This makes sense for big cities, but that vast territory in between, where Trump got the majority of his support, that territory where you see lots of trucks and SUVs, and people drive miles to Walmart or the grocery store or baseball practice - they're going to still want their own vehicle.
Need, not just want. For the residents of most of the surface area of America, you cannot survive without owning your own vehicle. Stores can be 10 to 50 to 100 miles away from your home, there are no buses or taxis or Uber, you can sometimes get a ride from a friend or neighbor but only if they're also planning to go to town, and if you each go to town together you're usually stuck there all day and then have to each wait long times for the other person to do what they need to do, because you're each shopping for the next 2 – 3 weeks before you go to town again.
Agreed, I have the feeling that most people think San Francisco or New York when they think "city"... the problem is that Phoenix exists (all 517 square miles). There are many, many medium sized (1 million ppl +) cities that are conglomerations of suburbs, with very little "urban" interface like Phoenix dotting the western portion of the US.
And there are plenty of people who do not and have no desire to live in a city at all, and that isn't going to change. Many people retire to rural areas, or live in smaller cities/towns. It's a deliberate lifestyle choice for many, and these people are perfectly happy to own a vehicle of their own and use it and it's not a problem that needs solving for them. So when urban technologists come in and say they're going to "solve" the problem of car ownership and turn it into a service, such people respond somewhere between mockery and outrage at the ignorance of such people thinking their ultra-urban environment is the only acceptable way of life.
Do you guys hang out in the makeup department and talk about your disineterest in lipstick? Why is every thread on this subject loaded with peanut gallery comments from people who aren't interested in autonomous cars. If you don't like them don't use them. They still stand to address the needs of 10s of millions of commuters in America, and far more worldwide. It's a huge addressable market.
I think it's not disinterest, but more of a reality check. While we all agree that self-driving cars will be a game changer, some of us think that it can be easily blown out of proportions.
"The needs of 10s of millions of commuters in America" could have been addressed with public transport years ago. The fact that they weren't should tell us that there's more to it than whether someone drives the car or not.
Basically this, combined with the fact that people who dislike public transit for cultural reasons (see also: hate the poor) point to SDC's as a panacea for all our transportation problems.
There was literally a post in one of these threads saying we should "screen" people so undesirables couldn't use public transit so it would be more attractive to yuppy scumbags.
I think this will change. Those small towns don't look so hot right now, and young people are leaving for the closest city because that's where the jobs are. The 'burbs will be fine but things don't look good for "small town America", a lot of towns could decay and disappear. Just because it's a deliberate lifestyle choice doesn't mean it's a sustainable one. Just look at the quality of housing stock, infrastructure, basic services like drinking water and jobs (or lack thereof) in these places, it's not a pretty picture.
Car ownership is a problem for some (many) people. If someone responds with mockery at the idea of self-driving cars only because it's not a problem for him, he's the one being ignorant.
No one is mocking the idea that there is a place for self driving cars, whether privately owned or pooled for collective use, just that this is going to completely replace private ownerships for everyone.
As a rural resident who does most driving on rough, dirt roads and roads without lane markings, I think it would be cool to eventually have a car that could self-drive, but I don't expect them to work for me anytime soon. Electric cars, similarly, aren't practical for rural usage—there is nothing comparable to the ease of throwing a few more cans of gas into the back to extend your range when driving long distance in a remote area with no fuel/power. As batteries and range keep getting better, they become more useful for some rural users, but still not so much for long distance backcountry travel.
Furthermore, people who choose to live in rural areas end up needing to be more self-sufficient mechanically as well, able to repair vehicles themselves. Electric and self-driving vehicles are and will continue to become decreasingly user-serviceable. That alone is a big reason for me to hesitate in ever wanting one. The world is moving away from repairability, and for people who need to be able to fix things ourselves, or who believe that it's the right thing to do, that forces us to avoid adoption of certain newer technologies. But now I'm getting into a whole new subject.
The best case I see, is the modern day equivalent of the horse that could get you home when you were otherwise too drunk to do so yourself. The worst case I see, is that this technology could be imposed on all of us, whether is works, is useful, is needed/wanted or not.
I couldn't begin to answer that, but I do and just about everyone I know does. Outside of the few major cities in the southwest, many people do. There are occasional small general stores scattered around, but if you want to actually go grocery shopping or hardware shopping, etc., you take a 50 to several hundred mile trip to various larger cities.
Couldn't you argue that self-driving cars are more appropriate to more sprawling areas versus other types of public transportation? Buses, trains, subways, light rail etc all seem inefficient for urban sprawl, but self-driving cars require no complicated infrastructure and let you get point-to-point just as fast as today.
There are two issues that I think get talked about together, whenever the idea of self-driving cars comes up: self-driving cars themselves, and then self-driving cars as part of an Uber-like pooled vehicle business model.
I think that self driving cars as a technology are definitely on the horizon, and if they don't hit any major roadblocks (literally or figuratively...), some level of self-driving capabilities might become mandatory in the next couple of decades. It makes driving on freeways much safer, and also allows for types of interchanges that aren't possible with human drivers.
But the argument you sometimes hear tossed around, that self-driving cars will lead to Uber-like services displacing all or nearly all private car ownership... that strikes me as much more speculative. There are cultural-psychological aspects to car ownership, and I'm not convinced that the value proposition could be made sufficiently strong to cause people to not want to own their own car, while still creating a viable business for the pooling company, in a suburban or exurban (to say nothing of truly rural) area.
Owning a car in a dense city is a pain in the ass and a huge expense; owning a car in a rural area is basically a necessity to live as an independent adult. It'll be a lot harder to get people in that second group to switch to vehicle pooling than the people who probably detest having a car in the first place for all the expense and inconvenience it causes.
Owning your own self-driving car would make sense there.
But in rural areas, you'd have to wait too long for a centralized service's car to show up because of lack of economy of scale, and the larger distances it'd have to service. In theory, you could schedule them well ahead of time to arrive when needed, but that's far less convenient and the scale & distance will still significantly affect the price.
Yeah, owning personal transportation isn't going anywhere for a LONG time except, largely, in certain growing circles in less than a handful of US Urban centers.
For everyone else self-driving will just another trickle-down feature their cars get; like electronic stability control. When the Ford Fiesta has had self-driving features for 3 years(so I can pick it up used) that's when I'll have it. And that's probably about when it will start seeing widespread adoption; when it's available standard in lower-end cars and used lower-end cars.
