Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas thinks that this chart represents the future of the auto industry, where we one day move into autonomous, shared transportation.
I’m not discounting the idea of the self-driving car. I think it will arrive at some point in the intermediate future, with far less capabilities than we may expect, but at much lower cost. The notion of self-driving, shared-ownership vehicles is a fantastical notion held by childless coastal elites who are utterly disconnected from the reality of the other 300 million Americans who must deal with children, elderly relatives, poor weather, long driving distances and a general aversion to anything that deviates from private vehicle ownership.
This is not likely to change, and it’s further compounded by the myriad regulations governing the automobile, which cannot be undo with the wave of a magic wand (or campaign donations). Adam Jonas is also notorious for making highly hyperbolic predictions about Tesla’s share price. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a way to gin up business for Morgan Stanley when it comes time to underwrite some car sharing IPOs. And lastly, tuning out anything with the word “disruption” in it is a pretty solid heuristic.
Tell me why I’m wrong.
So basically Adam Jonas wants to ruin the life of every American, and make sure we can’t drive ourselves or own transportation. We must sit in a filthy shared pod that someone else spilled a burrito in the day before.
Go away, you commie.
He should just come out and say that he wants me to take the bus.
“He should just come out and say that he wants me to take the bus.”
No, no.
Just (you and the rest of America) to the bus stop (wink wink).
Analysts, generally, say what the think is going to happen based on extant forces and trends*.
Not what they “want” to happen.
(* Well, ideally. At worst they say that whoever-pays-them has awesome stuff that will rule, and the competition sucks.)
Analysts often choose a specialty based upon the data they want to interpret. They say what they want to say.
Furthermore, Jonas is predicting the expansion of public transit. Hardly a controversial position if you glance at the data. If you look more deeply into the data, you find plenty of reasons to believe he’s wrong, but that’s another story.
Actually, CoreyDL, there may be some virtue to voluntary autonomous driving. It will get the incompetent, cell-phone texting idiots out of making poor and dangerous driving decisions, — and leave the road open to me and my stable of exclusively manual-transmission vehicles. (At least, that’s what I tell myself in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep!)
===================
Surely ‘rentals’ belong in the ‘shared economy,’ since I don’t own it?
I can only be happy that I’ll be dead by the time we get to stage 4. I actually like to drive. Crazy, I know.
You nailed it with this:
“The notion of self-driving, shared-ownership vehicles is a fantastical notion held by childless coastal elites who are utterly disconnected from the reality of the other 300 million Americans who must deal with children, elderly relatives, poor weather, long driving distances and a general aversion to anything that deviates from private vehicle ownership.”
Couldn’t agree more.
“I’ll be happy to be dead.” You stole my line Velvet Fog. If you love the automobile, this is dystopia.
I agree, I’m glad I’ll be dead before this happens. I know a lot of 25-35 year olds that are looking forward to it, they can play games or watch videos while riding in their pay by the mile pod. Sounds like hell to me.
I may be proven wrong, but my expectations for the autonomous car are low. The idea of a high-speed wheeled projectile careening along without a responsible human as a backup system strikes me as unrealistic — even if the technology works most of the time, we won’t stand for the consequences when it fails. When someone or his property is struck by said autonomous car, “nobody is responsible, so tough s**t” won’t be an acceptable response.
It’s not just likely, but inevitable, once analysis reveals (as it will) that the failure rate is many times lower than it is with human drivers.
Liability will be covered by insurance. Who will buy that insurance? Probably the carmaker and its systems designers, in the initial stages, to drive acceptance of the technology. Then later as the technology becomes commonplace it will be the car owner just like it is today.
As I’ve noted before, it isn’t just the odds of failure, but the consequences of failure.
There will be occasions when an autonomous car does damage that could have been prevented had there been a human to correct for it. And you can bet that those who have suffered from the consequences will respond accordingly.
And there will be *many* times more occasions when a human-controlled car does damage that an autonomous car would not, and, once autonomous cars are a realistic option, those who have suffered from the consequences will respond accordingly.
You are of course, right. I can see it now.
MAMD
Mothers Against Manual Driving
PFAF
Parents For Automated Future
DTTW
Don’t Touch The Wheel
Yes but the emotional response will be completely different. Humans in general are not the most rational things on earth. We have already accepted us killing each other we have not and I think will not except automated machines killing us.
You aren’t grasping the concept of how liability works.
Let’s suppose that Adam’s autonomous car negligently strikes Bob and kills him. Bob’s family is upset and wants its pound of flesh.
Does Bob’s family care that the autonomous car is statistically safer in the macro? No.
Does Bob’s family care that cars are safer at the time of Bob’s death than they were 10, 20 or 100 years earlier? No.
The only issue is Adam’s or someone else’s liability for that one particular incident. None of the macro issues are relevant for establishing the parameters for that one particular instance that resulted in Bob’s death.
There will be many Bobs, and no amount of data will justify their wrongful deaths. When their families and their lawyers start demanding a remedy, “autonomy is oarsume” won’t cut it.
LOL. I’m a lawyer. All I think about every day is liability.
The carmaker’s or Adam’s insurance will pay off Bob’s family. But they’ll still be out there agitating against autonomous cars. The problem is that they will be drowned out by the families of Cathy, Dave, Emily, Frank, Geoff, Henry, and Isabelle — all of whom were killed by reckless human drivers, because a whole lot of people are killed by reckless human drivers. If widespread use of autonomous cars becomes a realistic option, all of those families will agitate for them.
mopar4wd, I agree with you, but I think that the numbers of people killed by human drivers are so high that it will more than make up the difference. Remember, something like 40,000 people a year die in traffic accidents, and the vast majority of those are attributable to some sort of driver error.
Pch,
dal is correct – you’re forgetting the reverse. For ever 1 autonomous accident there will be 100 traditional accidents. That will move laws, regulations and public opinion quite quickly.
Driving a “manual” car will be like someone throwing a 3 year old in the back of a station wagon. Something that was once done and is now unthinkable.
Cathy, Dave, etc. are all irrelevant to Bob’s lawsuit. It’s about Bob, not about everyone else.
Humans like to have backup systems, even if they don’t always work properly. Automakers and insurers should expect greater exposure if they deliberately omit them.
“you’re forgetting the reverse.”
No, I went out of my way to point out why the reverse was irrelevant. The macro does not fix or eliminate responsibility for the micro.
Smart insurers will realize that their long-term exposure will be greatly reduced by autonomous cars, even at the cost of some high-profile initial losses. I have zero fear that insurance won’t be available once manufacturers have refined autonomous driving technology. Once insurance is in place, liability shifts from a structural issue to an issue to be resolved by lawyers throwing documents at each other. It’s a non-issue.
And I think in the long run the shift to all-autonomous driving on public highways will be partly driven by the increasing difficulty of getting insurance for human-driven vehicles.
I don’t see how you can dismiss the carnage from human drivers as “irrelevant.” It’s very real, and it’s going to lead to pressure for change once that change is seen as a realistic option and people understand how it works.
” The macro does not fix or eliminate responsibility for the micro.”
Sure it does.
Once again — the macro is irrelevant to the micro case.
