Would you want a self driving car?

[Tonitrus]

Basically no one will own a car when self driving cars arrive.

What is the main incremental expense for a taxi? It is the driver's time. That goes away in a self driving car. Cabs will become extremely cheap. People will just take uber everywhere.

Car ownership is extremely inefficient.  The car spends most of the time just sitting there parked and rotting.  It's necessary when it needs to be near a driver, but otherwise it's an idiotic state of things.

Despite inefficiency, I think there will still be plenty of demand for owning cars, even if the reasons are just:

- Cooties: plenty of people don't want to park their butt where thousands of others have, if they don't have to.  And will pay a premium for that privelage.

- Independence: the ability to just get-up-and-go, without waiting for a car (no matter how short that time is), or dealing with some 3rd party that has to jumble with pricing plans, liability, etc, whatever)

- Hubris: you know that in a world where owning one's own car becomes less common, the more of a status symbol owning one will become.  Plus, chicks.

And to call out a bad movie example, I think Schwarzenegger's The Sixth Day probably has the most realistic future for self-driving cars.  At least in the near term.

[lustindarkness]

Sad people that do not love their vehicles. Sad people that don't love to drive their awesome vehicles are sad. Sadly they have made up arguments online to justify their sadness and I'm sad that I did not ignore their sad waste of time. Sad. Sad. Sad.

[Tonitrus]

Sad people that do not love their vehicles. Sad people that don't love to drive their awesome vehicles are sad. Sadly they have made up arguments online to justify their sadness and I'm sad that I did not ignore their sad waste of time. Sad. Sad. Sad.

And there will never be practical, self-driving vehicles that can do the awesome off-road/semi-off road that FJ Cruisers do. 

[lustindarkness]

Sad people that do not love their vehicles. Sad people that don't love to drive their awesome vehicles are sad. Sadly they have made up arguments online to justify their sadness and I'm sad that I did not ignore their sad waste of time. Sad. Sad. Sad.

And there will never be practical, self-driving vehicles that can do the awesome off-road/semi-off road that FJ Cruisers do. 

Precisely. Curbs are simple suggestions.

[Habbaku]

Sad people that do not love their vehicles. Sad people that don't love to drive their awesome vehicles are sad. Sadly they have made up arguments online to justify their sadness and I'm sad that I did not ignore their sad waste of time. Sad. Sad. Sad.

Wanting a self-driving car has no impact on being able to drive one's own vehicle for pleasure.

[Iormlund]

Do you wear a seatbelt while driving?

Yes, but I'm opposed to laws making it mandatory.

What happens when little Jenny Smith flies off the window and face plants a local kid crossing the street crushing his back?
The insurance won't cover stupid muppets who refuse to use safety devices. The Smith's estate doesn't have enough money to pay for a lifetime disability scheme for the local, now paraplegic, kid. Does the taxpayer have to foot the bill?

[DGuller]

Do you wear a seatbelt while driving?

Yes, but I'm opposed to laws making it mandatory.

What happens when little Jenny Smith flies off the window and face plants a local kid crossing the street crushing his back?
The insurance won't cover stupid muppets who refuse to use safety devices. The Smith's estate doesn't have enough money to pay for a lifetime disability scheme for the local, now paraplegic, kid. Does the taxpayer have to foot the bill?

That seems rather farfetched.  And liability insurance does cover damage caused by bad decisions, it would be pretty useless if it didn't.

The simple reason why we need seat belt laws is that too many people are just too dumb to use them voluntarily.  Not because they're making a rational cost/benefit decision, they're just too dumb or too macho to do it.  And this macho behavior can be contagious, and make other people now hesitant to appear weak. 

At that point you can either choose to stick religiously with the ideology, even though it clearly results in suboptimal outcomes, or make a pragmatic policy choice that saves thousands of lives each year.

[Iormlund]

At least here not all bad decisions are covered. For example, AFAIK if you don't pass the mandated car check when stipulated your insurer can refuse to cover you.

