Audi, Nissan, BMW et all will have their technology on the road a good decade or
two before Google gets their stuff on the road
Google is predicting mass market availability in
3 to 6 years, not decades. These things have already been on the road for quite a while. As of April 2014, they'd logged
700,000 autonomous miles.
the majority of people would probably feel more comfortable buying it from
an established auto maker instead of from Google.
1) You wouldn't be buying them. We're talking about robot
taxis. Paying $5 for a ride requires considerably less faith than $30,000 to buy a vehicle.
2) I don't think so. We're talking technology here. Nothing about car manufacturer screams "I know how to build software for artificial vehicle control based on 3d visual mapping!" Google is a household name, and I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that the average person knows this is up their alley.
3) According to a
Cicso survey, about 60% in the US would trust a driverless car. Presumably those numbers will go up in time. I imagine it took a while for people to start trusting carriages without horses too.
the 2 trillion dollars though. The cars still need to be bought, parts on them are
still going to break and you're still going to want insurance. Not all insurance claims are for vehicle accidents after all.
So what? If you free up only one trillion dollars instead of two, is that really so terrible?
I thought we were talking about taxi's here? Or joint owned vehicles between 100 people?
Taxis, yes. End cost to consumer end "money being exchanged in industry X" are different things, but they're both things. And if it costs a company less to provide a service, some portion of that savings might be passed on to the consumer. 100 people with 100 cars need 100 insurance policies. If 100 people only need 20 robot taxis, that's fewer insurance policies. Or, as I suggested in my last post, only one policy that covers 20 vehicles. Pretty sure it's going to be cheaper than the 100 policies.
You still have all of your other non engine related issues. Suspension bushings, wheel bearings, etc. Maintenance is reduced, perhaps by as much as 2/3rds at a random guess, but not eliminated at all.
Let's say you're right. Why is a 2/3 cost reduction a bad thing? Who cares if it's not 100%?
We've pretty much hit the efficiency limit for solar panels,
It was cited earlier in the thread...if I recall correctly the number was an overall 7% increase in efficiency every year. As in multiply by 1.07, not add 7 to the efficiency number. It's slow, but it's still improving.
Also, they can't run during night hours.
Batteries. Also, there's nothing requiring individual vehicles to store all their power for the night. Having external storage is an option. Tesla motors is already working on that.
not all insurance covers vehicle accidents, but probably over 75% is.
I've been finding it surprisingly difficult to find exact figures on this, but according to
this only 42% of the insurance industry is property and casualty, of which auto insurance is a part.
National average auto insurance payment is
~$800/year. Using the study linked earlier as an example, the difference between insuring 120,000 privately owned vehicles and 18,000 robot taxis they estimate it would take to replace them is ~$81 million in saving divided by 200,000 people. Even if you double the cost of the 18,000 vehicles because they're driving more (more mileage means more expensive policy) it's still $67 milllion in savings. That's $235 savings per person. If you happen to live in a place where the costs are higher, say...New York, the savings work out to $326 per person.
But again, it seems probable that google would create their own division for this rather than handing money to insurance companies.
Insurance loss ratios are typically in the 40 to 60% range. So if google simply did it themselves, even if accidents remained exactly as they are it would still end up being being roughly that much in cost savings.
If we try to figure it out from the other direction, using the $235 per person figure...
88% of the us is licensed,
14% are uninsured,
314 million people, that's 237 million people, ~55 billion dollars per year being paid in auto insurance.
I guess what i'm trying to say is that for the "costs reduced by 90%!" thing to come true you're making an awful lot of assumptions about technology, engineering, peoples habbits and situations.
Well, that's what they've said their goal is. If you read the
Columbia University study, their case study figured that a city of 285,000 residents with 200,000 cars could replace 120,000 of them with 18,000 robot taxis. So, a 52% reduction rather than a 90% reduction.
That's still a lot.