Driverless cars

As I may have told you, I have been working with a group of product designers at Google who are working on the driverless car. This highly talented group works in what Google calls Google[x], their secret laboratory where they work on many other futuristic technologies. I was telling Lucy this morning that Google recently invested $258 million in a company called Uber. Uber is a car-hailing app that could potentially reinvent the way we get around, especially inside of large cities. Read this story to fully understand. Here is the last part of the article, which is what I find the most fascinating:

The real potential is for something quite different: ubiquitous taxis—summoned via smartphone or weird glasses—that are so cheap they make car ownership obsolete. That’s the kind of social and technological revolution that could justify the lofty valuation granted to Uber. It explains why the same company that’s invested in the technology to drive the cars is now investing in the technology to hail them. It’s a world in which algorithms for matching cabs with passengers and user interfaces for summoning taxis will become crucial elements of everyday transportation, the way gas stations and parking lots are today. 

Conversely—and this is why it’s important—we’re not going to need all these gas stations and parking lots.

In a world of ubiquitous cheap taxis, you don’t need nearly as many cars. Since not everyone commutes at the exact same time, any given car can shuttle several different people to work. And the average commuting vehicle can be small enough for a single passenger to sit in comfortably. This smaller number of smaller cars could get by with radically fewer parking spaces. A large share of vehicles would be in motion at any given time. And if there’s need to store excess cars somewhere during off-peak hours (to save energy, perhaps), they could congregate at a handful of peripheral lots. Ordinary homes, offices, and shopping centers wouldn’t need the vast fields of parking that are required by current law. By the same token, the main present-day impediments to electric cars—expense and range—would vanish.

Most trips, after all, are short. But the big problem with electric vehicles is that building a battery big enough for long trips is extremely expensive. In a world of vehicles for hire, this is easily solved—take light, cheap, short-range electric vehicles for the short-range trips that constitute the vast majority of driving. Save the internal combustion engines for the rare cases when they’re genuinely needed.

Cities based on cheap autonomous cabs would be much greener than today’s cities. Without the parking, they’d also be denser and more productive, but people wouldn’t have to sacrifice their large homes. It would be a true economic game-changer. But to get there we don’t just need the technology—we need the rules to allow it. Cars for hire, just like regular cars, need to be safe but shouldn’t face arbitrary numerical caps or other rules designed to repress competition. We need local transportation regulation to emphasize the needs of consumers, not producers, and to encourage innovation, not fear it.