Saving Cathy’s life does not provide a defense for Adam’s killing of Bob.
“Once again — the macro is irrelevant to the micro case.”
In terms of an insurance company’s expected liability? What?
I’ve already addressed it. If Adam and his car are negligent in that one instance, then they’re negligent for that one instance.
” If Adam and his car are negligent in that one instance, then they’re negligent for that one instance.”
And that is only of concern to Adam’s insurer.
“I don’t see how you can dismiss the carnage from human drivers as “irrelevant.” It’s very real, and it’s going to lead to pressure for change once that change is seen as a realistic option and people understand how it works.”
Are you sure? Roads have been at around 40k deaths/yr (with no real variation in miles driven) for a while now, and we as a society basically accept that. Where is this outcry going to come from to make it safer? I really don’t see it happening.
When Bob’s lawyers demonstrate that a human could have prevented Bob’s death, then the awards will be high and the liability will reach back to all of those who made a point of designing the car without a human fallback.
That should be a strong motivation for insurers and automakers in particular to avoid that pain. If installing a driver’s seat and a steering wheel can protect an OEM from billions of dollars of liability exposure, then they’re going to do the obvious and install them.
Pch101, the liability will not “reach back to all of those who made a point of designing the car without a human fallback.” Avoiding that is the whole reason insurance exists, and autonomous cars are not going to change the nature of insurance. I agree with you the severity of the initial instances will be higher. That will be accounted for in the price of the insurance and the carmaker, the systems maker, or both will eat the higher cost of insurance to promote the technology.
S2k, right now nothing is done about road carnage because people don’t see an alternative they like. They aren’t willing to avoid going places, and non-road transportation infrastructure isn’t an appealing option anywhere but a few large cities. The political environment is going to be very different when the argument is “We could have prevented this by automating the reckless driver’s car using this common technology” than it is now, when the best we can say is “We should have kept this reckless driver off the road.” Today, we may not have known that, or we are unwilling to affect the reckless driver’s ability to hold down a job or participate in society.
Bob’s family has every reason to sue the OEM that produced what proved to be a defective product.
Insurers will have an incentive to hang liability around the OEM’s necks to the extent that it reduces their own.
An OEM has no good reason to willingly take on that exposure.
“An OEM has no good reason to willingly take on that exposure.”
You mean other than selling autonomous cars to every elderly person in America who can’t drive or is starting to feel uncomfortable driving, and to every parent of an 11-year-old who’s sick of spending her entire life driving back and forth between activities? And, in the longer term, being at the forefront of something which is likely to eventually be 99.9% of the private vehicle market?
This is a potential bonanza. OEMs ignore it at their peril. Fortunately for them, we already see OEMs rushing to refine a lot of the needed technical elements in current cars.
I have my doubts that there is some enormous pent-up demand for cars that this would address. If I was an OEM, I wouldn’t bet the farm on pensioners on their last legs or on middle-class families trying to find room in their budgets for another car that they can’t afford.
I suspect that autonomous driving will be akin to cruise control on steroids. A nice feature but not a game changer.
Yup. Electronics *are more reliable* than average human beings.
Honestly, even more than above-average human beings.
And who is going to be held responsible for the mass casualties when the teenage Russian hacker puts the worm in the software???
And what will the insurance premiums look like then?
@DAC17
*sigh*
I know this new technology sounds scary, and hollywood has done a good job of making everyone think that we’re one step away from creating SkyNet and so on, but systems simply do not work this way. Smartphones will soon have better worldwide penetration than television and radio ever did, and for the most part, two companies can push an update that could destroy the entire system in one go (or a hacker who got access), yet this has not happened. The Canadarm2 on the International space station is controlled on a radio frequency that anyone with HAM radio equipment can access, and yet no one has taken control of it to smash the station. The internet is a large collection of systems transmitting unencrypted, unauthenticated information about routes to one another, and yet no one has destroyed it.
80% of the worlds computers run the same software, and even the most virulent viruses ever released didn’t approach 5% penetration, and were rendered harmless quickly.
Tesla pushes updates to every vehicle and is a huge target of opportunity for hackers to “prove” they can attack connected vehicles, yet this has not happened. Nor with OnStar, which connects far more vehicles and can even turn them off while driving!
Autonomous systems don’t work the way Hollywood would have you believe. Turning autonomous cars into murdermobiles without getting discovered along the way would be a task so difficult to defy credulity, and moreso, doing so in a way that would prevent companies affected from just disabling the cars until a patch could be applied even moreso.
But really, the #1 reason this won’t happen is because there is simply no reason possible why every car, everywhere, would need to be on the same network, regardless of vendor, region, design, model year, or many other factors. It will limit exposure and increase complexity of completing an interdiction in the first place.
Exactly.
‘“nobody is responsible, so tough s**t” won’t be an acceptable response.”
It is when the IRS says it.
“The idea of a high-speed wheeled projectile careening along without a responsible human as a backup system strikes me as unrealistic — even if the technology works most of the time, we won’t stand for the consequences when it fails.”
Exactly. Aircraft not only have a much simpler task (there are no trees or children to hit at 30,000 feet), but they also are expensive enough to allow for the very best in autonomous guidance systems – systems which have been around (and in continuous development) for decades. Still, a human pilot is required for all commercial aircraft.
But it’s already here. There are many autonomous rail systems in use today. They move thousands of people at airports without human intervention.
The “plane” analogy is a false one. You can’t slam on the brakes in a plane, people would still die. And perhaps more importantly, planes CAN fly *all* portions of flight – takeoff, ascent, cruise, descent, landing, completely automatically. So much so that modern planes have dispensed with pilot hardwired controls. Airbus cockpits don’t have what we consider “flight sticks” anymore. There are still humans, but they are no longer required.
This is what will happen with autonomous vehicles. Humans will be required to be present until it becomes clear that they aren’t necessary, at which point the world will inevitably move forward.
There’s no comparison between automated trains operating on limited-access fixed-route rail lines with no cross traffic and few contact points with pedestrians, and a passenger car operating on public streets with numerous potential hazards at virtually every point of the route.
“There’s no comparison between automated trains operating on limited-access fixed-route rail lines with no cross traffic and few contact points with pedestrians, and a passenger car operating on public streets with numerous potential hazards at virtually every point of the route.”
You’re right. And there’s even less to a plane. It was LuciferV8’s comment that I was responding to, not yours.
I think you are a little confused with your terminology Airbus air craft do have side stick controls vs the yoke on Boeing comercial aircraft. Both Boeing and Airbus have fly by wire on their models, that does not make it that the pilot cannot still fly the plane. The german wings crash and captain sulleburg landing on the Hudson ( both a320 air craft) show that pilots can still fly the plane. Auto land was an option on early jetliners first appearing in the late sixties, but most pilots today use heads up displays to land in bad weather as the auto land systems work in more ideal conditions but still feed telemetry to the pilots HUD. When autonomous systems in aircraft malfunction typicly you have two pilots that can recover the aircraft but even with 3 pilots it wasn’t enought to save air France 447 when the auto pilot disengaged on a very modern and advanced a330 jetliner over the Atlantic. Now how are people in autonomous cars going to react when it disengaged and they are texting reading applying makeup or intoxicated to regain control of their vehicle when the system inevitably shuts off. These are people who probably don’t get their oil changed so how certain can we be that they will keep their car in a state that allows the autonomous system to function properly.
