| I have a working solution for getting to work - i drive my car. Over the life of that car, i expect to pay about 25 cents a mile. The investment approach assumes there is some technology that either can be added to my car, or replace my car. This technology would need to lower the cost of ownership, and do so at a profit. In my specific case, you've only got about $10k left to work with over the remaining life of the car, and that's coming from gas, insurance, maintenance and repairs budgets. I'm just skeptical that that much room for improvement exists. Cars are a very mature technology. They have an (unfair?) advantage that a whole bunch of infrastructure is in place to support them. I would guess at least a trillion dollars has been spent optimizing cars and car manufacture. An alternative would need to overcome some pretty big obstacles. Self driving cars provide enormous potential for underutilization of existing cars, but it's really hard to get around the problem of requiring millions of cars from 8-9 AM and 5-6 PM. There are gains to be had, and all those incremental 1-2% improvements over a hundred years have improved efficiency greatly. The point here, you can use fewer self driving cars to serve the transportion needs - just as much gas would be used, but the environmental savings come from less metal and glass and energy to shape the materials. I'm just skeptical of even a billion dollar kickstarter moving the needle very much. Your optimism is commendable, but the only solution available to us today is using that billion dollars to somehow discount the purchase of slightly more fuel efficient cars. Even that is only a few percent improvement. Cities like Huston need to move the needle a lot, if they want kids to be able to play outside. |