This post is a classic example of confirmation bias.

I have been arguing for a while that most people will sign up to distributed transport services, otherwise known as TaaS.

The convenience of being able to order any type of vehicle and the cost effective nature of this are killer apps in my opinion and will crush most resistance, which typically manifests in the form of “but I like to carry my golf clubs in the trunk”.

My perspective could just be a sign of  a wider generational shift amongst people my age and younger, according to Fast Company.

Apparently young people are moving away from ownership:

Humanity is experiencing an evolution in consciousness. We are starting to think differently about what it means to “own” something. This is why a similar ambivalence towards ownership is emerging in all sorts of areas, from car-buying to music listening to entertainment consumption. Though technology facilitates this evolution and new generations champion it, the big push behind it all is that our thinking is changing.

This new attitude toward ownership is occurring everywhere, and once we recognize this change, we can leverage it. Instead of kicking against the wave (which is the tendency of many institutions and leaders), we can help our organizations thrive in this strange new marketplace by going with the flow and embracing the death of ownership.

The article doesn’t offer much in the way of supporting evidence. What did I say about confirmation bias?

This follows up from an article in The Atlantic discussing the drop in car ownership amongst younger people, which we also discussed.

Edit – Reader Gabriel S sends in this image:

The Atlantic

A question to our readers: Does Jevrons Paradox apply in a future where Transport as a Service (TaaS) is delivered almost entirely by autonomous vehicles?

For those not familiar with Jevrons Paradox, this is my interpretation: as humans are able to use energy more efficiently, we will compensate our efficiency by using more energy. For example, a household replaces all of their old incandescent light bulbs with new energy saving LED, however, instead of keeping to their normal habits they keep the lights on longer because the new lights use less energy.

The reason I ask this question, is because driverless car based TaaS will be far more efficient (and cheaper) than current human driven vehicles (particularly with single passenger vehicles on highways).  Will the lower costs mean we take more frivolous journeys? Or will knowing the exact fare of a driverless car trip make us more frugal?

To cap off this post I leave you with the thoughts of commenter Koshchei The Deathless from a few months back:

What about the effect on driverless taxis on walking habits? People who own cars tend to use them at the drop of a hat, not much thinking about petrol costs as they have already paid large costs to acquire the car such as buying it, insurance etc, and petrol and wear-and-tear costs aren’t obvious. Driverless cars differ in two ways here: 1) you pay per trip. People are more likely to think about the cost with pay-per-trip as the cost is always upfront and obvious. 2) Driverless is a little less convenient, you might have to wait 15 min or so after ordering.

Put those together and people might value living within walking distance of things. A short trip to buy milk using a car currently makes some sense, the waste of money there is a lot more obvious with driverless.

What are your thoughts?

I was just reading a an article from The Atlantic Cities from commenter Gabriel on ‘The End of Taxis’ in Washington DC. Its not really on driverless cars but one section caught my attention:

Two things distinguish Car2Go from Zipcar, its closest competitor: it charges by the minute instead of the hour, and customers can park and end their rentals at their destinations instead of having to return the car to the same spot where they picked it up. In D.C., the company negotiated with the city to allow its customers to park in any legal public spot, including metered ones, without having to feed the meter. At 38 cents per minute, that same three-mile trip with Car2Go can be as cheap as $7.

Good to see that car rental companies are charging by the hour. (Hopefully soon we will see them finding an alternative to the yearly subscription many of them have as well.) This model combined with being able to park the car in public car parks will make shorter trips much easier to make. Of relevance to robo-taxis, the deployment of this model is similar to how we see the future of driving. If commuters are comfortable with this concept in car share schemes then hopefully the transition of this model to robo-taxis will be seamless.

That said, 38 cents per minute is still to expensive for my regular commute, but give it a few years….

Foreign Policy, a blog I enjoy immensely has had a guest post discussing electric self driving cars by Steven Kopits from energy-strategy company Douglas-Westwood.