@Carilloskis: You really think the only failure mode of an Autonomous car will be to freewheel out of control? You don’t think that – I don’t know – *braking* might be a better option? :)
The point I was trying to make above, however, was that modrn aircraft’s flight sticks (call them what you will) are no longer hardwired by cabling to the control surfaces – an Airbus has a “joystick” that is entirely digital input, for example. Catastrophic computer failure would mean no control. And yet this is one of the most popular vehicles in the air today.
But it’s still not a fair analogy. Your aircraft can’t stop midair when a problem with a sensor or other input is identified. You car will be able to do exactly that. It seems more people would like to imagine this bizarre alternative where instead, the throttle somehow gets stuck on and the brakes suddenly don’t function and you can’t stop sort of thing, however.
@Orenwolf because suddenly breaking a car on a freeway where the speed limit is 65 isn’t the most intelligent thing to do. If the system fails you don’t want the car to make an emergency stop right in front of an 18 wheeler. With air planes typically flying at 36,000+ feet with several miles of separation between them if the Auto pilot disengages the pilots typically have time to regain control of the aircraft before anything bad happens, This is contrast with a highway where you have many other vehicles in close proximity to a vehicle that is suddenly not under operation of the computer and the driver is panicking. Pilots are trained for this sort of thing, The person playing angry birds on their iPhone will panic when the car hands control back to them and will not have been paying attention to the surrounding area to make an informed decision on what to do with the car.
As Far as the Aircraft go yes nearly every aircraft is either 100% Fly by wire or has most major subsystems being FBW. The A320, A330, A340, A350, A380, B777, B787, are All FBW the B737NG, 747-8 are partial FBW As they latter tow are based off older designs the development cost of switching the planes to 100%FBW isn’t cost effective , but all the aircraft mentioned still have auto pilot and auto land options et. al. As Far as cars are concerned most new cars and trucks Don’t have mechanical connections any more. On my 2010 F150 the Ignition is not tied directly to the starter. the Accelerator and Brake pedals rely on position sensors to tell the computer what position the pedals are in, my transfer case selector is a nob on the dash intact the only control on the 09 and newer F150s that is mechanically connected to what it does is the steering wheel , and i think ford might disconnect it mechanically in futures models to save weight. My Point is that there is a difference between a driver making a decision and a computer translating the drivers inputs into actions and the computer making decisions and then acting on those decisions.
““nobody is responsible, so tough s**t” won’t be an acceptable response.”
Driving is the most expensive, most perilous form of transportation there is today. Some insanely high portion of that peril is distracted, negligent drivers.
The argument that somehow technology that can see better, respond more quickly, and *is never distracted* is going to be less dangerous than a distracted teen driver, an aged driver who shouldn’t be on the road, or any of the other extremely large portion of the road accident causes is lunacy. The tech will be redundant, and it’s failure mode will be to simply pull over and stop and require manual intervention. It’s going to save literally thousands of lives.
“The argument that somehow technology that can see better, respond more quickly, and *is never distracted* is going to be less dangerous than a distracted teen driver, an aged driver who shouldn’t be on the road, or any of the other extremely large portion of the road accident causes is lunacy.”
Thanks, but that wasn’t the argument. Go back and read more carefully.
Pch101, I’ve been reading your comments here for years. For the most part, I enjoy them, especially since your politics and viewpoints are made so transparent. It’s refreshing and I thank you for that.
However, that doesn’t mean I appreciate the implication that I have issues with reading comprehension.
The point of my comment is that your suggestion that we won’t stand for the consequences will be proven false when the reality sets in that what we’ve been doing for the last century is *overlooking* the consequences of having humans behind the wheels, versus finding a safer option. When that becomes evident, your liability argument will be flipped on it’s head – no one will want to accept the liability of *not* letting an autonomous system drive.
“The point of my comment is that your suggestion that we won’t stand for the consequences will be proven false when the reality sets in that what we’ve been doing for the last century is *overlooking* the consequences of having humans behind the wheels, versus finding a safer option.”
As I noted, you failed to understand my point in the thread above. This statement proves it.
Even if autonomous cars prove to be as miraculous as you believe, there will still be casualties of the technology. And those casualties will want compensation.
The benefits that others obtain from the technology will not compensate those individuals who suffer harm. (One more time: The macro does not help the micro.) The benefits received by others do not provide recourse to those who draw the short straw as did as our fictional friend Bob in the previous hypothetical.
In our current system, liability for crashes usually belongs to drivers. If autonomous systems become the norm, then it will be the automakers and their suppliers who will be implicated as the culprits in many crashes, since the crashes will be caused by their equipment failures instead of driver error. There is no good reason why the automakers would want such a thing to happen to them — they are better off with how things are now.
Pch101, I think your arguments make sense if and only if you assume autonomous vehicles will not expand the car market at all. The idea boggles the mind, given the number of people who can’t drive but could use autonomous cars, and the number of people who would love to do other things while on the move.
Your worry about liability, though, is superfluous even if you’re right that autonomy won’t bring any additional market. I feel like you don’t understand how insurance works, which is baffling given that you’re a smart guy. Total losses will be vastly lower from autonomous cars than human-driven ones. In a reasonably competitive insurance market, lower losses mean lower total insurance premiums. Axiomatically.
The rest is just distribution, which the market figures out quickly and easily. If automakers have to pay most of the remaining insurance premium, they’ll make it up by charging incrementally more for the cars. Consumers will happily pay because either they won’t have to pay for insurance or their insurance premium will be a tiny fraction of what it is now.
My auto insurance policy is not going to cover the automaker’s liability.
If my autonomous car strikes and kills you and injures me while I am riding in it, then your estate and I may both end up suing the automaker, since we are both going to blame the OEM and will be motivated to do so since it is the deep pocket.
Furthermore, my insurer would be pleased if I won, since that would reduce the insurer’s exposure to any claims that I might file as its insured against my policy. It certainly won’t want to pay your estate, since its insured — me — didn’t cause the crash.
It would seem that some of you have not thought this through. Our current system mostly gives automakers a pass for vehicle deaths, as they are usually caused by driver error. Eliminating driving error doesn’t eliminate liability, it just passes it on to somebody else.
This is exactly why automakers will have insurance before introducing autonomous vehicles. In fact, I’m absolutely sure that today’s car makers have insurance against liability that could arise from features like adaptive cruise control and lane departure warning.
You can underwrite anything. For a while, my ex was on the actuarial team at a unit of AIG that underwrote special risks. The stuff they were able to insure — and to price intelligently — was mind-boggling.
Eliminating driver error will eliminate a ton of losses. There will be liability for the remaining losses, but both OEMs and insurers will be very motivated to sort it out. There will still be an expensive court case (or several) along the way, but that hasn’t ever stopped adoption of any other new technology. Liability and insurance get figured out.
