[User9812]

I can't see that working. You'll require a ton of cars taking individuals or small groups to and from work in a big city. That's not very efficient, and the reason we have a metro system in the first place.

1. That's a lot of pollution. 2. You have twice as much traffic, since these cars need to come to your house every morning, and drive back to their charging station in the evening. They can take those trips off-peak hours, but you still have a lot more cars on the road. They could stay at your house overnight to save on wasting energy, but at that point you're just owning a car, or renting one full-time. 3. Do many people take a taxi to and from work daily? No, and this is quite similar. It's too expensive, people take public transportation, or buy a cheap vehicle (this could be that vehicle).

This is a replacement for the taxi, and for car rentals. If you live in a city and need to rent a car for a day, this would be a great situation. You don't even need a driver's license, so you just push a button, car appears, and you're taking it to your destination. I've lived in a dozen different cities, and this is something I'd use. I don't rent cars often because it's kind of a hassle, a little scary driving in a new city, and a little annoying searching for parking, but the convenience of pushing a button would encourage me to use it for certain trips. It should also be slightly cheaper than a taxi since you're not paying or tipping a driver.

They could probably get creative and offer monthly plans, where you get up to X trips, and Y kilometers, for a slightly better rate than renting on a per trip basis.

[prawn]

1. Less pollution than what we have now given that many people spend time hunting for a park when they arrive, or drive five-seat vehicles even though they're alone or with 1-2 others. I read something saying that in a city centre, often 30% of traffic is simply people hunting for a park. I know when I arrive near my office, I can spend 5-10 minutes driving around trying to get an all-day park. Three times a week I'm driving an SUV that can seat five and has a large boot (passengers are my wife and toddler), the other days I'm in a five seat sedan (and solo).

2. I'd say that depots will be interspersed around the city and suburbs, for one thing. Cars might move from suburban depots over night to densely-arranged city parking/depots during the day, waiting for the evening rush. A car that dropped you at work after your run in from the South is then immediately free to take someone from the city centre down South again, or be available for a courier job, or a tourist leaving a city hotel for a day trip. The mesh of cars communicating will determine the most economical use of the vehicles and anticipate demand. Further, cars communicating with each other will mean that typical causes of congestion (like traffic lights) will be better handled and less of an issue.

3. Taxis are expensive partly because there are salaried humans driving them. If these are electric vehicles and solar charged, fuel and driver are largely out of the equation.

[User9812]

1. Not sure I agree with the first point. People hunting for a parking space once a day likely causes less pollution then a car driving itself to a charging station or depot twice a day. Plus, if these are an affordable method of commuting, you're going to be pulling people away from public transportation, and getting more vehicles on the road. If they're more expensive, then you'll just have people buying their own, and then they're in your situation, where they buy an SUV model since it's more versatile.

2. Moving some depots outside the city will definitely help. Yes, some of the cars going into the city will be used for courier jobs, or tourist day trips, but that's an incredibly small percentage. You might have 500,000 automated cars taking people to work. 450,000 sit in a depot waiting for the evening commute, and 50,000 are used for people active in the day. Once again 500,000 people take their car home, and about 450,000 sit idle again waiting for the next day. How does this work as a business? If you use one of these cars for work, you need to pay for 90% of the cost, because that car rarely gets used outside of taking you to and from work. Sure, you could do a ride share with a couple of other people, but still, the few of you are renting that car full-time. It doesn't work.

3. If these can be solar charged, then surely a taxi can be solar charged, so there's no difference in fuel cost. You're paying a driver, and someone in an office answering calls, so there is an extra cost, and I think they have a use case here.

In short, these cars need to be on the road all day long, that's how they lower their prices and raise efficiency. That doesn't work for daily commuting. However, they would be an incredible taxi service. Imagine you have a fleet of 100 automated cars, people use an app to set their pickup/destination, and the cars find the most efficient way of organizing the routes and schedule. A car breaks down, and another one automatically reroutes itself. You could give people the option of carpooling with a checkbox. Let people register on the app, and upload a photo. So, you set your destination, and it says it'll be $10 and 15 minutes, or you can carpool with John (25/male), and it'll cost your $7.50, and 20 minutes. This could even happen while you're in transit. You get a pop-up on the dash. Want to lower your rate and share a ride with the person in this photo? Say yes, we'll credit $5 to your account, and take a 5 minute detour to pick them up. Worried about safety? You could review passengers, and only car pool with people that have a high rating and good feedback. I think that's exciting, it should offer lower rates to consumers, and you get to socialize with new people at the same time, so you might make some friends on your next taxi ride.

