A year or so ago when I was down in “The Valley,” as we highlanders call the Phoenix metro area, I saw several Waymo driverless taxis and said to myself, “I want to try that.”
I was in Scottsdale recently and was surprised at the number of Waymo cars I saw. They were everywhere! You can recognize a Waymo by their spinning gumball machine appendages front, top and back. The driverless technology has been tested in Phoenix and a few other warm weather towns and we are on the verge of widespread adoption of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs).
I can imagine a time in the not-so-distant future when cars that we must drive ourselves will seem so “last century” as the kids say. So how will our lives change as this paradigm shift to AVs takes place in society?
Picture yourself as a billionaire. Would you drive to the office or to a show? Or would you have a chauffeur who worries about parking, cleaning and servicing the car? Most of us would rather have a chauffeur so we could read the news, drink our coffee, talk with friends or business associates or just play games while the driving was being done for us. If you are open to being chauffeured, you are a candidate for an AV.
“But I enjoy driving” you may think. And this is America, the land of the muscle car and pickup truck, so it will be your choice, of course. If AVs were a lot safer than driving yourself, perhaps that would sway your decision a bit. If your insurance company asks if you drive a vehicle yourself, and when you say “yes” your insurance bill doubles, I’m guessing that would sway your decision even more.
Insurance companies will soon be focusing rate decisions on AVs because AVs are already twice as safe as manually driven cars. (see Note 1 and Note 2 below) And this is the worst AVs will ever be. They will only improve from here. In addition, when accidents do happen, the electric vehicles are less expensive to repair.
I have missed more than one investment opportunity because I failed to appreciate how much consumers will pay just for convenience. AVs will be super-convenient. Just click on the app on your phone to be picked up in a warm (or air-conditioned) car and dropped right at the office door. Your car can run to the store for you while you work or watch a show. There are no worries about DUIs, so cocktails at dinner won’t have that black cloud hanging over them, and when you are dropped off at home, your car returns itself to a neighborhood garage to be serviced, cleaned and housed ready for your next call.
As more and more of us shift to using AVs, ride sharing will also spread. Think about the amount of time you actually use your car versus the time it sits idle in your garage. If you are like the average driver who puts 12,000 miles per year on their car and average 30 mph while driving, you spend only about one hour a day actually driving. You pay for a full day of the car’s life, but you only use it 5% of the time. What if you could split the cost with 5 or 10 other people? I believe the idea of subscribing to a car service will become widespread within a decade.
Think of the ramifications if we share AVs. The number of cars on the road drops dramatically, rush hours become a breeze, air pollution drops, the size of houses can be smaller (or your workshop larger) as garages are no longer needed. And city planning will change as parking and roads take up around 25% of most central city areas and the disadvantages of commuting dissolve into the pleasure of alone time to read or watch a game on TV.
Laws will need to be changed to align with this new reality, but I imagine regulators are closely watching the statistics of AV safety already. When the advantage of AVs over us flawed human drivers becomes obvious, things will change quickly, in bureaucrat-time, anyway.
It will be interesting to see which technology will be most widely adopted. This reminds me of the VHS vs Betamax struggle 45 years ago. It could be the marketing that wins vs the better technology like it did in the ‘80s. Let us hope not.
Right now, the two leading contenders in the AV space are Tesla and Waymo, a division of Google. These two companies use different technologies to run their AVs.
Waymo uses “Light Detection and Ranging” sensors, or LiDAR along with cameras, radar and geolocation mapping. Artificial intelligence (AI) pulls all of this together to make moment to moment driving decisions. This seems like plenty of redundant systems, but this is the same set of systems that General Motors used in its Cruise AVs. GM scrapped Cruise last year after they burned through $10 billion before several highly publicized accidents occurred. I assume that the difference in the success of Waymo and failure of Cruise is in the software. Time will tell.
Tesla’s robotaxi, a prototype of which was unveiled last year, relies heavily on cameras and AI to crunch the data. The same way you and I use our eyes letting our brains process the data while driving, Tesla Vision’s camera feeds are processed in real time by AI. Tesla is also introducing radar to assist in poor weather conditions, but its main technology are its cameras.
Tesla’s big advantage, however, is the massive amount of data it already has gathered from its over 6 million Teslas on the road, many of which are driven in harsh weather climates. Many already have self-driving packages which still require human supervision but can pretty much drive themselves. The introductory period for Tesla’s Robo Taxi ought to be very short since Tesla drivers have essentially been beta-testing their technology for years.
This data, from many cold, snowy weather areas gives Tesla a significant advantage over Waymo as its technology has only been tested in six warm weather cities. I’m not sure I want to be the first to ride in a Waymo in a Minnesota blizzard.
But the bottom line is that the age of AVs is upon us. Buckle up!
Note 1: https://www.lgrlawfirm.com/blog/examining-autonomous-car-accidents-and-statistics-2/
Note 2: https://www.warpnews.org/transportation/self-driving-cars-are-safer-than-human-drivers-study-shows/