[mercuryrising]

I see a couple of extremely powerful advantages to having a self driving car.

Your family only needs one car. You go to work at 8, and your kids go to school on the way so you drop them off. You get to work at 8:15, the car drops you off and heads back home. Your wife heads to work when the car gets back at 8:35, she gets there at 8:45. Your kids get off school at 3, but they have an after school activity so they let the car know it can charge up until 3:30, when it comes to pick them up. It drives there, picks the kids up at 3:45, gets back at 4, drives back to pick you up, brings you back home, drives to pick your SO up at 5, and by the time your SO gets home you have dinner ready.

If you're a single person you could probably split the car 5 ways with your friends. You could probably make a lot of money if you make an app that says "Pick me up here, my current GPS location, and drive me to work 15 minutes away at 8:00 AM every weekday. Bring me from work at 4:30 to a destination of my choosing after work". You could extremely accurately predict the price of transit, you know the probability of accidents. It's cheaper than any taxi, it's convenient.

Few accidents, no traffic jams, courteous to drivers, no speeding or parking tickets (unless you 'opt in' to speed), leisure, take a nap on the way to and from where you're going. The cars return to 'base' which is a parking lot that has a roof outfitted with solar energy, allowing the cars to store energy during the day. When cars weren't being used, if they still have juice, they either share the energy with the other cars that returned, or they compensate for the lack of renewable production at night. Some cars are 'regimented', where they follow the same pattern every day of the week. How much energy they use is known, they know how much energy they need to start the day with, and how much they can contribute back to the grid. There's other cars that are free runners that are always kept charged in case they need to drive to somewhere 4 hours away.

It'd be a little bit of an inconvenience to move things, but If you wanted to go from city A to city B, but needed to recharge halfway, you could just jump out and jump into another car at the charging station. NFC to verify who you are, grab your things and go. When you're driving towards the recharging station, it knows what music you have playing, what temperature everything is at, it preheats or precools the car for you - to ensure that swapping cars doesn't feel like swapping cars. Maybe you go to the bathroom at the rest stop, and when you come out the car is ready to go with all your belongings swapped. Put a little container in the middle that you can stash stuff in, just grab that when you change cars.

And carpooling - if you have 10 people that go to to work 15 minutes away, get some sort of carpool system going. First person gets on, the car drives to the next house, waits 2 minutes for the person to come, if they do great, if not they take off towards the next house. You say what time you want to be picked up, and a time within 10,20,30 minutes that you'd like to get there. Cheaper service if you have a bigger window of availability. Car texts you when it's outside (you can follow it on the map once it engages your current location).

I like thinking about electric cars.

[tednaleid]

I think it's even better than this. A family doesn't need one car, it needs zero cars, it just needs to be able to use one or more cars on demand.

The average family uses their car probably less than 10% of the time. The rest of that time could be used by others.

Once self-driving cars are ubiquitous, I expect that an Uber-like service will be the norm. You either subscribe or rent per trip and schedule when and where you want to be picked up.

The service you subscribe to has a fleet of cars and knows when people want to be picked up and where they want to be dropped off, as well as whether you're willing to carpool on the way (for a discount). They can optimize the scheduling of their fleet in the same way that FedEx and UPS optimize their driving routes now.

The future is going to feel a little strange and I can't wait.

[malandrew]

Yeah, the optimal solution for society involves not owning cars at all. An individually owned car moving around between a small web of trust such as a family, is more likely to make empty trips than a car that drops people off and can pick up the closest person that needs its services.

I hope we one day see a future where you will only be allowed to own a vehicle for inter-city and rural travel. Suburbs and cities should all be serviced by one collectively fleet for all citizens of that city.

[bradbatt]

I never really got the huge advantage of self-driving cars until I read something similar a few years ago talking about one parent in a family taking the car to work, then the car driving itself home, so that the other parent could drive the kids to school, etc.

Before then I had never thought about the biggest game changer of the self-driving car: The car driving around with NO ONE in it!!

That is huge and once the technology is good enough to be safer than our current state of affairs with human drivers, it is a complete and utter game changer. You would no longer need drivers for 18-wheelers and would not have issues with tired drivers pushing their limits to drive 12, 14, 16 hours...instead a truck could drive all day and all night at 55mph or whatever speeds were safe, only stopping for refueling or maintenance issues.

You could also have driverless taxis, school buses (maybe repurpose the drivers into chaperones who actually pay attention to what is going on in the bus?!), Greyhound-type bus lines, etc, etc.

Plus, as you pointed out, lots and lots of families would only need one car. Or several people could share a car together. Or services such as Zipcar could really take off because you don't have to go to where the car is — you could just find the nearest one and request that it come to you!

On top of all that, a huge benefit is that you can do other things while getting to your destination. Let the car drive while you read a book, catch up on email, text your friends, watch a movie — whatever.

I don't think the biggest impediments will be technological—they will be governmental and legal. Who is at fault in an accident of two driver-less cars? Do you still need a "license" to operate? What happens if they get hacked? Etc.

Totally agree with you that it is interesting and amazing to think about!

[peterjancelis]

All of this, and more, is probably why Google Ventures invested heavily in Uber in their latest round. (Note that they got a lower valuation than TPG was paying in the same round, so they must be bringing some tech to to table...)