[prawn]

1. Public transport will still be cheaper, so it will still have its place. And I think we'll see small charging spaces that autonomous vehicles can use every block or so. Plus parking for these vehicles will be dense and save loads of space - it is obscene how much of our space is dedicated to parking.

I think we'll also see something in between a typical commuting vehicle and a bus. If 10 people in a specific area have regular bookings to go from a two block area to the CBD in a fixed time, then a van will do pick-ups and drop-offs either from houses or from fixed corners (think unmarked bus stops). It will be like demand-based bus routes.

I think we might also eventually see pod-based vans for people that don't want to socialise in any way with others in the vehicle. That said, people cope with the subway OK.

I don't think pollution from driving will be a significant factor with a serious influx in electric vehicles.

2. That's worse than what's happening now. I think we'll see peak pricing motivate changes in schedules and a decrease in the full complement of cars. I also think we'll see companies selling time-share in vehicles so you might buy one of these cars to have priority access, but then earn money from whenever it's available to work for you as part of a network. Those that want to keep one dedicated to themselves could.

3. Staff costs are significant in Australia so here and in similar places, I think taxis will be increasingly popular. Already it's not far off the case that commuting via taxi outside peak times could be more affordable for me with a second car I use twice a day, twice a week. Four taxi trips would cost me $12-17 each ($2500-3500/year). My second car, ignoring the cost to buy it would reach $2500 annually from registration, insurance and maintenance. That ignores depreciation, cleaning, hassle of parking, walking to my parking spot in the rain four blocks away, etc. Take away salary costs of taxis and make them easy to hail and pay by phone and I'd switch so quickly. And I think many people would prefer to travel by autonomous vehicle than with a driver who smells, listens to crappy radio stations or answers their phone the entire trip.

[User9812]

A bus is possible, but if this was a viable business, it should exist already. The only difference is the cost of the driver, so the automated bus might save passengers $5/day. Is that $5/day extra cost keeping this business non-existent at the moment? I'm a little skeptical.

Keep in mind your taxi service is cheap because it's on the road all the time. A taxi might make $250/day, and pay the driver half of that cost. That means the company is making $125/day per taxi. You're one of 15 or 20 people taking that taxi in a day, so the $15 trip is possible. If everyone was taking an automated car to work, they need to pay the majority of that $125/day price. Split it with 4 people, and that's just over $30/day each. Kind of expensive. Add more people and we're turning into a bus or public transit again.

Work schedules offset would help everything all around. If some people worked 7-3, 8-4, 9-5, 10-6, 11-7, etc, then we could decrease rush hour traffic, and use the cars multiple times to lower the price to $10/day, which starts to become interesting.

I like your idea of buying a car, adding it to a network, and getting money back when you're not using it.

[prawn]

"A bus is possible, but if this was a viable business, it should exist already. The only difference is the cost of the driver, so the automated bus might save passengers $5/day. Is that $5/day extra cost keeping this business non-existent at the moment? I'm a little skeptical."

$5/day could be enough, especially if the parking situation changed for drivers at the other end. Take away street parking (no longer required when most cars are autonomous) near my office and I'd likely catch the bus. Have a bus that took me virtually door to door (rather than walking 3-4 blocks at each end) and I'd likely switch already.

I think lack of imagination might be one thing stopping a service like this existing now, and volume of passengers. If you wanted to start it now, you'd need coverage to justify the advertising campaign to build customers and to make it worthwhile. You'd need a fleet and then to hire and train drivers.

In the future, it will be APIs/software.

Imagine it's almost worth my while to pay $15/trip now. Then take out the driver and make it $10/trip plus pain-free bookings - I could read/work without feeling like I was being rude to the driver. Then imagine my booking app offers me $5/trip if I'm willing to car-pool, with the software automatically picking my ride-mates and most efficient pick-up and drop-off route. I'm pretty likely to do that. In dense areas and with time, manoeuvrable vans could be even more effective and the upgrade could be done with a software update.

