With due respect to the predictions of legal experts concerning the liability issues, I think market forces may well accelerate that development significantly, mostly because I expect ‘automatic taxis’ to be more common than personally owned vehicles. If you made me pick an actual number, I’d guess nine years with a standard deviation of about eighteen months until autonomous vehicles are a significant part of traffic in urban areas.
I live in a very ‘driving culture’ area. We don’t have much in the way of sidewalks, bike lanes, or public transportation, so owning a car is a basic but expensive necessity. But my car spends the majority of its time in the driveway. An automatic taxi would be more efficient in this regard, because it can bounce around wherever it’s needed. If a single car were enough to serve the needs of 2-4 people on average, then you could run a profitable company by charging a monthly fee of (say) ~$180 per person. $180 per month is a fair bit less than the individual costs of maintenance, fuel, and insurance, so it helps people that struggle with those costs. But the owner of the company can combine these payments, so they’ve got something like $500 per month per car to pay for fuel and maintenance and pocket the rest. Of the costs of car ownership only fuel scales linearly with distance traveled- insurance and mechanical upkeep get more efficient as you scale up.
This is a recipe for large, centralized taxi service companies. In addition, that kind of obvious revenue stream tends to attract significant capital investment by economic powerhouses- and in the case of driverless cars, this will tend to include those that can best maximize alternative revenue streams that derive from the service (I have no doubt that there is a room in Google headquarters full of engineers that are, as we speak, thinking of ways to improve targeted advertising through their automobile division). In other words, groups that have a large amount of legal clout and congressional influence will be pushing a product that improves environmental impacts and reduces human mortality while making transportation more accessible.
With due respect to the predictions of legal experts concerning the liability issues, I think market forces may well accelerate that development significantly, mostly because I expect ‘automatic taxis’ to be more common than personally owned vehicles. If you made me pick an actual number, I’d guess nine years with a standard deviation of about eighteen months until autonomous vehicles are a significant part of traffic in urban areas.
I live in a very ‘driving culture’ area. We don’t have much in the way of sidewalks, bike lanes, or public transportation, so owning a car is a basic but expensive necessity. But my car spends the majority of its time in the driveway. An automatic taxi would be more efficient in this regard, because it can bounce around wherever it’s needed. If a single car were enough to serve the needs of 2-4 people on average, then you could run a profitable company by charging a monthly fee of (say) ~$180 per person. $180 per month is a fair bit less than the individual costs of maintenance, fuel, and insurance, so it helps people that struggle with those costs. But the owner of the company can combine these payments, so they’ve got something like $500 per month per car to pay for fuel and maintenance and pocket the rest. Of the costs of car ownership only fuel scales linearly with distance traveled- insurance and mechanical upkeep get more efficient as you scale up.
This is a recipe for large, centralized taxi service companies. In addition, that kind of obvious revenue stream tends to attract significant capital investment by economic powerhouses- and in the case of driverless cars, this will tend to include those that can best maximize alternative revenue streams that derive from the service (I have no doubt that there is a room in Google headquarters full of engineers that are, as we speak, thinking of ways to improve targeted advertising through their automobile division). In other words, groups that have a large amount of legal clout and congressional influence will be pushing a product that improves environmental impacts and reduces human mortality while making transportation more accessible.