The reason it’s too expensive to just leave them in the truck all the way from the factory to the buyer is that if you leave them in the truck, you are denied the use of the truck for other deliveries until you have a buyer. Having the truck be self-driving doesn’t help, unless driving costs money but trucks are free.
Or, more broadly, using a truck for something else other than transportation, such as storage, a doctor’s office, etc. means that you’re replacing a specialized tool with one that tries to do two things (driving and storage, driving and doctoring, etc.) It’s particularly obvious for storage, since storage uses up a lot of space and using trucks for storage is inefficient just because of the cost of all those trucks, but even for other uses, a tool which does two things is never going to be as good as using a specialized tool for each one.
(The post tries to suggest that the vehicle can be specialized, but a vehicle specialized to also be an X is never going to be as specialized as having an actual X.)
Already today you have specialized trucks that sell icecream.
Given that most doctor’s office have a waiting room where multiple patients wait to have no downtime between patients even when one patient only takes a 3 minute visit, I’m also finding it questionable whether the average doctor would want to practice on the road.
You have specialized trucks that sell ice cream because the cost of traveling to an ice cream seller is high compared to the benefit gained from the ice cream, often so high that it wouldn’t be worth it at all unless you happen to be a block away from it, not to mention that ice cream is often sold to children who have limited ability to independently travel to a store. And even then, they haven’t driven ice cream parlors out of business, and the ice cream you’ll get there is probably going to be better than the ice cream you can get in a truck.
Also, we already have ice cream trucks that aren’t self-driving. For self-driving vehicles to become popular for something that we don’t use regular vehicles for, the main reason we don’t have it would have to be the cost of driving, but not the cost of the vehicle or fuel, the need for too much space, or the efficiency of doing it on a vehicle. Almost nothing fits in that category. (And if doctors want to make house calls, they can just drive the vehicle themselves. Self-driving cars aren’t going to save any money compared to that.)
What I failed to say is that I expect the time between production of a good and arrival at the customer to continue to shorten. I think additive manufacturing makes just in time production economical for a growing segment of goods.
Obviously the production and delivery specifics of different goods are very different. Wheat will continue to be warehoused long after jewellery and clothing have completely moved to just in time production and direct delivery. I misstated my position by not mentioning these important differences.
I say I think this transition will be slower than the others because I imagine it starts with goods that are precious, fragile or spoil quickly, i.e. the goods where you most want to minimize loading and unloading.
I don’t think trucks will be free, but I do think they’ll be much cheaper per ton per mile than they are now. Electric means the motor gets rid of most moving parts and becomes much more reliable. Autonomy means the rest of the vehicle gets rid of all the things that only a driver needs, especially the operator’s cab and mandatory stop times. A warehouse will still be cheaper in many cases (especially in rural areas), but the fraction of things that it is easier to just leave in the car can only go up.
One of the reasons why electric cars are a good idea is that you can burn fuel much more effectively in a stationary turbine than you can burn it in the turbine of a car.
Similarly, a 3D printer that’s stationary is likely better than one that sits inside a car. The 3D printer inside a car has to consider factors like the shocks that the car has while driving on the road.
The reason it’s too expensive to just leave them in the truck all the way from the factory to the buyer is that if you leave them in the truck, you are denied the use of the truck for other deliveries until you have a buyer. Having the truck be self-driving doesn’t help, unless driving costs money but trucks are free.
Or, more broadly, using a truck for something else other than transportation, such as storage, a doctor’s office, etc. means that you’re replacing a specialized tool with one that tries to do two things (driving and storage, driving and doctoring, etc.) It’s particularly obvious for storage, since storage uses up a lot of space and using trucks for storage is inefficient just because of the cost of all those trucks, but even for other uses, a tool which does two things is never going to be as good as using a specialized tool for each one.
(The post tries to suggest that the vehicle can be specialized, but a vehicle specialized to also be an X is never going to be as specialized as having an actual X.)
Already today you have specialized trucks that sell icecream.
Given that most doctor’s office have a waiting room where multiple patients wait to have no downtime between patients even when one patient only takes a 3 minute visit, I’m also finding it questionable whether the average doctor would want to practice on the road.
You have specialized trucks that sell ice cream because the cost of traveling to an ice cream seller is high compared to the benefit gained from the ice cream, often so high that it wouldn’t be worth it at all unless you happen to be a block away from it, not to mention that ice cream is often sold to children who have limited ability to independently travel to a store. And even then, they haven’t driven ice cream parlors out of business, and the ice cream you’ll get there is probably going to be better than the ice cream you can get in a truck.
Also, we already have ice cream trucks that aren’t self-driving. For self-driving vehicles to become popular for something that we don’t use regular vehicles for, the main reason we don’t have it would have to be the cost of driving, but not the cost of the vehicle or fuel, the need for too much space, or the efficiency of doing it on a vehicle. Almost nothing fits in that category. (And if doctors want to make house calls, they can just drive the vehicle themselves. Self-driving cars aren’t going to save any money compared to that.)
What I failed to say is that I expect the time between production of a good and arrival at the customer to continue to shorten. I think additive manufacturing makes just in time production economical for a growing segment of goods.
Obviously the production and delivery specifics of different goods are very different. Wheat will continue to be warehoused long after jewellery and clothing have completely moved to just in time production and direct delivery. I misstated my position by not mentioning these important differences.
I say I think this transition will be slower than the others because I imagine it starts with goods that are precious, fragile or spoil quickly, i.e. the goods where you most want to minimize loading and unloading.
I don’t think trucks will be free, but I do think they’ll be much cheaper per ton per mile than they are now. Electric means the motor gets rid of most moving parts and becomes much more reliable. Autonomy means the rest of the vehicle gets rid of all the things that only a driver needs, especially the operator’s cab and mandatory stop times. A warehouse will still be cheaper in many cases (especially in rural areas), but the fraction of things that it is easier to just leave in the car can only go up.
One of the reasons why electric cars are a good idea is that you can burn fuel much more effectively in a stationary turbine than you can burn it in the turbine of a car.
Similarly, a 3D printer that’s stationary is likely better than one that sits inside a car. The 3D printer inside a car has to consider factors like the shocks that the car has while driving on the road.