I've been thinking a bit about good places to adopt this early.

Lānaʻi might be a good candidate: absolute isolation from other road systems, a small population (3000 people), and a single owner (Larry Ellison) who's just the sort of filthy rich technophile who might be willing to replace an entire island's cars.

Singapore could be the first major city to make the move, due to its authoritarian government (hey, I don't like it, but it might make this easier), strict rules to keep the stock of vehicles relatively new, and relative isolation from other road systems (only two bridges to Malaysia).

I'm not entirely sure just how much Larry can do - it's really the 2% of the island that's state owned that includes the public roads.

Hawaii in general seems like a great place to start a lot of "infrastructure 2.0" (if I may carelessly make up a term) projects geographically, but the logistics are tough because so much of the population is desperately poor, there's already a lot of class/ethnic tension and to top it all off, local government is a mess.

I see a future where governments will make a laws about "manual control" like they make laws about airbags, minimum mileage and TPMS now.

In 2025 automakers simply won't be allowed to make a "manual control" car, and by 2050 there will be basically none left on the roads.

While I don't doubt things will move in this direction, dates like this seem extremely optimistic. Just speaking of the US, there are something like 250 million cars on the roads, and we buy cars at the rate of about 12-16 million a year. While I can see fully autonomous cars becoming available in the next decade, it will be some time before all manufacturers have refined enough systems, and legalization is in place, let alone mandating. Then you have the slow process of manual cars cycling out and getting replaced by autonomous vehicles. Another question is for the low income people that subsist on sub $1000 used cars, does a junker autonomous car continue to function, or are the poor now having to devote a significantly larger portion of their income to transportation? Then what happens to motorcyclists? I can't see them functioning autonomously. In some countries that would be a huge hit given the ubiquity of small displacement motorcycles.

To be entirely honest, I don't expect to see the elimination of occupant driven motor vehicles in my lifetime.

I think the existing auto fleet can be overcome fairly easily, albeit by a company that enters the market in a position that's initially losing.

The model I see that will remove individually-owned, occupant driven vehicles will some variation of:

My company will purchase your auto and credit you some amount of haulage on my autocar network, and perhaps some cash. For the low income people using sub-$1,000 cars a token amount of credit will be sufficient. The real value for them will be the convenience and reliability of transport they get from my system. Imagine not losing your hard-won job because your "beater" car failed at an inopportune time. Imagine not having unexpected car expenses that make you choose between, say, food and transportation.

The higher-end market will be a tougher sell, but there are likely productivity, personal time, and environmental impact arguments that can be made there.

I'll sell your car (likely at a loss) in some area when I haven't achieved market penetration yet (or for salvage). Once you're bought-in to my network you might leave me for a competitor, but ideally I'll use regulation, contractual lock-in, and other tools to attempt to keep Customers tied to my product until I've recouped my initial investment.

I think it could work. I don't particularly like it, but I think it has at least a non-zero possibility of happening.

Where do parents fit in this utopia of yours? I've got 2 car seats and a pram and some toys in my car in the driveway. Personally owned transport makes more sense for people who have to move things other than themselves and a laptop (tools, babies, etc)

Utopia? Did you read the last sentence of my comment? I think a self-driving car future is a future with disempowered individuals in a neo-feudal transportation world. It sounds terrible to me, but I think it's likely to happen (at least in the US). There are practical and economic advantages in that future and some large existing economic players who can profit from it.

I'd tend agree with your comment in the short term. Moving my daughter's child safety car seat would be a pain, for sure. Longer-term I would expect to see modular standards emerge for child safety car seats. You lock your child's seat into the standardized base that's hiding under a seat cushion in the back of the car. There are already stroller / pram systems that incorporate the child safety car seat, so I could expect that market to boom, too.

Moving things besides yourself is something a lot of people in urban areas already do with public transit. With a private autocar service it's more likely that you'd get more space than on a subway or bus, so I'd think it would be even easier to move more than just yourself. I would expect a rental option to let you keep the car with you, as opposed to it returning to the fleet when you reach your destination.

In a world with self-driving cars and a way to summon one at will, how many do you think we will need?

In a world where autonomous car are effectively autonomous on ALL roads, that could work. But we are really far from here. How does autonomous car fare when the infrastructure sucks ?

