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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: 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.