Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (30 page)

He says he's certain that autonomous car technology could have altered the course of his neighbor's life, and that the potential for helping the elderly, the blind, and the physically challenged with mobility and independence is enormous. “This could be so meaningful for a large portion of the senior population. That's a big part of why we're pursuing this.”

It's also why Google is more interested in moving faster than the car industry, Medford says.

That's not the whole story, though. There is more than simple disagreement over design philosophies and the pace of transition to full automation at work here. This divide in approach is also about preserving a business model based on selling the maximum number of cars possible. Carmakers are investing in and researching autonomy in part as a defensive measure, because they know that, in some form, autonomous technology is inevitable. Someday it will be ubiquitous and, eventually, required. But if it is presented as a feature incorporated into otherwise traditional cars, then the current model of private car ownership, of two or three vehicles per average household in America, might continue. A slick autonomous driving option then becomes just another selling tactic, a point of competition that can enhance car sales. And by not requiring technology that makes a car driverless all the time, but just under certain conditions—on freeways with well-marked lanes, for instance—carmakers can take a less technically challenging route.

Google, which has no existing car business to protect, but sees endless potential for marketing its autonomous technology, has a very different vision. A car in which autonomy is not a feature but the essence of the vehicle, so that it
can't be
driven by humans whether they want to or not, changes everything. Yes, it brings to an end the carnage of car crashes, of 35,000 deaths and 1.5 million trips to the ER every year. Yes, it gives mobility and independence to the elderly and the infirm who might otherwise be housebound. Yes, it reduces drunk driving and distracted driving to historical curiosities. But there's so much more. There is the flip side of the fully autonomous car, the true differentiator between the carmakers' evolutionary approach and Google's attempt at revolution: the Google car can do stuff without any humans in the car at all.

The car that travels on its own can remedy each and every major problem facing the transportation system of systems and,
along the way, end car ownership as we know it. That's why transportation scholar, author, and blogger David Levinson of the University of Minnesota has proclaimed that “autonomous vehicles appear to be the next profound transportation technology.”
¹
That is, autonomous cars could be to regular cars what those same regular cars were to horses more than a century ago. That's what Levinson foresees, and he is not alone.

Imagine this scenario: fully autonomous cars have become ubiquitous. This is doable sometime between 2030 and 2040 (with early adopters appearing by 2020). Human drivers will become little more than hobbyists, with car driving relegated to the same status as horseback riding: as recreation, not transportation. What does this transition do for the world? What might it look like?

Let's say you open an app on your smartphone and summon a driverless car to your house. You need to get downtown to attend an all-day conference that starts in two hours. The app consults the latest crowdsourced traffic data and informs you the car will pick you up forty-five minutes before the conference starts to ensure an on-time arrival. At the appointed time, your phone buzzes: the car is outside your house. It takes you to the conference site, its route selected based on current traffic data; it drops you at the curb and then takes off to pick up another passenger. During the ride you read and answered e-mail, browsed the news, made a couple of phone calls, played some Words With Friends, and booked a dinner reservation. Drive time has become productive time. Neither you nor the autonomous car has to worry about parking at the end of the trip—a process that, in the once congested downtown area, used to be both time-consuming and expensive. Space once set aside for parking cars is now used more productively, in the forms of protected bike lanes, outdoor cafés, open space, and mini-parks. At the end of your conference, you
use your app to schedule a pickup to return you home, your transportation needs met for the day—no fuss, no muss.

In this scenario, traditional car ownership makes no sense. If that was your personal car taking you downtown, then you would have to worry about finding and paying for parking, the driverless car cruising for a spot just like a human. And the same inefficiency that afflicts regular cars would kick in: the car would sit idle and unproductive all day. Instead, in a driverless rideshare scenario, any one of a buffet of options are available to you in seeking driverless car service: you could subscribe to a car plan much like a phone plan, buying minutes of travel rather than minutes of voice calls. Or perhaps payment is calculated by the mile. Or maybe you subscribe through a monthly fee like a data plan, with tiers of miles allowed, choosing a plan to match your needs. A thousand miles a month? Fifteen hundred? More? Or you might purchase any number of possible subscription plans, time-share plans, or contracts for autonomous vehicles on demand, with rates and terms kept reasonable by competition between providers. The key point here is that the car would belong to someone else, which might be a rideshare service, a car rental company, or the carmakers themselves, with customers paying only for what they need and use. Venues like Disneyland and Dodger Stadium and the Las Vegas strip might bundle tickets and hotel rooms with driverless service. Savvy local transit companies might get into the game, using driverless cars to solve the last-mile problem and get more people onto LA Metro's light rail or the LA–San Francisco bullet train now under construction. Would you use mass transit more if a driverless car whisked you to the station just in time to board—and it saved you money as well as time? New York City's transit company or Boston's or Portland's might enter such a market, simultaneously finding riders and easing traffic in their communities. They could offer
multi-modal mileage plans, with savings for riders who take the bulk of their journeys on high-speed mass transit. Indeed, in this future scenario, carpool lanes could be converted to automated bus lanes; multiple driverless buses could use unerring robotic guidance systems to cruise bumper to bumper like trains at 150 miles an hour, drafting behind one another like race car drivers to cut wind drag and delivering passengers in record time.

For consumers, there would be no insurance costs for driverless cars in this scenario, no fuel costs, and no parking costs. What it would most resemble is a ridesharing service without the human behind the wheel, which would greatly lower the cost. And now you know why Uber, the global rideshare leader, which went from zero to ubiquitous since 2009, has hired away university researchers by the dozen and launched its own driverless car project. Robot Uber is on the drawing board. The company sees such a transformation of car culture as the inevitable outcome of a perfected driverless car.

