I like futurism, but this is not it. This is an attempt to forecast how economic incentives will get rearranged in the near future conditional on the self-driving cars technology becoming widespread. This attempt was a failure.
Moreover, it was such an obvious failure, that the only two explanations I can come up with is either that the author has no clue at all about business and economics, or that he dumped a stream of consciousness without bothering to spend five minutes thinking about it.
If it is trivial to do better with a few moments of reflection then make with the interesting comments. I see your near universal non-specific disdainful comments as a significant part of why LW is less pleasant to post to.
The two root problems in your post are that you treat self-driving cars as cost-free instant teleportation devices and that you don’t understand which costs drive the particular forms that businesses take.
Diversification of vehicle types
Somewhat, but much less than you expect because contemporary car design is driven by law-mandated safety requirements. The same requirements put a floor on the cars’ weight.
There is also the fact that a general-purpose car will spend less time sitting in a parking lot doing nothing while waiting for someone to require it. Renting specialized equipment is expensive partially because of this—there is a lot of idle time.
Services at home
Nope. It’s not the case that the doctor doesn’t come to your house because she can’t afford a driver. The doctor doesn’t come to your house first because her time is more valuable than yours and second because it’s hard (=expensive) to bring along all the nurses and assistants and the medical equipment that she has around her office. And, by the way, the doctor doesn’t fill out the insurance paperwork—she has a much cheaper assistant who does.
Of course you can get a doctor (and a hairdresser, and a tatoo artist, etc.) to come to your house, even without self-driving cars. It’s just going to be very very expensive. I don’t expect this to change.
Rent anything
The cost of a driver is a minor component of the cost of renting large, expensive, luxury things. Taking it out will not make them suddenly affordable. And, by the way, who will unload, set up, dismantle and load back into the self-driving truck all these jacuzzis and huge sound systems?
Also, about the “stuff that previously only millionaires or billionaires would afford” that your median-income person would be able to rent if only you take the truck driver out of the equation—literally nothing comes to my mind.
Self-driving hotel rooms
They are called caravans or camper vans or RVs. They exist. Have you tried renting them? They are quite expensive to rent, much more so than hotel rooms.
Rise of alcoholism and drug abuse
″ for a large number of people, driving is their only reason not to drink or do drugs”—that’s, um, wrong. I have no idea how you came up with such nonsense.
Autonomous boats and yachts
There is no such thing as a “sailing license” (in most countries that I know of) and renting sizeable boats is quite expensive. It will not become less expensive if the boat has an autopilot. Recreational boating doesn’t want fully autonomous boats, anyway, and commercial shipping already uses autopilots and still finds out that it needs people to run ships.
Mobile storage
I think this already has been mentioned—storing things in trucks is much, MUCH more expensive than storing them in warehouses. Also, just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing was all the rage a couple of decades ago. The enthusiasm has cooled down considerably since then, mostly because people have found out that JIT production is not robust to disruptions and does not degrade gracefully if something goes wrong. Hint: something always goes wrong.
Renting a self-driving truck is not going to be cheaper than renting a regular truck (the rental company does not supply a driver in any case). Go ahead, look up how much renting trucks costs and then see if you want to store stuff in them.
contemporary car design is driven by law-mandated safety requirements
I don’t know about your country but in mine (Germany) the car industry has so much influence they basically write their own laws. (That’s how we got those safety requirements: They’re defense against cheaper cars from abroad.) If their business model stops being focused on general use cars, the laws will change very quickly.
a general-purpose car will spend less time sitting in a parking lot doing nothing while waiting for someone to require it
Sure! Not a problem if its TCO is pretty low. Most of those more specialized vehicles will be cheaper than general purpose cars, because they have sharply reduced capabilities. A great number of them will be pretty small, just enough to carry a single person or (in an even smaller, windowless car) a piece of cargo. Others will have to require paying a premium, but they’ll mostly be doing things general purpose cars cannot do, like transport a horse.
Side note: Some of those specialized cars will also be sold, not rented. I imagine rich parents gifting their seven year olds their own car. And as soon as someone makes what is basically just a bed on wheels, a small minority of people will live in those things.
The doctor doesn’t come to your house first because her time is more valuable than yours
That’s a good point. So maybe it starts with hairdressers.
Of course offering services at home will be most attractive to those who are new to their field and haven’t sunk costs into an office.
and second because it’s hard (=expensive) to bring along all the nurses and assistants and the medical equipment that she has around her office.
Most doctors need very little equipment most of the time. Some types of doctors (psychiatrists, dermatologists) need very little equipment period.
The cost of a driver is a minor component of the cost of renting large, expensive, luxury things. Taking it out will not make them suddenly affordable.
The main cost is insurance and autonomous vehicles means that one drops hard. The lack of a driver mostly means you can rent things out in a very large operating radius.
And, by the way, who will unload, set up, dismantle and load back into the self-driving truck all these jacuzzis and huge sound systems?
Most of the things never leave the “truck”. The vehicle is built around them, on a standardized flat chassis. Some of them will have staff, sure. For example, you’d have a bartender if you were renting out a highly specialized mobile bar that has casks of twenty different excellent whiskeys and might be popular with bachelor parties.
