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Self-Driving Cars — Really?

craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

I know the world of transportation visionaries/futurists seems to be in love with the concept of the self-driving car, but I don’t see it.  There is so much wrong with our existing paradigm in personal mobility, it’s hard to know where to start.  Perhaps here:  it’s grossly unaffordable – both economically and environmentally.  We all own a huge piece of steel that sits idle 23 hours a day.  During the hour it’s in use, it has an average of 1.1 occupants.  We fuel it with a substance that’s causing climate change, ocean acidification, lung cancer, war – and it’s putting the U.S. in greater debt at the rate of half a billion dollars a day.   If you want to get rid of something, does it really have to be the driver?

Again, I don’t see it.  Of course, I’m the guy who, when he first heard rap music several decades ago, told a friend, “That garbage will last about two weeks.”

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3 comments on “Self-Driving Cars — Really?”
  1. Andron Ocean says:
    August 30, 2013 at 3:42 pm

    I definitely agree with your basic point here. Self-driving cars won’t directly lead to any great economic or environmental breakthroughs, if we keep using them the way we use our current vehicles. (I think the idea is more to give drivers the freedom to text, eat, do makeup, play games, fiddle with the radio, and the other ten trillion things they love to stealthily do behind the wheel…)

    However, we might not use them the same way. Self-driving cars could make astonishingly good taxis. Request one on your smart phone, smart glasses, or whatever device you’re using twenty years from now, and have the car show up at your door. It will drive you wherever you want, drop you off, then go answer another call. So these “pieces of steel” would not be sitting idle 23 hours a day. There would be a slew of other effects as well. I touched on these in my last blog post on future transport systems (http://andronocean.com/2013/08/29/speed-systems-next-century-transport-2/), and Matthew Yglesias over at Slate did an even better job (http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/08/google_s_uber_investment_autonomous_cars_and_smartphone_taxes_are_a_game.html)

    For all that to work out, of course, we’d need to adopt self-driving taxis en masse. That would be a huge change, and they would need to be just as convenient, or way cheaper, than owning and using your own vehicle. Don’t know about that myself, but it’s an interesting concept.