jaunty75

It ain't just cars, either. I can easily envision a time when stores will no longer have checkout lines and cash registers. Rather, and this would be particularly true for grocery stores, where a typical shopper buys perhaps two or three dozen items during a shopping trip, you will have an account that will automatically be debited every time you take an item off a shelf, whether you put it in a shopping cart, a bag, a basket, or just carry it under your arm. If you put an item back on the shelf, your account will be credited. When you're done shopping, you just walk out of the store as you will have already paid for everything.

Just because we have always had to stop at the front of the store to pay for our purchases ever since there have been retail stores doesn't mean it always has to be this way. Similarly, just because we have always driven our cars for as long as there have been cars doesn't mean it will always be this way.


Here come 'smart stores' with robots, interactive shelves

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/come-smar...154603995.html

joe_padavano

Yup. I've seen these being demo'd already.

jaunty75

What we're seeing in this, and it will affect other low-skill labor-intensive industries and businesses, is the slow but inevitable erosion and eventual disappearance of entry-level, low-skill, repetitive, minimum-wage jobs. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the push for ever higher minimum wages around the country. Make the cost of anything, including labor, too high, and businesses will look for ways to consume less of it.

But this trend is mostly due simply to technological advancement. Automation has cost many jobs in manufacturing over the decades. The same thing is now coming to service industries.

It won't be long before you don't interact with a human at all at fast food restaurants. You'll order from a touchscreen at a kiosk (the same way you can now often check in for a flight at the airport), swipe your credit card or insert your dollar bills to pay, and then pick up your food on a tray from a conveyor belt a few minutes later. The only humans in the place will be the cooks. To go even further, you will soon be able to order and receive your McDonald's food without leaving the house. Not only will ordering be automated, but the order will be delivered by a self-driven car.

MDchanic

You mean sort of like the Automat?




- Eric

jaunty75

Even the White House is telling us to get used to the idea.

White House: Robots may take half of our jobs, and we should embrace it

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/whi...-it-2016-12-21

jaunty75

Absolutely, but what's going on now goes much farther than that.

Koda

I don't "fear" self driving cars; I understand the limitations of the current technology, however, better than most.

joe_padavano

I "fear" the shortcuts and incomplete testing that will lead to accidents. The autonomous car mafia is already complaining about safety regulations "stifling" their innovations.

88 Cutty Classic

i bought an 87 cutlass for my winter car this year. people thought i was nuts. i dont really want all the dummy gadgets that are in todays cars. to me thats just more stuff to break.

oldcutlass

How are they going to mandate the repairs to these vehicles. I remember the auto industry trying to make vehicle repairs mandatorily made at dealerships or certified repair stations. It went over like a wet fart in church. What about obsolescence, is there going to be a limit of running hours before a mandatory safety checks are required similar to aircraft? Who is responsible when these vehicles have accidents since the rules of the road fall on the drivers now?

joe_padavano

Exactly. Even today, state safety checks have expanded to include more equipment. Here in VA, for example, any seepage from your PS pump or hoses is grounds for failure, since most people have never driven a vehicle without power steering. The safety-critical sensors for these autonomous systems will need to have a similar level of inspection. Just how you test them is a different question. As for liability, expect the ambulance-chasing liability lawyers to go after the deep pockets of the automakers and their software suppliers. Of course, this just means they have to carry more liability insurance, the cost of which is baked into the cost of the new car.

MDchanic

My bet:
The small number of auto manufacturers, along with their in- or out-of-house software suppliers, who are now, by default, responsible for all collisions of their vehicles (unless it can be proven otherwise) set up a pool to pay at agreed-upon (read: "low") rates, and work out a "low-litigation" payment scheme, perhaps made mandatory to any victims inside of cars by making car occupants "accept" an "agreement" before starting the vehicle, which mandates "arbitration" for all claims. If they can get away with a single click signing away your right to sue for life, then even pedestrians will be included.

