The Future and Implications of Self Driving Cars

I just finished a summer road trip from San Diego to Portland, Oregon, then east through the Columbia River Gorge to Washington wine country. The long drive gave me time to think, and I began to wonder what the future of cars and road travel will look like even in my lifetime? I’m not a science fiction writer, but I am predicting the future, and there could be some Mission Impossible stunts hidden in this article. If you’re a patent troll, please do not read this article. I want this article to spark the imagination of developers and builders to get out there and make this a reality.

It’s been well documented that when Henry Ford capitalized on assembly line production to make cars cheap enough for the common person, the infrastructure lagged and the travel industry changed dramatically. Roads were mostly dirt, sometimes bricks or cobblestones. There was even a wooden “corduroy road” between Santa Cruz and Monterey made of split logs. There were no gas stations. No rest stops. Very few roadside inns or restaurants. A popular cookbook at the time gave recipes for cooking food wrapped in tin foil under the hood of your car wedged against the engine block. People could finally afford to buy a car that could go farther and faster than a horse and wagon, but where could you go? People had to find their way around without roadmaps, without signs, without smartphones and without GPS navigation systems.

Barely thirty years after Ford’s first Model A, there were paved interstate highways, an entirely new industry of motels (“motor hotels”), major travel destinations like Disneyland, and America’s dysfunctional love affair with oil kicked into high gear and reshaped geopolitics for decades, leaving us an inheritance today of global warming and oil related wars. 

I’m not bashing the last 100+ years of innovation and economic growth directly attributable to cars. I’m just saying that you pay for what you get. Be careful what you wish for. So what’s next when self-driving cars become reality? 

Probably the first big step will be autonomous cars as taxis and delivery trucks. Uber, Lyft, and whoever else in that business will likely invest in autonomous electric vehicles. Electric cars cost a bit more “out the door” today than combustion engines but require less maintenance, no gas, and less “high touch” upkeep. Imagine an electric vehicle fleet warehouse where taxis return when their energy is depleted, they plug themselves in to recharge, and no human is on premise. The entire taxi fleet is autonomous and remotely managed by an Operations center far, far away. (Somebody will need to invent automated car cleaning both inside and out.)

As battery technology improves, electric vehicles will eventually beat combustion engines for total cost of ownership. This will make even non-autonomous, human-driven electric vehicles attractive and competitive against combustion engines. Fast-charging batteries will be the prerequisite for this. I’ve surveyed multiple taxi drivers in Amsterdam who drive Teslas. “Which is better? A Tesla or a Mercedes as a Taxi vehicle?” The Dutch are never shy about giving brutally honest opinions. Taxi drivers in Amsterdam don’t like a 4-hour lunch break while their vehicle recharges just so they can finish their daily quotas. Electric vehicle battery recharging currently takes about an hour per 40 miles of driving range. Based on my surveys, electric vehicles need to hit a 500-mile range and/or 8-hours of continuous usage and/or 200 miles of range in 30-minutes of charging in order to compete against combustion engines in long distance usage scenarios. (The other complaint from Amsterdam taxi drivers is that Teslas are “American cars”, meaning that little mechanical and electrical components wear out after three years and need repairs faster than German cars.) 

I predict that autonomous delivery trucks will drive at night, during off peak traffic hours. No more trucks on the road during rush hour. I foresee large caravans of autonomous delivery trucks at night, almost touching bumper-to-bumper, like a train on the freeway. So what if they only go 55 miles per hour? They can take off at 10pm and travel over 400 miles before 6am. Some might even get fitted for railway track wheels as well as normal street tires so they can hop on or off train rail lines to complement train freight. The big, heavy diesel trains that make so much noise and trigger so much track maintenance might disappear, giving up their tracks for dual-mode rail-and-road, lighter weight, autonomous trucks.

There will be new security and fraud concerns, always new concerns about criminal activity. An entire truck caravan might just stop for a lone person standing in the road. Even bored high school kids in rural towns might have fun setting up a mannequin on the freeway and halting all autonomous vehicle traffic. And without any humans driving the trucks, lonely places on the road could birth new “stagecoach robbers”. All those Amazon delivery trucks would be attractive targets. More sophisticated robbers could use a Stingray-like 5G portable base station to lock up an autonomous truck’s communications, perhaps even hack in and trigger a “follow me” emergency protocol. It’s likely that private security will be needed to “ride-shotgun” for some delivery caravans to ward off pirates.

“Local” delivery trucks like FedEx and UPS might convert their drivers to onboard “sorters and door delivery handlers”. The autonomous vehicle will drive itself, map its own routing, and the “handler” will just hop on and off with the goods and signature capture duties. 

