I wonder how low "cars per person" we will achieve through self-driving Uber/lyft services? Those type of services, if cheap enough, could replace the need for cars for little trips here and there.
But things like commutes are harder to replace. You have everyone trying to drive all at the same time during high traffic. Traffic will only increase as people can nap during commutes because people will commute from further and further away.
You'd have to have a lot of extra cars that only make 2-4 trips a day due to demand.
Plus a large amount of car lifetime is determined by mileage. Fleet maintenance will help, but after 150k miles on average, they'll need to be replaced. If these self driving car services are so cheap, we might increase the car mileage per person. Which means we'll burn through cars at a faster pace than person.
I'm not convinced that the end of personal ownership will be all that bad for car companies. I bet it hurts midmarket luxury the hardest since nobody will buy them.
>Fleet maintenance will help, but after 150k miles on average, they'll need to be replaced.
What most people don't appreciate is that fleet use completely changes the economically optimal strategy for car manufacturing.
If you're selling cars, the dominant strategy is planned obsolescence. The fewer miles the car lasts, the more frequently the car needs to be replaced and the more revenue you make.
If you're selling mobility, the dominant strategy is durability and reliability. The more lifetime miles you can deliver from each car that comes off the line, the more revenue you make.
Tesla's stated goal is a "million mile powertrain."[1] I think their leadership has already anticipated this shift in the economic calculus.
This is really hard for people to understand. Things like long term cost per seat mile etc.
If electrical really is that efficient and maintenance free and cost effective, albeit a heavy investment, they should be employed in buses and taxis first. And long after that, in consumer cars that sit in the parking lot modt of the time.
> electrical really is that efficient [...] albeit a heavy investment, they should be employed in buses and taxis first
Most cities, and whole countries!, already have this! And they had this for a long time. It is just mostly overlooked by "car people" because these are driving on rails or streets with rails, instead of plain steets.
Maybe it is also overlooked because it is named "train", "metro" or "tram" instead of "bus". But a tram is really just like bus: It drives a predefined route multiple time per hour (or per day, or per week). You just need better streets for it (namely: streets with rails). But that's, again, mostly a one-time investment. It means building the energy infrastructure directly into the street.
Rails do have some disadvantages, and not all countries have a good rails infrastructure, especially not within their cities.
But: The one huge advantage is the energy supply - no huge batteries and no charging times. This is why this technology is so old and has alredy worked perfectly decades ago, before modern battery technologies were developed.
In almost every city I've lived in, buses are much more "fine-grained" than trains. It's just too expensive to build rails to the same density as roads.
I wonder if there are any public numbers for maintenance of existing electric busses (e.g. San Francisco's trolley busses) vs traditional busses.
Wikipedia just has an unsourced "Electric motors typically last longer than internal combustion motors, and cause less secondary damage from vibration, so electric buses tend to be very long-lived as compared to motorbuses"
Proterra Catalyst Electric Bus Completes Reliability Test By King County Metro[0] (2016) shows estimated maintenance costs of $0.20/mile, compared to national averages of $0.90/mile for diesel, $1.10/mile for diesel hybrid, and 1.00/mile for CNG.
King County Metro Transit Hybrid Articulated Buses: Interim Evaluation Results[1] (2006) page #24 (PDF page 35/58) shows a table of several individual buses of different types, with mileage, parts cost, and labor hours, summed into cost-per-mile. Diesel had an average cost per mile of $0.48/mile. Hybrid buses kept at one bus base had a cost per mile of $0.47, while Hybrid buses stored at another base had a cost per mile of $0.46.
I'm unsure about the national averages - they seem to be twice the Seattle rate. And KC Metro's electric buses are estimated to have less than half of the maintenance costs of other buses. And the national average for hybrid is higher than diesel, while KC Metro's hybrid buses have slightly lower maintenance costs than their diesel. Unfortunately, I couldn't find numbers on KC Metro's electric trolleys or CNG buses.
