Hailing the Robo Cab

Or maybe it'd be better to stay Long Island, Long Island. Oh goodness, Now, let's let's not do accents. It's too early in the afternoon to do accents, you guys. Uh no, no, so so Frank rotein and said, Hi, guys, just listen to part two of Mega Cities. Joe made a comment that compelled me to share my experience and possibly blow his mind as well as garner a little sympathy for me. His comment was and thing like, o MG, people actually drive into New York City. Oh yes, Joe. Unfortunately a

lot of us are tortured on a daily basis. I live on Long Island, about sixty miles from my job in Lower Manhattan editorializing huh okay back. Although Jonathan only lives three miles from his job, sixty miles is an average commute around here, But the distance isn't really the issue. The issue is time. It takes me three hours each way every day. Talk about premature aging. It is literal torture.

Now many people would to spend their sympathy to make the point that I must have or should have taken the commuting time into consideration when I bought my house.

I did. I bought my house in two and considered the commute into Manhattan acceptable because it only took an hour and twenty minutes, despite expanding all of the major highways and implementing new strategies to ease traffic, the population of Long Island in New York City having increased so quickly that my commute time is more than doubled in the twenty three years I've been doing this. No real point to make here, just my two cents. I enjoyed

the show. Thank you Frank, Well, thank you Frank. That was enlightening and a true nightmare to imagine. It was like one of the better Stephen King short stories. Yeah yeah, and uh, it takes me an hour to get to work, but that's because I walk. If I didn't walk, it would take me like ten minutes to work, you know, because he was saying, like, you know, three hours for sixty miles, takes me an hour just to go three

but then I'm on foot. Well just sure, sure, but yeah, I mean if you took, for example, a taxi, Yeah, if I if I, if I decided to take a cab, it would take me no time at all. Don't lie, Jonathan. Sometimes you call Uber. I have done that on occasion, usually when the weather is particularly awful. Yeah, normally I will walk it. But if if I am one exhausted and it's ninety eight degrees outside in seventy humidity, yeah I'm gonna call Uber. Or if it's pouring down rain,

I'll call Uber. Otherwise I walk it. And I got tell you. When I take Uber and I get in an air conditioned vehicle and I am quickly whisked away to my house in just ten or fifteen minutes, I start to really reconsider my part priorities when it comes to walking. Yeah. Yeah, all these car services are kind of rad. Yeah, they totally are. I mean, it's and it's one of those things that has developed quickly over

the past several years. And what led us to this particular episode and the reason why Frank's message is so is so pertinent, is we wanted to talk about this concept of combining a couple of things we've talked about in previous episodes. So, uh, we're talking mostly about autonomous vehicles, which we've covered multiple times on this show, and we're talking about ways to improve dense urban environments so that they are more pleasant to to work, play and live

in travel around in. Yeah. Yeah, And we've done at least three episodes about autonomous cars and how they work. So if you want to hear a whole lot about that, you can tune into Maximum over Clock and Lookamano Hands, both of which are from March and Robot You Can Drive My Car, which is by far my favorite episode title to say out loud from November. Do we really want to send people back to those March episodes? Yeah,

listen at your own risk. That was like the first month we were doing the show, early early in the in the whole deal. But that tells you how many times we've talked about autonomous cars I mean those are those are the ones that are expressly about autonomous cars. We also seem to mention them at least once every month or so. Well, we do because I think we're all three on record, and please feel free to disagree

as being pretty pro autonomous car. You know, like there are a lot of emerging technologies that have pros and cons things we can point out say, I don't know, you know that this could turn out bad. It's always hard to tell what the full range of effects of a new technology will be. With autonomous cars, I think the motivation is there for adoption. I think they're going to be overall beneficial in a pretty serious and noticeable way,

and I think I want one. Yeah, they're they're provably at this current stage, safer than human drivers and also uh more fuel efficient exactly. Yeah. So, so just a quick rundown on the benefits of autonomous cars, we've we've kind of mentioned them here. For an autonomous car, you can put sensors in every location around that car so that it can it can completely sense its environment with no blind spots. So that's already an advantage over a

human driver. Right. Also, it can pay equal amounts of attention to all of those at the same time processing all of that information, whereas as a human driver, you are focused on pretty much a single direction, with maybe some peripheral awareness of some other stuff that's going on, but it's not your full focus. It can't be can and look everywhere and it does. You can't look everywhere and you don't, right, uh, And if you try, then often bad things can happen. Maybe this is why Sherlock

