The main reason we are excited about autonomous vehicles is that the massive reductions in fatalities they will bring about. Another reason to be excited is the potential of driverless cars to use far less fuel than driven cars. We think because most self driving cars will 1) be single passenger vehicles that will have less mass and require less fuel 2) self driving vehicles will be inherently safer and require less heavy safety features, further lightening the mass of the vehicle and its fuel consumption. 3) Autonomous vehicles may never have to slow down and stop at traffic lights, wasting energy in braking. In this line of thinking a recent article at published at e360.yale.edu made much the same point.

 Obviously, far fewer crashes means fewer fatalities and fewer traffic jams, but it also could mean a big change in car design and fuel consumption.

As originally pointed out by climate and energy scientist Amory Lovins, only about one percent of the energy in a gallon of gasoline goes to moving the driver forward. About 75 percent of the energy leaves the tailpipe as heat and almost all the rest is needed to move a 4,000-pound car. But the bulk of that 4,000 pounds is only there to keep the driver and passengers safe in the relatively unlikely event of a major crash. If that risk was reduced dramatically, 4,000 pounds might come down closer to 750 to 1,000 pounds.

Other technology, known as dedicated short range communications (DSRC), enables a car to tell an intersection that it is approaching. A computer system at the intersection would then be able to coordinate all the approaching cars — assuming they were self-driving cars — and funnel them through the crossroads without stopping. The reduction in crashes could be dramatic.

Of course, a massive reduction in fuel consumption means a lot less money is being paid to countries like Saudi Arabia that produce oil. This will cause a lot of political pain and a lot of political fallout as noted in Foreign Policy a couple of months ago.

The other potential improvement for fuel consumption that I didn’t see explicitly mentioned in the e360 article was the idea of platooning or road trains as being developed by Volvo in Europe. We did some rough back of the envelope calculations that if road trains were ubiquitous they could reduce fuel consumption in the US ~813,000 barrels of oil per day. When you think of combining road trains with super light, efficient vehicles that never have to stop at traffic lights, the fuel savings are immense.

Thanks to Paul Godsmark for putting these up on our Facebook page and apologies for not posting them sooner, both Mat and I have been swamped at work.

I was just reading about the tanker driver strikes in Britain on the BBC. Now I don’t want to politicise this – I’m not backing one side or the other. However, the obvious implication of driverless car technology is that 15-20 years from now, news stories like this simply won’t occur as there probably won’t be truck drivers. I’m thinking more 15 years given the rate companies like Rio Tinto are pushing to replace employees with driverless technology (in both trucks and trains) – why not logistics companies as well?

So on one hand we will see less strikes, and if I was a business owner, the more my drivers went on strike the more I would try and replace them with AI or robotic technology. I’m not sure where this leaves drivers though? Given that they will soon be in a dying industry should they strike more to wring every pay rise and concession out of their bosses while they still can? Or should they encourage lower wages and conditions so they can avoid being replaced?

I would argue from a truck driver’s point of view that 1) if the employment market is relatively flexible and 2) I have upgraded my skills to get a job after 3) I become aware driverless technology will replace me…. then the logical answer is to strike for better pay while I still can.

As we reported not long ago Australian Mining giant Rio Tinto is planning on introducing 150 driverless trucks. Now it seems they are pushing driverless technology even further by aiming to make a large number of their trains completely driverless between 2014 and 2015. This change will cost the company $478 million AUD and could lead to 500 train drivers losing their jobs or being reassigned. It’s a lot of money for Rio Tinto to be spending, however, newspapers have reported that Rio Tinto’s train drivers are being paid $200,000+ as of 2o11, meaning if the change goes smoothly it will make its investment back by 2020.

It seems to me that when the price is right Rio Tinto is pretty keen to pioneer various forms of driverless technology. If this change is competitive then towards the middle and the end of the decade we can expect to see a lot more companies and public transport systems upgrading to this sort of technology.

We have recently done a couple of posts on fuel efficiency (the SARTE project in Europe and California’s 100MPG ‘X-Prize’).It’s gotten me thinking about how much oil can be saved from having everybody using driverless cars and I’ve decided to start a series of posts featuring my back of the envelope calculations on how many barrels of oil could be saved if everybody in the United States utilized a fossil fuel burning driverless vehicle for their regular travel. Currently 9.034 million barrels of oil (~380 million gallons or ~1,440 million litres) are consumed every day in American motor vehicles. As former US president George W. Bush said, ‘America is addicted to oil’.

We are excited about driverless cars because in theory they should drive much more efficiently and use less fuel, one reason for this is that driverless cars will be able to form convoys much more effectively. Convoys (or platooning) allow increases in efficiency in the same way riders in the Tour de France share the lead: the cyclists at the front creates a wind tunnel, allowing the other riders to travel with less wind resistance. Now, the SARTE project  suggests that driverless cars convoys could become 20% more efficient on highways. But how much of a car’s time is spent on highways? The EPA (and pretty much everyone else) assumes that 45% of driving occurs on highways.

Now to the back of the envelope maths:

If the US uses 9.034 million barrels of oil/day (and it does) then we can assume that approximately 45% is consumed on highway driving:

• 0.45 x 9,034,000 barrels of oil = 4,065,300 barrels of oil

If we assume that tomorrow every single car was retrofitted with driverless car technology and programmed to platoon on highways, and that this change resulted in 20% better fuel economy:

• 0.2 x 4,065,300 barrels of oil = 813,060 barrels of oil

Thomas Frey, prominent futurist, spoke at the TEDxReset Conference in Istanbul in the last few days. Side note – am I the only person who is growing tired of the millions of TED spawns? The first Sydney TED conference had a terrible line-up.

Maybe I am just jealous:

If you haven’t been to a TEDx event, it is hard to confer the life-changing nature of something like this. Ali Ustundag and his team pulled off a wonderful event.

Due to upcoming economic changes, he is predicting 2 billion jobs to disappear by 2030. 

Over the next 10 years we will see the first wave of autonomous vehicles hit the roads, with some of the first inroads made by vehicles that deliver packages, groceries, and fast-mail envelopes.

The first wave of driverless vehicles will be luxury vehicles that allow you to kick back, listen to music, have a cup of coffee, stop wherever you need to along the way, stay productive in transit with connections to the Internet, make phone calls, and even watch a movie or two, for substantially less than the cost of today’s limos.

Driverless technology will initially require a driver, but it will quickly creep into everyday use much as airbags

We’re planning on doing a full list soon of all the occupations to disappear. The list is quite long.

Frey wrote a dedicated blog post about driverless cars only 2 weeks ago for those who are interested.

*EDIT* I was just asked by someone “where’s the link to the video”. TED only puts a small proportion of their videos online so we’ll just have to hope it comes online in the next three months or so.

Driverless cars may actually cost more to insure according to Peter Nowak author of Sex, Bombs and Burgers. 

Nowak points out that all the extra electronics will add to the sticker price of the car, the cost of insurance could also go up as replacing those extra parts won’t be cheap if the car is in an accident.

It seems slightly obvious to suggest insurance would be higher on a more expensive car, however when you consider Nowak’s solution, it works:

One intriguing possibility is that the entire notion of car ownership may change. If we can simply order up a car on our smartphone that then drives itself to our front door, what need would we have to actually own one?

At DriverlesscarHQ.com we agree. with this statement. 20 years from now most of us are more likely to own a bicycle than a car. If we do own a car it will be for fun (off-roading or private racing tracks).