There is a significant difference between a lane departure warning system and an autonomous car. The former is a supplement that does not relieve the driver from the responsibility of driving; the latter specifically promises the consumer that the vehicle (and by extension, those who designed, produced and sold it) will do all of the work and assume the responsibility.
Occam’s Razor would suggest that automakers would be wise to take the path of least resistance, which would entail keeping drivers on the hook. That is done easily enough by maintaining a driver’s seat and a full set of controls so that it is ultimately the driver’s responsibility for driving safely.
It isn’t hard for OEM’s to provide a driver seat, steering wheel and the like because they are already doing it. They have plenty of experience with this approach, including legal experience.
And I suspect that this autonomous software would fail more often than you think — there are too many variables on public streets at any given time for there not to be a significant number of errors. There is no sound reason for an automaker take ownership of problems that are inevitable (and no, I don’t see the car market growing as a result of this technology, so there is no financial benefit for going out on a limb.)
“And I suspect that this autonomous software would fail more often than you think — there are too many variables on public streets at any given time for there not to be a significant number of errors. There is no sound reason for an automaker take ownership of problems that are inevitable (and no, I don’t see the car market growing as a result of this technology, so there is no financial benefit for going out on a limb.)”
Of course there is. Barrier to entry doesn’t preclude the creation of new markets. The chance to be the first mover in the autonomous vehicle market is a real, tangible profit motivator for companies.
I think one of the issues here is that you appear to be assuming that it will be today’s auto manufacturers who take this next step. This was the mistake made by phone manufacturers who thought Google and Apple would never steal their market out from under them as well.
google has the deep pockets to idemnify autonomous vehicle operators if necessary, and fight those tough battles in the courts. And they’ll do it just for the chance of being the 1st mover in the industry, because even if it fails it won’t bankrupt them. Same is true of Apple if they went that way.
Personal vehicle ownership exploded in popularity because it gives people the freedom to go where they want, when they want in the privacy and security of their own cabin. While the niche of shared transport with ever increasing automous tech will likely expand in areas where personal vehicle ownership is impractical, that segment is representative of only a small minority of the market. Full autonomy is a dream at the end of a very long pipe. Planes still have pilots for a reason, cars will continue to for the forseeable future as well.
Yeah, I expect Mr. Analyst is right, if “auto industry” means “New York and SF car owners”.
Otherwise, not so much.
I recall a German official at the UN saying about 20 years ago that he was personally offended by how much the average American drove, and his intention from his Manhattan office was to force us to reduce our horizons to less than thirty miles from birth to death.
Fortunately, my uncle has a country place that nobody knows about. It used to be a farm.
Long live the Red Barchetta!…with three pedals…
These are the same guys that keep telling me that we are becoming more urban and that the suburbs are going the way of the do-do. I guess the logic is that if we all live in cities, we don’t need cars.
Meanwhile, in the actual real world, the suburban community I live in didn’t exist 10 years ago – and they keep building more.
Hey, if you are a history professor type that wants to walk everywhere then go live in a city. I’ve worked NYC and I vowed I’m never going back to that hell-hole.
Living in the suburbs with a car is simply better.
Ultimately I think that’s what they want, but how badly they want it I can’t quite gauge.
zerofoo, there are large numbers of people who flee “The City” for the wide open spaces of “The Country” at their earliest opportunity.
While this is great for us in the real estate business, it isn’t too whoopee for the residents already living in the wide open spaces who see their sparsely-populated areas become more urbanized, by the day.
The truth, HDC, is that in many cities, the core AND the suburbs are growing, and there are plenty of folks in the suburbs who are fleeing them for the “core”.
I know that younger people are gravitating towards urban centers, but I think a surprising number of boomers are too. When my kids get older, I will probably be one of them – not because I don’t own a car, but because I just prefer being closer to all the stuff you get in a big city, without having to fight traffic.
Plus, I’m sick of having to drive 45 minutes for decent Italian food.
FreedMike, I completely understand what makes the inner-core of the big cities so attractive to some. For older folks it is usually also the close-at-hand medical care services.
My wife and I moved into town from our desert abode to be closer to our Regional Medical Center, just down the street.
My youngest brother and his wife live in NYC, Manhattan financial district, in a high-rise apartment given to his wife by her folks, who moved to the wide-open spaces of Santa Fe, New Mexico, when they retired.
I admit that having everything within walking distance is quaint, but only for as long as I can stand all the people milling about, the noise, the smells and cost of living.
Usually, less than a full week, for me. Then I gotta get outta there.
Dude, I’m pretty much an…ahem…overweight middle aged guy, so walking distance isn’t necessarily my prime motivation. :)
But it’s awfully nice to be within short driving distance to shopping areas, or a decent meal, or museums, or the theater, or a ball game. Where I live, all that stuff is a HUGE production, particularly if it’s anytime around the the morning or evening rushes, or lunch. I did a weekday Rockies game once with a 6:05 start. Never again.
LOL! In March-April 2014 we stayed in Phoenix (Tempe) Arizona for MLB Spring Training.
There was a lot to love there but all those people, all that traffic, all that noise, all that commotion…… irritated the hell out of me. All the loose nuts behind the wheel – that’s why we took the rentals everywhere instead of our POVs.
And when we went to the games, at least one a day, there was the commute on I-10 and the byways to get to the different stadiums and get stuck in lines and lines of traffic, coming and going to/from the stadium.
Not for me! At the end of Spring Training I needed to go home to the solitude of my desert abode for some extended R&R.
In North America, as it developed, yes. In other countries that didn’t invest in roads the same way, it’s a bit different. In the very large, very dense urban areas in Asia, you really don’t need a car. Many own them out of the desire for a status symbol, but when you have a working public transit system, and communities are developed around walking to the station, and other public facilities (schools, shopping, etc) from your house, the need for the car, even in the “suburbs” disappears.
That won’t be a way of life that I am saying you have to enjoy, but it is a way of life that a lot of people live. Are North American cities going that way? Some are, but people aren’t really willing to use their tax dollars in build the infrastructure you need to make it work. Until that happens, I can’t see the car dying out in North America, regardless of what particular people want to claim.
This will be a slow process — it will take longer than any of our lives — but it’s inevitable, and the reason why is the limited supply of land in places with enough water to support a dense population. Private car ownership will steadily become more expensive until it is inaccessible to all but the rich, and the reason why will be a lack of room to store a private car for everyone.
Private cars take up a huge amount of space. This is currently most visible in the city where adding a car for each apartment can nearly double the cost of building an apartment building. It’s less obvious in the suburbs, but it’s still true — how much did having the driveway and garage add to the cost of building your house, and to the amount of land you needed to have the size of house and yard you want? I live in a small six-unit condo complex in an inner-ring suburb that has approximately equal amounts of land devoted to 1) the condo building itself and 2) the driveway, six garages, and six carport spots devoted to the residents’ cars. Eventually, as the suburb slowly but steadily densifies, the land devoted to the cars is going to get so valuable as potential housing that it will become very difficult financially to keep it devoted to cars.
Note that the force behind this isn’t government planning — it’s just the reality of a limited supply of land and a continually expanding population, most of which will gravitate toward metro areas because that’s where jobs are. “But the Great Open Spaces!” you say. Well… most of the space that’s currently open doesn’t have enough water to support much development.
