Cities have the problem (congestion, limited parking) in the first place while rural areas generally don’t. Many cities are limited on resources so can’t change the problem as much as they want to, so generalized self driving cars would be a huge economic boon in that case. It is the cheap solution to an expensive urban problem, but getting there requires software that is smarter than what we have right now.
Rural areas simply don’t need self driving cars, so the hybrid solution is a non-starter, economically speaking.
I don’t see why. Certainly, there’s the room for cars, and far more people outside of cities own cars and have room for cars—but these are just questions of the capacity for car ownership, not the capacity for driving.
Consider: being unable to drive yourself places in the country is a far worse problem than being unable to drive yourself places in a city. Every job is far away and expects you to commute to it; there’s little-to-no public transit; and far fewer, far more expensive taxi/ridesharing services. Given the distances involved, walking or bicycling are impractical.
The single real solution to this problem, for the class of people involved (people too young to drive, people old enough their faculties have failed them, teenagers living in suburbs who want part-time jobs in the city, disabled people currently relying on privately-operated minibus service) is personal or family-owned self-driving cars. It’s essentially the middle-class equivalent of the accessibility advantage granted by having a dedicated chauffeur.
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Also, I feel obligated to mention that specifically in the Rust Belt in the US, there are a lot of people who have lost their licenses because disaffection drove them to alcoholism, which led to a series of DUIs. These people want to work, but they’ll never again be trusted to drive—so how will these people ever get another job?
Cheap driverless cars—ones that don’t have to be smart enough to drive in complex city conditions, only along country roads to about town limits—are clear winners here. (The current attempted semi-solution to these problems is electric bicycles, but they just don’t have the range if you don’t already live pretty close to town. Most such people end up having to move, usually away from their families, which takes away even more of their support-network.)
Just like “why not just give homeless people a house”, a very simple solution to persistent joblessness in these areas is to give the people without driver’s licenses a car that doesn’t require a driver’s license (because it drives itself.)
And the cheaper such a car is, the more of them you can afford to give away on a constrained budget; so you’d better constrain the problem domain as tightly as possible, and ship as MVP-like a product as possible. (Analogy: did the OLPC need to be a powerful computer? No, not for anything it needed to do. So you can cheap out on hardware, and thus make more of them.)
Or rather, SDVs are a solution looking for a suitable problem space - which may turn out to be imaginary (or, more charitably, significantly more constrained, e.g. "long-distance freeway travel")
You are only thinking about the USA, but there are places outside of the USA where SDVs can be transformative. Specifically, huge Chinese mega cities with really really crappy traffic and pollution problems.
Am not, but your point has merit, if you mean a networked system without physical rails. As a drop-in replacement - I don't see how a human vs. robot driver, on the same vehicle footprint, helps congestion.
Imagine 10 cars all in a line. Each car can only see the car in front of it, and has a delay of 3 seconds between seeing the car in front of it move and accelerating.
Given these numbers, we would expect car #10 to have to wait 30 seconds or so before they start moving.
As congestion is a feedback loop (lack of car movement results in other cars being unable to move), self-driving cars with a coordination mechanism and microsecond-level control would reduce the problem exponentially.
There usually is “enough” space on the road, when you account for all the unused space on the road in the opposite flow direction to rush-hour traffic. Cars just need to quickly take you to work, then slowly drive back the other way. Maybe even borrow a lane of the highway for parking, which shouldn’t worry traffic controllers given that they could send a command to all the cars to get them going again as soon as traffic is going to pick up.
In other words, this will generate pointless traffic - unless your system has strictly unidirectional flows at any given time, you have doubled the problem in an attempt to eliminate it (plus incidentally doubled the energy consumption, which translates to cost).
Rural areas simply don’t need self driving cars, so the hybrid solution is a non-starter, economically speaking.