For years, and much like cryptocurrency, I’ve been puzzling over the exact advantages brought by self-driving cars, especially as such a subsystem consumes substantial amounts of energy. David Zipper, who studies such topics at Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government, shares my bewilderment:
It’s understandable that companies want to maximize shareholder return; that’s their role in a market economy. But automakers are still struggling to explain why, exactly, we should be excited about this technology, rather than alarmed by it. We shouldn’t let them off the hook unless we have a convincing answer. [WaPo]
And if such technology was “successfully” introduced, I can’t help but remember the movie WALL-E (2008) in which the humans had been reduced to blobs of near-helpless protoplasm, until the automated systems had taken over because they couldn’t accomplish their primary mission without doing so.
Not that I’m saying that our future robotic overlords will be that Tesla sitting in your driveway. That’ll be something else.
But I’m really quite hesitant about this technological advance, particularly in view of this:
To understand why, consider an experiment in Northern California a few years ago, in which 13 people were given a chauffeur to take them anywhere they wanted for a week, effectively replicating the experience of having their own autonomous vehicle. Freed from the hassles of driving, test subjects traveled a whopping 83 percent more miles than when they had to drive themselves.
A concept called the Jevons paradox explains what happened: When a thing becomes cheaper, people discover new ways to use it. Self-driving cars reduce the “cost” of driving — in terms of effort, if not dollars — and as a result, they will induce people to take trips that they would have otherwise foregone. Over time, people with self-driving cars could opt to move farther from the central city, worsening sprawl and leading to still more miles driven.
This result depends on whether demand is rigid or flexible, and transportation, with the advent of work-from-home and remote-shopping, has become quite flexible. My Arts Editor is very happy not having to go shopping as much as she once used to.
And the more miles our cars cover, the more the environment is potentially degraded. That’s not a problem 50 or 100 years ago, but today we may be looking at a climate cliff.
So it’s all worth asking if self-driving cars are another miracle, or just bulls in the china shop.