Holmes doesn't drive out anywhere. Yeah, ever, because he's too much stuff all the time. Yeah, Yeah, it's very possible. The automous cars can also react in a fraction of the time it takes a human to react to the same stimulus. So if there's an emergency situation where you need to apply the break, a robotic car is going to be able to do that more effectively and faster than any human could. Um. And if the concentration of autonomous cars is high enough on the road, it can

really help reduce traffic congestion. We've talked about that in the past, where you don't even need to have every car in the road be autonomous, you just need enough of them to to create this, uh, this traffic flow that's much more efficient and you have fewer traffic jams as a result, at least according to simulations being run. We haven't rolled out enough of them to really test it out yet. Sure, well, well on a on a

small level and kind of anecdot totally. You can see this if you use Apple Maps or Google Maps or something like that to tell you how to get to a place, it will automatically reroot you around bad traffic areas these days. So technology. Yeah, and they also in addition to all of this theoretical knowledge, they have a practical proven record so far. They are doing very well

in the field. Yeah. The only accidents that the Google cars have been in so far the last time that we checked at any rate, Yeah, and I want to say they were it was up to seven or eleven total, But at any rate, none of them were caused by the the autonomous by the computer. They were caused by humans around the computer, you know. In fact, there was

an instance I can't remember exactly what it was. It was like a month ago or so where the media got all excited because there was a report that supposedly some autonomous cars had almost gotten into a wreck with each other. It was the biggest non story I know. I ended up reading into that and saying, there's nothing here that like, nobody got hurt, there was not a collision. Yeah,

the person from Google actually said. The person from Google said, the headline here is autonomous cars do exactly what they were supposed to do, because that's how it read the way. The way it was being reported, at least in some media outlets. Some of them were really good about it. Some of them were very responsible, but a few of them said, you know, near miss with autonomous cars. And the story almost came across as a Google car had um had cut off a Delphi car and that no,

it was it, Yeah, it was Delph. I think. Um, so a Google car had cut off a Delphi car and the Delphi car was able to react to prevent an accident from happening. And then the person at Delphi I said, that's not what I said at all. What I said was our autonomous car had made a plan to do a lane change, but then the Google car did a lane change first, which meant that the space the Delphi car was supposed to go into was currently occupied.

So the Delphi car switched its strategy, which is exactly what he when drivers do all the time, and we don't often fail to do and then hit each other where you're like, no, I want that lane and it is mine, whether your car isn't it or not. But that's the that was the deal was that it was not a car cutting off another one. It was a car making a lane change in another car changing at the last section second it's mind to change lanes. Yeah.

So I don't want to sound like a you know, schill for the autonomous car vendors out there, but it seems to me their track record is pretty good. The human driving track record is not good at all. Right, It's it's demonstrably worse, right, I mean, we have plenty

of of records on that. The one big drawback to autonomous cars is that they're going to be really really expensive when they come out, assuming that you know, at least at first at least at first, and and probably significantly expensive for quite some time afterward, because while manufacturing can really help bring down costs, like as you improve those processes, the amount of technology being packed into these cars is such that even with improvements to those manufacturing processes,

you're never going to get uh an autonomous car down to the price of like a mid priced car. It's always going to be on the high end, um possibly on the very high end, at least for the foreseeable future. But that's not necessarily a deal breaker as far as autonomous cars helping us out. No, Because I want to form a little analogy here. I remember people saying this.

