It’s great to explore this topic. You can have a lot of fun in picking a random industry and imagining the effect that self driving will have.<p>Health - beyond the obvious effects on the emergency room, what else? Ambulances willl quite clearly be affected. Why would someone wait minutes for one to arrive when they can just hop in an autocar to go the hospital? Or would the entire emergency room itself be on wheels? (Less likely.)<p>Will seniors stay at home for longer? Absolutely. How will this affect the need for aged care nurses? Will their doctors come to them?<p>But we can go even deeper. How will autocars affect people’s desire to exercise? Will more people ride bikes as a result of the increased safety of the roads?<p>Education - at first glance, it’s hard to see. But this is the one I’m currently most excited about. Primary and high school education are both built on cars - we just don’t realise it, but a crucial underpinning factor for parents using a local school is its convenience for them in dropping their kids off and picking them up. When that goes away, what happens next?<p>The demand for better public high schools will explode as the friction in going to a high school 25 minutes away in an awkward direction evaporates...<p>This makes for much more fertile territory for new schooling concepts - if I want to start a new kind of high school, one where the kids spend a bit of time each day tending to farm animals or perhaps studying entrepreneurship, it now becomes 10x easier to build critical mass. And given how much people care about their kids educations, I expect the movements in this space to be highly disruptive.<p>Those are two. On health, I’ve barely scratched the surface.<p>Then there is
- tourism
- logistics
- distribution (imagine Amazon’s FBA on steroids)
- housing (what happens to all those garages? Do we build shipping-container sizes homes that fold it wherever they park?)<p>The best way to understand the depth of the upcoming changes
is to pick a seemingly unrelated industry and explore how current car-related assumptions underpin it. It becomes clear, to me, that the internet of vehicles will be even more disruptive then the internet itself.
A couple of years ago there was a new article on the front page pretty much every day about the great new thing that will change our lives--3D printing. I'm worried that whatever happened to 3D printing is about to happen to self driving. What <i>did</i> happen to 3D printing?
The presentation doesn't take long to leap from inevitable market forces to totalitarian restructuring of public life in the US by city planners to provide those market forces with a chance of inevitability.<p>All those cell phones didn't require drastic changes to public space. They didn't come about by massive new principles of public policy. They came about because cell phones layered on top of existing lives and policies in a generally unobtrusive way. The cell phone created market forces that didn't require the displacement of large swaths of humanity. It was a rising tide that lifted ships other than those of venture capital.
This is kind of a meta comment, but I’ve been lurking on HN for a while on car posts in particular.<p>I have the impression that HN in general doesn’t like cars all that much, and in fact we would be much better of without them.<p>I can’t argue with the facts: congestion and pollution in large cities, such as London, have never been higher where almost all on-road public transport is still run on diesel.<p>However, I think driving for a lot of people is a liberating and pleasurable experience. and, before we go there, I’m not talking about being stuck in traffic, which is often a issue with poor planning and lack of infrastructure investment rather than an issue with cars themselves, but the pure pleasure of driving.<p>I’m quite concerned that self driving cars will take this simple pleasure and satisfaction from us, and perhaps that’s just a selfish opinion. I don’t know?
I am an advocate for autonomous cars, but I have to wonder if tech behemoths aren't forgetting a huge portion of people live outside of cities. It's important to note that rural people will be needing and buying new non-autonomous cars for decades yet and I don't know that there is actually a way to integrate autonomy into rural driving habits.
The most interesting phenomenon is "sleepers": people who sleep Friday night as their car drives to some scenic overlook sunrise and drive them home from retreat on Sunday night. Rural back roads will be moving at full stream in the dead of night with 'ghost cars' when they were once were completely quiet; zoning will limit noise, speed, illumination, toll's win go up, but airbnb's will flourish.<p>In the urban zone, there will be competition for scarce roadway as businesses no longer paying a driver, go increasingly JIT, and elite commuters value door to door service. No city gov't will be able to resist the right to tax per mile, tax rush hour surge charges, and tax luxury idle vehicles. This will push the middle and lower market into on demand rentals. And without the driver as an informal superintendent of the vehicle, there will be a very annoying problem of getting into a car that a gross person knew they were never going to be in again. Enter the eye in the sky. Except for customer with a 4-star reputation or higher. This will create a race to the bottom for anyone who can't or won't establish reputation to get passage on an autonomous vehicle.<p>I think we can't even fully contemplate yet how alienating and de-humanizing self-driving cars are going to large parts of our society, and how amazing they're going to be for others.
On the Tesla earnings call last week, Elon Musk stated that a software update coming in 3-6 months will allow Tesla cars with Autopilot HW2 to drive fully autonomous. At least on highways.<p>He's predictions are always late, so it may not be ready in August. But his predictions seem to come thru in end. If he can deliver by the end of the year or even next year, he would still beat all other car manufactures schedules.
We'll probably see self-driving before widespread electric car use. Self-driving is an auto accessory. It's going to come from companies like Continental and Delco, which make auto parts for manufacturers. The big players are targeting 2020 as the year self-driving becomes a more or less standard option. That may slip; Volvo's big Level 4 demo with 100 real users has been pushed back to 2021. But it's getting close. The hardware is here; it's now a software problem.<p>Electric cars need more infrastructure. Many more charging stations. Cheaper batteries. More lithium and cobalt mines. That will take a bit longer.<p>Self-driving cars and electric cars are independent technologies. Uber's self driving cars are gasoline-powered Volvos.
The ecosystems that will be disrupted by self driving cars are vast <a href="https://semiengineering.com/giant-auto-industry-disruption-ahead/" rel="nofollow">https://semiengineering.com/giant-auto-industry-disruption-a...</a>
The final video [1] has a pretty compelling argument for the conversion to self-driving cars happening quicker than expected:<p>Chen shows a picture of Easter morning in NYC in 1900 and asks the viewer to play "Where is the car?". After several seconds he highlights the one car in the frame surrounded entirely by house-and-buggy carts.<p>He then shows a picture of the Easter morning in NYC in 1913 and asks the reverse question: "Where is the horse?", as there is only 1 horse visible in the picture.<p>Obviously this is a carefully selected anecdote, but this is a really compelling argument that forward progress will be faster than expected.<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/YSdspVJgSFE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/YSdspVJgSFE</a>
Great analysis from A16Z as always. I love seeing the myriad form factors. How they map to different use cases. And how pipelines of these vehicles and drones could be used to transport to any place on the globe!<p>A good place to get started with the tech details of EV design is with the Tesla, Inc patents themselves:<p>US Patent Application for Integrated Electric Motor Assembly Patent Application (Application #20170291482)<p><a href="https://patents.justia.com/patent/20170291482" rel="nofollow">https://patents.justia.com/patent/20170291482</a>