Self-Driving Cars Can't Come Soon Enough

Everything about owning a car, nowadays, seems to be a pain in the arse.  But, currently, the only thing worse than owning a car, is not owning a car.  For the last sixty years all of society has been built around the car, and for most of us, life is pretty difficult without one.  The alternatives that existed 50 years ago, such as public transport, have withered, in inverse proportion to the rise of the privately owned car, and the rigid nature of public transport, providing routes from A to B that only let you go on to C or D, if you can make appropriate connecting journeys, make it pretty useless for modern life, other than perhaps in London.  There are taxis, or Uber if you only want to make the occasional local trip, and there are other car sharing schemes if you need to make longer journeys, but for most people, who need to make daily journeys to work and back, to the shops, let alone for holidays and other leisure activities, that would be a pretty expensive option.

Yet, owning a car has itself become a burden, with much of the early adopter advantages having long since disappeared.  In the 1960's, there were still traffic jams, but they were mostly, confined to places like London, or else at known bottlenecks, on roads that were inadequate for the increasing flows of traffic, at certain times of the year, as people began to flock to the seaside.  For most people who had a car, and in the 1960's it was still a minority, it was possible to get to work much faster than using the bus, if there was no work's car park, there was still, usually, a bit of nearby spare land, or a street to park in.  All of that is long gone.  Even a decade ago, when I lived fairly near to a main line bus route, I decided it was easier and cheaper, to catch the bus to Hanley, than to drive there, look for somewhere to park, which was not always possible, and pay for parking.  Having said that, from where I live now, not on a main line bus route, that wouldn't be possible.

But, the other advantage that used to be had from owning a car, of being able to get to work faster than the bus, has also now largely gone.  Traffic jams are now not something reserved for London, or holiday snarl ups on routes to the coast, but a ubiquitous feature of everyday life, as people try to get from A to B.  All the time, you are wasting fuel, and sucking in noxious exhaust gases.  Twenty-five years ago, I used to cycle the seven miles to work, rather than use the car, because even then I could do it in about 25-30 minutes, which was about the same as it took by car, and faster, when during a few weeks, the route was blocked by roadworks.  But, despite all the propaganda encouraging people to cycle to work, the majority are not fit enough to do it, and in the end I gave it up, having had several near death experiences due to both the state of the roads, and the reckless driving of others.

Last year, my son bought a car, and I decided to ask about a multi-car policy.  He was quoted by my insurance company at the time £3,000, despite the fact, he's been on my insurance policy, as a named driver for as long as he's been old enough to drive, which is now nearly twenty years.  He then got a quote from another well-known insurance company that came in at less than £1,000, which illustrates just how opaque the question of car insurance is.  Also, last year I had to replace a tyre on my car, not because it was worn out, but because I had hit one of the more than numerous large potholes that today infect our roads, like a bad case of smallpox.  It had caused the tyre wall to bulge, meaning it was dangerous.  It cost more than £100 for a replacement tyre.  Less than six months later, I had to replace the same tyre, for the same reason.  Yet, there is, in practice, no way to hold the local authorities accountable for their criminal lack of maintenance of the roads, that must be causing millions of pounds of damage to the country's stock of vehicles, let alone injuries to cyclists and motorcyclists that have to try to negotiate these cavernous depressions, along with raised manhole covers, and drainage grids waiting to suck in your front wheel.

If you think about other aspects of life, we have moved beyond the concept of ownership to one of renting.  Many people due to the astronomical inflation of property prices have been led into renting a home rather than buying one, and maybe when property prices crash, as they ultimately must do, people will go back to buying homes.   But, in other parts of Europe, where tenants are given much better rights than in Britain, renting is already the norm, and helps to explain why places such as Germany, have not suffered from the destabilising effects of property speculation that has affected Britain.  Recently, IKEA announced that they were going to start renting furniture, so that when you got tired of it, you could just return it, and swap it for something different.  That is like what used to happen fifty years ago with TV's.

And, of course, where twenty years ago, people used to buy their own video recorder, and buy or rent videos, and then DVD's to watch on these players, today everyone just has a subscription to Netflix or Amazon, and so on, and downloads whatever films, serials and so on they want to watch.  This is part of the process, that has been going on in the economy as a whole, whereby we have moved away from an economy based upon producing materials commodities that people then own, to a service based economy, whereby people simply buy a service, to consume things as and when they want them.

That is what, in relation to transport, public transport, or taxis and so on provided.  But, for most people that is still too inflexible, and too costly.  What is really needed is an equivalent of Netflix for transport.  What we need is flexible and cheap transport options that you can use, as and when you need transport, and forget about it when you don't.  Uber to an extent has brought a revolution in that respect.  But, the real revolution will come, when it's possible to have the equivalent of a Netflix account, and be able to summon up, within a couple of minutes, a self-driving vehicle, to wherever you are, to give it your destination, and via points, as you do now with a SatNav, and let it take you to where you want to go, with no further concern by yourself, and leaving you free to walk away from it, when you have reached your destination.

We already have some aspects of what is required for that.  A couple of years ago, my son made a promotional video for Mobikes for Manchester.  Not perhaps the best example, as Manchester have since found that the bikes were being stolen, and then left abandoned' leading Mobike to pull out.  But, already there are companies looking at similar schemes for electric scooters.  A while ago, I cited the example, in New Zealand, of a company that is introducing a two-seater, autonomous, electric flying taxi.  We also have some electric autonomous vehicles being introduced at airports etc.

If we had a large number of these autonomous vehicles that you could simply call when required, it would massively reduce the number of vehicles on the roads, and also reduce the number of journeys made.  Most cars, spend the vast majority of the day going nowhere, even setting aside time spent in traffic jams, because once you have arrived at your destination, the car is simply parked.  The economies of scale, mean that it becomes cheaper to just use such vehicles as and when required, rather than to go through all of the cost and hassle of owning your own car.  Gone would be all of the hassle of having to get car insurance, pay out for repairs, tyres, get the MOT, pay for parking, pay to have a garage built to house your car, and so on.

Moreover, where its near impossible for individual drivers to sue the local council for damage due to potholes, its inconceivable that a large company providing the fleet of such autonomous vehicles would allow councils to get away with it.  They would have cameras in the cars, and other data gathering equipment, to be able to show exactly where the offending road surfaces caused the damage, and Councils would have to pay up, or more likely take the cheaper route of actually maintaining the roads properly.