Google’s Robot Cars

1. Google's Robot Cars

Testifying before the Nevada State Assembly in April to have the state legalize its driverless cars, Google lobbyist David Goldwater asked the state’s transportation committee to “imagine a time when we will be able to call our public transportation on our cell phones or smartphones and tell it to come to our door to pick us up, without anybody in it, take us to our job, and be released to go perform the same service for somebody else.”
But a world filled with robot cars may have consequence even their
creator can’t predict. Driverless cars would be a perfect match for
car-sharing services such as Zipcar or Getaround, gradually replacing
the idea of car ownership with “mobility-as-a-service.” That, in turn,
may lead to a precipitous fall in car ownership--as high as 50%--while breathing new
life into suburbia and creating more congestions as the pain of commuting lessens. And what would halving the
number of cars on the road mean for the Detroit Three--and the taxpayers
who’d like the rest of their bailout back?
Six months before that hearing, when they were first reported in The New York Times, Google’s test cars had traveled 140,000 miles with only one accident. (A car was rear-ended while stopped at a light.) Since then, its car czar Sebastian Thrun--a former Stanford AI professor who won DARPA’s autonomous vehicle competition in 2005--has been vocal about the possibilities of cars without drivers, including fuel efficiency and fewer fatalities. And, perhaps most importantly, a future without horrible commutes.

2. The Commute of the Future
At last month’s Maker Faire 2011 in San Mateo, California, Thrun regaled the crowd
with visions of a “car-train” composed of robot cars traveling on
highways in close proximity to each other, using the “drafting”
technique typical of NASCAR drivers to speed up while saving fuel by as
much as 25 percent. “Think about the car as a medium of mass transit,”
he said, because you wouldn’t have to think about where you were going
or how you were getting there.
“The typical American spends an average of roughly 100 hours a year in traffic,” the economist Tyler Cowen wrote a few weeks ago in support of driverless cars. “Imagine using that time in better ways--by working or just having fun.”
One thing is certain--our current commutes need changing. They are making us fatter, unhappier, lonelier, and are probably killing us.
Last month, researchers at Sweden’s Umea University published their
finding that couples in which one partner commutes for longer than 45
minutes are 40% likelier to divorce.
But what if driverless cars mimicked transit instead? What
if you could watch movies, make Skype calls, or play with your children
in the back seat until you were delivered to your doorstep? A
game-changer in terms of commuting time and cost, it would breathe new life
back into suburban sprawl; it's not a problem to live two hours from
work when you can spend those two hours as if you were on your couch.
And what if you didn't even have to be making payments on that car that was driving you to work. Robot cars could allow us to drastically reduce car ownership.


3. "Zipcar, come here."
“What if I could take out my phone and say, ‘Zipcar, come here,’” Thrun asked rhetorically at a conference last year, “and a moment later the Zipcar came around the corner?” It’s not a stretch to imagine robot cars as a boon for car-sharing services.
But better positioned are new peer-to-peer services such as Getaround, which launched two weeks ago with 1,600 cars already enrolled--equivalent to 20% of Zipcar’s fleet. Membership is free, insurance and 24-hour roadside assistance is included, and all that’s required of car owners is installing a keyless remote to allow other Getaround users to unlock the car.
In a driverless world, owners would barely bad credit loans notice when their car was missing. They would just call another while their formerly sunk cost was out earning money. It would beat letting it collect dust in the garage every day, which is what most of us do now.
“There are over 250 million personal vehicles in the U.S. and they sit idle an average of 22 hours each day,” according to Getaround cofounder Sam Zaid. What would happen if, thanks to Getaround and Google, they only sat idle for, say, 20 hours a day? How many fewer cars would we need?

4. As Goes GM, So Goes The Nation
If Thrun and Sam Zaid of Getaround are correct, it could be possible to dramatically increase the utilization of cars (and congestion) while shrinking their numbers unsecured loans overall. (Highways would be as crowded as ever, but there would be a lot more open parking spots.) And then what would that mean for the (formerly) Big Three?
For the answer to that, we need look no further than 2009, the U.S. auto industry’s annus horriblis in which the total number of cars on the road contracted for the first time since World War II. Not coincidentally, both GM and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy that year.
More troubling than the one-time dip of the financial crisis is the gradual erosion in the number of teenage drivers, whose numbers have fallen below 10 million (from a peak of 12 million in 1978), despite the largest teenage population ever. “Many of today’s young people living in a more urban society learn to live without cars,” theorized the environmentalist Lester R. Brown at the time. “They socialize on the Internet and on smartphones, not in cars.”
Perhaps in the future, they will socialize on smartphones in driverless cars. In that case, to survive, the auto industry's business model might be starting to look like the smartphone one--with the hardware made in China, and the brains supplied by Google.