In fact, they're still saying it today, but they used to say it like in the nineties, was, Uh, we'll never have electric vehicles because they just cost too much and they will never cost less. We will surely never

improve upon this technology. Right. And it's true that there haven't been a whole lot of personal electric vehicles rolled out, But one thing that I think we did get fairly early on was certain areas, like some college campuses or some downtown areas adopting electric buses and other forms of electric public transportation. Right. And that's exactly why we want to kind of segue into this discussion about the possibility

of using electric autonomous vehicles as a taxi fleet. In other words, not looking at autonomous cars as something that you, as a person go out and go to a car dealership and purchase. And this is the vehicle you're going to be using. But rather, what about a an environment where there's a fleet of these autonomous cars and you can hail one of these cars like a cab whenever you need to get from point A to point B. And so it's a it's a very different use case.

And when it comes to that use case, the story is incredibly different. It is much different than from the the huge barrier of entry of the cost for an individual person, right, right, So so let's talk about some solid numbers. Let's talk about New York City, which has really had a lot of taxi cabs um and is also where Frank is from. Yes, so New York City

is great example for multiple reasons. One the enormous fleet of cabs that are there too, it's a very dense urban environment, it's got a large population we mentioned in our Mega Cities episode there there. It's a great candidate to use as an example. So the data that I'm going to be spouting off is from lots of different sources over several different years. So keep in mind that the numbers aren't all uh they don't all come from one source, right, So, uh so there's gonna be some

your mileage may vary in this case. According to the twenty ten census, uh less than half of the three million households in New York City own a car. So a fewer than half of the popular of the households, not population, but the households in New York City own a car. Um that's one point four million households on a car coin to the twenty census. And the lowest ownership rate is in Manhattan, where it's around twenty three of households owning a car. But doesn't every household have

their own subway station. Yes, that's how New York works. Uh well, no, I mean the point I'm making is that you can definitely chalk that up to them having very good public transit. Yeah, that's definitely. Well, that's part of it. But the taxi cabs are also the yellow cabs. They are they are almost almost exclusively concentrated in Lower Manhattan.

Uh so the other ones. Brooklyn is at forty percent ownership, Bronx is at Queens is in Staten Island is at Now if you want to compare that to the national average, the average across the entire United States. In the US of households own at least one car, so in New York City it is much lower than average. Um. New York City is therefore this great example of how are people getting around if they're not? If not everyone owns

a vehicle. Uh. And so besides the buses and subways, cabs and livery cars and other vehicles that are driver for higher services, that's the answer. Besides walking, that's also a big one. But how many taxis are they running around in New York? So the most recent number I've seen is thirty seven. However, the most recent site I could find was from an actual from an actual source from within New York City was the two thousand fourteen Taxi Cab fact Book, a jolly good read, uh, published

by New York's Taxi and Limousine Commission. And at that time when they published the fact book, it was thot seven. So somewhere in the thirteen thousand, five hundred range is what we're talking about. And it's such an exact number because New York and New York's Taxi and Limousine Commission specifically dispensed these uh, these medallions which are kind of like a license to be a cabby or our license for your car to be used as a cab. Right, you're authorized to act as a cab driver within the

New York City area. And a medallion is a small metal plate that actually attaches to the hood of a taxi. That's what designates that car as being authorized and is

it is legally allowed to act as a cab. Because we also have probably all have heard the stories of people landing in New York and some yahoo with a car just happens to be yellow driving on up and yeah, yeah, they're they're they're what make sure you don't get kidnapped by crazy person, right or or just fleeced like it may be that you know, you get picked up by somebody who's charging you ridiculous rates that I have nothing

to do with the um the actual authorized rates. Yeah, because I thought you meant the Central Park in New Hampshire. What I thought you wanted the scenic route. We're gonna visit all the borough until we get to Manhattan. Uh. Yeah. So the medallions are these plates that are on the cars. That's how you recognize that it's a cab technically, that you've got the yellow cabs in Lower Manhattan that's mainly where you're going to find them. Um, there are actually

two different types of medallions. There's independent medallions and many fleet medallions. But both of those mean that the driver of that car is authorized to operate a cab. So here's an interesting number. Yellow taxis provide an average of four eight five thousand trips per day collectively, not per taxi. No, yeah, it's all of them together, hundred seventy five million a year. By the way, that's a lot of trips. Now, they're also borrowed taxis, and I apologize if you guys in

New York pronounce it totally different. But it's b O r O and it's a it's for the Burrows. I would imagine brow you would think so, But it's b O r oh, and I'm calling it borrow. It's borrow taxis. You do what you want, Jonathan. At least twelve thousand of their abbreviated boraxes, So if you get on a borax, uh, slippery. No, the boro taxis there at least twelve thousand of them as and they are green in color, they're not yellow.