The article starts by making some interesting notes on electric car sales:

There were 13 million vehicles sold in the United States last year, meaning that electric vehicles comprised a meager 0.1 percent of the market…. Is the electric car then history? Will the Leaf and the Volt go the way of the ill-fated EV1, General Motors’ electric car from the 1990s? If the status quo persists, they very well might.

Steven goes on to become quite enthusiastic about the economic and social aspects of driverless cars:

The market for self-driving technology is large — my firm estimates it at $25 billion per year….Indeed, once the idea of sending the car to park itself takes hold, it is almost irresistible. Self-driving cars would be the biggest time-saving breakthrough since the washing machine.

In particular he sees a lot of potential in Transport as a Service (TaaS) utilizing electric robo-taxis:

In the town of Princeton, New Jersey, for example, taxis are found only at the train station, and the brief round trip from there to downtown Princeton costs approximately $40. Of this, only $5 represents vehicle-related costs; the remainder is attributable to the driver. At usage rates rivaling that of taxis — perhaps 100 miles per day — electric cars are quite competitive because of their lower operating costs. Thus a self-driving electric car could also make the same round trip at a cost of only $5. For a twice-daily, off-peak user, the monthly cost of vehicle access could be less than $300 — much less than the cost of car ownership.

As they say, read the whole thing, its also worth giving the comments section a once over.

We’re also interested in your thoughts on this topic. Will driverless technology save the electric car? Or will autonomous vehicles primarily be powered by hydrocarbons?

Edit: We’ve long thought that electric autonomous vehicles make sense. After all they could drive off and recharge themselves.

There was an interesting discussion in Anthony’s post about car sharing schemes about car ownership and how stuck we are to our cars.

Commenter Huadpe argued that we were going too far with our thoughts on the potential of  TaaS. He is probably correct! However, this article just popped up in my feed that’s quite interesting.

Car Generation Dying Out says the headline:

Nationally, the number of kilometres driven by people younger than 35 dropped by 23 per cent between 2001 and 2009, according to research by the think tank Frontier Group.

More than a quarter of those in that age group don’t own a driver’s licence.

The study that Frontier Group released in April attributed the shift away from driving to several things, including a doubling of petrol prices since 2001 and the ability of people on buses and subways to stay plugged into their social network without feeling guilty about distracted driving.

23 per cent. That’s significant.

In bigger cities, however, congestion has stifled the sense of freedom drivers once found behind the wheel, says Timothy K. Gilbert, who chairs the automotive marketing department at Northwood University in Florida.

‘‘When you begin to look at the vehicle as more utilitarian you begin to look at alternatives, because it’s only a method of transportation,’’ he says.

‘‘The way people look at the automobile reflects maybe not uncertainty as much as ambivalence.’’
Is ambivalence the death of romance?

‘‘Are we really ever going to get over the love affair? I doubt it,’’ Marsden says. ‘‘Automotive culture, that love affair is a deep one. And we may have to compromise, we may have to shift, we may have to redefine it, but it’s a pull.

‘‘It’s a deep, deep pull.’’

In many ways car share schemes are a glimpse into what a fully driverless car future will look like.

For most of us, instead of owning our car we will simply recruit the nearest driverless car to give us a lift to where we want to go. This is not to say that a driverless car utopia will be like one giant car share scheme (it will be a giant taxi service ), however, car share schemes do provide a model of a society where consumers don’t have to own their own car and that’s what we’re interested in looking at here.

juliesbicycle.com

What Are Car Share Schemes?

In my city car share schemes park their cars in designated bays in car parks, scheme members can unlock the car with a smart card and proceed to drive the car. The evolution of payment for car share schemes is quite intriguing. Nearly all schemes requite customers to pay an hourly rate, but the specific vary quite a lot. Many schemes require either a  joining fee, security deposit and/or insurance payment, conversely, some schemes charge monthly fees or direct debit your account. One similarity I’ve noticed between schemes is discounting for higher joining/monthly fees or bulk purchases of car usage time. We predict that payment for these schemes will evolve to be highly similar to mobile phone plans, maybe with a minimum monthly spend.

