Why flying cars are NOT revolutionary
It seems like the public was expecting the future to include flying cars as the technological future as seen on the Jetsons cartoon and Back to the Future movies. My golf clubs live in the trunk of my car now, and we’ll get back to them in a moment.
There are a few companies and quite a few people that think flying cars are the future, like Terrafugia, and Moller International. They look really cool, even better than cartoons and movies! Let’s just think about if we all had flying cars. What would be different? There would have to be highways in the sky, like in the J
etsons. We’d park them in our garages, or flying houses, and we’d use them to go to and from work, to get groceries, and drive to the golf course. There would likely be no such thing as a non-injury flying car crash. But there is something far more revolutionary in the works we’ve all heard about: driverless cars. According this recent Christian Science Monitor article, they could be on the road in the next 10 years.
So what? Why is that revolutionary, and not just evolutionary? Let’s assume all the bugs are worked out and autonomous cars are on their way. At first, they will be novel, and the huge changes to our way of life won’t be apparent. Early adopters will get them, and they will likely pay much less on their insurance. They won’t crash, they won’t drive drunk, they can sense and avoid other drunk drivers better than a person, and won’t fall asleep at the wheel. An insurance company would much prefer insuring a proven driverless car than a 16 year old that snuck a couple of beers from his parents fridge on a Saturday night. As regular drivers start to see yearly insurance go from thousands of dollars to a hundred or less, people will shift much faster than we probably expect. Let’s assume prices start coming down and Uber-like businesses spring up offering driverless cars you can schedule 24/7. Imagine that more than 50% of the cars on the road are driverless. How soon after that would driverless car owners (or renters) start to demand the cars with humans are a menace, and are causing 99.999% of the accidents on the road? How many people killed by a drunk driver will it take before government gets involved to limit which roads and what times of day a driver in a regular car is allowed when a perfectly legitimate alternative is available to prevent these kinds of accidents and fatalities? According to this article, car crashes cost $1 trillion dollars in 2010 in the US. $1 trillion is quite a lot of money. No matter the political party, I can imagine elected officials planning a long list of government projects that could spend $1 trillion.
We’ve only scratched the surface. If you can cheaply order up a driverless car 24/7, you start to think hard about why own a car. The average cost of a new car is about $30,000, and nobody would buy any investment that depreciated as fast as a new car. You lose thousands just driving it off the sales lot. Your car spends the majority of the time parked at your work during the day, and parked at your house while you sleep. If you have a $300 per month car payment, $300 per month car insurance, and $300 a month in gas and maintenance, that’s $900 per month divided by 1 hour a day of use times 30 days, or $30 per hour to own a car. What would change your mind? $20 per hour? How about $10 per hour or $5 per hour if you agreed to share a ride? Obviously, this kind of situation only works in urban and suburban areas. Likely there would be driverless car zones within cities or towns, and if you drive in from way out in the country, you’ll probably park at the border and hop in a driverless car for the last stretch. There would need to be some infrastructure and logistics to be worked out obviously, let’s assume those get figured out to continue. Probably best if people living remotely had flying cars!
This is when things start to get interesting. If “everyone” is using a driverless car that they rent or own, and it picks you up at a predetermined time or you can instantly call on one, houses no longer need to have a garage. Without a garage, you don’t need a paved driveway. There would be no need of stop signs, since the driverless cars would see the other cars and negotiate who stops and who goes, and perhaps they would simply adjust speeds to “miss” each other by a few feet. Next you can get rid of stop lights, the cars can space themselves out and speed through the openings of the cross traffic. You’ll probably want to be reading the paper the first time you fly through an intersection when none of the traffic stops! Without accidents, the cars don’t need to have all the metal and airbags and safety features that add weight and drive up cost. We won’t need the highway patrol, there will likely be fewer ambulances, probably self-driving, and smaller emergency rooms.
You’d probably have crosswalks to get people and bikes across busy roads, but it would probably make more sense to make an overpass for foot traffic. There is then no need to keep cars on the right side of the road, no need for medians, road markings, guardrails, toll booths, carpool lanes, road signs, speed limit signs, and all kinds of processes and roadway accessories we’ve become used to. The “system” of driverless cars would gravitate to the most fuel efficient, time efficient, and cost effective use of roads and transporting people. You need to get lumber at the hardware store? A truck sort-of vehicle arrives. Going to work only, a car that has a seat, a windshield, and radio arrives to whisk you to work.
No more rental cars at the airport, after all, driverless cars are mostly ALL rented. Once driverless cars are the majority, driverless buses and trucks would follow. Here you can see that currently there are more than 6 million people employed in the US driving trucks and buses. Auto parts stores, auto dealerships, and used car lots that cater to consumers would be obsolete. Auto manufacturing would become a commodity business making the most efficient and cost-effective driverless cars possible to cater to the large driverless car service businesses. A huge portion of today’s jobs will transition away: anything associated with each person owning their own car that they drive when they want to go somewhere.
So now we finally can figure out where my golf clubs will live in the future age of driverless cars. Not in the trunk of a car I own and drive an hour or two per day, and not in the garage that I won’t need because I no longer own a car. They will live in a closet, that one by the stairs where everything falls out when I open it that has things I don’t need and don’t want but can’t get rid of. I will get them out as I walk out of my house and down the path to the street, where my buddies are waiting with their golf clubs in a perfectly sized compartment for 4 sets of clubs attached to a driverless car on our way to play golf at a golf course with no parking lot.