Mercedes mulls driverless limo future The company that in the 19th century helped put “horseless” in front of “carriage” wants to empty the driver's seat in the 21st. Speaking to Reuters prior to the Frankfurt auto show, Daimler's CEO Dieter Zetsche said on-demand driverless limousines are “a concrete development goal of ours”. If it gets to a point where …
Overall car miles driven will increase if there's a large move to summon-on-demand, so other things being equal the practical lifespan of cars will decrease. Also people are going to be a lot less forgiving of minor faults that they'd just put with in their own geriatric vehicle, so the fleet of shared cars will have to be quite young, much as hire cars are now. And if shared-use-on-demand really takes off then demand for those ex-fleet vehicles will be low and they're going to effectively become worthless at a much younger age than current vehicles.
Hopefully autonomous cars will crash less often, so that will work in the opposite direction and reduce new vehicle sales.
All in all I don't think it's at all clear that this new ownership model will be bad for car manufacturers. It might well turn out to be another acceleration of the disposable consumer society that's been developed for other consumer durables.
@jake - "The concept WILL kill people. Honestly, the mind boggles ..."
Erm - are you saying that meatbag controlled vehicles don't?
I suggest that there will be far fewer fatalities (evidenced by the reduction in minor incidents that the current crop of cars are experiencing) with something that doesn't get tired or angry at the controls of the lethal weapons we seem content to let rule our lives.
I suggest that what's actually likely to happen is that automated driving will become the norm, but for many years regulators will insist that a fully licensed driver is in place at all times to take control (and any legal blame) when things go wrong. Just like in the civil airliner business. And just like in that industry, in practice the fully trained, fully licensed, bored and inattentive, totally out of practice, meatbag will be dropped in it at zero notice and will stuff up the save. And the subsequent crash will be put down to human error.
"The concept WILL kill people"
All it has to do is consistently drive better than humans do. That's not hard.
Our roads are such that it takes some pretty amazingly bad driving to end up in a crash (usually on all parts if there is more than one party involved) - which is why there aren't crashes more frequently.
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