Besides being able to drive you home when you’re drunk, what can you smart car do for you that you couldn’t already do with a regular car? Cruise for parking? These are just minor conveniences and for large swathes of the population, they’re likely not welcome either.
Save millions of lives by being safer driving than humans?
Drive you home the rest of the time?
Drive you cross country overnight while you sleep?
Come and pick you up at the airport after a holiday?
Make you money during the day as an autotaxi while you're not using it?
Save your life by avoiding accidents you didn't see?
Radically bring down the cost of taxis and car hire for those who don't own a car?
In our lifetimes all cars will be electric driverless cars in at least some countries. It may not be Tesla but the future is coming.
That’s not a perceptible change. It’s a wonderful thing and I’m all for people not dying, but people aren’t suddenly going to notice the difference. It’s not like people entering a car think “Am I going to die?!” every time they go to work.
> Drive you home the rest of the time?
Again I don’t see this as being more than a convenience. At beta it leads to more screen time zoning out with a Netflix a la train commuting.
> Drive you cross country overnight while you sleep?
The vast majority of people can’t afford to take a week off to travel across the country so they would not notice this.
> Come and pick you up at the airport after a holiday?
Again a convenience, not a major change. One can already call an Uber from the airport.
> Make you money during the day as an autotaxi while you're not using it?
I don’t see this being as popular an idea as people make it out to be. The phrase “Make money while you sleep” has been pitched for years and in the case of renting your car out overnight, doesn’t factor insurance costs and the race to the bottom on pricing . Once that catches up there won’t be much money to be made.
> Save your life by avoiding accidents you didn't see?
Again this is a great thing but not perceptible to the daily user.
> Radically bring down the cost of taxis and car hire for those who don't own a car?
It’s already lower than the cost of ownership thanks to VC money.
> In our lifetimes all cars will be electric driverless cars in at least some countries. It may not be Tesla but the future is coming.
Electric has nothing to do with “smart”. It can be a gas engine. It can be a fuel cell. It could be something we don’t even know about yet.
Electric has nothing to do with “smart”.
This is the same mistake big automakers are still making. Electric is the future, it is also radically simpler, allows for automated recharges etc. It's be very hard to build an autonomous gas car.
Will be interesting to see how it plays out - it's quite possible other manufacturers will see the light and start producing autonomous cars (they certainly have a production advantage at the moment), but I think the advantage Tesla has is that they own the whole stack and know where they're going.
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
I think you're significantly underestimating the impact it would have.
So what game changing functionality do you think smart cars provide?
One of my bets is that it will result in people moving away from the city - one of the major drawbacks of rural life is driving distance.
The used luxury car market has out-dated electronics that cannot be upgraded.
Not as bad as epoxying an iPad2 to the dash, but close enough.
Meanwhile, I think Tesla’s are at the equivalent stage of the original iPhone or the 3gs.
We still have a way to go before this is a commoditized standard.