[Eddie Teach]

ET, this is an unusual line of argument you are taking. If people have a chance to avoid purchasing a very large and bulky ~$25k piece of machinery because they can rent one when needed at even roughly the same long term cost (though I suspect it will be less), they will do so.

Some people. But that's not the argument I was talking about, it's the claim that costs would be reduced. Having (briefly) worked for a courier service, I'm not very confident that there will be high efficiency regarding mileage driven with customer/total mileage- and that number will go down the farther from city centers one gets.

[Monoriu]

For sure.  I hate driving.  The only reason I drive is to be able to get from point A to point B.  If a computer can take me there, so much the better.  The computer will do a much better job than me in driving the car. 

[DGuller]

At least here not all bad decisions are covered. For example, AFAIK if you don't pass the mandated car check when stipulated your insurer can refuse to cover you.

That's pretty dumb then.  Liability insurance is there to protect the other party.  Whether the person at fault is stupid or unlucky, the other party is injured just the same.  I'm sure there are some exclusions, but they have to be pretty gross violations and probably involve fraud (and even then the insurance company can be liable extra-contractually).

[dps]

The simple reason why we need seat belt laws is that too many people are just too dumb to use them voluntarily.  Not because they're making a rational cost/benefit decision, they're just too dumb or too macho to do it.  And this macho behavior can be contagious, and make other people now hesitant to appear weak.

At that point you can either choose to stick religiously with the ideology, even though it clearly results in suboptimal outcomes, or make a pragmatic policy choice that saves thousands of lives each year.

I think most people use their seatbelts because it makes sense to, not because it's against the law not to.  And the idea that "people are too stupid to do it voluntarily" is the worst reason to pass legislation regulating private, individual behavior. 

[Ed Anger]

DG is in the pocket of Big Seatbelts.

[11B4V]

No.

More laziness

[alfred russel]

ET, this is an unusual line of argument you are taking. If people have a chance to avoid purchasing a very large and bulky ~$25k piece of machinery because they can rent one when needed at even roughly the same long term cost (though I suspect it will be less), they will do so.

Some people. But that's not the argument I was talking about, it's the claim that costs would be reduced. Having (briefly) worked for a courier service, I'm not very confident that there will be high efficiency regarding mileage driven with customer/total mileage- and that number will go down the farther from city centers one gets.

It is possible that miles driven would increase because of what you are saying.

But think of some of the sources of savings:

-Huge reduction in costs of parking. Take a city like Atlanta. Say 6 million people. Maybe 3 million cars. The vast majority parked at any one time. All these parked cars are wasted space.
-Insurance--those 3 million cars need millions of insurance policies, which must be marketed, sold, and customized for the customer. Imagine if all the cars in Atlanta were effectively owned by 5 companies. The business of insurance would be less costly, even ignoring the theoretical safety benefits of self driving cars.
-Gas stations. People need gas stations near where they live. Lots of prime real estate is dedicated to gas stations. This would be unnecessary with self driving cars that could be based outside the city center.
-Maintenance. Imagine how much more efficient and effective maintenance would be if rather than having it overseen by millions of individual drivers it was managed professionally by a central entity? How much car damage is caused by skipped maintenance, and how much is wasted by unnecessary maintenance? For a simple example, just think how many fewer resources would be dedicated to emissions tests if all the cars in Atlanta were stored in a couple dozen locations.
-Avoiding obsolescence. Say a car lasts 200k miles and is driven 10k miles / year. How many cars from 1996 are still around? In the US it wasn't even mandatory to have airbags on both sides of the front seat until 1998. I suspect a not insignificant number of cars are being scrapped not because they hit a mileage number beyond which the car breaks down too much, but because they are obsolete or are breaking down from improper maintenance.
-Car selling costs: far more cost effective to just sell to a few fleet providers rather than millions of individuals.