They serve areas of New York not commonly covered by yellow taxi service or really anything out of Lower Manhattan UH and total, we're looking at around twenty five thousand taxis of some sort, yellow or greens serving the streets in New York City. Then you've got another twenty five thousand falling under the category of liveries UH and you cannot street hail one of those, So you can't be on the corner and see a livery car and flag

it down. They're not allowed to stop. You can. You must prearrange your trips with these services, so are a little different from the taxis. Also, until recently, there was no way to get a yellow cab without just flagging it down. You couldn't pre arrange them. You had to flag it down, and you flag it down these days either the old fashioned way where you're waving at a cab driver, or they're also apps now where you can use that to UH to flag a cab, but it's

essentially the same thing. Then you've got the black car Services, which has about another ten thousand vehicles, so you're looking at what sixty thousand of these cars driving people around New York City. Now, on top of that, those are all the those are the ones that are overseen by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, Yeah, what about Uber? So Uber Uber and Lift and all those other similar digital

services we've popped up recently. Uber in particular has raised some some some hell or in New York City, people would say, because they've they come in and the Taxi and Limousine Commission not really super happy about this other group coming in that has nothing like they don't answer to the commission at all. They set their own rates.

They you know, it's it's very different approach. And the perception is that Uber is taking a lot of business away from the registered drivers who also have to go through like the a lot more regulation than Uber does. So there there's some real concerns saying, hey, it's not really fair. This other business is coming in and they're not subject to the same restrictions that we are, So why are we Why are we allowing them to steal business?

That's kind of the narrative. However, there's some things you gotta keep in mind. First of all, there are more Uber cars in the streets of New York City, then there are yellow taxi cabs. Well, there are more Uber drivers. That's really well, that's the fair thing to say. How many are in operation at any given time. Isilar lower? Yeah? Yeah, So Uber drivers number around nineteen thousand in New York

City across seven bases. Uh. Depending upon where you read this, this the statistic, because I've also seen it as low as around fourteen thousand, four hundred and as high as nineteen thousand. But that means that there are more Uber drivers either way. Even on the low number, there are more Uber drivers than there are yellow taxi medallions in New York City. However, that does not mean that Uber has taken out a huge chunk of that taxi business.

So remember I said four eight thousand trips per day for the taxi cabs. For Uber, it's closer to thirty four thousand, thirty four thousand, two hundred seventy one trips per day. So a fraction, oh yeah, tiny tiny amount compared that was That number comes from a report in

September two fourteen. We should really do a whole episode on these these types of services, because the legal tangles in the surrounding, like socio technological issues are are really interesting um and the numbers are more serious than other cities. Portland is in the middle of a four month taxi deregulation experiment and according to their intern report, Uber and Lift and and et cetera have handled forty three per cent of taxi calls in May. Yeah, so very different

story depending upon where you are. Sure well, and that's also partially I'm sure due to the de regulation that's going on in that area right now. But you know what, we'll see what happens at the end of that experiment period and do lots more research and come back to guys with another episode if if it warrant that. Yeah, yeah, because it's it's definitely, I mean, the story of of Uber in general is pretty amazing. This was an idea

that uh ended up being a multibillion dollar idea. It's phenomenal. Yeah. So at any rate, we've got what's this like, seventy to nine thousand cars cars that are in services in New York City, not necessarily all at the same time, but yes, yeah, ninety thousand cars in New York City providing services for people to get from point A to

point b. Uh. So what if we did something really crazy and we ended up take all of those cars off the streets, fired all the drivers, and replace them all with robo taxis Well, that is certainly not great if you are a taxi or uber driver. Nope, but it's it's also something that you absolutely should plan for if you happen to be a taxi or uber driver, because, uh,

sooner or later this will happen. Whether whether it will happen, you know, within the next five to ten years, largely depends not so much on the technology as it does on the legislation. That's really where it's going to to be the battle ground, I think, But it will happen. Uh, and don't just believe us. There was a study that recently came out that says pretty much the same thing. Yeah. The Earth Institute at Columbia University was one of these studies.

