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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday July 26 2017, @05:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the I'm-sorry-Dave,-I-can't-do-that dept.

[...] some experts believe as much as 95% of passenger miles could be electric, autonomous by 2030, thanks to some basic economics. Because electric vehicles cost a whole lot less to drive and maintain—but more to buy—and because autonomous vehicles greatly reduce the cost of commercial driving, a combination of the two technologies will make autonomous Transportation as a Service exponentially more cost competitive than either owning a car, or hiring a car and driver. It's also exponentially more profitable for car companies, who have long feared the loss of maintenance and service profits associated with a transition to electric cars.

This question will come up more frequently as self-driving technology advances. Will perfection of that technology make a difference, though, in the face of social behaviors that have been deeply ingrained over the past century?


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  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @12:33PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @12:33PM (#544607)

    You assume that a person doesn't value their own time. People do use public transportation, mass transit, etc but that's only a small percentage of the population.

    And you assume everyone lives in North America? Somehow here in Europe, the fastest way around the city is bike and then public transport and then car. People "value their time", but forget how much time they actually waste owning a car.

    1. getting into a car
    2. finding place to park
    3. getting from parking place to destination

    But yes, maybe here in Germany it's a little different than America. Maybe if you actually look at places with decent public transit and shitty car access, like downtown New York and compare it with car travel, you'd have a different view. Comparing some suburbs to work in Chicago for car vs. public transport vs. bike, yeah .... not a good comparison since city planning is quite terrible, and 100% reliant on cars.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @02:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @02:58PM (#544660)

    And you assume everyone lives in North America? Somehow here in Europe, the fastest way around the city is bike and then public transport and then car. People "value their time", but forget how much time they actually waste owning a car.

    Immaterial. This story is about replacing cars in use by car owners. For most people who have alternative options - public trans, biking, walking, etc - they are already exercising those options.

    How much time am I wasting owning a car if I use it to visit clients? How about to go where public transportation doesn't go (which is just about everywhere that I go)? How about how much time I'd waste using public transportation in my area? Should I walk 15 minutes to wait for a bus that will take a roundabout route to my post office? Once I check my PO Box I'll wait another 1/2 hour for another bus to take me back to somewhere I can walk 15 minutes home.

    Why spend ~90 minutes or more on that adventure when I can make the round trip, stop at the store, hit a gas station and then a drive-thru and make it home in less than 30? Never mind having to deal with the weather while walking (plenty of sections of road around here don't have sidewalks so we have to walk in the gutter) to a bus (that may or not be on time), waiting for the bus while standing on the roadside (not an actual "bus stop"), waiting for another bus to come back and walking home.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 26 2017, @04:26PM (4 children)

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Wednesday July 26 2017, @04:26PM (#544710) Homepage Journal

    Ah, the (twisted) logic.

    1. It takes the same amount of time to enter a self-driving car as a driven one
    2. Your car will be able to park itself
    3. After it drops you off at the door.

    But yes, maybe here in Germany it's a little different than America.

    It's a LOT different. All of Europe is 3.931 million square miles, the US alone is 3.797 million. Germany is closer to the Ukraine than Illinois is from Ohio. No two European countries are as far apart as New York and Hawaii. There is no comparison at all between any European country with any North American country.

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    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday July 26 2017, @06:32PM (2 children)

      by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday July 26 2017, @06:32PM (#544780) Journal

      All of Europe is 3.931 million square miles, the US alone is 3.797 million

      This kind of statistic completely ignores the fact that the majority of the population of the US is clustered around the coasts, and the remainder is clustered in cities. For example, the total population of Utah is around 3 million, the population of the metro areas of the three largest cities in Utah is over 2 million.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @09:25PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @09:25PM (#544870)

        Have you been to Utah (or Nevada--similar terrain)? It's mostly steep rocky mountains (beautiful scenery) and desert. I'm surprised there are anywhere near a million people living outside the major metro areas, would have guessed much lower.

        I've crossed it several times by car, and twice on the crew of a friend riding his bike in RAAM (Race Across AMerica), a great way to see the country at ~15 mph (~25kph). Out in the desert areas we often went for an hour not seeing any other cars or people on the road, and then it was often another bike/crew that was in the same race with us. This sign and story, including the comments, is about what I remember --
            http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865586821/No-bull-no-service-for-106-miles.html [deseretnews.com]

        • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday July 27 2017, @07:54AM

          by TheRaven (270) on Thursday July 27 2017, @07:54AM (#545053) Journal
          Yes, I spent a few months in Utah, which is why I mentioned it specifically. The median population density, even in one of the most sparsely populated states of the USA, is higher than most of Europe. This is the point that's often missed by people that complain that things that work in Europe can't work in the US because of the lower average population density: the US has a long tail of very low population density that's missing in Europe, but the majority of the population is clustered in denser urban environments than most of the population of Europe.
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    • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday July 27 2017, @03:35AM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Thursday July 27 2017, @03:35AM (#544998) Homepage

      The US is closer to the UN than any European country. Each state in the US would be the equivalent of a European country.

      So of course comparing the US to Germany is wrong, it'd make more sense to compare New York to Germany.

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