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| Beginning Stages of Self Driving Car -- Image Credit: nydailynews.com |
Saving Lives: In 2009, there were ~5.5 million accidents leading to ~34,000 killed and ~2.2 million injured. With the driverless car, these numbers evaporate because the computers on the car are thousands of times quicker than human reflexes and are far more accurate at distinguishing objects. This amounts to saving (drum role) $450 billion each year!
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| Image Diagram of Car Accidents -- Image Credit: driveorigo.com |
More Human Hours: What if you were free to work or relax while traveling? The average US commute time is 25 min. Multiply that by 100 million workers x 2 for both ways and you get 5 billion human hours wasted per day. That represents $50 billion per day in work force power.
Transportation Costs: Right now, there are ~1.6 million US trucker jobs with a median salary of ~$37,500. Imagine 99% of those jobs replaced by safer, more efficient, and faster autonomous cars. That would save our economy a mind-numbing $50 billion per year. That is the equivalent of 16 Human genome projects each year.
Faster Transportation: Forget the word traffic jams because it won't exist. With wirelessly communicating cars, travel can happen in sync so that traffic jams are eliminated. Furthermore, because automated cars have far more superior reflexes compared to humans, they can travel at faster highway speeds of almost 100mph.
More Efficient Energy Usage: We keep a safe distance from the car ahead of us. But with automated cars, they actually travel in tight formations that severely lessons air-drag. Furthermore, we can be dropped off straight at our destination while the driverless car goes park itself. This saves massive city parking costs.
© Nicholas Shah and Learning More Than Living, 2013. Please note that the material included this was not written by a licensed medical professional. Therefore, please consult your physician before trying anything suggested in this article. Please note that there were several images in this article. The first as from nydailynews.com. The second was from driveorigo.com. This blog does not claim ownership of these images. Nicholas Shah does not claim ownership to the ideas put forth here. However, he does claim ownership to the writing and authorship of the learningmorethanliving blog. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas Shah and Learning More Than Living with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Thank You.
Comments About Your Article:
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that the technology is quite as perfect as you are making it sound but I agree that it is a change that will eventually come and be a great asset to society.
Technology is not perfect and there are always problems with it. It is not as though there will be zero crashes with these cars but certainly the reduction will save lives and money.
It is very naive to think that everyone will use there commuting time to do work. It can be hard to write while moving and I get really car sick if I read too long while in motion. A lot of people find driving or riding in cars relaxing. Too much time getting to work is a pain but I don't know if I would see all of transportation time as a "waste."
I definitely agree that the drop in the cost of shipping that not having to pay people to drive trucks would cause would be good for the economy. Maybe have a little sympathy, though, every time you talk about millions of people losing their jobs.
A world without traffic jams would be nice and technology does look promising to help lesson this problem.
Remember that even if the car parks itself it will have to park somewhere and unless you want to pay the energy cost of returning home it will need to find and pay for parking.
It is not as though the change from driven cars to automatic ones will take place over night. Most people cannot afford to buy a new car, especially until the one they are already driving needs replacing. The companies who produce these cars are not going to just give them away so it will be a gradual process for them to replace driven cars. Some of the benefits won't be able to occur until they because a majority means of transit, such as coordinating traffic.
I did overall enjoy reading this article. Although is a little idealistic in certain respects it does bring up many ways in which this technology will likely benefit our lives.
A Blog Reader
1. I don't see why the technology wouldn't be as good as he is making it sound. You have to remember that Volvo and BMW are the ones making the predictions and often car companies over estimate the amount of time needed for a technology to be ready. We can certainly speculate that if Volvo and BMW are predicting this car in 2020 then the technology has already been developed and is likely in a testing phase.
ReplyDelete2. A company is likely to see transportation time as a "waste." Maybe an individual wouldn't but sitting in a moving car while listening to music is not an effective use of time for most people.
3. I don't think this is a sound argument. Imagine if we said the same thing when bulldozers came out? Should we get rid of bulldozers to save the million of hole digger jobs that were lost? A common mistake is to over value the importance of employment in an economy and to underestimate the value of innovation and it's ability to produce more goods using less resources. The goal of the economy is to create value. Truckers who have lost there jobs will soon have new jobs as new innovation require new work. But at the same time the work that everyone will have to do will be reduced.
4. True
5. True
A random blogger
Additionally, when companies free up the money they have to pay truckers then the resultant will be lower costs for products. The net gain of he economy is more important than the temporary negative side effects felt by a small region on the economy.
ReplyDeleteFewer*
ReplyDeleteNew innovations.
Man they need to let you edit these comments.
A Random Blogger,
ReplyDelete1. I see your point.
2. Certainly too much time in a car is a waste but my point was that not all of it is and that this technology will not magically erase what waste there is. Also you could say the same thing about almost any form of entertainment but without a certain amount of time relaxing workers are not efficient. Additionally regardless of whether or not they are driving everyone is not going to use the time efficiently. When most people ride in a car that someone else is driving they do not not do work. Instead they listen to music, talk, do nothing, etc. As I mentioned there are disadvantages to doing work in a car such at motion sickness and difficulty writing. Obviously there will be people who will use this time productively but all the hours used for transportation will not magically be converted into productive work time.
3. I think you misunderstood my comment. I think for society and the economy as a whole it will be good. I just have noticed that this blog often unapologetically talks about people losing their jobs and that maybe the tone could be a little more sympathetic to those who will suffer a loss of job. I understand the economics behind your comment and agree.
4&5 Thank you
-Yes it would be nice to edit the comments, maybe it will let you if you don't make it anonymous (I don't know, never tried).
A Blog Reader
A Random Blogger,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree.
And yes, sorry about misunderstanding your point. I think you make a fair point.