back to article Are driverless cars the death knell of the motor biz?

If you're a believer, then the autonomous car is a gateway to a brave new world in which you'll never have to waste an hour looking for a parking spot, ever again. An obvious challenge to this vision is whether it encourages traffic-choked, polluting and wasteful behaviour: instead of parking while you visit the supermarket, …

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  1. Peter Johnston 1

    There is another factor.

    People have an emotional attachment to their car - it is a status symbol, an extension to their personality, a proof of their ability.

    Sitting in the back won't have nearly the same emotional attachment. Cars will become like white goods - just a functional "thing".

    Car manufacturers rely on that emotional attachment to trade you up, to keep your loyalty and to sell you options. This will end all of those and commoditise the car industry - leading to closure of probably half the plants and 2/3 of the companies.

    1. Charles 9

      But the thing is that personal attachment frays when the driver has to sit in traffic jams twice a day. As noted, at least when one is a passenger, they can engage in other things besides keeping their eyes on the road.

    2. Steve 13
      Thumb Down

      The vast majority of vehicles are simply to get someone from A to B and to have sufficient space to transport what they need. Do you think that the owners of Zafira's or Cee'ds are particularly proud of and emotionally attached to their 2nd hand vehicles?

  2. Markus Imhof

    Sounds a lot like Car2Go to me...

    ..apart from the self driving.

    Read through the article, skimmed the comments. Has any of you participated in a scheme like Car2Go? Works a treat in urban areas, less so in the outlying districts (density of cars is too low).

    Basic concept:

    - throw a lot of vehicles into a carsharing system so that basically you'll always find a car within a few minutes walking range

    - set up a competitive time-based all-inclusive pricing scheme that (strongly) encourages short-distances rides while making long-distance use quite expensive

    - fleet monitoring through GPS, driver identification through an RFID tag

    - Apps to find and guide you to the nearest car on your smartphon

    - dedicated parking at central locations (where it's more or less impossible to find a parking spot otherwise)

    The only people annoyed by this are the taxi drivers and, to a minor point, bus operators. Car2Go prices are competitive with individual tickets for local busses.

    Link: https://www.car2go.com/en/berlin/what-is-car2go/

    1. Zmodem

      Re: Sounds a lot like Car2Go to me...

      none of it will ever work except massive park and rides, and big motorway signs telling you they have spaces from 5 miles away like inner city car parks

      the park and ride fee need to be a single fee and people claim it back from work through some government scheme

  3. Jim 59

    People

    Unfortunately for this vision, people like to own the things they come into personal contact with. That preference could be difficult to change. People want their own car even if it is more expensive than public transport.

  4. Matt_payne666

    I think it would be a good thing... an addition to all the other modes of transport available... I need my car - Im on call and visit several sites per day and carry a few bags of kit so need my flexability... I also love to drive, I live in the country and have the luxury that 90% of my travels are on lovely windy, NSL b-roads...

    If I was heading into London - I can take the autonomous car instead of the train, let it find its way to a centralish location and drop me off, I can do what I want without worries about parking, vandalism, forgetting where the thing is! when I want to go home I press a button on the app and a car arrives to take me back, irrespective of where in the town I am...

    This works well for a few town based friends of mine, when visiting us in the sticks timing is of the essence as rail links back to the smoke on a sunday are pretty horrific so just take a returning autonomous car home - the ideal being enough cars and infrastructure to make the scheme work... much like the Boris Bikes in London...

  5. Matthew 17

    Death knell

    The motor industry employs more people either directly or indirectly (filling stations, Halfords, car cleaning, repairs etc). Cars are quite personal things, they provide the freedom to go anywhere at any time without having to pre-book or buy a ticket. If I want to go to London, right now, I could it's 200 miles away but my car is sat outside. When I'm in my car no-one really knows where I am. Cars are great, it's why we're so picky on which one(s) we have.

    Now an automatic car, that you just sit in whilst it obediently takes you from A - B would be more of a personal taxi, the performance, handing etc would be redundant, buying a more powerful car would be completely pointless as the car would only ever drive safely and at the limit. The model for a luxury car would be very different, now they'd be a small mobile office, somewhere to write emails, watch a film, update your status, do some eShopping, be sold something, chat to other 'drivers', have a drink or a snooze. But as most car journeys are fairly mundane and you're just along for the ride then the car is then just a personal taxi, when was the last time you cared what sort of car the taxi driver turned up in?

    therefore renting a driverless car as and when would start to make sense, you'd pay a subscription and have some kind of 'app' that you could push when you wanted picking up and the taxi would take you, your passengers and shopping to where you needed to go.

    It would eliminate traffic jams, streets jammed up with parked cars also. There would be no need for all the street furniture such as traffic lights and matrix signs as the automated vehicles won't need them.

    It all sounds bliss, however the automotive industry would be on its arse as people wouldn't be buying cars, nor would they be attached to them as before, they'd simply be an appliance. All the secondary employment it creates would also be in trouble, you'd not need to go to a service station, you'd not need to sit in that cafe eating a £10 bacon sandwich, you wouldn't ask the taxi to go through a car wash or spend the night in a travel lodge to break up the trip, you could sleep in the car.

    The list of jobs and industry that would be at risk is difficult to calculate but it would be huge.

    You'd also lose that freedom and individuality, the taxis would obviously know exactly where you are, where you went, would log and profile your trips to determine what it could sell you.

    I still think it's unlikely to happen soon, if all cars are driven by Google and there's a glitch that causes an accident and someone dies then the driver at fault in the crash would be Google, everyone that bought or signed up to their scheme would now have a car that could kill them and would be reliant on a software update to make them safe. The lawsuits would be incredible and wipe Google off the planet.