“This will be a slow process — it will take longer than any of our lives — but it’s inevitable, and the reason why is the limited supply of land in places with enough water to support a dense population. Private car ownership will steadily become more expensive until it is inaccessible to all but the rich, and the reason why will be a lack of room to store a private car for everyone.”
How do you figure? Even where I live in Chicagoland, which is pretty dense, there is enough room to store 2-3-4+ cars on almost every .2 acre lot in suburbia, and I don’t see those lots getting any smaller. And the houses that are torn town and then built up with bigger houses invariably get 3 car garages (versus 1-2 car garages common now). Will it continue to get more and more cost prohibitive to have a car in the city? Maybe/probably, but even in the densest suburbs I don’t see any way space contracts for cars. No matter how much the pinko greenies want them to, no one is going to be tearing down single family houses and building condos with no parking to take their place en masse.
“no one is going to be tearing down single family houses and building condos with no parking to take their place en masse.”
Already happening every day all over the single-family neighborhoods of Seattle, and starting to in the inner-ring suburbs.
You can see this trend a lot more clearly when you live in a metro area that’s wedged between a body of water and a jagged mountain range.
Wouldn’t you say that’s a pretty specific example and not indicative across the whole of America?
I would say that’s typical of most of America’s larger cities. San Francisco is on a peninsula. Los Angeles is in a narrow valley. New York is hemmed in by waterways. DC runs into mountains on one side and another metro area on the other. Atlanta and Houston are already so built out that you can’t realistically drive from one end to the center in normal trips, meaning you won’t solve housing problems by expanding further out. Someplace like Chicago or Denver with open land stretching tens of miles in three directions is the exception rather than the rule.
FreedMike’s point is also good: infill is more appealing than open land, despite making cars more expensive, once you start traveling very long distances.
That’s a function of location rather than anything you state above. You can always build up and down, just costs more. There’s plenty of land in this country.
Having lived in Los Angeles for 15 year, I’d say L.A. is not really good example. It’s actually, a good example and area of which you NEED a car.
dal is right – cities are going to become more condensed, and that’s where it’s going.
There’s the question of water resources (critical on the West Coast, but less so in a place like Chicago, which sits on a huge lake), and then there’s this: roadbuilding to support the old suburban model is now fiscally impossible.
How much would it cost to simply build a new eight lane freeway through a city like Chicago, or L.A., or pretty much anywhere else? Multiply that times the number of cities that are under-served by freeways, and you might as well talk about not only putting men on Mars, but a Hilton as well. Here in Denver it cost upwards of $1 billion to simply widen and improve part of I-25 through the city, and that was almost a decade ago…and the highway still sucks.
Combine that with the higher price of cars, and you have a situation where driving is going to become more expensive and more difficult. That doesn’t mean cars are going away, but it does mean drivers will want to stay closer in to the city. That’s going to lead to higher density. In high cost cities like Seattle, which are experiencing a lot of growth, then building up is what will happen. In a place like Chicago, which isn’t growing all that much, you’ll see a lot more “in-fill”, and you might see more folks with some money moving back into the city. That’s happening here in Denver, which has IMMENSE amounts of open land around it (if you’ve ever flown into here, you know exactly what I’m talking about).
“Combine that with the higher price of cars…”
Car prices are essentially flat when adjusted for inflation. Price increases beyond the CPI are largely attributable to bells and whistles that people want but don’t need.
Adding or removing highways won’t do much for traffic, either way. Traffic is similar to a gas, expanding when there is room for it and contracting when there is not.
Suburbs aren’t going away — when land prices are low, it is cheaper to build out than up, and many Americans (although certainly not all) prefer suburbs. What can be expected to happen is that high real estate costs in certain metro areas will encourage some people to leave for cheaper surroundings, which will distribute the growth to places where there is cheaper land. Combine that with some of the cultural factors that drive suburbanization (new urbanists tend to be liberals, while conservatives prefer suburbs), and we’ll end up with growth in second-tier MSAs and sprawl expanding and finding its way to new areas. The Sun Belt should see a lot of this growth.
The urban areas won’t go away, either. But they don’t provide a substitute for the trend toward suburbanization.
“the other 300 million Americans who must deal with children, elderly relatives”
You mean the ones with their elderly parents who can’t drive and their kids who have to shuttled all over hell and creation? Those people? It seems like they would love a self driving car to take mom to the store and the doctor and little Joe to his 6am swim practice.
I think they’d rather have all of those places in walking distance of their house, instead.
Here’s where you’re wrong:
“The notion of self-driving, shared-ownership vehicles is a fantastical notion held by childless coastal elites who are utterly disconnected from the reality of the other 300 million Americans who must deal with children, elderly relatives, poor weather, long driving distances and a general aversion to anything that deviates from private vehicle ownership.”
“Elites” who live on the coast don’t have children, elderly relatives, poor weather, or long driving distances? It’s generally more effective to engage the positions of those you disagree with, rather than simply to dismiss them with a sneering caricature that does not bear much resemblance to reality.
Hear, hear.
He went a bit far with that but the point is the same. while there has been a little uptick in urban living I’m not sure it will last. Most of the millennial families in my little urban/suburban neighbor hood have started moving further out now that they are starting to have kids just like our parents did. And I will say that in many parts of the country it is true that car sharing will likely never work.
I’m not a millenial — I started life a bit late — but I’m one of those people with a new family who recently moved from the city to an inner-ring suburb. And guess what… I did it against my choice, because of housing costs. I’d rather be in the city. I think that describes most of the people I know in the same situation. That’s why there is so much building going on in central cities.
In almost every city you care to name, you’re either begging to get your kid into a charter/”special” school, spending $$$$ on private school, or dooming your kid and sending them to a war zone failing public school. That’s the real driver out of the city. Plenty of people “would rather” be in the city, but don’t want their kids going to school there.
In my particular city, most of the in-city schools are pretty good. It was housing prices, not schools, that drove us out. And, really, it was development patterns that led to the housing prices. Seattle has this schizoid division between expensive single-family homes and tiny apartments, neither of which really worked for us. In the suburbs we were able to find a middle ground (a condo about 50% bigger than a typical Seattle apartment) that made financial sense.
S2k Chris, what you say about quality education is true. But public schools are the way they are because the people who voted for the members of the US government caused it to lower the level of education necessary so more kids would graduate.
Hillary was right when she said it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a village to educate a child. Lowered education standards in the cities do not produce America’s best and brightest students or scholars. For that you need to send the kids who can to private formative-years schools, like Montessori, or similar.
“Lowered education standards in the cities do not produce America’s best and brightest students or scholars. For that you need to send the kids who can to private formative-years schools, like Montessori, or similar.”
Or, move to one of several surrounding suburbs with good public schools. Which is basically what I said, you either stay in the city and pay through the nose for private school, or move to a decent suburb with good schools. Maybe Seattle is again an exception, but in almost every major urban area, there’s always the poor inner city schools and the affluent suburbs with good public schools outside the city.
