Within a generation, automobiles will be endowed with what’s known as Level 4 autonomy—full self-driving artificial intelligence for cars—which will not so much change the game as burn down the casino. Autonomy will make it possible for unmanned automobiles to be summoned, via app, to your location. And not just any passing tramp steamer, but exactly the vehicle you need for the occasion, cleaned and fueled, for as little or as long as you need (offers may vary in your state). When you’re done—poof!—it will go away.
The point is that cars that require drivers tend to be idle a lot of the time, while cars without drivers would not be.
That’s true of course, but to summon a car at will could require a significant inventory. Don’t discount the garage yet.
In addition to higher usage of the cars themselves, consider:
Trucking and Freight
Parking and its impact on both commercial and residential real estate (this is huge)
Gas stations/fuel distribution chains
Maintenance
Safety
Access
Liability
Traffic management
The devil is in the detailing.
Lol! Brilliant!
When the weather is good, and you live in a mapped area, you will be able have the UHAUL truck, or whatever, that you need for a few hours come to your house. That will be nice. Or if you live in a city like New York, and wouldnt have owned a vehicle anyway, you now have an automated taxi, again assuming the weather. Long distance driving will also be less tedious, plus some other 2nd order crap like self-parking. Otherwise everything will more or less be the same. The car will still have to have a hand off procedure, so everyone will have to know how to drive, perhaps even more so. Most people will still own their cars, just like they do now even though they can lease, and the need for parking infrastructure will largely be unchanged .
Self-driving cars are easy, but self-cleaning and self-loading cars are not.
People by free-standing single-family homes that are often uninhabited for half the day. We don’t have boarders bunking up in them during our work hours.
This is because we don’t trust other people to keep our stuff clean.
Also if you have kids there is an enormous amount of kid-stuff, sized to your kid, that stays in your car (seats, etc). Unless a car that fits not only your group size but your kid size can be summoned quickly, people will still buy their own cars.
Seems to me that most of the economic arguments for new public transit – especially at the hyper-expensive costs we have in the US – go up in smoke if you plug this in as a likely development in the not-so-far-off future.
Reading this makes go Atrios and call “Vaporware!” on self-driving cars impact to society. My guess it is going to take several generations here as:
1) Testing on self-driving cars has only occurred in good weather conditions. So we are still ~10 years away from finalizing.
2) We forget how long it takes old technology to phase out. Most home still have LAN telephone lines.
I couldn’t disagree more. A couple of points that sink his argument.
1. Cars are idle 95% of the time- but almost all cars are idle simultaneously. People aren’t going to suddenly go to work at 4 am so they can save a few bucks on their driver less taxi to get there, we know this because people don’t go into work half an hour earlier to avoid traffic (high cost in terms of time and stress, modest cost in terms of extra gas burned). Driverless cars don’t solve the main reason that cars are idle 95% of the time.
2. People really like cars to be available right now. Take a parent with 2 small kids (like me), I want to run errands around 9am. With all the random stuff that can happen I might be leaving anywhere from 8:45 to not happening today. Having a taxi running its meter outside my door would be stressful, as would getting the kids ready and then waiting 10-15 mins for one to arrive. Car ownership is incredibly convenient.
3. Econ 101- when something costs less people use more of it. Driverless cars have the potential to cost less in terms of gas, insurance but the big one is opportunity costs. Being able to sit comfortably (once interiors catch up to not having to drive) and watch TV/get on a conference call/nap/read/do the nasty behind tinted windows (or not if that is your thing) makes being in a car far more enjoyable and people will drive way more (in terms of miles).
I would agree that focusing on vehicle usage rates is a questionable. We don’t know what the economic factors will be. In some locals, It may even pay off for the usage rate to go down.
There will certainly still be private cars, semi private cars and public cars. The mix will vary according to local market conditions.
The point is that cars that require drivers tend to be idle a lot of the time, while cars without drivers would not be
WHY???
Reducing the cost of taxis will certainly increase taxi usage. I think for picking kids up, taxi services make sense as the cost of the driver will be effectively zero, and it’s cheaper for a nearby taxi to go point A to point B than for the parent to send their car from point B to point A to point B. I think the main issue will be whether the administrative overhead of automated taxis is greater than the economy of scale taxi services will get on expenses for buying in bulk and for frequent usage. Automated taxis might be cheaper per mile than owning a car. Another issue might be battery technology. Taxis would need to be able to handle a lot of mileage during peak hours between recharges. I think this will be the standard in dense cities wherever parking is an issue, but maybe not so much in small, rural towns where there simply isn’t a dense enough population.
So, of you lived in a microhome you could go to bed and decide “I want to try Seattle” and the driverless flatbed would come pick you up and you’d wake up in a new town.
I sometimes wonder “what would Tyler Cowen’s life be like in the future?” You’d need one book of blank pages and a microprojector would project text onto the really nice paper to retain the book feel. A camera would record eye movement and facial expressions to know what you enjoyed. You’d sleep in a shipping coffin and be in a new city every day and all your meal choices would be crowdsourced for you, no longer anchored to the strip malls, delivered to the best venue by drone. You would have no idea how to make your life better than the computers have done for you.
This is all well and good as long as people are willing the trust government to fill the void when an evacuation is necessary. See New Orleans in 2005. Oops, bad example of government rising to the occasion.
And how well will the vehicles work after a snow storm with piles of ice covering the sensors, or roads washed out, or fallen trees.
Auto-cars will have a use for the invalid, old and other non-drivers, who need transport in good weather on well-defined streets.
Dr. Kling, you’re probably familiar with this saying in the software business; “80% done, 80% of the time”. If Google has been working on driver-less cars for 5 years and they are saying it’s just a few years away, then I’d say it’s no less than 20 years away.
I would bet Dr. Caplan $500 that the 1 millionth driver-less car will not be purchased until after 2036…or something like that.
They can have my steering wheel when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.