04. May 2013 · Categories: Politics

While everybody talks about electric cars as the important development in cars, the real revolution stills goes largely unnoticed: the self driving car. At the moment we only see electronics making driving safer and more comfortable, but there is a huge change lurking once fully autonomous driving will be possible. It will mean self driving taxis that will be cheaper to use than owning your own car. It would allow us to organize transportation based on three elements:

  • a mini car for say two people, limited to 60km/h (40mph). It has limited storage for short trips or some shopping, and is a lot lighter than a typical car as its low speed means much less risk.

  • a transit car for 8 people, with larger storage, optimized for hour long trips. It is longer than cars today, and this allows it to be very aerodynamic. Because of the efficiency of sharing and the safety of autonomous driving it travels at 160km/h(100mph) on most roads. You even get a nice tray to get some work done, complete with high speed Internet access, but without a toilet it is not really suited for long distances.

  • High speed trains/planes will be used for the real long distances. And with transport to their stations now easy to do, much more people will use them.

All are autonomous and have an integrated reservation system coordinating the sharing of transit cars. A typical journey starts by telling your phone where and when you want to go. After selecting the best option, you hop into a mini car that will bring you to a transit station, where you change into a transit car, which will bring you close to your destination, where another mini car will deliver you onto the right doorstep. You might have to wait for maybe five minutes for a car, or for longer journeys up to 20% of the travel time, but when you book early, you can have a reliable reservation to plan on. There is some choice in balancing the travel time with the number of people sharing a transit car, but given that you can use the time quite efficiently for work or relaxing, not many people choose quicker journeys.

Car manufacturers should be scared. While individual cars will not die, they will become a pure luxury item. They will be much more expensive than using taxis: the shared transit cars are not only much more fuel efficient per person, but their purchase price will be amortized over more than 100000km driven per year. This means a huge drop in units sold, and production concentrated on a few taxi models with large runs.

But it will also affect our demand for highways. The sharing will greatly reduce traffic, and the ability to safely coordinate all vehicles would allow overtaking even on normal roads, and make the ones on the highway much more efficient. So the reduced demand will cause us to wonder why one would have ever needed five lanes per side.