By comparison, the 2016 IRS rate for Business Mileage is $0.54/mile. [2]
Operator Type Average Maintenance Costs Per Mile ($)
KC Metro Electric 0.20 (2016) (estimated)
National Diesel 0.90 (2016)
KC Metro Diesel 0.48 (2006)
National Hybrid 1.10 (2016)
KC Metro Hybrid 0.47 (2006)
National CNG 1.00 (2016)
IRS Mileage Rate 0.54 (2016) (car)
Self driving cars make existing mass transit more useful. Many offices have a shuttle bus to the subway for free, but they don't run late and cabs are slow to arrive and pricey. Cheep and fast self driving cars in such areas make the occasional cab ride far easier.
>Plus a large amount of car lifetime is determined by mileage.
It depends somewhat on location. Corrosion from salt (put on roads in winter or from ocean air) is probably more proportional to age than mileage.
But I fully agree with this basic point and it often seems to be ignored. To the degree that car lifetime is primarily based on mileage, increased utilization doesn't really buy you an awful lot.
In addition, as you and other suggest, basic economics pretty much dictates that, to the degree going somewhere in a car gets easier/cheaper, you'll get more of it. Many people are willing to trade a longer commute in terms of time for taking a train versus driving themselves today. I don't see why having a "driver" would change this equation.
Mileage is not a major factor with young cars. People have regularly hit 1,000,000 miles and while many components need to be replaced much of the original car can make it that long. Further replacing a full engine costs less than you might think, it's the piecemeal replacement of individual parts that drives up costs.
In any case, something makes cars depreciate over time. Lots of people don't dump their cars just because they're tired of them. And, if you're just driving somewhere like the US Southwest, age probably isn't the issue.
Some of these cabs are lasting 30+ years, though they often use old cop cars which also have high mileage. The limitation is offen accidents not direct mileage.
Cars are definitely more than a commuting device, they are cultural.
Also I think articles like this often forget that while it would be great to not need a car for the morning commute, people in suburbia still need to do many other things like shopping and fetching children etc.
Many of those tasks are just easier or more preferred to be done in personal transport. Sometimes you need to leave some shopping in the car while you go in to sit with the kids at an after school thing, before heading past a friends house to drop off their kids then finally heading home. A self driving fleet could probably still achieve that in multiple trips, but how many people want to deal with continuously pre-planning and concerting a half dozen small trips a day?
I strongly dislike suburbia and car culture does grind my gears in various ways, but I can't help but feel the car-in-an-app is solving the very specific problem of short once off trips, and solving that doesn't even come close to solving the nations transport issues.
I suspect that a lot of people who live in cities, don't own a car, don't use a car much, etc. don't really appreciate the degree to which people customize cars for their needs (roof racks for sporting equipment like canoes, car seats for kids, etc.) and use them for mobile storage. As an exurban person who does a lot of outdoors activities, it's hard for me to imagine not having a personal vehicle. The economics would really have to be compelling and it's hard to imagine they will be especially if the number of miles "driven" go up.
You will have carseat cars, cars with sports racks, larger minivans where you don't need the sports rack and so on. Uber today has a car seat option for example in NYC.
I could see cars that let you just move the stroller in and lock it in with standardized connection types in the wheels, no carseat ritual required, no waking up the baby. I can also see cargo delivery cars that you just drop your shit in and it delivers it securely to your house after you have gone shopping. Or even more likely, you just use an app for that and not even go to the store. Malls turn into showrooms.
All of that is for a self driving future.
What you do today is use something like car rentals when you want to go do outdoor activities. A friend of mine uses uber to go kiteboarding and rents a car with friends when he goes skiing.
There is probably a pretty well-defined density threshold where vehicle pooling makes sense, vs. personally owned vehicles.
In cities, pooled vehicles are a no-brainer. It's probably already faster to have an Uber come get you than it is to park a personally-owned car in the core parts of NYC, SF, or some other megacities. This is only going to get better, including specialty vehicles.
But as you get out into the suburbs and exurbs, it's more challenging to provide an acceptable level of service (max. 5 minutes from call to arrival, or some other pain threshold that causes people to just wish they had their own car). The economics also start to get harder: if I take an Uber (self-driving or otherwise) out to my house in the sticks, it's a lot less likely to get a return fare back into the city; that trip is a lot less profitable than circulation within an area. So it's doubly bad for a self-driving car company: you need a lot more cars/customer to provide the same service level, and you're spending a lot more time "deadheading" with empty vehicles, or charging extra to compensate.
