. That is the service car sharing platforms, like Uber, provide. They figure out how many people need a car when and where, and ensure there are enough cars to match it affordably.pic.twitter.com/RvfQVATj9A
That still doesn’t answer the question who owns the car. One option is that private people invest in a self-driving car and make it available on these sharing platforms. Who maintains and cleans those cars though?
Another option is that manufacturers or sharing platforms will own the cars, but it gets expensive fast. There are 260 million registered cars in the United States. If self-driving and sharing increases utilization from 5% to 75%, you need 18 million cars for the same usage.
At $50k per car (double the current average purchase price), the manual to autonomous transition would cost $900 billion. For America alone. That’s twice the cost of building the United States interstate highway system.pic.twitter.com/jnUZ3dk2Kh
How to raise $900 billion to finance 18 million self-driving cars is almost a bigger challenge than manufacturing them. Luckily, there are already organizations which specialize in this: Leasing companies.
Leasing companies are specialized in raising capital and using that to generate a steady revenue stream. There is little difference for them between consumers or sharing platforms paying for a car.
With car sharing, riders care more about price and availability than which car they get. And once these personal preferences no longer matter, leasing companies will optimize for total cost of ownership. Expect cars which are easier to maintain, clean, and repair.
A healthy marketplace will have several sharing platforms and several fleet owners compete for the rider’s business.
All of this will be a quadruple hit to the fancy car manufacturers of this world: (1) From gasoline to electric wipes out the engine and drive train competences. (2) From manual-driving to self-driving replaces mechanical expertise with software knowledge. […]
[…] (3) From status objects to shared vehicles removes the brand advantage. (4) From personal ownership to shared fleets undoes the dealer sales network. This pretty much just leaves them with their manufacturing capability (which we shouldn’t underestimate).
Let’s pause for a moment and recap what we have so far: (1) People want cheaper, faster, and safer transport. (2) Self-driving, electric cars will outperform manual gasoline ones. […]
[…] (3) Sharing a self-driving car will be cheaper than owning one. (4) Leasing companies will own car fleets which will be available through sharing platforms. (5) It’s unlikely existing car brands will win the market in this new world.
Now that we have self-driving cars, what else will change? For one, the roads will be different. Once all cars are self-driving, we don’t need road signage or markings anymore. Traffic lights will be a thing of the past. Good digital maps are how self-driving cars navigate.pic.twitter.com/DnzbAhx7c5
As time progresses, governments will understand that building a road is half their job and publishing live data about it the other half. Access to the location, condition, utilization, and speed limits of each road in the past, present, and future will be baseline expectation.pic.twitter.com/W3fqaV88MP
Cars will use cameras, lidar, and radar to see the next 200m, but need external information to know what is happening kilometers away. Road owners can provide this by using phone triangulation and video detection.pic.twitter.com/29SgbRBwO2
Cars will also need to know what other cars are doing and intending to do. This requires a communication channel (like Wifi-P) and information standard (yet to be defined).
My bet is on 1-way (think UDP), as opposed to 2-way (like TCP), data transfer between vehicles as well as with the road. No manufacturer wants a crash “because the road didn’t respond” or “the other car gave me the wrong information.” Cars need to be as independent as possible.pic.twitter.com/TKgnIbhzN5
On-demand cars on smart roads also means every person’s trip history will be stored, for as much as sharing platforms require identification.
These self-driving cars will also religiously follow traffic rules, as it will speed up the overall system and governments will make it part of their certification process.
No need to speed anyway, as self-driving cars react faster than humans and can thus go faster.pic.twitter.com/r28cPHdkz2
This does bring us to the point of regulation. Many observers point out that it might be the single largest stumbling block for full autonomy, though I’m hopeful.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.