I speculate a lot on this blog about what electric and autonomous vehicles will mean for the future of our cities. The reason it’s speculation is because it’s phenomenally difficult to know with any sort of certainty what the downstream effects of these technologies will be.
I’ve seen some people claim that a car is still a car. That is, all of the same rules will apply even if they’re powered completely by renewals and we manage to make drivers obsolete (5-10 years?). But I fundamentally disagree with this line of thinking. There will be both positive and negative consequences. They are just yet to be seen.
Benedict Evans recently wrote a post where he started to think about where some of these changes might happen. And so I thought it might be valuable to throw a few of these into the discussion mix. Here are some of his ideas:
About half of car maintenance spending in the US goes to things directly related to the internal combustion engine. Electric takes that away.
There are about 150,000 gas stations in the US. They go, along with their associated convenience stores, which is where the margins are made. Interestingly enough, more than half of all US tobacco sales happen at gas stations. Where does that go?
It is estimated that electric vehicles will increase overall electricity demand by 10-20%. But this could disappear with the battery storage and off-peak power.
Globally, about 1 million people die every year from car accidents. In the US, something like 90% of all accidents are thought to be caused by human error and about 1/3 of fatal accidents involve alcohol. Autonomy has the potential to take most of this away. Personally, I think we’ll look back and think about how dangerous driving used to be and wonder how/why we all did it.
A complete rethink of parking. This obviously gets talked about a lot. ~14% of LA’s land is thought to be used for parking. My guess is that parking ratios/requirements go way down (we’re already in the 0 to 0.3 per residential unit territory here in Toronto) and parking garages transform into yards for AVs.
Autonomous vehicles once again rewrite the retail real estate landscape. Benedict believes they will create more billionaires in real estate and retail than in tech or manufacturing. I like how he describes big box retailing as an arbitrage of land costs, transportation costs, and people’s willingness to drive and park. This point is likely about AVs + e-commerce. See yesterday’s post about Amazon.
Finally, his last point is that autonomous vehicles could become a kind of mobile Panopticon. The Panopticon was an institutional building typology conceived of by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. It was based on the idea that inmates could all be monitored by a single watchman, without any of the inmates knowing if they were, in fact, being watched. It was a way of trying to impose strict obedience in prisons, and so on. Since virtually all autonomous vehicles require some sort of computer vision, Benedict argues that they could become the 21st century watchmen. Move over CCTV.
The other big question is about decentralization. New transportation technologies have consistently promoted greater suburbanization – think streetcar suburbs to car suburbs. The fact that you’ll be able to use your time more productively in an autonomous vehicle is continually floated as an argument for this trend to continue. But I haven’t made up my mind about this one.
Do you have any other thoughts on the downstream effects of electric and autonomous vehicles?
“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” – Jim Barksdale, former Netscape CEO
Fred Wilson wrote a post yesterday about Tesla’s data advantage in this self-driving car arms race that we are currently living through. (I found the above quote in the comment section of the post.)
In their Q3 2016 update, Tesla claims to have logged more than 1.3 billion miles on its vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. This is important because the more data it collects – across diverse road and weather conditions – the better the vehicles get at driving without human intervention. As Fred Wilson put it: “more data is better than more software engineers.” So that places Tesla ahead of Google, Uber, GM, et al.
I spent a lot of time driving over the past week, certainly more than usual, and I couldn’t help but think about how much better it would have been to instead sit in the backseat and read a book (or mindlessly scroll through Instagram).
I always try and use cruise control on long drives, but unless the road is fairly empty, I find it doesn’t work very well. Everyone is driving at different speeds and so I usually end up having to reset it / adjust it every so often.
The big question in my mind is still: How does the world look when driving longer distances doesn’t suck so much? What changes when you can get into your / a car (important distinction) at bedtime, fall asleep, and then wake up in a new place?
A lot, I think.
Tesla has just announced “full self-driving hardware” on all of its cars, including the upcoming Model 3, in anticipation of a big software update to be released sometime around December 2016 (hopefully).
This will enable fully autonomous driving “in almost all circumstances” – they mention rain, fog, and dust, but no snow – at a level of safety that Tesla believes is already 2x better than the average human driver.
This is being accomplished through a souped up onboard computer and by increasing the number of surround cameras from 4 to 8. Here’s a diagram (via Tesla) of how those cameras work and how they will capture a 360 degree view:
A couple of immediate thoughts / takeaways:
I speculate a lot on this blog about what electric and autonomous vehicles will mean for the future of our cities. The reason it’s speculation is because it’s phenomenally difficult to know with any sort of certainty what the downstream effects of these technologies will be.
I’ve seen some people claim that a car is still a car. That is, all of the same rules will apply even if they’re powered completely by renewals and we manage to make drivers obsolete (5-10 years?). But I fundamentally disagree with this line of thinking. There will be both positive and negative consequences. They are just yet to be seen.
Benedict Evans recently wrote a post where he started to think about where some of these changes might happen. And so I thought it might be valuable to throw a few of these into the discussion mix. Here are some of his ideas:
About half of car maintenance spending in the US goes to things directly related to the internal combustion engine. Electric takes that away.
