I find it far more likely that these cars will mostly operate in fleets, since most people just need auto-travel for short periods each day. So you will probably be able to subscribe to a car service that picks you up when you need it on demand, and moves on to the next subscriber when you're done.
He's also working on automated maintenance facilities that would allow a self-driving car to report for maintenance/cleaning. The car drives up, receives service and drives off afterwards to the next pick-up.
I had this discussion with my friend. Would automated fleets of cars make sense? If traffic is three times as heavy during rush-hour as it normally is then you would either have to have a lot of cars sitting idle the rest of the day or raise costs for rush-hour so high that it wouldn’t make economic sense to use a self-driving car service to get to and from work. I’d be interested if there’s any statistics on traffic volumes for areas including cities and there outlying suburbs in the United States to see what the economics of a service would have to look like taking into account daily variations in traffic patterns.
Even assuming everyone commutes at the same time, the status quo cars sitting idle the rest of the day, the only difference is that they need two or three spaces to park each, and typically in high value locations. Your car sits at home at night and at work during the day. With the car service there could be half as many parking spaces or less, and they can drive themselves to a garage in some remote area, rather than within walking distance of a place you want to be.
The car service makes car pooling and mass transit more practical as well. Maybe you could hitch a ride with someone to work, but then you might have to stay late. With personal car ownership, you need to drive alone both ways, but with the car service, you can share the morning trip and if you need to take separate transportation in the evening. If buses in your area can't reliably get to work on time, you could have the car service pick you up to go to work, the the bus take you home.
> I had this discussion with my friend. Would automated fleets of cars make sense?
The "automated fleet" idea is not how people are planning to see this idea play out. Automated, self-driving cars are one thing, but an automated fleet makes it sound like a train rather than many vehicles operating very efficiently (meaning without human drivers) but each with a separate destination.
To an alien watching from orbit, a country of automated cars would appear different from the present only in that the cars would be much closer together than they are now, with no increased danger of collision -- indeed, less danger. Cars would still leave the freeway and go to their intended destination just as they do now, just more efficiently.
> it wouldn’t make economic sense to use a self-driving car service to get to and from work.
It would if everyone still owned a car as they do now, the only difference being that the car drives itself. If the idea of a "fleet" were taken seriously, why not switch to trains or buses instead of cars? The only reason to have a car is to be able to go directly to your destination.
> an automated fleet makes it sound like a train rather than many vehicles...each with a separate destination
When I hear the word "fleet" it usually just means a number of vehicles bought by one company: A car rental company has a fleet of cars. A trucking company has a fleet of trucks. A car dealer has a fleet manager. (Forgive me for pointing this out, I'm sure you know it already, just trying to clarify the terminology.)
Enterprise Rent-a-Car will already send any of the cars in their fleet to your door. Of course they send a human along to drive the car to you.
If they got an automated fleet they could offer the same service they do now, but they would just send the car over by itself.
At least that's what "automated fleet" sounds like to me. :-)
I am assuming that services which rented out automated cars would have large numbers of them. I’m referring to them as a fleet in the same way logistics companies refer to a fleet of trucks even if there not all driving the same rout.
If only ¼ of car owners are on the road at peak traffic times then it could make sense to have automated car rental for a specific trip instead of car ownership. Assume drives to work take 30 minutes and that most people go to work from 6:00 AM to 9:00 AM. Also assume that we have inefficient routs requiring the car to drive the same distance for all pickups and drop-offs. Between 5:30 AM and 8:30 AM you could get three people to work with one automated car. Assuming this would it be cost efficient for companies to charge a low enough trip cost to make it more economical for people with fairly predictable driving requirements to rent a car as needed instead of buying one.
I'm using "fleet" in the same way as you, jareds. A single company owns a large number of vehicles rather than a large group of individuals each owning one vehicle.
We wouldn't need to dedicate such a high level of inefficient resources to parking vehicles that sit mostly unused and it could offer us the opportunity to remake our cities to be more pedestrian and bike friendly.
