Are Driverless Cars The Future Of Motoring?

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
http://ift.tt/16C5B6P

By Paul Homewood

I have been working around to doing a post on driverless cars for a while now.

It is certainly something that the UK Government is pushing hard for, for whatever reason.

On Sunday, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard ran this piece:

No more petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will be sold anywhere in the world within eight years. The entire market for land transport will switch to electrification, leading to a collapse of oil prices and the demise of the petroleum industry as we have known it for a century.

This is the futuristic forecast by Stanford University economist Tony Seba. His report, with the deceptively bland title Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030, has gone viral in green circles and is causing spasms of anxiety in the established industries.

Prof Seba’s premise is that people will stop driving altogether. They will switch en masse to self-drive electric vehicles (EVs) that are ten times cheaper to run than fossil-based cars, with a near-zero marginal cost of fuel and an expected lifespan of 1m miles.

Only nostalgics will cling to the old habit of car ownership. The rest will adapt to vehicles on demand. It will become harder to find a petrol station, spares, or anybody to fix the 2,000 moving parts that bedevil the internal combustion engine. Dealers will disappear by 2024.

Cities will ban human drivers once the data confirms how dangerous they can be behind a wheel. This will spread to suburbs, and then beyond. There will be a “mass stranding of existing vehicles”. The value of second-hard cars will plunge. You will have to pay to dispose of your old vehicle.

http://ift.tt/2pNjsB4

The article received a pretty scathing response from many commenters, like:

Seba himself is apparently an instructor in Entrepreneurship, Disruption and Clean Energy at Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program, in other words, a bit of a fruit loop.

We can safely dismiss the possibility of electric cars making any real inroads in the foreseeable future, despite AEP’s fake graph (note the misleading y-axis!). As we know, there is very little consumer interest in them, and this is unlikely to change soon.

But what about driverless cars?

What follows is a bit of blue sky thinking. I do not claim to know all of the technical ins and outs, nor any of the answers.

But I want to throw up some of the potential obstacles and challenges for debate.

Much of this is subjective, and cannot be measured in pounds, shillings and pence, or for that matter computer modelling. The bottom line is, why would people want to give up their cars to be driven around by a robot?

How many cars?

In the UK, there are currently around 31.7 million cars in the UK, about one for every two people.

If they were to be replaced driverless vehicles, how many would we need?

It is claimed that far fewer would be required, the logic being that we only use our cars for a few hours everyday. So, if we use them on average for 4 hours, in theory one car could be used by six different people.

However, this is fallacious, since many people use their cars at the same time of day, rush hour. Being generous, we could assume that we would only need 80% of current cars, so about 25 million.

We could, of course, make do with many less if we walked, cycled or took public transport a lot more, but this is not the point.

And one consequence of a smaller fleet would be that we would be unlikely to have our driverless car on the doorstep when we needed it. Imagine dropping into work half an hour late, and telling the boss that your Google car turned up late.

At what cost?

Working on that 25 million figure, how much would they all cost?

We know that electric cars are still considerable dearer than petrol/diesel. For instance, the Nissan Leaf starts at £26000, if you ignore the government subsidy of £4500, and this is a pretty basic car.

Driverless cars will need all of the extra equipment, cameras, computers etc, so we could easily be looking at £30K, unless we are expected to travel round in tiny bubble cars.

Based on these figures, 25 million cars would cost £750 billion. And who is expected to foot the bill for this?

Governments certainly could not afford it, and neither could even Google or Apple, even with their vast wealth. Bear in mind as well that we are just talking one country here, the UK.

If finance was to come from banks, you can guarantee that, as customers, we would all have to pay through the nose for using them.

What would it cost to hire one?

We’re into guessing territory here, but it currently costs around £40/day to hire an average conventional mid-sized vehicle.

It is claimed that driverless cars will work out much cheaper, because they might run for 1 million miles. That reminds me of Trigger’s broom!

As Fools and Horses fans may recall, Trigger had been a road sweeper for 20 years, and still had his original broom. It had only needed 14 new handles and 17 new heads!

The car might last 1 million miles, but the battery, motor transmission, brakes etc etc won’t last anywhere near as long. And, no doubt, the body will have rusted away long before.

It is also a mistake to calculate costs just on the car’s direct cost, as we would as private buyers. When it is our own car, we clean it, check the oil and tyres, fill up with petrol, arrange tax and insurance, and do all of the other things necessary to keep it on the road ourselves. As it is us, there is no cost.

Hire cars don’t have this luxury. Driverless cars are likely to be even more exposed to extra costs, as there would need to be a sophisticated system to administer the whole operation.

