[fracus]

I really feel we are headed towards a future where humans driving cars will be illegal outside of few exceptions. There will be no traffic as all the robocars will coordinate unselfishly. Car ownership won't be a thing, rides will be a service. Parking spots won't be needed. It's just getting over a safety threshold we are comfortable with.

[senectus1]

I think you're partially right... it'll start with insurance companies, they'll charge people that insist on driving it themselves more for the right (due to safer standards (not that I'm saying this is the case, just that THEY will say it is)).

Then local Gov will charge more to allow non robot cars on the road ( less wear and tear on the roads, fewer roads needed due to more reliably predictable drivers and fewer accidents).

Then lastly manufactures will get to a point that they need to simplify their production range and will pretty much only produce self driving.

lastly, culturally the demand will change. the ipad generation dont want to have learn to drive or have to spend their screen time driving. the damand from them alone will push for self driving cars.

[rurp]

We're so many years from that point that it's impossible to make reliable predictions. I was hearing these claims over a decade ago and we're only marginally closer. The vast majority of miles driven still happen in locations and/or conditions that self driving isn't reliable at.

There is a massive long tail of unusual cases that happen outside of major cities that nobody is even really trying to solve at the moment because there isn't much of a profit motive compared to dense cities.

[Aurornis]

> Car ownership won't be a thing

Car ownership definitely isn’t going away. Sharing a vehicle with the general public gets old fast if you have the means to avoid it.

There are also many reasons people use cars for more than going from point A to point B on a purely transactional basis. Many professions need to leave things in the car or truck like tools or even your laptop. Having to take everything you own into every building in case the self-driving car gets called back home for service or whatever isn’t going to work.

[xnx]

Google is exploring bringing the Waymo driver to privately owned cars as well.

[Zigurd]

That's probably a thought experiment in business models. Like a franchise. Waymo is experimenting with Uber as it's retailer, essentially. Personally, I'd prefer to do business with Waymo, directly.

If the cost of the Waymo Driver hardware falls to the point where it's not prohibitive for the low duty cycle of a private vehicle, I could see that eventually happening.

[rhcom2]

A lot of people really like driving and are pretty into cars. Maybe in 100+ years but I think this is sci-fi in the near term.

[Faark]

Yeah, will probably be the same as with horses. Quiet a few of them standing around at the outskirts of the my town. Maybe we'll get an equivalent to horse girls

[int_19h]

In US, I find it doubtful regardless of how well the tech works, for purely political reasons.

On the right, car ownership is deeply culturally ingrained as a signifier of personal freedom, and the notion of the government requiring that a robot drive you instead would be unpalatable, never mind the notion of no car ownership at all.

On the left, you have a generally hostile attitude towards cars in general as undesirable and to be replaced with public transport. Then there's a growing current of FSD being associated with "big tech" in general and Musk in particular that makes it an even stronger knee-jerk reaction.

[throwaway314155]

The shoddy past 10-15 years of self driving improvements has led me to believe that this "inevitable future" is at least 20-30 years away, if not longer given that a huge portion of existing cars would need to be effectively outlawed for that that to happen, people and businesses will basically always have legitimate reasons for wanting a human in the loop (and not remotely), and the tech has been worked on actively for decades and still doesn't work well enough to avoid loss of life (which, similar to a terrorist attack, might not be as devastating in numbers as the current state of affairs with humans driving - but will absolutely cause a deeper psychological impact on the general public as there is something seemingly more cruel and dystopian about a company killing people via "error" or cost-savings than a person killing someone by accident).

[trainsarebetter]

The psychological distinction is definitely something that was perhaps overlooked. we need to put the blame on some one, for closer. Loosing to some rounding error definitely is haunting

[blindriver]

I have predicted this for years. I think they will make city cores self-driving cars only, with no other cars, or even bicycles because they are too chaotic. China should have done this with those ghost cities, so that they could have dominated with full self driving before other countries.

Someone will own the platform that coordinate car movement, and then all cars will need to pay to get onto this coordination platform that will tell each car how to drive, which route to take, etc. Each car know what all the other cars in its area will be doing, so that mass coordination is possible. This is how you can get a completely full highway but all traveling at 65 mph 1 feet away from each other.

[trainsarebetter]

No bicycles? That is ridicules. Many city’s are now trending towards people centric design. Bikes are a key part of that

[Svip]

I surely hope not. I'd rather have a city centre without cars than one filled with constantly self-driving cars. Pedestrians and animals are still "chaotic elements". At 105 km/h (still slow by European standards), what happens when a deer suddenly runs onto the motorway with a distance of ~30 cm between the vehicles? Talk about carnage.

I suppose the solution is to seal in all roads then with high walls; what dystopian future.

[fracus]

Imagine all the land being used for parking that wouldn't be needed anymore. Car accidents will be like plane accidents where a full investigation will be launched to improve the car and coordination software.

[seanmcdirmid]

Ghost cities are really just ghost districts, and they simply aren’t economically viable which is why they are deserted, traffic won’t make something economically viable, and it’s quite the opposite, economic viability brings traffic. Self driving isn’t going to make Kangbashi or Tianjin’s new financial district popular.

China is demoing a lot of self driving cars in their suburbs however, so not core Beijing, but out in Daxing or Changping, for example. China could and will mandate self driving cars in dense city cores when they become viable to optimize traffic flow in cities that can’t really fit many more new roads. And Chinese companies are working hard to make mass produced Lidar economical, while America will probably just put high tariffs on that.

[mrtksn]

It's already a reality in many places around the world. Most of people don't own a car, just participate in the ride sharing economy. In many places they still have a safety driver like Tesla but there are plenty of places with %100 autonomous driving.

Also authorities are getting giddy when a human tries to drive on railways, so it's effectively illegal to drive in certain places where the ride sharing is the default mode of transportation. It's also very privacy focused, even though there are cameras everywhere you can just buy an anonymous travel pass that you top-up every once in a while. It also allows you to hop between rides for free or at discount.

In the larger cities they often use hyperloop, so you never get stuck in the traffic.