Quote:
Originally Posted by STK
Uber and Lyft will only substitute AV cars for the current "IC cars w/drivers" if it makes them money, meaning both costs and prices fall. Same w/folks replacing one or all of their cars with an AV service. So if AV is more expensive for the consumer it's not going to happen.
Similarly with safety. If AV is less safe it will not be successful. Also, I think you might be applying the wrong standard to safety. If the standard is commercial air travel, then I'm with you - AV cars are decades away. But if the standard is significantly beating current car safety (accidents/death per mile), then AV will be coming much sooner. The GM announcement is sooner than I expected.
I'm also not sure why you think it would be less convenient. Certainly in an urban and close suburban environment, having an app-based program bring a car to your door in a couple of minutes and not having to park at you destination is pretty damn convenient. That's why Lyft and Uber are already valued in the billions. Also, well designed AV should make traffic move faster by reducing the accordion effect of stopping and starting that is a major cause of congestion. That's why I think own--driven cars will be slowly eliminated from city centers and cities. Once AV reaches critical mass, the own-driven cars will be really slowing things down. Finally, for most folks, the ability to do other things than drive while commuting/traveling is a big convenience - sleep, entertainment, work, whatever. My guess is only a small percentage of people really like to drive, especially on commutes.
I think increased driver training, stricter drunk driver laws and stricter texting laws are a bigger fantasy than AV. Like it not, society has been letting idiots drive cars forever. It's not like society doesn't know that drunk driving and texting kill people. Yet we've chosen not to strictly enforce the rules and not to provide rigorous driver training. Most of the gains in safety come from safer cars.
So yeah, interesting times.
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I checked on the web, Uber costs $1.55 per mile from few websites I saw. The GSA reimbursement rate for private owned vehicle use is $0.55. All Uber is is a non-unionized, independent-driver, Taxi service (with resultant business tax structure) that utilizes a phone app. Uber nothing new relative to the concept of a hired car service and doesn't make the case for AV any more than Taxis do, which have been prior to the automobile. I don;t understand why people try to make an argument that Uber and Lyft are some type of precursor to the automation age; that argument could have been made for the more than the last 100 years. And here's a bit of trivia, out where I live in Central Virginia, we don't have Uber, an Uber driver would starve to death
So back to the real discussion. My using the air traffic control system was about the prevention of vehicle collisions, rather than deaths per 100 million miles traveled (the main metric used for safety evaluation). 99.999 ground vehicle deaths are due to collisions; a few people do die while driving and then crash. When planes collide in air most everyone dies since the planes fall out of the sky an impact the ground, which is why the FAA tries to prevent air collisions in the first place. I agree, a lot of the reduction in ground vehicle deaths is attributed to safety apparatus and better vehicle design introduced into the automobile since the 1960s, but preventing collisions in the first place is the key to low death rates. Preventing collisions is the primary argument for the move to AV. I'm highly skeptical that AV is actually going to reduce the amount of vehicle collisions while maintaining the same amount of passenger miles driven per year at the same average rate of speed per mile. I certainly do not think vehicle collisions are magically going to decrease while AV is somehow transitioned into the current traffic environment of human-driven cars. I think collisions and deaths will increase during the transition period. Trust me, the DOT
is not going to tolerate that situation.
Why I think AV will be less convenient is in the future where people envision a less total vehicle population in the US and a person just summons an AV car service to come pick them up; where AVs are a shared asset, constantly moving about picking people up and dropping them off on individual trips. This will be inconvenient as compared to now, walking out to your car and driving somewhere. It will be inconvenient because the overall speed of travel will be reduced, not increased, so it will take longer to get some place. And as Uber proves, it will cost more per mile.