* cars sent to pick up stuff without drivers
* kids sent to school with the car to circle back and pick up the parents afterwards
* cars doing the minimum to stay 'in traffic' to avoid paying high fees for parking
* far more miles per car because the biggest limiting factor (the presence of a driver) will wall away
* huge CO2 impact (negative) from all these extra miles
People buying personal cars at the moment tend to choose the latter: https://www.edmunds.com/most-popular-cars/
Coupled with electrification going on at the same time (many countries and states have set 2030 or 2035 deadlines), the CO2 impact won't be as bad, although we should still focus on public mass transit.
Overall, automated road vehicles are a huge boon.
> * far more miles per car because the biggest limiting factor (the presence of a driver) will wall away
> * huge CO2 impact (negative) from all these extra miles
These are all very important. Most cars on the road are single occupancy. Once we can have zero occupancy the problem will only get worse.
For example, your fleet of low- or zero-emission vehicles would greatly offset the average vehicles that people would have been using instead.
Also, zero occupancy vehicles never have to drive around looking for parking near their destination. They are immediately reusable or could go to an out-of-the-way pool.
Isn't this backwards? Why should kids have to go earlier than parents if the parents don't need to drop them off before work?
> huge CO2 impact (negative) from all these extra miles
Won't most automated vehicles be electric?
Because in most places school starts before work starts, this has always been the case, even in places where people don't have cars, and not everybody has a car in places where most people do.
> Won't most automated vehicles be electric?
Yes, but that doesn't automatically mean all that power is made with renewables.
Electric vehicles are consistently more carbon efficient than individual combustion engines, except for specific outlier instances in developing countries which are 100% dirty coal power grids.
This means a fleet of electric vehicles will have less of a carbon impact per mile than the average human driven vehicle.
But that's an entirely different subject. We are simply looking at the effect on the total number of miles driven here, which will absolutely explode once driverless vehicles are a reality. And those KWh will have to come from somewhere and they will have a carbon footprint even when they are entirely made with renewables.
The solution to this is to drive substantially less not to drive more with cleaner vehicles.
There is still no comparison between electric vehicles and combustion vehicles in terms of carbon footprint.
- Mass transit is full of big heavy vehicles running mostly empty on off-peak hours. It's more efficient only at rush hour. I'd expect net efficiency over the full usage is worse, compared to electric cars.
- As they start making custom robocar hardware, it'll become a mix probably including smaller lighter single-occupancy cars.
- Mass transit ought to become much more useful and attractive given on-demand robocar rides to and from your station.
- (Added:) Congestion pricing becomes more doable for cars that are already networked for other reasons. Congestion pricing is the obvious approach to really solving congestion.
That is really only true in the states right? In other countries with decent mass transit systems, it seems like they are really full during rush hour but only mostly full at other times, utilization is very good. American systems seem to be dysfunctional...probably because cars are more convenient for off peak travel. I can see how door-to-door automated vans or even taxis could fill in off peak travel here, while the big vehicles serve mostly peak demand (in the states, elsewhere it isn't as needed).
Parking will get cheaper, if anything:
- Electric AVs can park themselves 5x further away with no UX downside and minimal energy cost.
- Nobody needs to use the doors while parked, and AVs can cooperatively rearrange themselves to allow ingress or egress, meaning they can park with almost no clearance in all directions.
- Parking garages can be designed with the assumption that vehicles are driven with perfect precision, allowing wasted aisle space to be significantly reduced.
Only if the parents are WFH and going to lunch. School starts too early already.