Not to mention the bonus of taking cars off the street.

Autonomous vans on demand are going to be incredibly useful for wine tasting trips...

[dzhiurgis]

Everything relating to public transportation will be the major pain point. It is heavily regulated, subsidised, unionised, etc.

London isn't able to replace ticket sellers with machines yet, so you can imagine how long it will take to replace the drivers. Alternatively, they will see this a profit eating activity and resist until the people wouldn't take it anymore.

[jeremyjh]

When I was in London in 2009 I bought metro and surface train tickets from a machine.

[lmm]

> A bus is possible, but if this was a viable business, it should exist already. The only difference is the cost of the driver, so the automated bus might save passengers $5/day. Is that $5/day extra cost keeping this business non-existent at the moment? I'm a little skeptical.

You're already seeing the much-maligned google (and other tech companies) buses in SF and area, so they're just-about-viable for some cases. I've seen a similar business model for hotel-airport shuttle services, and these kind of vehicles are everywhere in denser cities (Hong Kong, Firenze).

[Joeri]

You can price the car based on the time of the ride, to spread out rush hour and reuse vehicles for multiple trips. It will always be more efficient than privately owned vehicles due to the ability to choose the appropriate vehicle for the ride, instead of having to buy a vehicle for the most intensive purpose and underutilizing it a majority of the time.

[jfoutz]

I think you're underestimating the amount of pollution/resources that go into making a car. Reducing the overall number of cars produced would offset a huge number of those extra trips.

[newaccountfool]

I think people forget about this point, especially tyres. They take a ton of effort to make and you cant really resuse them for much afterwords.

[mikeloeb]

I keep hearing the "there would be fewer cars" claim, but my counter-claim is that the mileage would be the same, so wear and tear would be the same. Look at how quickly taxis decay to see this.

Furthermore, I looked up reuses for tires. There is already a large, multi-stage chain of reuses and recycling for them, for all kinds of applications, from burning for cement kilns to civil engineering and agricultural products.[0] [1] [2] As one article put it "Those same characteristics, which make waste tires such a problem, also make them one of the most re-used waste materials"

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire_recycling

[1] http://www.designrulz.com/product-design/2012/12/20-ideas-of...

[2] http://www.earth911.com/living/travel-living/recycling-myste...

[pwf]

I imagine this working a lot like car2go, which I've used to commute in Austin. The cars are rarely at a central depot except for maintenance. They're left wherever you last used them until someone else gets in. This could only be better than that, as users won't have to walk to find one.

There's no reason for the cars to drive back into the city every evening. They could charge themselves while you're at work if they had to charge daily.

[facepalm]

It will presumably be cheaper than taxis, that is kind of the point.

I think most people don't even realize how expensive their car really is (is there such a thing as a "cheap car", if you take into account taxes, insurance, gas prices, maintenance, time wasted looking for parking and waiting in traffic jams). Convenience of autonomous cars might quickly win them over.

Charging: maybe you have a point for people who commute from suburbs. But you could have charging stations in the suburbs. I think there will be algorithms for determining optimal distribution of cars and charging stations. Apparently the Tesla can be charged at a normal power socket. If that goes for other cars as well, there would be no reason not to have lots and lots of charging stations (contrary to gas which is explosive and toxic, so you don't want to have a gas station near your house).

Anybody with a house front could perhaps offer a charging station to earn some money on the side.

[lars512]

You're right, public transport isn't going anywhere and still has huge efficiency benefits. But these cars can make it better, by solving the first/last mile problem.

I imagine them ferrying people frantically to and from mass transit hubs, especially between low-density suburban housing and trains.

[danielweber]

You are going to have to, first, make the mass transit so awesome that people voluntarily leave their cars behind to get on the train.

As you get more cars off the road, other people will use the open roads to travel into the city.

Note that "you have to make mass transit awesome enough that people use it" is not "make driving suck." You will never make any headway in a democracy by telling the majority of the people they should re-arrange their lives to follow your utopian model.

[digikata]

If you have automated cars at either end of a rail system, you get rail efficiency in the middle. This alleviates one big reason not to use trains to commute - the stations are farther than walking distance at one end. If you get an automated ride to cover the gap between the station and your work - it complements both systems.