No Future For Car Sharing?

Oblivion. In the medium to long term anyway. Even now, car share schemes haven’t been able to compete with public transport. In the future, the introduction of widespread driverless car taxis, no-one will want the hassle of share car joining fees when they can rent a cheap, safe driverless car. So in its current form, car sharing will die.

However, car share scheme companies may not go the way of the dodo. When driverless cars first come in, car share companies will have prime real estate to park the cars in easily accessible places as well as having a customer base ready to try an alternative mode of transport.

Car Sharing Predicts Car Ownership In A Driverless Car ‘Utopia’

The main reason I’ve been looking at car share schemes is that they reduce the need for car ownership which is the same predicted effect for driverless cars. For most of us our cars are parked 90% of the time, so it will be much easier to rent a driverless taxi than shoulder the costs of buying a car, paying for fuel, registration, insurance, upkeep and so forth. Currently there are about 240 million registered cars, vans and motorcycles on the USA’s roads and I’m interested in trying to estimate how far that number will fall with the introduction of driverless cars.

Looking at the academic research on this subject there is an interesting, freely available paper on how car sharing affects car ownership in the US and Canada. This paper claims that for every share car between 9 and 13 cars are taken off the road. Let’s average this and call it 11 cars. So to perform a crude extrapolation to take all of the USA’s current fleet off the roads about 22 million share cars would be required – a 90% reduction. This is in line with the thinking that if we don’t use our cars 90% of the time we will need 90% less cars.

The psychology behind car share members getting rid of cars is quite interesting. Just because people became members of car share schemes didn’t mean they suddenly abandoned their personal vehicles. Intriguingly, the bulk of those getting rid of a vehicle were those who were already single vehicle households, suggesting to me that car sharing really only pushes people who are already considering going car-less. However, athough the average American household has nearly 3 cars, I was surprised to find out that about one third had only one car. For the entire survey the vehicles per household dropped from 0.47 to 0.24. As such the willingness amongst the American population to shed their excess vehicles when driverless cars become widespread is quite a real possibility.

From servicingstopmercedes.co.uk

Summary

So while car share schemes are not a perfect model for how driverless cars will change society, they do show that people are willing to pay for rental cars that are more expensive than public transport. Once consumers start using car sharing schemes they are more likely to shed their personal vehicles, perhaps even 11 vehicles per share car, particularly if they are in single vehicle households.

Extrapolating this to a future driverless cars are more competitive than car share schemes I predict car numbers will drop to about 1 car for every 10-15 people. In today’s terms that’s between 20-35 million driverless cars on American roads.

Parking lots.

They’re a necessary but ugly blight on the landscape of many fine cities and we arguably have far more than we’ll ever need.

For example: according to the New York Times, Houston has 30 car spots per resident.

What happens when we suddenly no longer need to park our cars?

Slate’s talking about this today.

Every metropolitan area in the United States contains many, many more parking spaces than automobiles. When you’re at work, the space allocated for your vehicle at home sits there empty. When you’re at home, the space allocated for your vehicle at the office sits empty. Malls build parking to accommodate demand during peak hours, and the spaces mostly sit empty off-peak. But if the cars could drive around without a human pilot, there’d be no need for such lavish supplies of vehicle storage. In principle, a metro area could get by with fewer than one parking space per car since even at minimum-demand times a nonzero quantity of vehicles would be in use. That’s probably extreme, but right now depending on how you count we have somewhere between three and eight spaces per car. If the cars don’t need to sit idly waiting for you until you want to leave (imagine a world of cheap, ubiquitous taxis) that number is going to become totally ridiculous. After exploding for about 60 years, the torrent of parking construction is going to halt very suddenly and then start shifting into reverse. That should even make some rail lines more useful.