HDC-
The reason why inner city schools suck is because parents that can rub two nickels together, are involved in their kids’ lives, and are sick of crime move out. In many cases, there isn’t anyone to teach but kids who have no hope.
bbal, what you say is true, but moving to the suburbs is not always the panacea for everyone.
For instance, a very dear and lifelong friend of mine taught at Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico for decades, retired from the New Mexico State school system with a pension, moved to Henderson, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas, Nevada, where he started a brand new career teaching, for Big Bucks.
He was appalled at the low quality of education he was forced to teach in this otherwise extremely wealthy suburb of Las Vegas, NV. But even worse were the low-class aptitudes of the kids attending that school system.
Native American kids in the New Mexico Pueblo were much smarter than these suburban-resident kids of Big City Las Vegas, NV.
@S2k Chris, bball:
If you’re in Chicago, or Detroit, then yeah…send the kids to the public schools at their peril. I grew up in St. Louis, so I know exactly how that goes – I wouldn’t send my kids to those schools at gunpoint (and given how bad crime is there, that’s actually not an entirely unrealistic scenario).
Other cities have good public school options. Here in Denver, some of the best schools in the area are city neighborhood schools, and there are a lot of magnet facilities too.
Bringing more folks back into the city would actually improve the public system, I think.
“Bringing more folks back into the city would actually improve the public system, I think.”
I’ve seen this with my own eyes in DC, a city with a justified reputation for terrifyingly bad public schools, but also with red-hot growth in many central neighborhoods. The schools in the gentrifying areas are improving at a rapid clip. Unfortunately, housing is getting unaffordable even faster.
It’s squeezing water in a balloon. If in-city schools are good, housing will cost more. If they’re bad, housing will cost less, as some buyers go to the suburbs instead and others pay for private school with money they would have used for housing.
I think Denver is the exception to the rule. Show me a metropolitan area, and I will find a number of suburbs that have better schools than the city proper.
Who’s going to be the guinea pig that moves back into the city with his wife and two kids? Is that guy selling his 2500 sq ft house in a nationally recognized district for a condo in a district where you have to worry about magnet track or picking the right school?
@bball:
Don’t misunderstand me – I wouldn’t say Denver city schools are better on a whole than the best suburban districts, but they clearly hold their own overall. My oldest is in college, but there are any number of schools in DPS I’d gladly send my youngest to, if I could ever get out of this lousy suburb I’m stuck in. When I divorced my wife, I was stupid enough to agree to keep my kids in the schools they were in at the time, and my ex is a loon who’ll block any request I make to re-do this, just to spite me.
“In my particular city, most of the in-city schools are pretty good.”
dal, Seattle sounds like the exception to the rule. LA got itself fired by a number of families who could afford to move out of the district to better schools. I was one of them.
I’ve heard Chicago schools aren’t that hot either. Same in SF. In fact, I can’t think of any large metro area where the inner city schools are better than schools in the burbs, except for yours.
Shared ownership is probably a stretch, but the general acceptance of autonomous cars is something I wouldn’t bet against. Like a lot of technologies, the break in acceptance will be generational rather than regional.
I don’t know a single person in my age range, who isn’t an auto enthusiast, that wouldn’t be willing to try an autonomous car. Most of them are more enthusiastic than that. Also, we as enthusiasts tend to have rose-colored glasses when we imagine how much people really enjoy driving. General experience has taught me that most people could not care less about the act itself. It’s the freedom to move that matters.
“It’s the freedom to move that matters.”
Yes, exactly.
And the autonomous car (which I am optimistic about) will bring freedom to move around low-density areas to kids and the elderly who don’t have it today.
In very high-density areas, as I’ve argued over and over before (and as people who have never lived in a truly dense city have a hard time understanding), non-car modes often offer more freedom of movement than cars.
What ever happened to Kids riding their bike around their neighborhoods to hang out with friends go to sports practices etc. thats what i did when i was growing up. I’d even ride my bike to school somedays.
@Carilloskis
People then wonder why their Children are getting fatter and unhealthy.
Using Apps on a smartphone or playing Video games, does not burn off much calories
Not to take away from your point, but its sugar which is causing the obesity.
It’s like Adam Jonas just whipped his d1ck out and p1ssed all over my profession.
I should write articles about how Morgan Stanley’s historical significance and expertise doesn’t mean sh1t and that the future is bitcoin retirement investment portfolios…
Or I could just pound nails through my d1ck and be more value added to society.
Ha. As part of the 100 year old model, I thought the same thing. Apparently the old guard will give way to Tesla and that will be that!
100 years ago people thought the automobile would never replace the horse and buggy, and that the automobile was so complex to drive that only the best and brightest would be able to control it.
You’re missing the point. Example: the rubber compound of any high pressure rubber line in your shitty zip car is made from a proprietary ‘batter’ of sorts. That batter is heated and extruded over a proprietary weave of nylon. That weave is sandwiched between an inner cover of another proprietary batter layer. It’s black box dimensions are controlled via laser. Hundreds of years of quality lessons learned are piled into this process. That’s just in those insignificant high pressure hoses.
Blanket statements like yours and Mister Jonas are ludicrous and discount processes that have been refined such that us plebeian folk can afford the same luxury as the top echelon of yesteryear.
@tresmonos:
But that’s exactly what happened. You don’t think there was an investment of knowledge and tradition in the horse-and-buggy or stagecoach trade before it was basically replaced?
A better question might be: Why would it even matter? Why would the knowledge of the last 100 years not apply to the next 100? Surely autonomous cars will build on what came before? It’s not like the Jetsons mobile is the next step in vehicle evolution (as awesome as that might be!).
I’m not addressing the autonomous argument. Pch has that base covered. I’m addressing how laughable it is to assume Google and Apple will acquire all of this as a vertically integrated system. Tesla isn’t sustainable due to their level of vertical integration and 20 JPH line rate. Granted, a lot of this knowledge disappears when you offshore a plant. Control plans associated with production and quality operating systems can only tell you so much. but the same goes with resourcing a part – you will lose some plant level tribal knowledge.
This analyst is a f*cking idiot.
It’s like Adam Jonas just whipped his d1ck out and p1ssed all over my profession.
I should write articles about how Morgan Stanley’s historical significance and expertise doesn’t mean sh1t and that the future is bitcoin retirement investment portfolios…
Or I could just pound nails through my d1ck and be more value added to society.
I’m surprised that Jonas took a break from fellatiating Elon Musk. He rarely comes up for air these days.
In an even more futuristic society, they’ll have large autonomous, or semi-autonomous vehicles, riding on a specialized surface, using a public energy source and running scheduled routes. Lines can even extend into suburbs, and between suburbs. Economies of scale will greatly reduce the cost of travel.
So basically trolleys or street cars.
Exactly we had the system 100 years ago (and still do in parts of the country) but it was highly unprofitable so it went by the way side when government spending moved to roads.
Indianapolis had a very effective and affordable street car system from 1895 til 1953, with interurban lines running out to the outlying cities. The scandal (beyond a mere conspiracy) is that GM, together with Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and Mack trucks paid for all of the track to be ripped up and removed.