I imagine this going one of two ways: either human-operated vehicles might be outlawed, or auto companies will apply market pressure to favor people not manually driving (steep, steep discounts in insurance for self-driving vehicles, since many states still require insurance but if the self-driving cars reach the safety goals they're aiming at, it's basically free money for insurers to insure them at any price).

If we can require all self-driving cars to take orders from a central authority, we can do some pretty amazing things:

- Most traffic problems are a result of human (over)caution and poor merging technique. A centrally coordinated system of self-driving cars are perfectly aware of each other's intentions and could run much smaller safety margins, as well as make lane/exit access perfectly equitable. The effective carrying capacity of highways would increase immensely, and traffic jams would be a thing of the past.

- 100% of cars on the same coordination system would also allow us to do away with most stoplights, as it could simply modulate speed so that intersections are always running in both directions, but cars never collide. (This could be overridden for pedestrian crossings, and wouldn't be much of a benefit in the city, but in places that are already pedestrian-hostile - i.e. most of Real America - it wouldn't make things much worse and pedestrians would be pretty rare.)

Designing such a system to use a centralized authority, as opposed to having a distributed architecture, sounds like an invitation for all kinds of chaos. Given how seductively "easy" centralized solutions seem to be I don't doubt things will go this way, with results varying from hilarious to frustrating to tragic. (I'm not saying that distributed architecture is a panacea, but it seems like a centralized system is both wholly disempowering to the individual and much more vulnerable to all sorts of corruption.)

Model it on Air Traffic Control perhaps? So that local traffic is handled by a local system, but longer distance traffic is handed off to a higher tier one?

A distributed system would let people behave in ways advantageous to themselves, to everyone else's detriment, by causing their safety systems to yield to the dangerous driver (i.e. what happens currently). If there's nothing stopping people from creating an "everyone needs to wait for me" situation, they will.

That's a problem that has to be worked around in a system with a centralized control architecture, too. Presumably there will be some safety systems acting autonomously in the car (latency and network reliability being what they are) and those systems will be gamed.

To boil my position down: I want to see an Internet-style architecture rather than a "Bell System" style architecture. I'd rather have "smarter cars" with "dumber roads" and as little mandated centralized control as possible.

In a decentralized system attestation of identity (likely tied to one or more existing civil methods) and attribution of actions observed to individual vehicles would definitely have to be a component. Any identity system cannot approach 100% reliability, but if every car is able to report to law enforcement (or private driver reputation-tracking networks) the observations it makes of the behavior of other drivers I would expect that "cheaters" would be visible as statistical outliers.

"The car to my left doesn't answer as a known transponder challenge/response in the vehicle reputation database I am querying. I am going to assign a lower priority to any non-emergency events it is reporting to me."

"Hey-- that car just started broadcasting a different transponder response. Something is really, really funny where. I'm going to alert cars in my proximity that something is up so that they can physically identify the car with their LIDAR / imaging / etc. and treat it cautiously. If enough funny-business occurs eventually law enforcement will be alerted and physical interdiction can occur."

"According to the vehicle database I'm subscribed to this car always traverses statistically similar routes 15% more quickly than other cars. Other cars in its proximity on these routes have their traversal slowed as compared to their traversal of the same routes when this care is not present. It sounds like funny business is at-play. I'm going to cast a vote for this car to be more likely to be subject to an inspection."

etc.

I'd prefer such a world to not involve the ability for totalitarian (or-- ahem-- certain republics who purport to be democratic in nature and are filled with power-mad bureaucrats conducting dragnet surveillance) to use these tools for public surveillance, but I'm resigned to that fate. Self-driving cars themselves aren't a threat to freedom, but the infrastructures of surveillance and control that will grow up around them almost certainly will be.

Freedom aside, whatever happens is going to end up being an information security nightmare. Too many disciplines who have never had any exposure to information security are going to intersect with this technology, and each of those intersections is going to be ripe with all kinds of interesting threats and failure modes. People will be inconvenienced. People will be robbed, physically assaulted, and violated. People will die. I have no illusions that criminals are unsophisticated and that these systems won't be attacked in every possible way.

    > If we can require all self-driving cars to take orders
    > from a central authority, we can do some pretty amazing
    > things

The possibilities for fine-grained congestion and peak-usage charging are endless, for example

Probably very unlikely unless you solve poverty.

