Google's driverless cars could save lives, make money for their owners

So far, Google’s cars have driven around 700,000 miles, which is a little bit less than two trips to the moon and back again, or 29 trips around the world. In all that time, they have been involved in only two crashes – once when the car was being driven manually by a human driver, another when an automatically-driven car was rear-ended at a junction.

All the suggestions are that driverless cars would be much, much safer than human-driven cars – Google estimates that replacing all cars on the roads with driverless equivalents would eliminate at least 90 per cent of automobile accidents. To put that in perspective, every year 1.24m people die in road traffic accidents around the world, compared to 627,000 from malaria. Even if driverless cars were only able to prevent half of all accidents, they could be as good for humanity as a cure for malaria.

And that’s just the start. Instead of spending 90 minutes driving in and out of work each day, commuters will be able to catch up with a newspaper and a cup of coffee while their car drives for them. Or by working remotely for those 90 minutes, a 9 to 5 employee could increase their daily earnings by 20 per cent.

Coordinating with each other remotely, driverless cars will be able to avoid other traffic, maybe ending congestion entirely. Cars are parked for 98 per cent of their lives: to exploit that, driverless car owners could turn their vehicles into taxis while they’re at work, drastically reducing costs for everyone. Eat your heart out, Uber.

One third of transportation costs are labour costs, which will be eliminated entirely, and driverless lorries will be able to travel non-stop, making goods transportation much cheaper. Driverless freight transport may eventually outcompete rail on time and price entirely, especially if driverless-only highways are built that allow for much faster speeds, making railroads entirely redundant. Someday, railway projects like HS2 might look as anachronistic as a 1980s-built National Fax Machine Network would seem today.

harvesmom wrote:I can't see it catching on   For one thing, your street cred would go straight down the drain being seen in something that Noddy and Big Ears travel in, and another thing I am a very nervous passenger at the best of times. When I am being driven I end up with a hole in the passenger footwell where I have tried to brake for the driver  ::%:: 

harvesmom wrote:I can't see it catching on   For one thing, your street cred would go straight down the drain being seen in something that Noddy and Big Ears travel in, and another thing I am a very nervous passenger at the best of times. When I am being driven I end up with a hole in the passenger footwell where I have tried to brake for the driver  ::%:: 

There is a darker side of a disruption that will dwarf the industrial revolution. The emergence of a true sharing economy for car and truck transportation will cause demand for autos to fall by 50% from peak levels. This will mirror the impact of cloud computing and virutalization on purchases of computing hardware and IT equipment.

Unfortunately, the reduced demand will bankrupt most of the major automobile companies, throwing scores of workers out of a job. Surviving auto and truck companies will decimate their workforces and shift to nearly 100% automated factories.

The huge chunk of the U.S. economy that depends on cars and trucks will also suffer a massive consolidation. Independent auto repair shops will disappear. So will car washes, auto detailing companies, and many other secondary vehicle services verticals. All car maintenance will shift to massive factory-like facilities where humans monitor machines but barely touch the cars themselves.

The multi-billion dollar after-market autoparts segment will shrink even more than the carmakers. Car owners are the dominant purchasing force in aftermarket car parts. If no one owns a car then no one will need to buy extra parts (except for the car fleet operators).

Airports will lose all parking revenue and will have to identify other means of revenue to replace this staple. Shipping companies such as UPS and Federal Express will be forced to compete with both automakers and the likes of Google. Automakers will allow third-parties to build delivery networks on top of shared self-driving cars. Google will use its maps and vast store of transportation information to allow anyone running an Android device to operate a regional or city-based delivery service that competes with the likes of FedEx or UPS.

While everyone will have access to cars, surge pricing and congestion pricing will become commonplace. Getting into the cities on weekends and during holidays will be very expensive. Government-funded hackers will spend even more time figuring out how to hack the transit infrastructure and bring the entire grid to a halt or worse—execute remote hijackings of cars or buses with people in them.

Cars will have advertising systems. For a reduced rate, we will agree to watch or listen to those ads that will make a detour to the donut shop or the movie theater a button push away.

The resource wars that once centered on oil and natural gas reserves will shift to focus on the limited amount of key elements required to make new types of long-lasting batteries. For example, the Andes and other places where lithium is found in abundance could become the New Middle East, with global factions vying for political control of the invaluable natural bounty.