It’s easy to think that the city is too spread out to have a practical public transit option, but one can look back in history and see that it’s been done before!
I don’t for a second promote the end of car ownership, or even multiple car ownership, or even multiple gas guzzling car ownership. But I believe that there is room for every sort of plane, train, and automobile in the transportation landscape. I currently do not think that the technology is there to reliably convert most traffic to autonomous vehicles, being in automation myself and understanding some of the challenges that need to be overcome and the incredible plethora of variables that are encountered and need to be addressed. I think some of the people working on this stuff are a bit too scientific about these things: “our simulations showed that crashes are exceedingly rare,” that kind of thing. Well I personally feel like I’d rather take my life in my own hands than to entrust it to a computer algorithm, even if statistics are against me.
@mopar4wd Right. I am fascinated by privately owned mass transit. Detroit Bus Company, shuttles, etc.
More like driverless subway or metro lines, I think. Those are a piece, to serve destinations where there isn’t enough space for fleets of cars. Autonomous cars are another piece, to serve places where there is room for them. The future is multimodal.
I’m not sure what’s sillier… the chart, or the TTAC reaction to it. There are so many reasons why fully autonomous cars are not in our near future that this is not even worth a response, let alone a TTAC article IMO.
I mean, the average car on the road today is 11 YEARS OLD. That’s at least another 11 years of normal cars to flush through, and that’s not factoring in that there is no autonomous solution to replace the cars on the road today with. Furthermore if autonomous cars require any infrastructural changes AT ALL, you can add another couple dozen years as we are barely keeping up with infrastructure as is. Again on top of that there are ~170M drivers in the US, but only ~16M passenger cars sold each year. Etc. etc.
The way I see automated cars coming into play is as another choice, not a replacement. As a ~28 year NYC resident, I can deal with commuting in a pod with others, but at the same time it would be great to have my own car for the weekends or if I choose to drive on my own. Plenty of people pretty much already do this. My company has a big ride share program through the state. All that would change would be the removal of the driver. To that end, for us, that would mean the ability to buy more fun, less compromised cars for personal use, which would help bolster that market and generate more choices. Etc. etc. People are so reactionary and pessimistic in the face of potential change. It’s childish and silly.
Truth. It’s like seeing passionate responses to space geek articles about colonizing Mars.
You would think regulars on a site as focused on the auto industry as TTAC would be able to see all the huge obvious roadblocks of the reality proposed by this press thirsty analyst. TTAC’s B&B should know better.
The self-imposed “Best & Brightest” moniker is as much ironic as it is sincere.
If autonomous cars should reach the point where crashes are extremely rare–a big if–and if Pch is wrong about liability (I’m not betting against him) then there will be a population density (which will certainly include inner ring suburbs in my estimation) where it will be much, much less expensive to share pods than to own your own car (your car, after all, is not in use about 90-95% of the time), which is a big waste of capital.
It will be a huge boon to the elderly who no longer can drive, to the disabled, and to parents with kids who need to be chauffeured hither and yon.
And my guess is that ***at least*** 70 percent of Americans and Canadians will be living in places where pods are the (inexpensive) way to go.
But my second favorite activity will probably be illegal except on special out-of-the-way tracks; or else it will be prohibitively expensive to insure, and a big part of our culture, which I love, will be gone. But I probably wo’nt be around to enjoy this brave new world.
There is no way human driven cars will be purged from public roads in the next 50 or even 100 years.
Don’t forget about DUI addicts either, which would also drive down accident rates considerably. That drop in accident rates would drive down insurance costs, which would free up money for more fun cars. I think this whole thing will be 100% voluntary and a net positive for everyone, including enthusiasts.
We as enthusiasts need to stop assuming the role of victims whose way of life is under constant threat. The presence/choice of automated cars will more likely be a net plus for us than a minus.
Very interesting points on DUI. That would be great.
Problem is that DUI has become an industry and that industry isn’t simply going to say “Well, we had a great run but it’s all over.” Municipalities, Lawyers, and scores of other folks make a lot of money and it is easy money because “Drunk” Drivers are right up there with smokers when it comes to image. I use the term drunk loosely because it is increasingly easy to get a DUI without actually being too impaired to operate a vehicle but again, lowering the limits is easy money for a lot of folks and those folks have a lot of political clout. so even if a “car has no way for one to actually control it, expect the passenger in the left front seat to have to be sober.
Going back to my example of the dead guy Bob, if Dave the Drunk’s autonomous car kills Bob and a competent sober driver could have prevented the crash, then I would expect Dave’s intoxicated state to go against him. He gets no brownie points for being in an automatic car that happened to fail at the wrong time.
I seriously doubt that we’re going to get to the point that we will have a situation in which there will be cars that do not have drivers who are responsible for them. Autopilot hasn’t eliminated the need for cockpit crews, and neither will this.
Autonomous cars will one day be A thing, but they won’t be THE thing in personal transportation. In urban areas where trains get you only so far and buses only a bit further, autonomous cars will get you much closer to where you need to go. And in a dense urban environment where things like gridlock are a real, daily concern, they might thrive.
For the rest of us yokels, I don’t see an autonomous car having any efficiencies over the regular, drive-it-yourself type.
If the cost per mile of a shared automated car is cheaper than that of a car one owns, plenty of folks will jump to the automated car thing in droves. Plus the cars could be built around how people actually tend to travel, or customized towards different needs. I just bought a house, for example. I commute by myself, but with all the stuff we have to buy, I would love to have a cargo van on the weekends. So I could commute in a 1 person pod, but then on the weekends call for a van or something of the sort when I need it. That would save a ton of energy and cost.
Sure, in areas where it will have cost advantages, such as built up urban areas and city centers, where paying for parking becomes part of the equation.
Even outside of urban areas it can make sense. Imagine the cost of buying/insuring/registering a car split amongst thousands of people. Pretty much all you’d be paying for is gas, and if you are in a vehicle with other people that would get cut down too. It would be cheaper than public transportation too as you wouldn’t need a driver to operate it, or stick to a prescribed route/schedule. Not to mention many big cities already have robust public transportation systems, whereas folks in rural or sprawling areas don’t. I think this would be more beneficial to folks in sparse areas than dense ones… the folks in dense areas have been making do without cars already.
Thousands of people? The inside of this car is going to be filthy. The interior is going to look like a 14 year old Panther within the first year.
Seems right. I’ll need multiple purchasers to be able to afford the Apple Car and multiple options for when my google car doesn’t work right.
But in all seriousness, a built in Bourbon dispenser in my self driving car’s dash will go a long way to making me forget that I like to drive. Tie it in to my infotainment system. “OK Google…Make Old Fashioned with Blanton’s”. I’d ask Siri, but I’d probably get a Natty Light.
@DK:
“The notion of self-driving, shared-ownership vehicles is a fantastical notion held by childless coastal elites who are utterly disconnected from the reality of the other 300 million Americans who must deal with children, elderly relatives, poor weather, long driving distances and a general aversion to anything that deviates from private vehicle ownership.”