Brad Templeton, who has a fantastic RoboCar section on his site, has these thoughts:

Robocars should be able to outdo even the best parking valet when it comes to parking densely in a lot. This is not just because of their ability to do details moves in close quarters, it’s because they can coordinate. For example, if rearranging a valet lot requires moving every single car, that’s something the robocars can all do at once, and an almost impossible task for human valets.

Of course, robocar lots will try to organize so that cars that may be needed soon can get out more easily, and cars with known (and later) need times will be more blocked, but in truth no car will be very blocked, because of the robocars ability to move in concert.

The combination of smaller cars and super-valet parking should allow typical parking lots to hold several times more vehicles than they can today.

If we ever need to build more parking lots, lots designed for robocars could be even denser. For example, they could have sections with very low ceilings — because humans almost never go in there. A parking structure could thus have twice as many storeys.

Aside from the above, I find myself disagreeing with most of Brad’s other thoughts on parking but he’s got just as much chance at being right. For example, he posits that double-parking might be the way of the future:

Robocars might not only park blocking driveways. At low-traffic times (which are exactly the times that the most parking is needed) robocars could double-park or even triple park on the streets. One could imagine a street with 6 lanes at rush hour that, during the night or middle of the day is reduced to just 2 lanes with 4 lanes of parking. Or even to a single one-way lane. This works well because cars have to be somewhere. They either will be moving in the driving lanes or waiting in the waiting lanes. The total amount of space remains similar (parked cars are of course denser on the ground than moving ones.)

Robocar double parking doesn’t mean a problem for the cars on the curb lane, even if the cars are quadruple parked. Of course, cars would be encouraged to try to organize themselves so that cars needed soonest are on the outside, and long-wait cars are on the inside, but that just reduces the amount of moving.

That’s because robocars could, when double-parked on a block of moderate length, always leave one “gap” in the line of cars. This gap could be in the middle, or it could be a more natural gap at one of the ends. If there’s a frequently used driveway, there will already be a gap.

I’m not sure I see this happening though. As discussed above, we’re going to be up to our eyeballs in redundant parking lots so you’d think they would be the first port of call. Not only this but Driverless Cars will need to charge themselves somehow and the double parking solution doesn’t fit that vision.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this -

Matthew.

We’ve had a fair amount of fun up to this point sharing some of our favorite Driverless Cars from around the world. Check out some other posts of ours to see past concept vehicles.

Today we present to you many that you may have missed – and some very cool ideas to boot.

The Transport as a Service model (TaaS) will mean that Driverless Car companies of the future will seek differentiation in order to win clients just as they do today. Some will compete on price, and we can easily imagine that they will be hyper-efficient, super-aerodynamic, light and tiny.

Others will push into the luxury space and be like rolling lounges, kitted out with luxurious leather and wood-grain fittings. It’s these kinds of imaginings which have gone into the images below. Hat Tip to Eco Friend for helping us to discover many of these:

Click Any Image To See The Full Size.

The ATNMBL - From Mike and Maaike  :

The seats facing outside would make me quick sick. I doubt I’d be the only one! A stylish vision, however.

Hat Tip To A Distinctive World

Name Unknown – From Forbes:

A touch more functional.

The Driverless Taxi By Peter Kubik

Hat Tip : Environment Team

The Guardian by John Bukasa of Casser Design

Complete lack of privacy, but it would suit sporting parades and others who want to be seen.

Hat Tip: Yanko Design

The Zagato

Not to be confused with the real world Zagato.

The iMove by Liviu Tudoran

What it would be like if Apple were to release a car:

Hat Tip : Car Guide Blog

The Autonomi

EV 2020 by Robin Long

Jaguar Mark XXI by Chris Pollard

This one pushes the boundaries of the imagination, however we can definitely see car-makers moving to develop vehicles that have efficiency as priority #1, #2 and #3. Given that form won’t be an issue any more, cars will most likely be sleek and could well be covered in solar panels.

Hat Tip : Car Body Design