In a self-driving future, we may not even want to own cars

<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/google_self_driving_car_it_may_never_actually_happen.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slate.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;technology&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;...</a><p><i>&quot;But the maps have problems, starting with the fact that the car can’t travel a single inch without one ... all 4 million miles of U.S. public roads will be need to be mapped, plus driveways, off-road trails, and everywhere else you&#x27;d ever want to take the car. So far, only a few thousand miles of road have gotten the treatment .., The company frequently says that its car has driven more than 700,000 miles safely, but those are the same few thousand mapped miles, driven over and over again.<p>... Safety is at stake here; Chris Urmson, director of the Google car team, told me that if the car came across a traffic signal not on its map, it could potentially run a red light, simply because it wouldn&#x27;t know to look for the signal. Urmson added, however, that an unmapped traffic signal would be &quot;very unlikely,&quot;<p>... MIT roboticist John Leonard says it goes to the heart of why the Google car project is so daunting. &quot;While the probability of a single driver encountering a newly installed traffic light is very low, the probability of at least one driver encountering one on a given day is very high,&quot; Leonard says. The list of these &quot;rare&quot; events is practically endless, said Leonard, who does not expect a full self-driving car in his lifetime (he’s 49).<p>... &quot;None of this reasoning will be inside computers anytime soon,&quot; says Raj Rajkumar, director of autonomous driving research at Carnegie-Mellon University, former home of both the current and prior directors of Google&#x27;s car project.&quot;</i>

if you own a self driving car, you could either have it sit in your driveway doing nothing - or you could hook it up to an api provided by uber to put your car to work.<p>if everyone does that with their self-driving cars, the cost of transportation will go down. it&#x27;ll change the economics of car ownership; the cost of using a car will go down because the cars that exist will be put to greater use - so why bother buying one?<p>that whole thing could precipitate a sea-change in how the auto industry works. we&#x27;ll see far fewer cars, built to be maintanable with easily replaced parts, sold to people who use them as investments that generate returns.<p>it&#x27;s even going to change the _retail_ model if you think about it. couple the ability to see anythign you want with an occulus-rift headset, and lower traffic (thanks to fuller cars driving smarter) means it&#x27;ll take less time to get where you want to go, and the model of &#x27;a target every 1 mile&#x27; will just stop making sense.<p>the FUTURE!

Maybe it is because I live in a small town on a small hobby farm, but it seems to me that the vision of self-driving cars is very much a city thing.<p>I can&#x27;t see self-driving cars being used to drive around my fields, picking up rocks, towing farm equipment, hauling hay, or any of the other things that pickup trucks are used for.<p>Maybe they will be able to navigate 4WD roads to get up into the mountains or out into the desert, but I&#x27;m not sure that would offer as much benefit as it would in city traffic.<p>The visions people just look to me a lot like the future of public transportation, and not at all the future of motor vehicles in general.

During the War of 1812, word reached the East Coast of the U.S. that there was going to be a battle near New Orleans.<p>There was a guy who _ran_ all the way from the East Coast to New Orleans. When he got there, the battle was already over, so he ran back.<p>My point is this: technology is not just making us live happier and healthier lives. It&#x27;s also beginning to raise a generation who won&#x27;t be able to self-propel themselves over long distances, whether by foot, horse, car, plane, or whatnot. This is going to have implications for the way cities handle disasters.<p>I love this tech, but it stands to change the nature of what it means to be human almost as much as the electric light did.

I&#x27;m really excited about this aspect of self-driving cars.<p>In the future, one day a father may need to schedule a doctor&#x27;s appointment for his son. He will schedule it after his son&#x27;s school, and a self-driving car will pick up his son in the pick-up loop (just like how he&#x27;s dropped off in the morning). Dad will also schedule a self-driving car to meet his son at the doctor. He will receive notifications and photo&#x2F;video of the pick-up of his son at the school. They will arrive at the doctor&#x27;s office at the same time.<p>There&#x27;s way more things that will change, but I think family planning and dynamics around travel will be one of them.

Makes sense from an efficiency point of view. Not exactly keen on the hygiene aspect of shared cars though.

More likely is that the government will (via regulations) make it very hard to own cars. There are downsides to self-driving car though. Eventually you will have to give up anonymity and the freedom to go where you want, when you want. The government will surely &quot;own&quot; the system that runs the self-driving cars network. Self-driving cars aren&#x27;t autonomous.