Has anyone seen a roadmap that includes how other industries are affected(disrupted)?
Should we think hard about selling our cars now before they are de-valued or become more costly to drive?
Clean Disruption - Why Energy & Transportation will be Obsolete by 2030 - Oslo, March 2016
It’s possible that the value of this data could subsidise ride costs. They basically become a ubiquitous street level surveillance system and for this to be effective you want a lot of them driving around.
Some examples:
Detailed local weather mapping.
Potential for near real time street view.
Very detailed sensing of traffic flows and trends, can also estimate pedestrian traffic.
Could use the sensors to track non self driving cars by alpnr. Locate stolen or wanted vehicles.
Automated reporting of traffic infringements, dangerous driving or accidents.
Can estimate patronage of almost any business, via rides to destination, counting carparks, local foot traffic etc.
Can sell data on infrastructure conditions (pothole location, missing signs, etc) to cities.
Lots of other detailed profiling on riders, consumers, businesses. For example can automatically distinguish between blue collar bars and cocktail lounges.
Almost certainly lots lots more I couldn’t imagine. It’s the data!
On a side note, the Google Play Services running in the background on most smartphones have already been mapping traffic hotspots and measuring business patronage by time of day.
Say, you pass a mall and the passenger sees an ad on the car screen about a sale at Macy's located inside the mall. With a single tap, the passenger has the option of re-routing the car to the mall.
No way Google isn't going to try to monetize it with targeted ads
Again, none of those things require self driving technology to put onto a central unit in a car. Add some cameras and sensors that collect data.
A lot of this already happens with things like OnStar and other insurance schemes.
> Self-driving is a feature that can justify the investment in those sensor installations.
Most of these sensors on their own are pretty cheap for simple data collection. Again, most of this stuff is already tracked, take google maps, or onstar, as examples.
I imagine that the traditional car rental companies will be the first to provide services. They already have fleet maintenance, post-ride clean-up/turnaround, and demand forecasting/repositioning down, all that's left is to setup a subscription model.
Uber could get there but I kinda feel that they will implode if they make an attempt to transition to self-driving cars, from a huge driver backlash or strike.
Though I really want to see most what happens to all the parking lots and parking garages which will slowly disappear. Hopefully they can be transformed into green spaces.
A city fleet is basically the set of vehicles owned and operated by a city government, mostly for use by its employees but could also be interpreted to include public transportation.
A caveat is that the Waymo fleet would obviously be significantly bigger and thus more complex to handle, but I’m sure there’s a physical analog of “sharding” or dividing up fleets into geographical sets.