People want transport to be: Cheaper Faster More reliable Safer Door-to-door Private Less polluting (In assumed order of importance)
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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
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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?
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A healthy marketplace will have several sharing platforms and several fleet owners compete for the rider’s business.
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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. […]
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[…] (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).
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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. […]
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[…] (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.
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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
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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
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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
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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).
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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
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On-demand cars on smart roads also means every person’s trip history will be stored, for as much as sharing platforms require identification.
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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.
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No need to speed anyway, as self-driving cars react faster than humans and can thus go faster.pic.twitter.com/r28cPHdkz2
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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.
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People and companies in your place will see the personal benefits of self-driving cars once a neighboring city, state, or country allows for it. That creates competitive pressure to update regulation. Governments are slow, but this will move faster than you think.
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Governments will want to certify that self-driving cars are “safe,” which honestly will be an industry itself. Most of these cars will use some form of machine learning, so we likely need simulations as opposed to formal verification.
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Once regulation is adjusted, there will be a transition phase with mixed manual/self-driving traffic. This will make self-driving look worse than it really is, because the manual traffic is less predictable. We honestly can’t do much about it (see investments needed above).
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Trucks will be the first ones to go autonomous, because their usage can be limited to the relatively easy confines of highways and companies are willing to put up with those limitations.pic.twitter.com/C0QdEUyOpf
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Picture container depots at city edges and self-driving trucks shuttling between them. An extension of what’s already happening in ports.pic.twitter.com/RIXY8Mj6We
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Over time, cars will be able to navigate the more complicated inner cities with their pedestrians, bikes, and other traffic. This is where things will get really interesting.
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For one, more people will start using cars for trips than ever before, as the price will be low compared to other transport modes. We will run headlong into the Jevons paradox of improved efficiency causing usage increase. (Which makes the above $900b investment conservative)pic.twitter.com/cYY7MynviU
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A big turning point will be once self-driving cars are cheaper than mass rail transport (tram, metro, train). The average per mile cost in the UK is £0.31 for cars vs £0.16 for trains now, so we need a 50% drop.
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In the Netherlands, 10% of commuters take public transport and 50% go by car. In the United Kingdom, 15% go by train/bus and 70% by car. Roads will have to support 20% more cars if everyone would switch.pic.twitter.com/L5bi0iiRQG
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