Robots by John M. Jordan

Author:John M. Jordan
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2016-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

Now follow the money: who stands to win, and to lose?

Winners

Mapping and sensor companies will provide essential infrastructure for autonomous vehicles. In addition to Google, companies like Bosch, Velodyne, and Continental are making efforts in this market. Audi, BMW, and Daimler joined forces to purchase Nokia’s mapping unit in 2015.

If parking spaces could be reduced by a measurable percentage, urban planning could accommodate personal transportation in new ways. Institutions such as hospitals and high schools that spend heavily on parking could find new uses for large pieces of land; indeed, an MIT study found that up to one-third of some cities’ land area is devoted to parking.26 Self-driving cars could also play an important part in many cities’ efforts to ban cars from their downtowns: Brussels, Dublin, Helsinki, Madrid, Milan, and Oslo are all moving in this direction.

Intermediaries between passengers and transportation services providers could flourish. If people no longer owned a car for all the hours it sat still, ride-based models like Uber or Lyft could compete with time-share models of the sort used for fractional business jet ownership. At the lower end of the market, Zipcar or Hertz could still be useful providers.

Without hordes of people commuting to work in private cars at the same time, commuters could have more time at home, or more productive time in transit. Even if the timing and duration of the commutes remained roughly the same, being driven should lower blood pressure and increase productivity. Pedestrian accidents should become less frequent.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly 34,000 people in the United States died from motor vehicle accidents in 2013 alone;27 “motor vehicle traffic” generated 4 million trips to emergency departments in 2010.28 Any measurable reduction in those numbers would certainly benefit society.

Autonomous vehicles drive better than people, particularly in stop-and-go situations where vehicle-to-vehicle communications or “cloud automobiles” can reduce the accordion-like action of impatient and underinformed human drivers on congested roads. Improved traffic flow through coordination with other vehicles would reduce travel time, increase fuel economy, and reduce net energy consumption. Much like cloud computing, aggregating discrete assets into coordinated use lowers costs and reduces net overhead while dramatically increasing utilization of those assets.

On the downside, in light of the high cost of the failure of autonomous systems, inspecting and certifying them would need to be more stringent, more like inspecting and certifying private planes, and recalls of systems found to be defective might need to more extensive. If the state did not inspect autonomous vehicles directly, it would still need to certify inspection stations.

Much like the countries without copper wire telephone infrastructure that adopted cellular systems more rapidly than the United States, countries that build infrastructure for driverless cars without having to overlay it on traditional roads will be at an advantage.29

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