“Fuel stations” will refuel electric vehicles. Either the charging station or the autonomous vehicle or both will contain robotic-like self-fueling capabilities. Autonomous vehicles will drive into a refueling station and no human attendant will be needed to deliver the “fuel”. I can see some off-grid refueling stations in the countryside using solar and wind generators on premises to keep their “tanks” full. There will be large energy storage devices for these fueling stations.

In cities, less and less people will own their own private vehicle. There will be vehicle co-op sharing programs. Autonomous taxis will make owning a vehicle less necessary. Elderly people who can no longer drive themselves safely will be able to remain in their homes longer instead of moving to assisted care retirement homes. Florida driving patterns will change dramatically.

Instead of wasting time and energy circling the parking lot hunting for the closest parking spot, your autonomous car can drop you off right at the door of the store and then go off into orbit by itself, circling the block if needed, waiting for your command to pick you up. We will need to redesign the entry ways to most stores as autonomous cars stack up in lines like planes at O’Hare waiting to land. Autonomous cars won’t mix well in today’s parking lots because humans are terrible at parking and people walk too casually through parking lots. Autonomous cars will freak out as people randomly stride out between parked cars. Will autonomous cars “honk” at people in parking lots? Will New Yorkers and Jersey-ites react well to autonomous cars honking at them? How does one flip off a driverless car?

Of course, the main feature we are all waiting for is “Auto-pilot”. People will continue to own their own vehicles for a long time to come before finally giving up individual ownership in favor of taxis or co-op shared vehicles. Who doesn’t want to get into your car and just say, “take me home”? Or “take me to work”? There are so many use cases for this with benefits and detriments. For one, I can “send” my car to grandma’s house to pick her up and bring her back to my place for dinner without me being in the car. For another, you can go ahead and indulge more at the bar and get as tipsy as you want since your car will drive you home.

Laws will need to change to allow autopilot to take full control. There might need to be a drunk-driver detector that blocks the driver “under the influence” and prevents him/her from taking back driving control. 

Many a teenager will curse dad’s car for taking control and driving straight home at the appointed curfew hour.

There are some people with medical issues that prevent them from obtaining a driver’s license today. Can they own an autonomous vehicle? How will the car insurance company react to a request to insure a person who owns an autonomous car yet has no legal driver’s license? If an autonomous car gets into an accident with another autonomous car, who is at fault? Who gets an infraction ticket? And how do my insurance premiums change due to that accident?

Autopilot will help you be “more productive” with your face down in your laptop or smartphone, get your work emails done while stuck in traffic, watch the latest tv episode you missed, update Facebook, read a book, or just sleep.

Sleep. Sleeping in autonomous cars! I have friends who are infamous for driving long road trips after midnight “to beat the traffic”, arriving at their destination 300 to 500 miles away, having driven all night. That doesn’t work for me. But if I had an autopilot feature in my car, and if my destination was mapped out, why not go to sleep in the car and let it drive? I could work all day Friday, then get into my car, go to sleep, and wake up Saturday morning at the lake or the beach. If refueling stations become automated, I don’t even need to wake up to recharge my car. Did you ever notice that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang never needed gas, was totally autonomous, and let the kids sleep in the backseat?

I’m not kidding. Some people will opt to drive all night and skip the motel fees. Your autopilot doesn’t need to drive as fast as you can, just fast enough to be safe and get you farther down the road in six to eight hours of downtime for you. It’s like wormhole travel – time and space shrink while you sleep and you wake up far away. There will be funny stories about people who punched in “Springfield” as the destination only to wake up in the wrong state. 

We will need a new service industry for “rest stops” with refueling stations, bathrooms and showers. Your car just pulls up, plugs in, and you hop out and go to the locker room. Or maybe it’s more like a private garage where you pull into a chamber, the garage door closes behind you, you hop out in your pajamas unseen by the public, and there’s a full bathroom and shower for you while your car plugs in and recharges.

My friends work at Facebook. One of the perks there is that if you own an electric vehicle, they have valets who will plug it in and recharge it while you are at work – all for free. Free fuel! Everybody knows how expensive rent is in the Bay Area. Imagine some ingenious worker who owns a car with autopilot. He just maps out a driving loop, puts his vehicle on autopilot, goes to bed, drives all night in a loop, pulls into the office in the morning, goes to the gym and the café and gets to work. No rent to pay. No fear of being roused by the cops issuing tickets for sleeping in a parked car. Maybe seats in future cars will fold down into the backseat to form a big, flat padded surface like a mattress. Maybe the windows will electronically tint to black out. How will city governments react to people sleeping in cars that just keep moving all night?

Or why not just get a low-rent apartment 120 miles from the office? Even a five or six hour daily commute becomes imaginable if I have door to door autonomous driving, my own personal space, and I can plug into my virtual world while being driven. I have Japanese friends who already spend six hours daily commuting by train which is only tolerable when they get a seat and can doze off or play on their smartphone. Americans might embrace Japanese-length commutes when they have their own private space in their autonomous car, with no bother from fellow commuters.

