Honestly if autonomous cars can reduce even 10% of accidents caused by drunk driving and other human errors then they will have payed their way and more.
But speaking of paying, self driving cars also won't speed, turn right on red without a full stop, etc. Which means traffic tickets would be a thing of the past, along with the revenue they bring in.
That's probably not true. I've gotten the impression that a sizable chunk of police funding comes from speeding tickets.
Paying an officer to do something low-risk like camping out next to a road for a shift isn't really expensive. Same with monitoring systems like cameras on traffic lights. Set-up cost is significant, but they probably pay for themselves within a year.
The initial cost doesn't matter. If an officer doesn't cost much, yet you don't have to pay him any more than that is a 100% decrease in cost.
Second I know that the officer is not the only cost involved. What about maintaining a fleet of top of the line vehicles? How about paying all the support personnel such as IT Staff, dispatch, managers, etc? All of the other expensive toys carried around by the chaser?
> Second I know that the officer is not the only cost involved. What about maintaining a fleet of top of the line vehicles? How about paying all the support personnel such as IT Staff, dispatch, managers, etc? All of the other expensive toys carried around by the chaser?
Arguable. It depends on how badly you want [insert autonomous car producer here] to run your local police department from the cloud.
I was thinking about this for other reasons (it is beneficial for the auto-car to know about road closures), but a reasonable implementation has the vehicle interpreting rules data provided by the governments where it is operating, so you can do certification by making sure the vehicle 'correctly' interprets a given data set.
Having the rules data provided by the government is a fairly straightforward way for the vehicles to work even after the builder repudiates maintenance (maybe that is better said as 'to continue to work longer after', but whatever).
(I'm not worried about the cloud, hand-wringing and paranoia are going to make these things at least function independently or keep them off the road altogether)
Currently, that situation isn't possible, as self-driving cars still require an attentive driver who can take over at any time.
In the future? That's a hard question, and I'm sure however the legal system deals with it first will be wholly unfair and illogical. It'll be a battle between car owners, manufacturers, state and federal bodies, cities and counties, certification and safety agencies, etc.
Are we talking push bikes? At least in the UK you don't need a license for that anyway. I guess it's possible you wouldn't need a license for a self-driving car, but while regulations demand a fit driver who can control the vehicle that won't be the case.
Actually assuming 190 million licensed drivers (although drunks kill all manner of people, including themselves) and 10K drinking related deaths per year (how many are caused by drunks as opposed to would have happened anyway with at least one driver who happens to be drunk?)
Anyway assuming all victims loose 100 years of life...
10e3/190e6 * 24 * 365 * 100 * 0.1 = a delta of 4.6 hrs/day so I think your hyperbole is pretty much mathematically correct.
Our local krispie kreme closed, so the next closest is about 100 miles away, so if a "driveby" was purchased for me, it could actually burn up 4 or 5 hours of my time, especially during rush hour.
That's too idealistic. The reduction of accidents caused by human errors could very well be offset by a substantial increase in machine/OS/SW/HW caused accidents.
That's pretty unlikely though. It's not like cars are going from manual-everything to autonomous all at once. Multiple levels of traction control and steering assistance are already in control of your car, and they prevent more accidents than they cause. Autonomy is going to be rolled out in pieces and tested little by little.