| This is a good question, and doesn't deserve a snarky response. This is the long-term good-case scenario (using USA-focused numbers, but you can extrapolate to the rest of the world): -Car accidents will be reduced to nearly zero, saving about 34,000 lives and 250,000 injuries each year. The NHTSA estimates that this costs $871 billion per year[0]. -Because car accidents will be much less frequent, cars can be built lighter, saving the energy that's currently spent on armor. And in the scenario where people hail rides rather than own cars, the car that transports you will be the right size for you - i.e. a one-person car for most trips - which saves a lot of energy too. The energy savings help with intra-city air pollution, climate change, and decreased costs. -Self-driving cars free up the 50 billion hours that Americans spend driving each year. At the average wage, that's worth about one trillion dollars. -A lot of valuable land is used for parking (14% of Los Angeles, for example[1]). Hailed robot cars wouldn't need to park, and self-owned cars can drop their owners at their expensive destinations in a central business district, and drive a few minutes away to park in a garage where they pack together much more closely than humans can park them. The freed-up space can be used for housing or other valuable uses. -Hopefully, self-driving cars massively reduce congestion. Due to their much-faster-than-human reaction time, they can drive very close behind each other at high speeds. Two single-person cars can fit side by side in a lane. Street-side parking space can be turned into more lanes. Reduced crashes result in fewer traffic jams and lane closures. (Personally, I worry that increased car usage might exceed these effects.) Most of these figures come from Brad Templeton's webpages about robot cars[2]. [0] http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/207567-nhtsa-car-cr... [1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/12/parking-los-a... [2] https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/robot-cars.html |