Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Saturday November 07 2015, @04:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the sharing-your-vroom dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by FlatPepsi on Sunday November 08 2015, @01:08AM

    by FlatPepsi (3546) on Sunday November 08 2015, @01:08AM (#260176)

    Everyone keeps saying driverless cards will make car ownership obsolete. I don't understand why this would be.

    We already have a self-driving, time-share by the hour car rental. It exists in nearly every city in the nation. We call it a Taxi.

    Taxi's (aka self-driving car rental on demand) has not made car ownership obsolete. In a very small handful of cities, it makes not owning a car a practical option - but in those cases decent public transportation exists too.

    Self driving cars will change nothing with personal car ownership. Now, long haul truckers, on the other hand...

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @03:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @03:00AM (#260223)

    Agreed. Self-driving cars provide only an incremental improvement over existing taxi and carsharing services. Those services already get some value out of being able to use the car for a larger proportion of the day than a single user. The main advantage over a taxi would be getting rid of labor costs, making the service cheaper, and therefore making slightly more people be willing to use it instead of owning a car. A taxi company could also probably need fewer taxis as currently the taxis are unused while their owner sleeps, but the need to cover peek demand means that probably wouldn't make too big a difference, especially after counting the fact that self-driving cars will likely be significantly more expensive, at least initially (due to the additional sensors needed if nothing else).

    The models I've seen claiming self-driving taxis could be significantly less expensive than owning a car assume pretty much everyone in an urban area would switch, meaning there would be a huge fleet of self-driving taxis (mind, significantly smaller than the current set of personally owned cars), so there would always be one available nearby and having so many would mean they could be used efficiently enough to significantly reduce the number of cars needed. Whether slowly decreasing the price of taxis over time gets to such a state, I don't know.