I think it is extremely likely that hailing and renting a self driving will be much, much cheaper than owning, maintaining and insuring your own vehicle.

I have many friends who buy cars from the $500-$1000 range and then drive them for a few years, fixing everything themselves using replacement parts. The cars are usually 15-20 years old. The insurance is $100-$200 a year. If they drive daily,do you think anyone will rent them a brand new, technology packed car for what is effectively $20 a month? HN lives in this bubble when everyone can afford a new car, or at least a lease on a car, but if you move slightly out of the 1st world countries(and by that I mean good countries with free healthcare, free education, but still with developing economies), you will find that for a lot of people $200 is half of their monthly salary. And yet those people drive their cars too. They don't live in poverty by any means, it's just that the standard of living is different than in the West.

>do you think anyone will rent them a brand new, technology packed car for what is effectively $20 a month?

Self driving cars won't always be new though. The price of the technology will drop rapidly as they become mass produced. And there will always an economic advantage to renting vs owning. The cost of the car is effectively divided over several people instead of one.

Except it will never be cheaper than public transportation. If public transportation is available, they will take public transportation. If public transportation is not available, neither will be driverless taxis.

That could be true... assuming that the government is able to adopt innovations and cost saving measures across all of their public transit systems fast enough to keep up with price drops from private industry.

I suspect that will not be the case. While public transportation may catch up on price (if the political will exists to push it there), I do think there will be a period of time where hailing a self driving car will be cheaper than some or most public transit options.

Will there be a difference between a self driving 1-5 person machine and a self driving 5-1000 person machine?

A robotaxi can take you to the local robobus hub, which drives you to the local robotrain point, whereupon a Just In Time (un)scheduled train will leave, as all journeys can be coordinated.

I can't imagine that there won't be strong efforts made by any entrants into the individual autocar market not to hinder the penetration of new public transit systems, and to hobble existing systems.

Why not? If driverless taxis are cheap enough, even a small town or rural area could have some. Wheras public transportation is available only in very large cities.

I imagine buses would be much cheaper and more prevalent when you don't have to pay for a driver.

I don't think having to pay for a human bus driver is the primary obstacle preventing us from having cheap and efficient public transportation.

Source: Most of Europe.

The issues with public transports are the same as with biking in the US: It works better when cities are really dense. Suburbs destroy the efficiency of public transport, biking, walking, inline skating, and any other non-car transportation.

Europe is very different from the US. People will drive 1-2 hours to get to work, which is not really done as much in Europe.

It's a myth that poor people drive. They depend on biking, walking, bumming rides from their friends and relatives, and public transportation.

I'd be interested to see statistics from more rural areas where there isn't any robust (or, in some cases, any) public transit. In urban areas, where living without a car is a possibility, I don't doubt that the low income population doesn't drive. In more rural areas I suspect it's the opposite.

Public transportation is not cheap and/or available in many places in the world. Look at all the cheap beater cars (even in the US), those aren't going driverless anytime soon.

Your can downvote me for days but that won't make your statements correct. In the 2000 Bay Area Travel Survey, driving was a minority share of trips for people in the bottom income quintile. Walking, biking, transit, riding as passengers in cars, and "other" are 50% more popular than driving.

Jokes on you. My account cannot downvote people yet.

See, that's the thing with Hacker News. A lot of people here think Silicon Valley is the center of the world and everywhere is just like us, when the fact, we are living in a little bubble and a lot of the US operates very differently.

It doesn't matter how big the empty part of the United States is. The Bay Area is as populous as Sweden and therefore big enough to do things its own way. It may in fact be true that the poor person in Pecos County, Texas, drives around in his own car, it is also an irrelevant fact on a population-weighted basis.

So when you said "It's a myth that poor people drive."

You really mean "It's a myth that poor people drive in heavily populated cities.", in that case, you would be correct lol.

This is getting downvoted because it sounds pretty flippant from a US point of view, but it's actually perfectly accurate for most of the world. In much of Africa, you're middle class if you have a bicycle, and only the rich own cars. Motorcycles are wildly popular in much of Asia for the same reason: they're a lot more affordable than cars, not just to own but to operate as well.