I think Jonas is way too utopian on shared autonomous vehicles. People have always shared vehicles when ownership is out of reach, just like people have shared apartments and rented out rooms to make ends meet. The existence of car sharing apps no more means people will abandon personal auto ownership than the existence of Airbnb mean that people will abandon home ownership. It just strikes me as naive to extrapolate from a few novel start ups to imagine that such cost savings measures will be adequate for everyone. Not everyone is going to rent out an unused room room in their home just to collect rent from strangers. Honestly I do not want to pimp out my Model S to strangers even if Blueberry becomes fully autonomous. If people really want to ride share to save money, there are plenty of opportunities to carpool or take public transportation. Having an app on your smartphone does not make such options all that more attractive. Fundamentally, autonomous vehicles will put professional drivers out of work. The cost savings from eliminating these jobs will enable people to make more frequent use of vehicles for hire. But in the end vehicle miles per capita will go up as the cost per mile and inconvenience of travel go down, and automakers will sell even more vehicles per year. Additionally roads will become more congested than ever as vehicles without any occupants roll about avoiding parking tickets.
Sorry but reading this gave me pain.
Every single sentence is basically ridiculous.
Jonas is talking about shared fleets, not shared personal cars.
Millennia's just don't care about car ownership, in fact its just considered a huge hassle and big cost point.
People just want to have an on demand supercheap uber.
Its trivial that using a shared fleet selfdriving car will be cheaper than using a personal car.
It has some similarities to public transport, just without all the major downsides off.
Sharing the ride with weirdos.
Dirty interior.
slower than a car.
Doesn't drop you off right in front of your doorstep.
scheduled times that you have to adjust to.
Your argument about the "using an app to hire them doesnt change anything" made me literally facepalm.
Do you realize the hyper growth of Uber in the last 4 years?
from 0 to 39B$ market evaluation, present in over 50 countries.
Just in London they have 20.000 operating Uber cars as of today.
You think that would have been the case without the app?
The only thing why I am less worried about the future of Tesla in a future of automated fleets is that premium segment will still be dominated by personal owned cars.
Similar to the airline industry.
Where the really wealthy people have their own private jets.
and everyone else who cant afford it rides in the "shared jets"
The cost to entry point will for personal self driving cars will obviously be much cheaper then for Privat jets.
I guess around 35k$.
I also see the Car become the second living room, and that more people could start to appreciate a nice interior.
Tesla CTO JB Straubel talks about the future of electric cars at 2015 Vail Global Energy Forum | Electrek
That a very good Panel with JB Straubel participating in it.
One big topic is how the SDC will shape the future of the industry.
______________________________________________________________________________________
One other big advantage that was mentioned in that talk was the possiblity of "dynamic highways"
Problem:
Typical highway has 3 lanes going inside the city, and 3 lanes going outside the city.
In the Morning everyone wants to get inside the city, and there is traffic jam on the inside lanes, while the outside lanes are almost empty.
In the evening everyone wants to get outside t he city, and there is a traffic jam on the outside lanes, while the inside lanes are almost empty.
Solution:
Mark the inner most lanes of the highway as "Dynamic lanes SDC ONLY".
Those lanes will change their direction, e.g. from 5am to 2pm both lanes are "in the city lanes" and after 2pm they become "out of the city lanes"
o = outside city lane
i = inside city lane
d = dynamic lane that changes from o to i depending on the time of the day.
lanes typical as of today:
| o | o | o | i | i | i |
dynamic lanes:
| o | o | d | d | i | i |
morning:
| o | o | i | i | i | i |
evening:
| o | o | o | o | i | i |
And allow those lanes only to be used only by full automated SDC.
That way we could increase the use of the infrastructure by about 33% without any huge expenses.
That solution would never work with human beings as drivers, it would be a nightmare, but with SDC it will work.
Soo....who's gonna do it?
