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Your Next Car Will Plug-in. the One After That May Not Exist...

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

Phoenix666 writes:

[...] 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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Original Submission

• Re:Just what I never wanted (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @01:13PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @01:13PM (#544612)

  1) Your weekly shop. This consists - in my country at least - of driving to a supermarket, loading up the boot. You can't do that on public transport.
                  Though you MIGHT be able to do that in a hired car (which is what any automated vehicle essentially is), you certainly can't do it on a bus or train.

  I dunno. I certainly lived for a couple years (in the US) with no car -- and I didn't do the whole shopping every day or two that's apparently popular in some European cities. I went shopping once a week, sometimes less, with a bicycle and a sturdy duffle bag. I packed my groceries in the bag, put the bag on my back, and rode home -- every week. I could certainly have taken a bus or train with that load of groceries, or even more. (But this was a typical US city, so there were no trains, and the bus routes would actually require you to walk a mile, take two buses (with a 25-minute wait at the changeover), and generally turn a 1-hour shopping run into a whole afternoon wasted.) If someone needs more groceries in a week than he can hump on his back, perhaps he should attack the problem from both ends by eating less?

  And yeah, I realize you might be shopping for several mouths. But since you stated it as "Your weekly shop", not "a family's weekly shop", I think it's fair to point out that a properly routed and scheduled public transportation system really can handle this for quite a lot of folks.

  Parent