- Eric

jaunty75

You guys are overlooking one thing. When cars are self-driving, private vehicle ownership will, for the most part, disappear. When you need to go somewhere, you'll summon a car the way you would now summon a taxi. Maintenance and all of that will be the responsibility of the transit company just the way maintenance of taxi cabs, buses, subway cars, etc. now are the responsibility of whatever organizations run those services.

This will have huge implications for our society, but then so did the adoption of the motor car a century ago. Our auto industry will shrink drastically. Instead of selling 16 or 17 million cars a year, they'll sell 2 million. The auto industry will cease to be a major factor in our economy.

I read recently, and I pointed this out in a post on this website a few months ago, that the average private vehicle is driven only 5% of the time. The rest of the time, it's parked somewhere (garage, driveway, parking lot, street, whatever) until the next time it's needed. That's a tremendous waste of resources. With a self-driving car world, cars will be on the road probably 90+% of the time, so resource use will be much more efficient.

House design will change drastically, too. With the need to own a car no longer there, the need for a garage to store it in, too, will disappear. Houses have been designed for car storage for 100 years now, and that will no longer be necessary. Driveways probably won't be needed, either. Neither will vast seas of parking lots around shopping malls, sports stadiums, and everything else. There's now a parking area around or in front of every office building, post office, strip mall, everything. All no longer needed. Think how much more land, particularly urban land that can be in short supply or even non-existent in some areas, can be put to other uses. Think for a minute how much of our land area is devoted to making places to park cars. No more need for parking garages. The list goes on.

Big changes are coming.

jaunty75

Amazon leads the way, something it seems to be doing a lot of these days.

Amazon now has 45,000 robots in its warehouses

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazo...n-by-50-2017-1

MDchanic

It hurts me to say this, Jaunty, but I mostly agree with you.

- Eric

jaunty75

Agreeing with me causes pain to most people!


The most important lesson we can take from the 20th century is that technological change happens, and it happens quickly. As just one example, Lindbergh did his famous cross-Atlantic flight in 1927. Ten years later, Amelia Earhart was flying around the world. Twenty years after that, propeller aircraft for passenger travel was obsolete, and cross-continent and cross-ocean jet travel in comfort in just a few hours was commonplace. Barely more than a decade later, we were on the moon. So barely more than 40 years, little more than half a typical lifetime, from barely being able to cross the ocean to putting humans on the moon.

Why should self-driving cars be so much more difficult? The concept has its own set of problems, of course, but it will happen, and probably sooner rather than later.

I always like to think of my grandmother, who was born in 1899 and died in 1982. Think of the technological change that she saw in her lifetime. She was born into a world with no radio, no television, horse-drawn transport still commonplace, and barely the concept of air travel. Telephones were just beginning to become commonplace in households. Wiring houses for electricity was still going on. The motion picture had not been invented yet. The Wright brothers were a few years away, Henry Ford's Model T about a decade away, radio 20 years away, and television 40 or more. But by the time she died, we had all of that and much, much more. If you had predicted even some of those things in the year of her birth, you would have been most likely laughed out of the room or called a crazy person just the way people are poo-pooing the idea of self-driving cars now.

But it all happened, and it continues to happen.

MDchanic

The disturbing part is that in the more than forty years since the last moon landings, not only have we never reached the moon again, but we've reached no other planets, are still using the same orbital vehicle we were using forty years ago (wait... I think it was retired due to old age), and, considering the demise of the Concorde, which was in regular use forty years ago, it actually takes us longer to travel across the ocean now than it did then.

In addition, one of the workhorses of our Air Force, the B52, was put into production almost sixty years ago, as was another military workhorse, the Chinook.

Meanwhile, we keep banging into each other on the sidewalks and the roads, because we can't keep our noses out of our smartphones.

- Eric

jaunty75

Your points are all quite true. Technological change is not linear, and it does have its fits and starts. We didn't do much in space beyond the moon not because of technical hurdles but because of political and financial ones.

The B-52 might have been introduced in the 1950s, but those aircraft are constantly updated, and the B-52 of today is nothing like the B-52 of the 1950s except maybe for how it looks from 50 feet away.