    1. Charles 9

      Re: Death knell

      The thing is, the price of that freedom has gone way up, to the point that it's practically unaffordable for most. Unless people are SO desperate for their own car that they'll pay in blood, personal car ownership may be a fading trend. Besides, do we really, REALLY need to be able to go anywhere on a moment's notice?

      As for the automotive industry, consider that cars will sill be bought and maintained: just not by people, and cars will still need petrol on a regular basis. Given that their paths can be unpredictable, there will still be a need for petrol stations scattered throughout. Also, as for privacy in a car, even that's going away due to the insurance companies (trust me, pretty soon it's put a GPS tracker in your car or you can't get insurance, period).

  6. phil4

    Surely what this shows is that once the car can drive itself there are a myriad of options (some more viable than others), that will suit varying groups of people more or less.

    As an example, look at the cars that people currently drive. For many reasons they're not all the same. Not just superficially, but apart from the A-B provision, completely different. It's like that because everyone has different needs/desires that they spend their cash on.

    As such a suggestion like this will I'm sure appeal to some, and not others.

    I'm in the "probably not" camp.... I like to chose the temp I set the heating aircon too, I like a clean car, I like getting somewhere directly and quickly. All lost if sharing.

    If I could not share, and still guarantee a nice car turn up where and when I want, without too much planning.... then provided it were cheap enough, I'd probably do it.

    But then look at my cars. none of them are econo-boxes.

  7. strum

    Actuarily so

    Before driverless cars could be accepted on to our roads, it seems to me the bare minimum requirement would be that they are significantly safer than human drivers - actuarily, at least.

    If that becomes so, chances are that insuring human driving becomes prohibitive (where it isn't already). Indeed, it's possible that the fleet-owners of driverless cars could self-insure, since their chances of accident would be predictable. The remaining business wouldn't be worth the insurance companies' time - especially since they don't make any money out of if now, with 30M drivers who /must/ get insurance.

    1. Zmodem

      Re: Actuarily so

      you just have to remove the 1000 + commuter cars from the morning rush hour and it will put a end to most congestion of people searching for parking and changing places at lunch, then most bumper taps will be removed too

  8. Ozzard

    A hacker's paradise

    I thought the same thing when I first saw the functioning driverless cars. Then I wondered how I'd feel getting into a car I didn't control and where I had no idea whether the control software had been hacked - for example, to drive just fine for thousands of hours and then randomly accelerate at a T-junction with a concrete wall on the far side of the junction.

    I have no idea how I'd resolve that issue. Thoughts?

    1. Bob 18

      Re: A hacker's paradise

      Maybe YOU would drive the car when you're inside. For this scheme to work, the car only has to be driveless when vacant.

  9. dave 76
    Thumb Up

    reducing congestion

    This is a good solution for some and a non-starter for others. that's ok, doesn't have to be for everyone, just for sufficient people to make the service viable.

    I've got drivers licenses for 4 countries and am a member of car sharing schemes in 2 of them. I have no need for personally owning a car - public transport, taxis, car share and car hire fill my needs very nicely and I don't need to worry about maintenance, wear and tear, parking, vandalism etc. But you if you want to keep a car, no problem to me.

    Car share schemes are estimated to remove the need for 7-10 cars from the road. Even if it at the lower end, surely all you people who must own their car should be keen on the idea as it removes some of the congestion and allows you to have a better drive?

  10. Dagg Silver badge
    Facepalm

    VW

    Concept sounds nice but in Oz it won't work as all the VWs will stuff it up with all the random slow downs and stops.

  11. MachDiamond Silver badge

    Have a go on driverless cars at Heathrow's T5.

    Yeah, it isn't going to work everywhere, but it can work in densely populated areas that need congestion relief the most.

    www.ultraglobalprt.com

    1. Richard 12 Silver badge
      FAIL

      Those Business T5 pods are fundamentally broken-by-design.

      One, very simple change would have made them brilliant: External power supply.

      - eg Third rail, 'scalextrix' slot, overhead line or lines etc. After all, it's a point-to-point railway!

      But no, they decided that something that's going to spend its entire existence continually trundling back-and-forth for about 17 hours a day should be battery-powered, and thus have a flat battery by around 10am and be near-useless for the rest of the day, and wear out the battery within a year or two.

      So higher operating costs, lower availability and greater emissions due to waste during the charging cycle! Fools.

      They never have enough time to properly recharge during the day, so unless you go at a time when nobody flies, you end up waiting for ages for a podule with enough charge - and having to share it anyway because otherwise you'll miss your flight.

      Compare to the free Miami downtown "Metromover", which uses a "slot-car" power supply.

      I don't use the T5 Business parking anymore - the 'normal' one is cheaper and it takes just as long to get into T5 from the M25, even though I have to wait for the shuttle bus.

  12. Faster Better Greener

    Smart algorithms to manage a dynamic fleet

    So we need to minimise the number of expensive assets (cars in this case), but still have a big enough fleet, so that customers can have one available within a reasonable amount of time. This kind of fleet sizing verus availability optimisation is already pretty well advanced in another sector – executive jet hire. Customer base much smaller; assets much more expensive. Result: huge amount of attention to the algorithms. I believe NetJets is best-on-planet at this kind of thing. Perhaps clone-able to this application?

  13. Bob 18

    Even if this reduces demand in the developed world, increases in the developing world are likely to keep global automobile demand on the upswing for at least a few more decades.

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