Many people shake their heads when they think about autonomous vehicles citing safety concerns for pedestrians. Eventually that must be solved for truly autonomous vehicles to be viable. But I hope the inventors and developers also take into account animals on the road. Dogs and cats have to be considered. What about wildlife? In some parts of the world, a deer or moose on the road strikes fear into even the best driver. One of my rural friends told me that if you see a cow on the road, don’t worry, just point your car directly at the cow, maintain speed, and at the last moment swerve around the cow. He claimed that cows are too slow and dumb to react. But he also said that if you see a horse on the road, stop. Do not pass. If you must continue, then creep by gently because a horse can get spooked and jump right onto your car. It’s no joke to have a 1500 pound animal land on your windshield. People die from car collisions with animals, not to mention the animal too. Autonomous vehicles will need to keep an eye out for critters on the road while keeping their passengers and innocent bystander pedestrians safe.

A number of technologies will need to step up to enable self-driving cars. Artificial intelligence, self-learning neural networks, robotics, electric engines and batteries. Even if and when 5G networks become “ubiquitous”, any self-driving car will need its own command and control “brain” to make safety decisions faster than any network can relay instructions. That means increases in compute power, fast memory storage, camera and imaging technology, lasers, vehicle radar, possibly ultrasonic “radar”. Expect to see new kinds of paint on the roads to help autonomous vehicles “follow the yellow brick road”. Expect new kinds of RFID modules and detectors installed along the road in lieu of humanly visible signs. Expect night vision and infrared detectors in cars. In some places, the road itself will be “smart” and will act as an “air traffic controller” to communicate instructions to all vehicles on the road to keep traffic flowing optimally and safely. In my opinion, it’s more likely that 5G will enable “smart roads” that improve traffic congestion and prevent traffic jams more so than it will actually enable autonomous vehicles – there won’t be 5G in many rural places where autonomous vehicles want to go. You’re not going to install or expand 5G base station footprints in rural areas unless the road itself is the 5G network medium. Maybe we can shrink 5G femtocells into reflectors and “turtles” cemented to the road, powered by a tiny embedded solar panel?

Speaking of “smart roads”, if and when we develop “air traffic control” for congested city streets that take over driving your vehicle like an autopilot, there will need to be a Supreme Court ruling for or against the concept. Americans love their freedoms, and the freedom to drive rudely, like a maniac, is dearly held by many of my friends. They will fight tooth and nail to protect their right to break all traffic laws in their muscle car or BMW, weaving in and out of traffic. If more of us had dashboard cameras today, we could produce multiple YouTube channels of bad drivers that would be highly entertaining. Perhaps the greatest threats to Americans’ personal freedom over their steering wheel and gas pedal are smart roads and autonomous cars. Detroit will fund opposition legislation to prevent high end, fast cars from being rendered moot by smart roads and autonomous autopilots. This will ensure that we will never achieve total control over every car and truck on the road. So autonomous vehicles will need to be better drivers than humans. Maybe there’s a potential upsell to upgrade your autopilot to drive just like a NASCAR champion. “Gosh officer, I don’t know what happened. I just installed the autopilot upgrade to the Richard Petty version and I have no idea how I got here so fast.” 

In summary, autonomous vehicles are coming soon. Some are already here. Autonomous vehicle fleets will drive better economics for electric vehicles, making them competitive against combustion engine vehicles. Human driving behaviors will change when autonomous and autopilot vehicles are available. Certain jobs will change or go away completely. Today there is a shortage of truck drivers in America that threatens to harm our economic expansion, but this very shortage may spur invention of autonomous delivery trucks. Night traffic patterns will change, improving life for some people while harming quality of life for other people living near busy roads. Autonomous vehicles might not need bright headlights if they use night-vision or other vision technology, and roadside streetlights might only turn on when they detect a human-driven vehicle approaching, thus reducing light pollution and conserving energy. Gas stations will morph and human attendants might decrease. Remote roadside motels might suffer. Rest stop businesses might pop up with Japanese-like capsule motels. Increased time sitting in cars will demand better vehicle seat ergonomics or people will suffer the common back ailments currently plaguing long-haul truck and taxi drivers. People might become even more sedentary than they are today. No trip, no matter how short, will be too inconvenient if you can just hop into an autonomous car and let it drive you. “Virtually remote” workers who currently work “from home” could easily adopt a nomadic lifestyle using autonomous vehicles as mobile offices and literally travel all over the country, working and driving day or night, working 8 hours to fulfill their daily obligation then stepping out of their vehicle into a totally new part of the country. I can see either a millennial sitcom about that or a tv reality show where the poor subject never knows where they are going to emerge from their vehicle in the morning.

If these predictions are correct, then people will be far more mobile than before, people’s attachment and reliance on cars will grow, society and the economy will change, and the concept of “local community” will change, for better or for worse.