No normal person will ever own a self-driving car

A few things I’ve read recently have convinced me that the average punter will never own a self-driving car.

The main reason for this is that they’re going to be significantly more expensive than an old-fashioned car, mainly because of all the sensors. As pointed out recently in the New York Times, “[a]dding self-driving technology — at least as it stands now — into regular passenger cars could make them absurdly expensive for anyone without the cash of a Silicon Valley mogul. Until recently, the laser sensor used on the Google car project cost $75,000 [£50,000].” Even though that price is clearly going to come down, it’ll always be more expensive to produce a self-driving car than an old-fashioned one.

The additional costs mean that they need to be used much more than normal cars in order to recoup the cost. HGV lorries might (as mentioned in the article linked to above) adopt the technology first, because it means a lorry can then be on the road 24/7 with only one driver, which mean that the additional cost will be recouped quickly.

Normal, old-fashioned cars are just not used enough to make it worthwhile to make them so expensive. According to the RAC, the “average car is parked at home for 80% of the time, parked elsewhere for 16% of the time and is only on the move for 4% of the time.”

Because of this, a self-driving car only really makes economic sense if it’s being used as a taxi, so it’s no surprise that Uber are very interested in this area — they already have put self-driving cars on the road in Pittsburgh.

Even if some crazy individual were to buy a self-driving car, it would be a bit silly to park it when they’re not using it rather than letting it make some money on its own working for Uber or similar. Only multi-millionaires will buy a self-driving car and then leave it in the driveway.

So we aren’t going to replace our old car with a self-driving model. Instead, we’ll simply start using self-driving taxis more and more until we don’t see the point in owning a car any more. It probably won’t be long before young people can’t see any point in getting a driving licence, but I imagine companies like Uber might need to introduce subscription services covering all you transportation needs for a fixed monthly fee in order to tempt current drivers to give up their car.

The move to self-driving cars is of course going to be bad news for the majority of car manufacturers. If normal people don’t buy cars, there is absolutely no reason to have so many brands and models to choose from. It’ll probably be more like the situation in the aviation industry, where companies buy hundreds of planes and then decide how they want them to look.