That's not to say that self-driving vehicles won't significantly affect driving and commuting patterns, even in rural areas, but the displacement of personally-owned vehicles is going to be more challenging and may lag urban areas by a very long time.
>Cars are definitely more than a commuting device, they are cultural
I am from a generation (in my 40s) were most of my friends do not like the robot car idea because they love cars and driving. To me that is a very weird thing; I hated driving since I got my licence (well over 20 years ago). It is a nuisance and waste of time and I would never do it again if I did not have to. I find the cars I am supposed to like, like sportscars uncomfortable and beauty of a piece of transportation does not come into the equation. I do not know what it is with that obsession. But most my friends have it nonetheless. Which makes me have plenty of volunteer drivers who love to drive 1000km for fun while I read or work.
I'm the same way. The whole time I'm driving I'm wishing I could be doing something more productive with that time. It's a time suck and way too risky. Also, ubers too expensive.
I live in New York, frequently travel to suburbs around the country and world, and have not missed for a second the driver's license I gave up almost 5 years ago. This might be a generational thing.
I don't understand. Do places like the US national parks have train stations? And do you take an Uber all the way into the wilderness? Are Uber drivers really happy do that? Do you carry a SATCOM system so you can get a data connection to request an Uber to get home again? How long do you have to wait for one to turn up if you are doing a climb three hours drive into the wilderness?
For example look at the 'getting here' page for a random national park, like Zion. It only lists directions for private cars. Presumably if there was any other way of getting there then someone like the National Parks would make it extremely clear how to do that. Are there train stations near Zion? Would you literally take an Uber all the way there from a major city? It would be hundreds of dollars wouldn't it?
If you got an invite to join your friends hiking for a few days in Zion next week, how would you get there?
I think you're going to reply 'well obviously you can't quite do everything and I wouldn't be able to do a climb far from a central visitor centre or join those friends' and bingo, I think the bar for what you can do outdoors without a car to get you there is pretty sad and you'll be missing out rather than living some high life of car freedom.
My car's paid for, sits out of the way in my garage and costs me a week or so's wages a year in maintenance, fuel and insurance. It's an effective tool to get out there in the world and do things with basically zero negative impact on my life.
National parks do have buses. I live in NYC, and have backpacked from one bus stop to another (three days and 25 miles away) through state wilderness in the Catskills. How you get from place to place changes, and it does take a little bit more planning, but it's really not a big deal. I agree, if you're in the mountain west, it's really hard not to have a car and go hiking or camping or biking. But if you're in a well connected area of the country, with lots of buses, trains and boats connecting the relatively close together locales, it's really not that hard to get out without a car. And even in the mountain west, if you have a group of friends you always go out with, you really only need one or two cars amongst all of you (and it may be cheaper to rent when you need it).
Car rentals for those times you really need a car for a few days. Especially given the cost of parking in a city like DC or NYC (unless you want to play the "move your car every other day for street cleaning" game), it's possible to rent a car almost every weekend for the same cost.
You don't miss the freedom of not having to return to the spot where you left your personal vehicle because you never enjoyed it. If you are used to taking public transport you might be massively put off by the idea of being limited to round trips from wherever you left your car.
Theoretically, people could take the best of both worlds by substituting public for rental or personal for public when the other has an advantage, but that rarely happens because people tend to stick to the mode of transport they are most used to.
Personally, I am lucky to be just two days of cycling (or one really long day) from the Alps, and when I do that trip on external power it does not matter wether it is by train or by car, it always feels like cheating.
If my worst case is paying a few hundred dollars for a hired car to get to and from places as remote as Zion, places I don't go more than once or twice a year, I say good riddance to the cost and hassle of owning, maintaining and operating a car. All of this only gets easier when cars drive themselves.
What's what I'd said someone would say. 'replace much'. And I think 'much' would turn out to be a pretty poor standard compared to what you can do with a car. The logistical organisation involved in achieving what you could do would be a huge time and money sink - which is what people who give up cars often say was the benefit in the first place!