The problem with the Concorde was again economic and not technical. It could get you across the ocean in 2 hours instead of 6, but it cost so much more to do that that people decided they didn't want to spend $10,000 for a cross-ocean flight just to be there a few hours quicker than a flight that cost $1000. But the technology is there if we ever want to go back to it.

I live not very far away from Spaceport America. The effort has had its fits and starts, but we're not long away from people being ferried into orbit on a regular basis and not by the government. Yes, the first riders will most likely be wealthy tourists, but eventually the cost will come down as it always does. Then travel by near-earth-orbit spacecraft will become commonplace, and the SST will be made obsolete before it gets a chance to be adopted again.

http://spaceportamerica.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/sc...=25977297&_r=0

Technology advances. But it's not always adopted, for various reasons. Sometimes the technology is there before a need it can fill is identified. The laser, invented in about 1960, was thought to be nothing more than a laboratory curiosity at the time. Now its indispensable in more aspects of our lives than we can count. But I will mention one: medicine. Procedures are performed every day today that would have been considered miracles a few short years ago because of laser tools now available.

wr1970

Thank god i live in a urban location!That being said you are potraying a very average guy to have no reason for breathing. This guy will be unemployable. You are projecting more doom for blue coolar workers than hope for a better future. I will never use this car with no driver.I reject it because i'm not that lazy.I reject it because i don't think they are safe. I think we all should shoot down all drones.There is no privacy with a drone buzzing overhead with camera trained on your every move.

Koda

While Jaunty's predictions are probably inevitable, there are many things that will delay it way beyond our lifetimes. There are people in New York that don't own cars and have never driven. That doesn't mean anything for rural Oklahoma. I think people have been working on self driving cars for about 20 years, and they are only about, I'd estimate 50% of the way to making it work well, and 20% of the way to making it cost competitive.

I think we will see municipal transportation services, like NYC cab, go automated in 20 years, but I doubt we will see fleets of automated cars replacing private transit anytime soon. You don't see taxis everywhere outside of metro downtown areas, and, while I suspect that autonomous taxis will be half the price of a normal one, that's still a dollar a mile, and I can operate a private vehicle for around 20 cents a mile. Also, taxis do not go everywhere, do not haul everything, and are not available at all times.

I bet we will still have manually driven cars at the end of this century.

jaunty75

Does this include the cost of buying the car, including financing? You can buy a lot of taxi service, even at a dollar a mile, if you don't have to spend $25,000 to buy the car first.

This it not because of any technological limitation. And why aren't taxis available at all times? Of course they are. You need to go somewhere at 3 a.m., you can find a cab company that will come to you.

I just picked this city and cab company randomly. What's the FIRST thing it says in the very first line on this page?

http://rochestercabservice.com/

There will always be a few. But it will not be the norm.

wr1970

There are plenty of towns with populations of 2,000 or more with no taxis service in there towns right now. I am not talking in Oklahoma but a good example.I am talking in Kansas. I am sure plenty other states are the same way.

jaunty75

You're stuck thinking in terms of 2017. Thirty, fifty years from now, things will be much different.

And why are we suddenly stuck on taxi service? We're talking about self-driving vehicles. Taxi service as we think of it today will be obsolete.

Vehicles will be available 24 hours a day. You won't need to worry about a driver. Yes, they will likely be slower to come to rural areas than urban, but they'll get there.

wr1970

I didn't bring up taxis. I just commented that we are far from having what you claim is much closer to happening than we think.You sure are getting twisted up. LOL Calm down.

btw

So if I keep the wife's '11 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid long enough, I'll be able to tell the great-greats "sure it's a classic from the early 2000s. That big wheel? A steering wheel with bluetooth controls. Radical, even then, huh?"

Can't imagine what would be said about the '64 Dynamic....

Yikes.

MDchanic

Exactly, but the lack of political motivation (and, secondarily, financial liberty) reduces the impetus to advance the technology.


The first one flew in 1954 and the last one rolled off the assembly line in October of 1962.
They're the same planes, in use for over half a century.
Think of how crazy that would sound to an Air Forces member during World War II.


The same could be said for propeller-driven flight versus jet flight in the 1950s.

