A specialized cabin for your kid to drive to/from school alone, or for your toddler to drive to/from kindergarten alone. Robotaxis will definitely be used for this because it is super valuable to parents. But a small specialized cabin would be more economical than a standard (typical car size) cabin fitted with child seats.
Visiting dialysis station.
Specialized delivery cabins for particular types of cargo: refrigerated, extra suspension, stuff for transporting animals. We do this with trucks, but trucks are big because they’re optimized to need less human drivers per mass of cargo, and once that restriction is gone the disadvantages of big trucks should incentivize a move to smaller cargo vehicles.
I think these three are major enough that even if we stay with single vehicles, these use cases would merit development of specialized robotaxis to cover them, sooner or later. But a tug and cabin system gets there sooner.
In a car park? But they will be way more densely packed than cars in car parks, because no humans need access. The cabins get placed there and retrieved from there by autonomous engines.
I was thinking about people living in detached homes in residential neighborhoods, i.e. places where I would expect local politics to prevent car parks (‘parking lots’ in my colloquialisms) from being built at all.
Here are more use cases.
A specialized cabin for your kid to drive to/from school alone, or for your toddler to drive to/from kindergarten alone. Robotaxis will definitely be used for this because it is super valuable to parents. But a small specialized cabin would be more economical than a standard (typical car size) cabin fitted with child seats.
Visiting dialysis station.
Specialized delivery cabins for particular types of cargo: refrigerated, extra suspension, stuff for transporting animals. We do this with trucks, but trucks are big because they’re optimized to need less human drivers per mass of cargo, and once that restriction is gone the disadvantages of big trucks should incentivize a move to smaller cargo vehicles.
I think these three are major enough that even if we stay with single vehicles, these use cases would merit development of specialized robotaxis to cover them, sooner or later. But a tug and cabin system gets there sooner.
Specialized cabins seem like they would hurt this idea – where would people store all of their cabins?
In a car park? But they will be way more densely packed than cars in car parks, because no humans need access. The cabins get placed there and retrieved from there by autonomous engines.
Good answer!
I was thinking about people living in detached homes in residential neighborhoods, i.e. places where I would expect local politics to prevent car parks (‘parking lots’ in my colloquialisms) from being built at all.