You wouldn't get to join your friends hiking in Zion is what would happen in reality.
No, you'd rent a car is what would happen in reality. Same way as the vast majority of people who visit Zion. I went to many remote areas in the western US before I moved from the east coast, and it was often in rental cars (and not once in the personal car I owned, which remained on the east coast.)
This just isn't the obstacle you're making it out to be.
I can totally understand doing this with a rental car, but upthread, the idea of not having a driver's license at all was being put forward in a positive light. So that means no renting a car. Without the ability to drive, you'd have to not just rent a car, but rent a driver as well; that's like an order of magnitude difference in price.
Rental cars are already a great alternative to private car ownership in a great many situations, basically any one where you don't need a car where you live most of the time, and just need one for travel/vacation/etc. purposes.
Speaking for myself as somewhat of an outdoors adventurer: my wife and I still need a car for that stuff, but we don't need two cars anymore, and we don't use the one car we still have very much during the week (which means it will last longer). This represents a smaller, but still tangible, difference in car buying needs.
Lots of types of bicyling require a car. Downhill mountain biking is very exciting and the mountains are absolutely beautiful. It's like skiing, but more dangerous because there's no snow.
I live in a city with Car2Go and this use case is covered by the ability to make stops on a trip. You just pay for the time that the car is reserved to you. I see no reason that a self driving vehicle couldn't offer a similar option.
A lot of people do not by cars in areas where there is affordable and useful public transportation or taxis. I would say most people are buying cars in areas where a cab would be significantly more expensive.
There is currently no viable alternative to cars in the vast majority of the US.
Taxis are usually disgusting too. I won't take a cab because I frequently feel like I need to shower after sitting in one. I rate Uber drivers almost exclusively by their cleanliness, which is usualy very good.
All you save is the driver and some fraction of the accidents, and you gain a lot of sensors that need maintenance. Free transportation would be something indeed, but uber will never be more than a cheap taxi, and "cheap" is just a function of income.
Additionally, taxi service doesn't have to be unreliable, that's more about american car ownership being so high there isn't much market for taxis.
I think the typical SDC taxi will be a two seater. Getting rid of the driver not only saves on wages, but also space, weight, fuel etc.
By "unreliable" I mostly meant the primitive "call your local monopoly, and they may or may not send you a car in 1-30 minutes, so just stand there and wait and worry" system as opposed to the quick and visible Uber/Lyft experience.
I agree that taxi could work like that, I've just gotten used to the thoroughly rotten SF taxi system.
That is certainly the silent promise in any gushing text about self driving cars, time will tell how good the robots drive after the few years of neglect most cars suffer.
> You have everyone trying to drive all at the same time during high traffic. Traffic will only increase as people can nap during commutes because people will commute from further and further away
Perhaps the only way to get Americans to start riding buses is by making it sexy with an app and adding a smartphone/credit card barrier to keep the poor people out.
>But things like commutes are harder to replace. You have everyone trying to drive all at the same time during high traffic.
Replacements for commuting with more people per vehicle include self-driving cars taking people to transit stations, as the article discusses, and computerized ride-sharing in self-driving cars or min-vans. In addition, my understanding is that self-driving cars can drive safely with considerably less spacing between cars, so a given road can carry many more people per hour.
>my understanding is that self-driving cars can drive safely with considerably less spacing between cars
SDC's still need to maintain a safe stopping distance. The problem is really the opposite, human drivers drive too close, causing bunching, traffic jams, and collisions.
>> traffic will only increase as people can nap during commutes because people will commute from further and further away.
Napping or not a two hour commute isn't going to go mainstream anytime soon, even if you don't have to drive. That's four hours a day on the road and you can't just 'nap' through it every day.
Guess we'll need to agree to disagree and see how the situation shakes out, as we run the "in vivo" experiment.
