General Motors, Ford and other established automakers risk becoming relics if they don’t catch up to Chinese carmakers and technology companies in electric vehicles and self-driving cars.
General Motors, Ford and other established automakers risk becoming relics if they don’t catch up to Chinese carmakers and technology companies in electric vehicles and self-driving cars.
Self-driving cars can give an amazing level of autonomy and independence to people like never before. Think about elderly and disabled people who normally would have to rely on others to get around having the ability to do so on their own terms.
Also think about freedom of time you would get back. Stuck in a traffic jam? Watch a movie, read a book, get some road head. Everyone suddenly has their own personal drivers.
Accidents would decrease too (Waymo has published a peer reviewed paper showing that it’s almost 12x safer than people). No having to worry about drunk or tired drivers.
Most people don’t care about driving, they just want a way to get from point A to B, and self-driving enables all of that.
I’d rather live somewhere with buses and trains. You can get places when old and/or drunk, you build a better world for everyone, and you don’t funnel money into shitty privately owned tech companies.
And until we can tear down and rebuild the world, that’s not going to be possible for a large swath of people. Think about places that don’t have good mass transit infrastructure and probably won’t. This gives those people access.
There are many, many, people that could be granted good bus service without tearing down and rebuilding the world. The problem is political. Every day and every dollar we put into other lesser solutions comes with a large opportunity cost.
Imagine if we’d focused on buses for the past 22 years instead of waymo. How many people could be served by the $16 billion in funding waymo got?
I don’t want a driver. Even if I had enough money to pay a personal chauffeur, I wouldn’t want one. I prefer to drive my own car.
But maybe I’m in the minority on that one. Maybe most people would prefer self-driving cars. That’s fine, I guess, but I just hope someone keeps making regular cars, because I ain’t interested in being driven around by a robot.
Ideally I’d be able to live in a city or town designed around people, not cars. So I wouldn’t have to own a car, autonomous driving or otherwise, to get around.
Eventually your auto insurance will go up to the point where it’s unaffordable to drive yourself.
This isn’t a near future prediction, but it’ll happen once self-driving cars reach a critical mass.
Why would the cost of insuring human-driven cars increase? It’s not like the risk of a human drivers will suddenly go up with driverless cars on the road. In fact, driverless cars, if they worked, would lower the claims rate of human-driven cars.
And the insurance companies won’t pressure owners to switch to driverless vehicles. True self-driving vehicles won’t require insurance at all. If the manufacturer is completely responsible for any risk, then it’s the manufacturer that has all the liability. Your self-driving car would just have a lifetime worth of insurance coverage built into the purchase price. A world of only self driving cars is a world where car insurance companies don’t exist.
Because humans are terrible drivers and would be responsible for the vast majority of crashes. And the fact that self driving cars don’t need insurance would drive up the costs since the premium pool would be much smaller.
That makes zero mathematical sense.
It does if you understand how insurance works.
The insurance companies pool all of the premiums they receive and pay claims out of that. The more people paying into the pool, the lower the financial burden of a single payout.
With auto insurance specifically, everyone with a different insurance company paying into that company’s pool is further mitigating the risk.
If self driving cars aren’t required to carry insurance, then the number of people paying into the pool is going to shrink but the total cars on the road won’t at the same rate.
Since fully autonomous vehicles are going to be way more expensive than manually driven vehicles, the premiums will need to rise dramatically.
There’s a limit to the gains from pooling insurance risk. Sure, you gain a lot by going from 1000 people in a pool fo 10000. But 10 million to 20 million? You reach a point where the law of large numbers takes over and adding more people doesn’t produce further gains.
Then I’ll sell my car for scrap and walk or bike. And when I can’t walk or bike anymore, well, there’s always mobility scooters.