According to McKinsey, something like $100 billion has been invested in trying to get autonomous vehicles to work and yet the industry remains stuck with problems like this one here:
State-of-the-art robot cars also struggle with construction, animals, traffic cones, crossing guards, and what the industry calls “unprotected left turns,” which most of us would call “left turns.”
The industry says its Derek Zoolander problem applies only to lefts that require navigating oncoming traffic. (Great.) It’s devoted enormous resources to figuring out left turns, but the work continues.
Right now certainly feels like an autonomous vehicle winter (we have many winters going on at the moment). The industry has spent a lot of time and money getting maybe 90% of the way there, but this last bit has proven to be a lot more challenging than I think most people anticipated.
This has a lot of people thinking that it's going to be many decades before we finally get full autonomy (if ever) and that, in the interim, all we will have are very specific use cases: trucks on highways, mining machines (the above article writes about this), and so on.
This may very well be the case. Frankly, I don't know. But it's perhaps important to remember two things: (1) pessimists aren't usually the ones who change the world and (2) there is something known as the Gartner hype cycle, which is a graphical representation of how new innovations typically get adopted.
The Gartner hype cycle has five phases. The important ones for this discussion are the first three. First there is a technology trigger. Second there is an inflation of expectations (until it hits a peak). And then third, there is a trough of disillusionment. This is the moment where interest wanes and people begin to think it'll never happen (until it does happen).
That might be what we're living through right now, or it might not be. But my gut tells me that it's the former.
Last night I had a dream that I was driving around in a snowstorm and, for whatever reason, my tires had almost no tread on them. So I was all over the road. Strange. I have no idea what this means, if anything at all.
But it did remind me that I can absolutely imagine a time when the thought of driving your own car (outside of it being maybe a hobby) will seem positively archaic. I mean, think about how messy our current system is. Roads are a chaotic and oftentimes dangerous place.
The more interesting question for me though is: how will self-driving vehicles change our cities, our habits, and so on? In Elon Musk’s recently published Master Plan (Part Deux) he outlines 4 main goals for Tesla:
Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage
Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments
Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning
Enable your car to make money for you when you aren’t using it
Let’s think about what these could mean.
One translates into decentralized energy generation and storage. Now all of a sudden the cars on our roads will be roaming around our cities collecting and storing energy, eventually returning home at the end of the day to power our homes. I can already imagine fleets of sun worshipping cars chasing the light as it moves across our cities.
Two is recognition that self-driving vehicles are going to have a meaningful impact on traditional public transit. (Elon reveals that Tesla is working on high passenger-density urban transport.)
Three addresses the chaotic current state and the massive potential of networked cars.
Four is particularly interesting to me. I wonder to what extent this income will simply subsidize car ownership or if it could actually transform cars into an investment (rather than purely an expense). Will people end up buying self-driving vehicles in the same way that people buy real estate for yield?
Furthermore, how does this notion of a shared vehicle pool now completely change the way we think about parking requirements. For instance, today we think about parking in terms of individual usage. This tenant requires/wants X amount of parking. All 2-bedroom apartments require Y amount of parking.
But if we’re now all sharing our vehicles, parking requirements would then be based on some broader and collective demand curve. Parking would become less individualistic and instead become more of a yard where self-driving vehicles come to store themselves when not in use.
Once again, we reach a point where utilization rates go up for each vehicle and overall parking demand goes down. Good thing we’re getting rid of parking minimums.
What else could you see happening?