In the area where I live (N. VA), there are already an astonishing (to me, anyway) number of people who drive an hour or more each way to work. 2+ hours a day of just piloting a car down the highway, frequently in heavy traffic. This isn't especially uncommon or anything -- it's not the majority (thankfully, due to all the externalities involved), but it's not rare either. People generally do it because it allows them to buy a significantly bigger/nicer/whatever-er house out in the exurbs than in the inner suburbs, for a given amount of money. I think it's an insane tradeoff, but people are already doing it.
If you didn't have to drive the car, and could basically reconfigure the car's interior to some sort of fully-reclining "pod" like the very high-end cabins of transcontinential airliners... it'd seem a lot less insane. I could imagine dragging myself up at oh-dark-thirty much more easily, if all I was doing was staggering from my bed to a vehicle, where I could pass back out until I was five minutes out from the office.
The afternoon commute would still be rough, because I don't really do naps, but a self-driving car would let you legitimately work from the road; it wouldn't be that hard to stack up a few hours of email, coding, or other non-face-to-face work to do on the way home.
All of a sudden, living in West Virginia and commuting to DC doesn't seem entirely impractical -- and that's probably a nasty problem for transportation infrastructure if a bunch of people all decide to try it in the near future.
Almost all cars right now are empty nearly all day every day. Vehicles that go around picking people up (cabs, buses, ubers, etc) are the ones that actually achieve utilisation of any significant amount. If more cars are shared, people per car goes down, not up.
Also, it's not as if those empty unused private cars disappear when not in use. They take up vast amounts of public and private space in urban and suburban areas.
The "slug lines" of the Washington, D.C. area (places where people can congregate to join other commuters, to use the high-occupancy lanes) give us a useful view into this.
Yes, if you're driving alone, you have to use a single car. But having the car take care of finding others going (effectively) the same place, and picking them up seamlessly, for only a short increase in commuter time (and a corresponding drop in fare), will make these cars do a whole lot more than 2-4 trips a day.
In fact, given how much of a difference in arrival time for the people on my project (anywhere from 6:30 am to noon to 1pm) I think the cars will be able to do quite a few trips.
My pet idea is that you could do dynamic "bus lines" with this.
Have a variety of capacity vehicles, including full sized buses. Have bus stops and have people indicate where they are going, and set preferences (like "willing to accept a change for a discount" to allow better vehicle utilisation), and dynamically adjust the routes accordingly and use minibuses or smaller cars to "backfill" capacity to aim to guarantee that you can be picked up within a certain time.
Having fixed routes and scale up size of vehicles based on actual detailed drivership data would be very interesting.
I know from my own bus usage that having the certainty that there'll be a bus "soon enough" makes a big difference in how often I take the bus vs. when I'll order a car. If I know that if I go to the bus stop I'll get one or the other but guaranteed within a short time, it'd remove most of my need for ordering cars.
Rush hour traffic is due to human drivers making bad decisions. They knee-jerk the brakes just in case, they rubber neck by accidents, they take too long to accelerate, they try to cut other people off from merging, etc etc etc...
Computer drivers could make much better use of the existing bandwidth on freeways. I'm guessing 6X better, since my 15 minutes drive takes 1.5 hours during rush hour.
It could be a long time before we ever have enough automated cars to realize this benefit. But when that days comes, we could safely increase speed limits too (computers generally have better reaction times).
Large minivans/buses should and probably will replace work commutes. In Singapore a few startups have started such services. From looking at Singapore government's plans they are trying to bring all places to 15-20 min walk to mrt and then have automated vehicles pick and drop people from designated places to and from the mrt stations. As they are a small country and have made car use and parking expensive they will get a lot of traction for automated services.
But things like commutes are harder to replace. You have everyone trying to drive all at the same time during high traffic. Traffic will only increase as people can nap during commutes because people will commute from further and further away.
You'd have to have a lot of extra cars that only make 2-4 trips a day due to demand.
Plus a large amount of car lifetime is determined by mileage. Fleet maintenance will help, but after 150k miles on average, they'll need to be replaced. If these self driving car services are so cheap, we might increase the car mileage per person. Which means we'll burn through cars at a faster pace than person.
I'm not convinced that the end of personal ownership will be all that bad for car companies. I bet it hurts midmarket luxury the hardest since nobody will buy them.