I was watching a Jvlogger (Japan vlogger) I'm friends with and he was talking about self-driving cars and how he expects that this transition will be like the transition between the horse and buggy to the automobile...meaning in a few years everything will go toward self-driving cars very rapidly.
Again, this is all based on the speculation that we'd be going to fully self-driving vehicles in let's say a decade. I seriously doubt that would happen, but just to play along...
While that's a fascinating concept I think it would be met with a LOT of issues and questions that I figured I'd also discuss here:
- Would self-driving cars promote ride-sharing services more where people just won't need or want to own vehicles?
- Would non self-driving cars be considered a hazard by some governments who want to force older cars off the road and in that case...
- Would more cars be retro-fitted with this technology, or are we going to have an overwhelming need to recycle/destroy old cars?
- Would we need less lanes of traffic and would we start shutting down/re-purposing lanes of traffic that are no longer needed?
- How radically would "car culture" be affected by these changes? Would people no longer consider the car as a status symbol the same way?
As I mentioned before, once more cars are self-driving, I think we'll start seeing much lighter, smaller vehicles that won't require as much safety/luxury built in and I'm still not sure why people disagree with this concept. Once we have self-driving cars and a networked grid (theoretically), our commute times will probably be down to 1/3 of what they are now. If all cars are lighter and on a networked grid, there's much less need for heavy safety equipment, and it's a multiplying factor..the lighter the vehicle, the less damage done if it did hit an object.
Yes, larger vehicles would still be needed for hauling things, but I predict for a lot of people they'll be rented for a short time basis.