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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The transition to fully driverless cars is still several years away, but vehicle automation has already started to change the way we are thinking about transportation, and it is set to disrupt business models throughout the automotive industry.
Driverless cars are also likely to create new business opportunities and have a broad reach, touching companies and industries beyond the automotive industry and giving rise to a wide range of products and services.
We currently have Uber developing a driverless vehicle, and Google advancing its driverless car and investigating a ridesharing model.
Meanwhile, Apple is reportedly gearing up to challenge Telsa in electric cars and Silicon Valley is extending its reach into the auto industry.
These developments signal the creation of an entirely new shared economy businesses that will tap into a new market that could see smart mobility seamlessly integrated in our lives.
Consider, for example, the opportunity to provide mobility as a service using shared on-demand driverless vehicle fleets. Research by Deloitte shows that car ownership is increasingly making less sense to many people, especially in urban areas.
Individuals are finding it difficult to justify tying up capital in an under-utilised asset that stays idle for 20 to 22 hours every day. Driverless on-demand shared vehicles provide a sensible option as a second car for many people and as the trend becomes more widespread, it may also begin to challenge the first car.
Results from a recent study by the International Transport Forum that modelled the impacts of shared driverless vehicle fleets for the city of Lisbon in Portugal demonstrates the impacts. It showed that the city's mobility needs can be delivered with only 35% of vehicles during peak hours, when using shared driverless vehicles complementing high capacity rail. Over 24 hours, the city would need only 10% of the existing cars to meet its transportation needs.
The Lisbon study also found that while the overall volume of car travel would likely increase (because the vehicles will need to re-position after they drop off passengers), the driverless vehicles could still be turned into a major positive in the fight against air pollution if they were all-electric.
It also found that a shared self-driving fleet that replaces cars and buses is also likely to remove the need for all on-street parking, freeing an area equivalent to 210 soccer fields, or almost 20% of the total kerb-to-kerb street space.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nuke on Saturday November 07 2015, @05:41PM
Don't know where to begin debunking this puff. But here's some :
driverless cars is still several years away
... and yet ...
vehicle automation has already started to change the way we are thinking about transportation
Is it? Only in the sense that from time to time we read (and comment) articles about driverless cars. I know of no-one who is already planning their travel arrangements for the driverless car era.
showed that the city's mobility needs can be delivered with only 35% of vehicles during peak hours when using shared driverless vehicles complementing high capacity rail. Over 24 hours, the city would need only 10% of the existing cars to meet its transportation needs
Eh? I suspect that means that a hell of a lot more people are assumed to be using rail (nothing to do with driverless cars), otherwise it is assuming that each driverless car is averaging three commuting trips in the peak time - like into the centre and and back into the suburbs again for the next passenger, three times. The optimism is out of control here.
it also found that a shared self-driving fleet that replaces cars and buses is also likely to remove the need for all on-street parking
Eh? Replacing buses as well now? And how the removal of on-street parking? People are going to want the thing right outside their home when they come out in the morning (at least the first of those three commuters). They are not going to be happy with waiting for half-an-hour while it comes from some central parking area. Don't forget all these re-positioning trips when empty are traffic over and above present day traffic levels. At least TFA does mention that, but makes very light of it.
Since these self driving cars are going to be very minimalistic (judging by the ones seen so far, and they are "green" you see) it is not going to cost much to own one anyway, then at least you won't need to go to work sitting in someone else's last night's vomit and fag ends.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheLink on Saturday November 07 2015, @06:54PM
It's far easier to have "robot" trucks do only the "robot friendly" routes (e.g. mainly expressways), do them well, and do them nonstop - no driver fatigue. You might even be able to convince the insurance companies to charge you less. And if a kid somehow jumps in front of a robot truck in an expressway and gets squished, it's a smaller PR problem than if a kid jumps in front of a robot bus/taxi/car in the city/suburb and gets squished (just make sure the robot truck doesn't go through such places till the technology and laws etc are ready and you can avoid a lot of such problems).
Taxis and buses have to deal all sorts with strangers- plenty of unknowns. Whereas for certain trucking routes you can arrange for the robot trucks to not deal with strangers (unless they are hijackers, in which case you don't really have to be so friendly and interactive either ;) ). Taxis and passenger cars have to deal with humans and their fickleness, and more difficult road conditions (there may not be any robot friendly routes to the destinations they want).
So I don't know why so many people are so enthusiastic and gungho about robot taxis, buses and passenger cars. To me it seems an easier sell to the trucking industry.
Of course that's still bad news to the millions of truck drivers in the world. People say these robots will create jobs just like when cars replaced horses, those making buggy whips switched to doing something else. But how many of the truck drivers are the horses and how many are the buggy whip makers? Did the horses get more jobs? Or did they get turned into glue and animal feed?