The Concorde was working well, but ticket sales were down post-9/11/2001, as they were for all airlines. Once the Concorde was developed, airlines and manufacturers showed no real interest in developing it further, or in developing any competition.
It seems likely that they were making plenty of money with their subsonic planes and routes, and spending the extra money to continue supersonic improvements didn't seem like it would pay off. Had they done so, and pushed the issue, I am sure that today anyone travelling to Europe at a level above coach would be deciding between $1,000 tickets in subsonic and $1,500 tickets in supersonic.

To me, the lack of further development of supersonic passenger planes and of space travel, along with intense development of industrial efficiency, indicates a shift in our society away from interest in things that might create a better world for all, and toward greed on the part of the captains of industry, and is reflective of an overall societal decline.
We'll come up with some neat new technological geegaws, but I think we've already hit our peak.

- Eric

jaunty75

No, but you continued it.

Some things will happen sooner, some will happen later. But they will happen.

jaunty75

Exactly correct on all counts. You own, say, an early 1900s car with a crank starter. What do you say today to people when they ask what that thing is sticking out the front? Or if you have an early car with a tiller for steering instead of a wheel, and someone asks you what that thing is? It'll be the same with today's cars when they get old enough.

Koda

While Jaunty's predictions are probably inevitable, there are many things that will delay it way beyond our lifetimes. There are people in New York that don't own cars and have never driven. That doesn't mean anything for rural Oklahoma. I think people have been working on self driving cars for about 20 years, and they are only about, I'd estimate 50% of the way to making it work well, and 20% of the way to making it cost competitive.

I think we will see municipal transportation services, like NYC cab, go automated in 20 years, but I doubt we will see fleets of automated cars replacing private transit anytime soon. You don't see taxis everywhere outside of metro downtown areas, and, while I suspect that autonomous taxis will be half the price of a normal one, that's still a dollar a mile, and I can operate a private vehicle for around 20 cents a mile. Also, taxis do not go everywhere, do not haul everything, and are not available at all times.

I bet we will still have manually driven cars at the end of this century.

wr1970

Because taxis can be self drive it fit the thread .

jaunty75

Let's see the math on this.

I did a little math of my own. Mine includes the cost of buying the car and insuring it.

I assume a $25,000 car I bought for cash. I'm going to drive it for 10 years and put 12,000 miles per year on it. Insurance is $800 per year. I average 30 miles per gallon, and gas is $2.00 per gallon for the sake of argument.

cost of car: $25,000
cost of insurance for 10 years: 10 x $800 = $8,000
cost of fuel: 120,000 miles over 10 years divided by 30 mpg multiplied by $2.00 per gallon equals $8,000 for fuel.

Total of these three costs, which totally neglects maintenance, routine and otherwise, is $41,000. Divide $41,000 by 120,000 miles gives 34 cents per mile.

Now add in some maintenance. Do an oil change every 5,000 miles at, say, $30 per change if you go to a shop. That's 24 oil changes in 120,000 miles at a cost of $720. Figure on needing new brakes at least a couple of times in that time, another $500. Two sets of replacement tires at about $800 per set is another $1,600. Other routine and non routine maintenance, especially as the car gets higher mileage, could be another $5,000 in total over 10 years.

Add these together: $720+500+1,600+5,000 = $7,820. Divide by 120,000 and you get another 6.5 cents per mile. So now we're up to about 40 cents per mile.

How do you get 20?

Maybe you do all of your own maintenance, drill for your own oil in your backyard, polymerize some of that oil to make your own tires, etc. etc. etc., but I'm talking about average Joe American who does not do his own maintenance except to check the oil once in a while and refill the windshield washer reservoir when it needs it.

jaunty75

The Kelley Blue Book site has a 5-year cost-to-own feature which you can use for most any new car.

I chose a 2017 Honda Accord four-door sedan with base options except adding an automatic transmission. The site accounts for not only the costs I mentioned above, but it also includes depreciation and vehicle registration fees, something that I neglected above and costs about $50 per year in my state for another $500 over 10 years.