Even something as simple as keeping the car clean won’t come cheap. After all, we would not want our Google car to turn up on the doorstep with, as one commenter delicately put it, a dirty nappy in the back. Or packets of crisps, mud or cigarette ash. If the car was used by six different users each day, potentially somebody (or something) would need to give it at least a rudimentary hoover out every time.

And on top of all this is the cost of finance and profit margin, not to mention electricity.

But let’s stick with the figure of £40/day. If I wanted one to take me to work, it would probably take 30 minutes to get to me, another 30 minutes to get to work, and probably another 30 minutes to go back to depot. In total, an hour and a half.

With cleaning and general turn around time, we could be looking at two hours in total.

The car would probably only be in regular demand for 12 hours each day, and there would doubtlessly be times in that period when nobody needed it. It might therefore, for the sake of argument, generate six hires a day. At £40/day, that comes to £7/trip. As I also want to go home from work at night, this would cost me £14/day.

If I bought a new mid-sized diesel, I would probably be looking at an annual cost of about £5000 for everything except petrol – in other words, roughly £14/day. For that, I have my own car which I can use whenever I want, without the hassle of booking one.

So where is the incentive in switching to driverless cars?

Much is made of the fact that running costs, ie petrol, are higher than in an electric car. As most of you will know, I am an accountant and budget my expenses very carefully! I do about 12000 miles a year, and spend £1500 a year on diesel. About half of this is fuel duty, which we would all have to pay in the form of another tax if electric cars take over.

Excluding this tax, I am therefore only spending £2/day on fuel. I am certainly not going to get worked up over that.

Where would they all be parked?

One point that is often ignored is just where all of these millions of driverless cars would be kept.

Obviously our own cars tend to be kept in our garages, drives or roadside. Driverless cars would need some sort of central facility where they could be recharged, cleaned, checked, maintained and monitored. But a huge amount of space would be needed.

My local city of Sheffield has a population of 1.6 million (metro area). If we pro-rata down the national figure of 25 million cars, Sheffield’s share would be about 600,000. I simply can’t visualise where all of these could such a huge number of cars could be stored.

It would be equivalent to about 1000 multi-storey car parks. Alternatively, Stansted Airport has 30,000 car park spaces, spread over three parks. Imagine multiplying that by twenty.

It is not just a question of finding the space, particularly when land is so much in demand for houses etc. All of these driverless parks would need to have charging points for each car, along with the necessary infrastructure of access roads, security, as well as the cost of building the car park in the first place.

The cost of all of this would be absolutely astronomical. Again, I ask, who is going to pay for it all?

Political considerations

You may be getting the impression that we are half way to cloud cuckoo land.

But, apart from these inconvenient facts, there are some strong political factors at play here.

The car industry in the UK, not to mention Germany, US and others in the West, has built up an enviable reputation for quality,which together with its accumulated experience and technical knowhow gives it a massive competitive advantage on a global level.

Are the UK, German or US governments going to throw this all away?

In the new world of driverless cars, the rules will have changed. Western car makers will no longer hold sway. Instead, the new technology is likely to be dominated by low cost Asian manufacturers, together with the digital giants.

This fact alone will ensure that the government won’t do anything to upset the apple cart. The UK government has, of course, been pushing for development of electric cars, because it wants UK manufacturers to lead the field.

But there is no guarantee that they would be able to do that with the advent of driverless cars.

There is also the issue of fuel duty, which currently brings in £28 billion for the government, a number which is projected to carry on growing for the next five years.

It would be political suicide for any government to have to find a new way of raising this revenue, if cars went all electric. Whatever way they found, there would be so many losers as to virtually guarantee it losing the next election and the one after that.

It seems odd then that the government has been encouraging the uptake of electric vehicles, for instance by subsidising purchases prices and vehicle duty. In part, I believe, the government has felt the need to be seen to be “doing something”. I suspect they realise that it will take many years for electric cars to make any serious inroads, and will therefore be a problem for their successors.

The driver

“Clever” people like AEP and the clown Seba tend to look at these matters from a theoretical point of view. To them, driverless cars are the new technology and they are going to save us from global warming, so surely everybody would want them.

But this is not about theory, it is about what drivers themselves want, which is something that is highly subjective.

For most people, a car offers the freedom to go where you want, when you want, something driverless cars cannot match.

To have to book a car, which could take a while to arrive, every time you wanted to go somewhere, would definitely put driverless technology at a big disadvantage.

Then there is the cost. It’s a nice day today, so we might decide on the spur of the moment to go out for the day. Would I make the same decision if I was faced with a £40 bill? Almost certainly not.

And what of those who use their cars at weekends to go to golf, take the kids to their various activities, pop to the shops and all of the other little trips? Do we book a car for each trip, or just pay for the whole day? Either way, it is all grossly inconvenient and extremely costly.

In short, I cannot see many people with cars who would willingly give them up voluntarily.