Also, about the “stuff that previously only millionaires or billionaires would afford” that your median-income person would be able to rent if only you take the truck driver out of the equation—literally nothing comes to my mind.
Alright. I’ll leave it at that.
They are called caravans or camper vans or RVs. They exist. Have you tried renting them? They are quite expensive to rent, much more so than hotel rooms.
You’re simply wrong about rental RVs: their prices are not much more expensive than hotel rooms anymore. (They do remain more expensive than small rental cars.) Check for yourself at places like http://www.apollorv.com/ . They’ll get cheaper by going electric (like all cars will) due to less moving parts and less repairs. They’ll get cheaper again by going autonomous (like all cars will) due to less mass for the driver cab and less accidents. So even if it was just self-driving RVs, they’d be an opportunity to disrupt stationary hotels.
But RVs are lower class than most hotel rooms, they’re cramped, they’re optimized for carrying lots of supplies and they have kitchens. A lot of people wouldn’t want to use an RV even if it was half the price of a typical hotel room. If you have a self-driving RV and you want to really tear into the market share of stationary hotels, you throw out the kitchen and most of the cupboards and put in the best bed that you can make fit and a great entertainment system.
″ for a large number of people, driving is their only reason not to drink or do drugs”—that’s, um, wrong. I have no idea how you came up with such nonsense.
Couple of years in psychiatric research.
no such thing as a “sailing license” (in most countries that I know of)
So you don’t know a lot of European countries? I don’t know a lot of non-European ones, so you may be right this isn’t a factor there.
renting sizeable boats is quite expensive
Exactly. And why? Because the risk of accidents, and the insurance to cover that, is a larger cost factor than with cars. And the main advantage of vehicle autonomy is the sharply reduced number of accidents.
Maybe many don’t. But recreational divers and anglers and people who just need to get across the water will be happy with it.
commercial shipping already uses autopilots and still finds out that it needs people to run ships
Yes but it needs way fewer people. If you charter a yacht now, you have a crew of at least 5 people. With an autonomous yacht, you can go down to one crewmember who mostly cleans the place, and maybe a cook.
Renting a self-driving truck is not going to be cheaper than renting a regular truck
Your assertion is ludicrous. Yes it will be cheaper, and a lot. The self-driving truck doesn’t need to carry all the mass that the driver needs, including fragile points of failure such as windows, it doesn’t have mandatory stop times, it gets into way fewer accidents, it basically cannot be stolen. If you don’t think a self-driving truck company can undercut a traditional trucking company, I hope you don’t run a trucking company.
Sorry, I’ll bail out of the detailed debate, primarily because it’s all handwaving and there are very few falsifiable assertions in there. You say that it’s going to get much much cheaper, I say that it won’t—and there is no way for us to resolve this disagreement. As an aside, several statements of fact that you make here are wrong (no, you don’t need a crew of at least five people to charter a yacht; yes, RV rentals are much more expensive than hotel rooms—have you rented an RV? I have).
For what it’s worth, my original opinion remains intact.
I like futurism, but this is not it. This is an attempt to forecast how economic incentives will get rearranged in the near future conditional on the self-driving cars technology becoming widespread. This attempt was a failure.
Moreover, it was such an obvious failure, that the only two explanations I can come up with is either that the author has no clue at all about business and economics, or that he dumped a stream of consciousness without bothering to spend five minutes thinking about it.
If it is trivial to do better with a few moments of reflection then make with the interesting comments. I see your near universal non-specific disdainful comments as a significant part of why LW is less pleasant to post to.
Among the most pleasant places to post to are mutual-adoration communities. There are some on the web. They are among the most useless, too, though.
The way it usually works is that the place to get good information is different from the place to get your hedons. That’s not an accident.
I don’t see how it was a failure, so you’re wrong about it being obvious.
Given the intensity of your criticism, I wonder why you aren’t being more specific about the faults you see here.
The two root problems in your post are that you treat self-driving cars as cost-free instant teleportation devices and that you don’t understand which costs drive the particular forms that businesses take.
Somewhat, but much less than you expect because contemporary car design is driven by law-mandated safety requirements. The same requirements put a floor on the cars’ weight.
There is also the fact that a general-purpose car will spend less time sitting in a parking lot doing nothing while waiting for someone to require it. Renting specialized equipment is expensive partially because of this—there is a lot of idle time.
Nope. It’s not the case that the doctor doesn’t come to your house because she can’t afford a driver. The doctor doesn’t come to your house first because her time is more valuable than yours and second because it’s hard (=expensive) to bring along all the nurses and assistants and the medical equipment that she has around her office. And, by the way, the doctor doesn’t fill out the insurance paperwork—she has a much cheaper assistant who does.
Of course you can get a doctor (and a hairdresser, and a tatoo artist, etc.) to come to your house, even without self-driving cars. It’s just going to be very very expensive. I don’t expect this to change.
The cost of a driver is a minor component of the cost of renting large, expensive, luxury things. Taking it out will not make them suddenly affordable. And, by the way, who will unload, set up, dismantle and load back into the self-driving truck all these jacuzzis and huge sound systems?