You think the people who live in big coastal cities don’t have all that stuff to deal with? Of course they do. The difference is that they live in cities that are so densely populated that the whole transportation model is radically different than it is in the suburbs. And there’s no way to build roads in a place like New York, or D.C., or Boston, or L.A. – the cost would be in the tens of billions of dollars, and there’s no money for that.
(And as far as Boston is concerned, good luck talking them into ANY more road projects after the Big Dig – I think that fiasco pretty much killed it for large scale projects until the year 2112.)
That’s why the idea of alternative transportation works for these folks. If you can’t improve the infrastructure, create transportation methods that will work better in it.
And if any of that could be transplanted to smaller cities, then why not?
While the big dig went way over budget, and way over the amount of time it was supposed to take, it has made a huge dent in traffic. My house in Lexington to Logan Airport used to be minimum 45 minutes, and often as much as an hour. Now, I can usually make that trip in a half hour, and it would take really bad traffic (maybe AM rush hour) to make that trip take the old 45 minutes.
The Big Dig also made parts of downtown Boston much nicer. Last time I visited Boston, I really noticed the difference from pre-Big Dig.
@ David:
Well, I’d say for $24 billion the folks there in Boston SHOULD have seen some traffic improvements!
And you’re spot on about the traffic from the airport. I got married in 1993, and our honeymoon was in Boston / Martha’s Vineyard. We flew into Logan and got a rental at the airport, and the traffic into the city was so bad that there was actually a guy with a machine strapped to his back, serving drinks. He made a passable cup of cappucino, actually.
Boston is a great town, but it’s BY FAR the worst city I’ve ever driven in – even worse than New York. At least the street patterns in NYC make sense, so you know where you are while you’re in gridlock.
My guess is the initial estimates for the big dig were woefully inadequate, and that was probably somewhat intentional otherwise the ball would never have gotten rolling. How anyone expected to tunnel under a city built on essentially filled in marshland while not disrupting the highway/central artery,subway system or buildings above for about $2 billion is fantasy land dreaming. I can still remember the horrific elevated central artery, an unmitigated eyesore and traffic nightmare all in one. Without the big dig the city would have stagnated, and I believe if you take the long view, even with the cost over runs, the project was worth every penny.
DK:
On the one hand, I agree, this is lunacy. But, I can see it being forced in the long-term, and it will be a lousy day when the most fun I can have on a twisty road in on a bicycle.
And on the other hand?
Forced by who? How? Lets not succumb to the grips of group think paranoia, theres no logic in these fears.
“The notion of self-driving, shared-ownership vehicles is a fantastical notion held by childless coastal elites who are utterly disconnected from the reality of the other 300 million Americans who must deal with children, elderly relatives, poor weather, long driving distances and a general aversion to anything that deviates from private vehicle ownership.”
This pretty much gets to the heart of the matter.
Excellent work, Mr. Kreindler.
Meh.
I already use Zipcar when I travel, or when I need to haul something I can’t in my RX8. I would *love* for these to be even more accessible.
I mean, I *have* an RX8. I love driving it so very very much, but I also live in a big city and when I’m going to ikea I’m perfectly fine spending $20 to rent the local zipvan for two hours. And when I travel I’m perfectly happy to choose the exact zipcar I want where I want it and go get it and not deal with Rental car crap.
For those two cases, I’d be even happier if I could have the zipcar come to me, or drive itself home when I was done with it, or get a one-way van from ikea that takes itself back when I was done. Anyone who does not believe there is a market for this is deluding themselves.
Now, if I could get an RX8 (or some modern equivalent… what is that, exactly?) that drove itself to me for trips down a windy mountain road, or on track day, or for a long tour? I’d probably give up my car, too – no maintenance or repair worries, and presumably, like zipcar, no insurance to deal with either.
I see no reason why autonomous cars wouid require there to be no human drivers. What I *do* see is that the cost for human drivers will only go up, because as automous cars reduce accidents, a human driver will become a greater liability, and inertia will take over.
Honestly, I think the biggest thing standing in the way of autonomous cars, ironically enough, is mass transportation itself.
If you would rather outsource the driving experience, why not just outsource the whole damn thing, and save cash by riding with other folks in the process?
The major challenge to the Pod model of autonomous transit, is convincing people it is superior to all the other non-automotive options.
@LuciferV8: There are some excellent mass transit systems out there. That doesn’t mean there aren’t taxis and private vehicles on those same roads, obviously. Freedom to go where others aren’t going right now is a luxury that’s not likely to fade in interest anytime soon.
Yeah, sure. Right now, Mr. Jonas will have to pry my Impala from my cold, dead hands!
In the future, who knows? After all, who would’ve thought that someday we would all have to be forced into running around everywhere in our 4-wheeled metal boxes, scurrying here to there, always in a hurry, always on a tight schedule we often put upon ourselves?
Right now, most of us are trapped in the society we live in, suburbia, where a car is mandatory or we are stuck.
The biggest challenge right now to getting around efficiently in the framework we have is the semi-truck. Get those things off the road during rush hours and things will vastly improve for all commuters. Seriously. Not sure how that will be accomplished. Strictly overnight hours, perhaps? Anybody’s guess, if even remotely possible.
Shared autonomy might be more efficient than owned autonomy, so it could make everyone take public transportation, but even with owned autonomy it could be the death of a lot of companies. Why would brand identity, design and fancy engines matter when you don’t even drive the car? All cars will be boxes no fancier than a bus.
@Magnusmaster:
“Why would brand identity, design and fancy engines matter when you don’t even drive the car?” Because today they still matter to people that don’t drive the car. You don’t think those folks being driven around in their bentleys still have someone making decisions somewhere based on which engine or which colour? Someone still decides these things.
But even more than that, lets look at a more non-1% view:
Right now in my city, here are my choices for getting from point a to b, using a vehicle I am not driving:
– Bus
– Subway
– UberX*
– Taxi*
– Uber black*
– Limo
Now, why choose one over the other? This is especially true of the three I put asterisks beside, that are in the same app? A combination of convenience, price point, comfort, and even status play a part.
You don’t think affluent folks will want a luxury autonomous car? Interior and exterior features will still matter – perhaps moreso as you spend less time driving, in fact. Look at uber – all three of their options will arguably get you from A to B in roughly the same amount of time, yet people still use Uber Black even though it’s much more expensive, just because they want the experience of a livery car.
Would I rather go to dinner in an autonomous Yaris or an autonomous Ferrari? Would I be the only one willing to pay more just for that option? Of course I won’t be. Just like today, with non-autonomous cars.
The problem of owning a car in a big city is not buying the car, it is parking it.
With parking being a problem, why wouldn’t you share one via public transit (subway, bus, light rail, etc), hired ride (taxi, uber, etc), or walking instead?
I know if I live in a big city and drive I’d way a valet back home mode, and probably will pay $3k for that feature alone.
No, not everyone wants to live in the suburb or wants the trade off, at least outside of the US / Canada this gets very expensive.
I’m looking out my window at work at a fully functional V2V test fleet that represents all of the major manufacturers. But if I believe what I read here, this technology will never be accepted by the public. I see autonomous vehicles frequently on our test track, developed on a military contract. Surely that technology will never transfer, right?
Wake up, folks. It’s coming a lot faster than you think.