The site also includes financing, which I also neglected above but which is far and away the way most new vehicles are purchased.

Anyway, Kelley's cost-to-own figure is 44 cents per mile. Not far off from the 40 cents per mile I came up with above.

https://www.kbb.com/new-cars/total-cost-of-ownership/

jaunty75

I did a little further googling around.

A USA Today article from May 2015 says the average new vehicle transaction price in the U.S. at that time was just under $34,000.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/...book/26690191/


From the bankrate.com website, the average new car loan in late December 2016 for a 5-year loan had an interest rate of 4.32%.

https://www.google.com/search?q=aver...utf-8&oe=utf-8


If you put 10% down on that $34,000 car, you would be financing $30,600, and your monthly payment would be $568. Over 5 years (60 payments), that's $34,080 in total payments. Add in the down payment, and you paid $37,480 for that $34,000 car.

MDchanic

Except a taxi goes 120,000 miles in a year.

Your numbers aren't bad. The IRS, no bastion of generosity, allows 53.5˘ a mile this year (down from 54˘ last year), which is not an unreasonable estimate.

If I recall, a cab driver working a twelve hour shift in NY these days makes about $100, maybe $150 a day.
If we divide that 120,000 miles a year by 365 days, we get about 325 miles travelled in a 24 hour day (assuming that the cab is in constant operation, which they generally are), which, at 53.5˘ a mile equals about $175 in operating costs. Let's assume my mileage estimate is a bit low and call it $200.
If the two drivers operating the cab over 24 hours are making about $100-$150 each, then let's call it $250 total for the drivers.
So, the car costs about $200, and the drivers cost about $250.
Sounds to me like you could run a driverless cab service for about half the price of one with drivers, and turn a slightly increased profit doing it.

- Eric

jaunty75

I wasn't trying to calculate the per-mile cost of operating a taxi. I'm trying to calculate the cost for a privately-owned vehicle. Koda said he can operate a private vehicle for 20 cents per mile. As I said earlier, I'd like to see his math on that and what assumptions he makes.

wr1970

Hey can you guys give up the taxis post or what.LOL In my state we pay personal property tax every year. Didn't see that listed.

Koda

Ok, Jaunty, you're on. Bear in mind my 20 cents a mile was an estimate.

My ride is as follows:

2007 Toyota Tacoma B Cab PreRunner 5 speed stick 4 banger.
200,000 miles (or close enough)
I paid $15,000 for it new.
My insurance is around 600 a year for it, I believe, in Indiana.
It's on its 4th set of tires, and I paid 120/tire for these Michelins.
I change oil every 5k miles, for 50 bucks of Mobil 1 and a Purolator.
I changed the radiator fluid once, the rear end oil once, and the trans oil once.
I put a serp belt on it, and replaced the front mudflaps.
It gets 23 mpg, so let's assume $2.30 per gallon so 10 cents a mile.

So, 15k of car, 6k of insurance, say 1.5k of tires, 2k of oil changes, 0.5k misc expenses, and 20k of gasoline. $45k total. 200,000 miles is 22.5 cents per mile.

Live in a cheap insurance state, buy a cheaper Toyota, and drive the ***** off it is my method.

Koda

Oops, my front bearings went out and I had them replaced. 23 cents a mile.

jaunty75

I have no quibble with any of your analysis, but you're talking about a specific case, yourself, not the average across the car-buying and owning public.

Anyone can come up with any cost-per-mile amount they want if they make the appropriate assumptions or live their life a certain way. (Not everyone can live in Indiana, for example.) But that won't be the average cost across 300 million Americans living in all 50 states and exposed to all different kinds of car cost environments.

To determine whether or not a driverless car society is economically feasible, one has to determine the cost of that society spread over all its members just the way the cost of car ownership today has to be spread across all members of today's society, and that includes people who can do it for 10 cents per mile, those who can't do it for less than $1.00 per mile, and everyone in between.

jaunty75

Depending on how many miles these bearings will last, a set of bearings alone that raises your per-mile cost from 20 to 23 cents, a 15% increase, is one expensive set of bearings!