Also, about the “stuff that previously only millionaires or billionaires would afford” that your median-income person would be able to rent if only you take the truck driver out of the equation—literally nothing comes to my mind.
They are called caravans or camper vans or RVs. They exist. Have you tried renting them? They are quite expensive to rent, much more so than hotel rooms.
″ for a large number of people, driving is their only reason not to drink or do drugs”—that’s, um, wrong. I have no idea how you came up with such nonsense.
There is no such thing as a “sailing license” (in most countries that I know of) and renting sizeable boats is quite expensive. It will not become less expensive if the boat has an autopilot. Recreational boating doesn’t want fully autonomous boats, anyway, and commercial shipping already uses autopilots and still finds out that it needs people to run ships.
I think this already has been mentioned—storing things in trucks is much, MUCH more expensive than storing them in warehouses. Also, just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing was all the rage a couple of decades ago. The enthusiasm has cooled down considerably since then, mostly because people have found out that JIT production is not robust to disruptions and does not degrade gracefully if something goes wrong. Hint: something always goes wrong.
Renting a self-driving truck is not going to be cheaper than renting a regular truck (the rental company does not supply a driver in any case). Go ahead, look up how much renting trucks costs and then see if you want to store stuff in them.
I don’t know about your country but in mine (Germany) the car industry has so much influence they basically write their own laws. (That’s how we got those safety requirements: They’re defense against cheaper cars from abroad.) If their business model stops being focused on general use cars, the laws will change very quickly.
Sure! Not a problem if its TCO is pretty low. Most of those more specialized vehicles will be cheaper than general purpose cars, because they have sharply reduced capabilities. A great number of them will be pretty small, just enough to carry a single person or (in an even smaller, windowless car) a piece of cargo. Others will have to require paying a premium, but they’ll mostly be doing things general purpose cars cannot do, like transport a horse.
Side note: Some of those specialized cars will also be sold, not rented. I imagine rich parents gifting their seven year olds their own car. And as soon as someone makes what is basically just a bed on wheels, a small minority of people will live in those things.
That’s a good point. So maybe it starts with hairdressers.
Of course offering services at home will be most attractive to those who are new to their field and haven’t sunk costs into an office.
Most doctors need very little equipment most of the time. Some types of doctors (psychiatrists, dermatologists) need very little equipment period.
The main cost is insurance and autonomous vehicles means that one drops hard. The lack of a driver mostly means you can rent things out in a very large operating radius.
Most of the things never leave the “truck”. The vehicle is built around them, on a standardized flat chassis. Some of them will have staff, sure. For example, you’d have a bartender if you were renting out a highly specialized mobile bar that has casks of twenty different excellent whiskeys and might be popular with bachelor parties.
Alright. I’ll leave it at that.
You’re simply wrong about rental RVs: their prices are not much more expensive than hotel rooms anymore. (They do remain more expensive than small rental cars.) Check for yourself at places like http://www.apollorv.com/ . They’ll get cheaper by going electric (like all cars will) due to less moving parts and less repairs. They’ll get cheaper again by going autonomous (like all cars will) due to less mass for the driver cab and less accidents. So even if it was just self-driving RVs, they’d be an opportunity to disrupt stationary hotels.
But RVs are lower class than most hotel rooms, they’re cramped, they’re optimized for carrying lots of supplies and they have kitchens. A lot of people wouldn’t want to use an RV even if it was half the price of a typical hotel room. If you have a self-driving RV and you want to really tear into the market share of stationary hotels, you throw out the kitchen and most of the cupboards and put in the best bed that you can make fit and a great entertainment system.
Couple of years in psychiatric research.
So you don’t know a lot of European countries? I don’t know a lot of non-European ones, so you may be right this isn’t a factor there.
Exactly. And why? Because the risk of accidents, and the insurance to cover that, is a larger cost factor than with cars. And the main advantage of vehicle autonomy is the sharply reduced number of accidents.
Maybe many don’t. But recreational divers and anglers and people who just need to get across the water will be happy with it.
Yes but it needs way fewer people. If you charter a yacht now, you have a crew of at least 5 people. With an autonomous yacht, you can go down to one crewmember who mostly cleans the place, and maybe a cook.
Your assertion is ludicrous. Yes it will be cheaper, and a lot. The self-driving truck doesn’t need to carry all the mass that the driver needs, including fragile points of failure such as windows, it doesn’t have mandatory stop times, it gets into way fewer accidents, it basically cannot be stolen. If you don’t think a self-driving truck company can undercut a traditional trucking company, I hope you don’t run a trucking company.
Sorry, I’ll bail out of the detailed debate, primarily because it’s all handwaving and there are very few falsifiable assertions in there. You say that it’s going to get much much cheaper, I say that it won’t—and there is no way for us to resolve this disagreement. As an aside, several statements of fact that you make here are wrong (no, you don’t need a crew of at least five people to charter a yacht; yes, RV rentals are much more expensive than hotel rooms—have you rented an RV? I have).
For what it’s worth, my original opinion remains intact.
I should be disappointed, but disappointment requires surprise.