I guess there's a mismatch in some people's understanding of what a driverless car should be.
It sounds like you think "a vehicle that works in a limited set of circumstances" qualifies as a car. As a mode of transport in some areas, I get why that would seem useful. Busses, trams and trains work like that. And subways! I use all those: they're great.
I imagine the GP thinks of cars as "can go almost anywhere with limited immediate infrastructure, even some way off-road". That's how I think of them. I can imagine "driverless cars that operate like 1-5 person taxis in urban areas that have specialised roadways" could show up. But to me, these are not "cars". They don't get me to a party in the woods; they don't let me park up illegally when I need to sleep; they probably don't let me rush an injured person or someone giving birth to prepared to deal with the legal consequences later.. etc.
These things will not be "cars"; they'll be non-mass-public-transit.
* Driverless cars means independence for people who otherwise are restricted (elderly, kids, blind, etc).
* Driverless cars are more fuel efficient. Sure, they aren't as efficient as not driving, but, just like driving with cruise control is better than not, complete automation will be better.
* Driverless cars will enable more productive use of the commute time.
There are probably many more benefits as well.
The one thing the author probably gets correct is that this will increase traffic load on the roads, and it is questionable whether it will increase efficiency of roadway usage more than it increases traffic load, but I'm guessing it won't. I can imagine a case where I have a single car, driving me to work, then going back to take my wife, then back to the house to pick up kids, then back to pick up my wife, and so on. In other words, a lot of empty drive time. This would be mitigated by a taxi-like "call the nearest car".
You're missing one important factor - many people, me included, just like to drive cars and they don't treat them as "transport vehicle only". I would refuse to use a driverless car even if it would be more economic, more safe and would transport me faster.
Given that by some reasonable definition we already have driverless cars, albeit limited to two cities, why does that sound implausible to you?
Cars that can drive everywhere, in every condition, without humans intervening at least remotely and occasionally in some limited way? Probably not.
Robo-taxis in most major cities and trucks that can reliably handle the full interstate network, to be picked up by a human driver for the last mile? Why not?
To the folks particularly in US obsessed about driverless cars, why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions of people if you ignore a couple of metro/train drivers per 1000s of people.
The point of a driverless car, from what I understand, is having end-to-end connectivity without the need to drive which is pain.
I live in a place where public transport already has last mile connectivity and I walk the rest of the way. Never owned a car and never plan to.
Those ARE better examples, but unfortunately, they aren't examples that driverless car visionaries are envisioning, as it doesn't represent an advantage to them. They think that their technology will make their commutes faster!
Why not? I'm seeing numerous, huge advantages to the driverless cars. The only advantage to a normal car is that sometimes they can be fun to drive. Frankly, I'd be more than happy to make that tradeoff, and I suspect I'm not unusual in that regard.
I dunno. In well developed cities people used bikes and public transport instead since decades now. Driverless cars sounds so silly, if I ever used a car, it wouldn't be in the city, be to go out somewhere outside the normal infrastructure.
There is a driver! It's just in software! The car's still got something driving it. It's just not a person!
People tell me, "Dude, that's pedantic. Clearly what people mean when they say 'driverless cars' isn't that there's literally nothing driving it. They mean that having people driving cars has a lot of downsides and having the benefits of cars available without having an in-person driver opens up a lot of opportunities and frees us from personally having to drive ourselves."
While driverless cars do provide advantages over normal cars, there are two counterpoints I would like to make.
First, there are people who simply will not trust the driverless cars. I was talking to a friend yesterday who said that he wouldn't ride in a driverless car, and he wouldn't want to drive on the same road as one. Uptake is not going to be as fast as people seem to expect once the cars are practical for market.
And second, in the words of Jarrett Walker [1]: "Technology never changes facts of geometry." No matter how small you can make the engines, airbags, and frame, as long as you have each passenger in a separate, self-propelled, hopefully crash-proof shell, they are always going to take up far more space than a bus or a train, and require far more resources to construct.
Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead.
Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.
Thanks, I hadn't thought to express it that way. It seems like most of the people optimistic about driverless cars live in the US, and are now trying to deploy them in desert grid-cities like Phoenix. They should try driving almost anywhere else, where the roads have evolved over centuries to support vehicles (cars, but before that carriages) controlled by humans cooperating to get from place to place. Why build robots to operate in that environment, when you can build them their own lane?
Maybe for legacy applications where driverless cars can't fit. They didn't tear down and architect most of Europe to make room for cars so why should driverless cars be any different? It would basically be the Vespa of the driverless age.
Ah, ok :) , I hadn't understood your statement correctly.
I'm looking forward to self driving cars because of their convenience ! Imagine being able to sleep during road trips, using them as a taxicab for places where there's no parking (and ask it to park itself :) ), sending them to pick up somebody... the possibilities are endless !!
Driverless cars would be very useful; it would mean I can use my time in the car in a more useful way, like reading. Now I have to use the train for that.
But maybe that's also the risk of driverless cars: it would make them more attractive than they should be, because they're really too inefficient to be able to afford them as society's main form of transportation.
It sounds like you think "a vehicle that works in a limited set of circumstances" qualifies as a car. As a mode of transport in some areas, I get why that would seem useful. Busses, trams and trains work like that. And subways! I use all those: they're great.
I imagine the GP thinks of cars as "can go almost anywhere with limited immediate infrastructure, even some way off-road". That's how I think of them. I can imagine "driverless cars that operate like 1-5 person taxis in urban areas that have specialised roadways" could show up. But to me, these are not "cars". They don't get me to a party in the woods; they don't let me park up illegally when I need to sleep; they probably don't let me rush an injured person or someone giving birth to prepared to deal with the legal consequences later.. etc.
These things will not be "cars"; they'll be non-mass-public-transit.
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