This is why carmakers want autonomy to be evolutionary, not revolutionary, to keep that Uber robot at bay as long as possible. A world of fully autonomous cars à la Google or Uber would end car ownership as we know it.

It also ends cars as we know them. Think about it. The most common method of commuting to work in America—76 percent of the work trips we take —consists of one person in a car that could seat five or six people, that has an enormous trunk and a fuel tank with a range of hundreds of miles, all for a trip that, for the average American, is under fourteen miles each way.
²
Indeed, the average car in American cities travels a total of 36.5 miles a day for all purposes, while the average rural-based car clocks in at 48.6 miles all day. As car owners, we want vehicles that can carry a lot of stuff and people long distances, even though we usually don't do so, just so we're covered when we
need that capacity. Nobody wants too little car to do what they need to do. But that's another built-in inefficiency of the current car-ownership economy. Not only are our cars parked most of the time, but they offer much more capacity than we need most of the time.

In the app-driven, on-demand scenario of driverless cars, the fleets for rent can be made up of a variety of vehicles purpose-built for each type of trip. Providers would build fleets out of a variety of vehicle types and sizes. Freed from the need to build cars that serve as general-purpose-vehicle versions of the Swiss Army knife, car designers could unleash a torrent of new designs for specific purposes: small one- or two-seat minis for short city trips; sleek in-line models for families of four seated one behind another for quick journeys to the beach; car bodies designed to easily store bicycles or surfboards or that have cargo space for trips to Costco. Robot shared vehicles could also usher in the rise of electric cars because range would no longer be an issue for most trips. Each car would serve multiple users in a day—instead of being parked twenty-two hours out of the day—on short trips with ample opportunities to recharge as needed between customers. The hundred-mile ranges of today's electrics could be easily outstripped with lighter vehicles. Larger autonomous cars capable of carrying more people and stuff or going longer distances—hybrids or fuel-cell powered, perhaps—would be available as needed. Gasoline-powered cars in the consumer space would be dethroned.

In this scenario, fewer cars would be needed nationwide. Far fewer. And the drivers that would exist would flow in harmony instead of battling to pass and cut off and wave fists at one another. Congestion and traffic jams would be a bad memory; no more new lanes would have to be constructed, and those we have wouldn't need to be twelve feet wide to accommodate human error.
All those parking lots could become green spaces. We'd end up with smaller freeways, smaller streets, and much smaller transportation budgets for cities, states, and the federal government. These dollars could be redirected to maintaining and repairing what we have.

Some existing lanes could be given over to the goods-movement industry, which can also flourish with automation. Driver fatigue and rest rules would end. Safety would be guaranteed. Trucks could platoon—draft bumper to bumper—at high speeds in their dedicated lanes, cutting time and fuel. The robot Uber model may not replace ownership for freight and commercial vehicles, but all the other benefits of automation apply. For that matter, private ownership of robotic consumer cars would still continue for those who want it—and, at the outset, polls suggest many if not most Americans will not want to give up on a hundred years of pride, status, and habit linking them to car ownership. But the economics of a shared system and the practical benefits of having access to many different purpose-built cars instead of one jack-of-all-trades vehicle will be compelling. The Millennials will flock to it.

The upside for carmakers who seize this transformation as an opportunity instead of a threat are compelling, too: cars used around the clock instead of parked around the clock will wear out quickly and need to be replaced much more often than the ten-plus years Americans keep their privately owned cars today. Manufacturers of the new generation of purpose-built vehicles will replace the same car three or four times during those ten years. The first movers in this new competitive landscape will do very well by embracing this scenario. Today's carmakers may end up making that leap. Or newcomers will swoop in and steal the business from them, as computer makers replaced the typewriter manufacturers.

Driverless cars are not a total panacea. Enormous amounts of transportation would still be embedded in our daily lives and consumer economy. Much of the current pain would be vanquished, though.

The problem of traffic jams would disappear.

The problem of traffic carnage would be gone, deaths dropping from the tens of thousands range to something measured in the hundreds or less. No more drunks on the road. No more texting and wandering over the centerline. No more careening into telephone poles on dark rural highways.

The problems of capacity, of overload on freeways, of trucks backed up at the ports, of cars crawling painfully up the 405 and every other overburdened highway at rush hour, all go away, too. As does the need to expend fantastic amounts of money expanding capacity.

For mass transit systems already in place, the last-mile problem can be solved at last, while compelling new forms of automated mass transit could emerge.

The pollution, climate, and health costs that have long been attached to our cars—and that drivers have never been forced to pay—go away, too. We get to keep our cars—a different ownership model, perhaps, yet still cars—but the transition from polluting fossil fuels to clean electric vehicles finally makes practical and economic sense in the land of robot cars. Fossil fuel dependence, with all its environmental, economic, and national security implications, could be eased.

The death of parking would be particularly huge. Parking isn't just a drag on our time. It is a drag on the economy, a voracious land hog that grows with cancer-like relentlessness because most new real estate development includes a large, expensive, legally mandated parking component. Providing ample parking is a sensible-seeming policy but it comes with unintended consequences.
For one, new parking in cities induces demand just like new freeway lanes, encouraging more people to drive into congested areas instead of making travel choices that reduce the need for parking (such as buses, subways, walking, or biking). Later, when tastes and trends inevitably shift and a once-thriving urban shopping center or other destination loses patrons, its under-utilized or abandoned parking lot will remain in place for years, an oil-stained island of asphalt and wasted space all too familiar to American city dwellers. A survey of mixed-used districts in cities across the country found that, despite a perception of parking scarcity at individual venues, the number of spaces available in the immediate areas exceeds demand by an average of 65 percent.
³
Our oversupplied parking systems are yet another wildly inefficient use of resources in the door-to-door universe.