Weekend Thinking: The Robot Cars Are Coming
What happens when we stop driving?
While a self-driving, or autonomous, vehicle seems like science fiction, driverless cars are coming. It’s pretty clear that the end goal of companies like Uber and Lyft is not to disrupt the taxi business, but to disrupt humans driving cars and trucks.
Tesla, Google and Apple are working on it. So are existing car companies like Volvo, BMW and Ford.
The self-driving future is now. Like, right now.
Uber is testing its fleet of robot Volvos in Pittsburgh at the moment, where the company’s Advanced Technology Centre is located.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmofgf-Y3Mc
Uber also recently spent $680 million to buy Otto, a company led by the Google exec that oversaw that company’s self-driving vehicle program. Otto focuses on retrofitting existing trucks to allow them to be driven autonomously.
And Tesla’s semi-autonomous Autopilot feature already lets its sleek cars travel without the driver steering. One man in Missouri says his Tesla saved his life when he suffered a pulmonary embolism, a potentially fatal blood vessel blockage, while driving. Switching to Autopilot, his car drove him 20 miles down the freeway to the closest hospital.
We love our cars. But that love comes with a huge cost.
There are more than one billion vehicles around the world, and automotive accidents kill a staggering 1.3 million people a year – that’s more than 3,200 deaths every day. Then there’s the environmental impact and lost time and productivity that comes with traffic congestion caused by cars.
Cars also take up a lot of space. One UK study argues that shared autonomous vehicles could increase available urban space by 15 to 20 per cent by eliminating parking spaces. London, for example, has 6.8 million parking spaces that take up about 16 per cent of the city’s land. Parking consumes even more land in other cities.
So it’s entirely possible that you might be driving the last car you’ll ever buy. We may quickly move beyond owning cars to a model of tapping an app to order a self-driving vehicle when we need a lift. Uber has already proven the validity of the model.
We can expect a lot of angst as this technology becomes embedded in our lives, but that always happens with something new. Yet a world where we no longer own the robot cars that drive us to and from our destination is likely to be better in addressing safety and environmental concerns.
But what happens to all the people who rely on driving trucks, taxis or buses to earn a living – about 1.5 per cent of Canadian workers are truck drivers.
An IMF report says that automation doesn’t kill jobs, just moves them around. Others aren’t so sure.
The automotive industry is massive in North America. But shared vehicles will mean fewer vehicles, and no need for the huge number of retail car dealerships or repair shops that dot our cities and towns. The automotive sector becomes a purely B2B play.
That’s a lot of change. And it will happen sooner than you think.