There are about 150,000 gas stations in the US. They go, along with their associated convenience stores, which is where the margins are made. Interestingly enough, more than half of all US tobacco sales happen at gas stations. Where does that go?
It is estimated that electric vehicles will increase overall electricity demand by 10-20%. But this could disappear with the battery storage and off-peak power.
Globally, about 1 million people die every year from car accidents. In the US, something like 90% of all accidents are thought to be caused by human error and about 1/3 of fatal accidents involve alcohol. Autonomy has the potential to take most of this away. Personally, I think we’ll look back and think about how dangerous driving used to be and wonder how/why we all did it.
A complete rethink of parking. This obviously gets talked about a lot. ~14% of LA’s land is thought to be used for parking. My guess is that parking ratios/requirements go way down (we’re already in the 0 to 0.3 per residential unit territory here in Toronto) and parking garages transform into yards for AVs.
Autonomous vehicles once again rewrite the retail real estate landscape. Benedict believes they will create more billionaires in real estate and retail than in tech or manufacturing. I like how he describes big box retailing as an arbitrage of land costs, transportation costs, and people’s willingness to drive and park. This point is likely about AVs + e-commerce. See yesterday’s post about Amazon.
Finally, his last point is that autonomous vehicles could become a kind of mobile Panopticon. The Panopticon was an institutional building typology conceived of by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. It was based on the idea that inmates could all be monitored by a single watchman, without any of the inmates knowing if they were, in fact, being watched. It was a way of trying to impose strict obedience in prisons, and so on. Since virtually all autonomous vehicles require some sort of computer vision, Benedict argues that they could become the 21st century watchmen. Move over CCTV.
The other big question is about decentralization. New transportation technologies have consistently promoted greater suburbanization – think streetcar suburbs to car suburbs. The fact that you’ll be able to use your time more productively in an autonomous vehicle is continually floated as an argument for this trend to continue. But I haven’t made up my mind about this one.
Do you have any other thoughts on the downstream effects of electric and autonomous vehicles?
“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” – Jim Barksdale, former Netscape CEO
Fred Wilson wrote a post yesterday about Tesla’s data advantage in this self-driving car arms race that we are currently living through. (I found the above quote in the comment section of the post.)
In their Q3 2016 update, Tesla claims to have logged more than 1.3 billion miles on its vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. This is important because the more data it collects – across diverse road and weather conditions – the better the vehicles get at driving without human intervention. As Fred Wilson put it: “more data is better than more software engineers.” So that places Tesla ahead of Google, Uber, GM, et al.
I spent a lot of time driving over the past week, certainly more than usual, and I couldn’t help but think about how much better it would have been to instead sit in the backseat and read a book (or mindlessly scroll through Instagram).
I always try and use cruise control on long drives, but unless the road is fairly empty, I find it doesn’t work very well. Everyone is driving at different speeds and so I usually end up having to reset it / adjust it every so often.
The big question in my mind is still: How does the world look when driving longer distances doesn’t suck so much? What changes when you can get into your / a car (important distinction) at bedtime, fall asleep, and then wake up in a new place?
A lot, I think.
Tesla has just announced “full self-driving hardware” on all of its cars, including the upcoming Model 3, in anticipation of a big software update to be released sometime around December 2016 (hopefully).
This will enable fully autonomous driving “in almost all circumstances” – they mention rain, fog, and dust, but no snow – at a level of safety that Tesla believes is already 2x better than the average human driver.
This is being accomplished through a souped up onboard computer and by increasing the number of surround cameras from 4 to 8. Here’s a diagram (via Tesla) of how those cameras work and how they will capture a 360 degree view:
A couple of immediate thoughts / takeaways:
The Smart Summon feature is obviously very cool. Summon on your smartphone and your car will come find you. Elon Musk has said that it will eventually find you even if you happen to be on the other side of the country.
But this assumes that there are solid metal snake chargers (or something else) to automatically charge your vehicle somewhere on route. It also suggests that the vehicles won’t be equipped to cross international borders by themselves.
Elon Musk has said that (unfortunately) retrofitting older Tesla vehicles to full self-driving hardware will be very difficult and costly – the cost delta is greater than buying a new car. This reinforces my belief that leasing, rather than owning, is probably a wise strategy right now given how much change is happening in the auto space.
Lastly, here’s some fine print from the Tesla Auto Pilot website:
“Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year.”
Uber vs. Tesla. Round 1. Fight.
If you’d like to see a full self-driving Tesla in action, check out the video on their website.
The Smart Summon feature is obviously very cool. Summon on your smartphone and your car will come find you. Elon Musk has said that it will eventually find you even if you happen to be on the other side of the country.
But this assumes that there are solid metal snake chargers (or something else) to automatically charge your vehicle somewhere on route. It also suggests that the vehicles won’t be equipped to cross international borders by themselves.
Elon Musk has said that (unfortunately) retrofitting older Tesla vehicles to full self-driving hardware will be very difficult and costly – the cost delta is greater than buying a new car. This reinforces my belief that leasing, rather than owning, is probably a wise strategy right now given how much change is happening in the auto space.
Lastly, here’s some fine print from the Tesla Auto Pilot website:
“Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year.”
Uber vs. Tesla. Round 1. Fight.
If you’d like to see a full self-driving Tesla in action, check out the video on their website.
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