Those are hardly the only reasons. I want a vehicle that has my stuff in it: My kids' car seats, my cell phone charger, my wife's umbrella, our radio presets, etc. If a random car pulls up at my house and I have to put 3 armloads of stuff in it every time I get in, that's a big deal. I frequently put stuff in my car for a second destination; sports equipment, a change of clothes, re-usable shopping bags, library books, etc. That's impossible if I'm in someone else's car. I want a vehicle that's comfortable and that I'm familiar with; I sit in it for 2 hours a day, and I don't want to worry if I'm going to end up with gum on my pants from the previous occupants.
My car isn't just a train or a bus that goes directly to where I want it to; that's called a taxi. My car is a small extension of my house.
I recently consumed a piece that argued that auto manufacturers have been supremely successful in linking our personal cars to our egos. "You are what you drive." It really hit home for me and appealed to the part of me that finds little appealing in attachment to physical things.
However I will say that your issues are pretty easily solved, imo. The car service simply customizes your ride experience with your radio choices. Car seats are necessary because of imperfect human drivers and (?) not necessary when robots are driving.
Removable/secure trunks could be stored at some site until needed, retrieved from cars and stored by robots since lifting and carrying are simple tasks for robots. When you request the next leg of your service, the first stop is the storage center where your secure trunk was stored.
I already mentioned about the maintenance facilities Musk is working on. Cheap and effective sensors detect gum/soilage, modern fabrics repel dirt and detritus and are cleaned to tolerable levels. Or another car comes instead. And your 2 hours in a car drops precipitously as smart-queuing greatly improves travel times.
This reminds me a lot of the book by Bruno Latour: "Aramis, or The Love of Technology", which was about a French government-sponsored light rail project called "Aramis" (Really a revolutionary public transport concept), where each car would route itself to it's destination independently, coupled to the cars in front and behind electronically, rather than physically. Of course, continual political interference scuppered the whole thing before they could get it to work (a challenge with the technology of the day), and the whole thing drifted on and on for decades without really taking off. Now, of course, the whole thing would be much easier, and the technology behind self-driving cars might actually make it a reality.
Well sure, if you're sticking with the one car per person model, you still need enough cars for the peak concurrent usage. The difference with automated cars is that you theoretically only need exactly enough cars for the peak concurrent usage, whereas we currently (presumably) have many more cars than that.
I haven't thought about this deeply, I'm thinking out loud...
What are the energy cost implications of this? Okay, I drive my car to work, and it sits there until I go home. If it was part of a fleet, it would leave my work parking lot, go to some other part of town (empty, using energy), and so on. Okay, we can also save energy by ride sharing, but I speculate that it wouldn't take much to make that really unappealing. In reality, we don't just go from home to work and back; we stop at the grocery, drop the kids off at school, and so on.
We already have fleets of automatic cars - they are called taxis. Their neural net is wet, is all. So as a first approximation I'd say taxi fleets are a pretty good proxy for energy use and cost. Sure, the driver needs to be paid, but we can model that.
If most people don't own their car and use a fleet service, then it would be easy for the fleets to offer discounts to people who were willing to share a ride for part of the journey. Being able to automate car-pooling could drastically increase the passengers-per-car during rush hour so rush hour traffic might decrease.
It would be an interesting experiment to have a mass-market transit system priced based on demand. If a ride at 9am cost twice as much as a ride at 10am or 8am, would we start seeing a more companies offering flexible hours or varying their hours to take advantage of cheaper commutes?
If you ask me, they should raise prices on the MRT during rush hour, instead of just lowering prices in early the morning.
But that's just me. The normal price to get to work on the MRT is less than 1 USD. So the difference between that and free isn't worth it for me to alter my schedule. Less well off people might be more influenced, and raising prices might be politically infeasible. (And I usually ride my bicycle to work anyway.)
King County Metro definitely has peak and non-peak fares. I don't think that's all that unusual.
Also, it's not a mass transit system, but the 520 Toll Bridge in Seattle uses this to price tolls. It was the first time I'd seen this, but perhaps there are other places where tolls operate similarly?
He's also working on automated maintenance facilities that would allow a self-driving car to report for maintenance/cleaning. The car drives up, receives service and drives off afterwards to the next pick-up.