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday November 07 2015, @07:49PM
People have some really fantastic ideas about how they think these driverless cars will work.
They seem to think that some magic "AI" will drive visually just like a human, or better.
Nope. You are basically putting them on an electronic equivalent of railroad track with a few sensors to prevent collisions, and a pile of pre-programmed algorithms to handle KNOWN exceptions and variations.
Absolutely the trucking industry wants this. You can't just make space for new railroad tracks any more, and industry is much more distributed these days. But unlike Billybob Blowjo living in a rural area with gravel and dirt roads, pathways to industrial locations are easier to map and maintain.
If enough consumer driverless cars actually get on the road, just wait until 5000 cars drive in to a canyon after a bridge goes out, only stopping once it fills up. Or cars plow in to a maintenance crew because certain models of cars didn't get the emergency map update or whatever. Or after enough disasters, traffic grinds to a halt ever time a swirl runs across the road.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 07 2015, @11:06PM
How many industrial areas have you been to? Many actually do have dirt roads as truck drivers don't care too much and tear up roads very fast. Every time these sorts of stories come up I am reminded that 99% of the readership here live in urban environments and work in cubicles, never venturing out of their tiny bubbles to see how ignorant they really are.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 07 2015, @11:42PM
That is a good point, but there is no need to be insulting about it.
In all probability, the people designing, promoting, and buying in to driverless cars and trucks are likewise unfamiliar with the real world conditions. Either way, users of such vehicles will have to make some concessions if they want to fully automate their processes.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nuke on Sunday November 08 2015, @11:39AM
How many industrial areas have you been to? Many actually do have dirt roads
Not in the UK.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @03:56PM
How many industrial areas have you been to? Many actually do have dirt roads as truck drivers don't care too much and tear up roads very fast. Every time these sorts of stories come up I am reminded that 99% of the readership here live in urban environments and work in cubicles, never venturing out of their tiny bubbles to see how ignorant they really are.
#1 You forget one of the points - unlike taxis the robot trucks don't have to do ALL the routes.
It's far easier to have "robot" trucks do only the "robot friendly" routes (e.g. mainly expressways), do them well
#2 I've been to a fair number of industrial areas where the roads are fine. More importantly the roads at most major transportation hubs like the LA port, O Hare airport, the Houston port are fine and certainly aren't dirt roads.
So you're not just ignorant, you also have difficulty following a thread.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday November 07 2015, @11:07PM
I'll wager that driverless trucks will not happen, for simple liability reasons. That is , the driver is usually responsible for the load in some manner. I would expect auto-drive (like the simpsons!!) to be plausible, with the driver actually being responsive.
At least initially. I would argue that the changes that are going to happen will be quick, but the penetration will be uneven as with most technology.
The positive side is the number of people who *cannot* drive, who will be able to get around - elderly and other disabled folks. Surely this is something we can all hope for?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday November 07 2015, @07:04PM
Tesla's cars are far from dinky, and they have one out now that's almost driverless.
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(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 07 2015, @07:53PM
Actually driverless cars are already there now. Indeed most of the cars are driverless most of the time. It's just that usually the driverless cars don't move, and if they do, it's because someone forgot to put in the brake. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @04:40PM
Yeah, this article (and by extension its "curator" Arthur T. Knackerbracket) are involved in that journalistic Möbius strip of the Driverless Car Utopia. They're probably getting passive-aggressively sick of being stuck in traffic on the few days they can't be in their Web-2.0 Bullshit Economy Utopia (a.k.a. the home office), and have to deal with the realities of motor vehicle logistics in urban areas (our ancestors found a solution to expensive and scarce parking, auto theft, and what west coast motorists call "San Francisco Nose" [the dents on the front and back bumpers from other moronic parallel-parkers playing bumper-cars with your car]: that solution is called THE SUBURBS).
This "constantly flowing stream of cars that doesn't have to park" isn't remotely possible now, not without some sort of utopic mega-fuel-station where hundreds of cars can fill up with gas, or super-recharge (and that's not even taking the payment for said fuel into account). Also, have you noticed that every cab you've ridden in the past has had some dire mechanical problem due to not going to the mechanic often enough during its death march to 300,000 miles in 5 years? How do you think that's going to hold up with EVERY car owned by society, in your pie in the sky "utopia"?
When I see "driverless car" or "car of the future", I think of the Johnny Cab from Total Recall, and the electric cars in Gattaca, in the middle of the absolutely abhorrent "utopia society" (which is a world I wouldn't want to live in, in far far more ways than just the genetic discrimination).
To the authors and fanboys of articles like these: grow up. Either live with the joys and pains of owning an automobile, or move into the city and strategize to the point where you never need to own one. (I have a friend who doesn't have a car, doesn't need one for his travel logistics, and isn't as utterly insufferable as these "driverless car society" acolytes).