Are actually quite a few that are really interesting. This one is available in full on the net. If you want to go and read it, you you can find the Earth Institute's Columbia University study was released in two thousand their team, and it was looking for sustainable solutions for personal mobility. In other words, what is the what is the car of the future going to look like?

And is it going to be a privately owned vehicle or will we have shifted to some other means of mobility in the future, and they were actually looking at what are the most economical and energy efficient methods of getting around, especially if you are in an urban environment, because the further out from an urban environment you get,

the more a private personal vehicle makes sense. But if you are within an urban environment and your travel is restricted to you know, a certain few thousand miles a year, like six thousand miles a year because of the way you work and live in that space, owning a personal vehicle may not make sense. And so they looked at several different factors. One was they were looking at the way of using the internet to coordinate between a fleet

of cars and the people who need transportation. So like the smartphone apps for Uber and Left and also for some cab companies, so it takes advantage of like GPS data, It takes advantage of the this intern interconnection where you also have a system that can keep track of what all the different cars are doing at any given time, so it can route the most efficient vehicle to get to the destination. Uh that destination being the person who's hailing a car. And if you you have an app

for something like Uber, it probably already does something like this. Yeah, yeah, it's it's very much like that. If you ever pull up the Uber app and you just use it without like you're not calling a car yet, you can actually see all the cars that are in your area that are driving around in different places. And then when you you cannot control, please make pac Man. Google Maps did for April, they turned They turn Google, But we're talking

about pac Man with the ghosts being real cars. Go watch Pixel and come back to me and tell me what a great idea that was. Okay, So the next thing they looked at were autonomous vehicles. That's also part of the what they were considering for the cars or the personal transportation of the future shared vehicles. So this would be the you know, abandoning the idea of owning your own vehicle and doing something more along the lines of taking cabs or Uber or these robotic cars. Uh.

And you wouldn't known the robotic car. You would just you know, hire it for a ride and then you would be done, and then you would do it again whenever you need a ride the next time. How about if the car didn't have to be the same size for every trip? Huge, huge part of this, Yeah, because let's say you're one person, you need a taxi ride and there are three empty seats or two empty seats

that you're not occupying. Yeah, I've randomly, you know, had nothing but minivans to choose from when I get often an airport or something. Yeah. No, every time I go to c e s. Whenever I'm in the line, the taxi cab line, it almost always seems like I get the mini van as my cab, and that's space going to waste. There could be a group behind me that

could have really used that. But because the way the system works where it's first come, first serve, it doesn't you know, they're not they're not matching the size of the vehicle with the needs of the writer. But if you could do that, if you could write size, if I'm one person for this trip, right, then you could have a vehicle of the appropriate size, a small vehicle come pick you up. Whereas a family a four that are on vacation and have luggage, they could have a

larger vehicle pick them up. And of course that's not just about space, that's about energy. If the car only needs to fit one person, it will weigh less and it needs less and less energy, and also it takes up less space for storage, it takes up less space

for parking. There are a lot of reasons why you would want to maximize the efficiency of the size of the various cars in your taxi fleet, because it may be that you're you know, especially if you look at the statistics in New York City, most of the rides

tend to be one or two people. So if your fleet is mostly of vehicles that can carry one or two people, then you can, uh, you know, you you can have a much smaller storage space for your fleet of vehicles since only a small portion of them would be larger, right for the for those times where there are three or four more people who need to get from point A to point B. Now I see another thing that you said they take into considerations advanced propulsion.

Now we're talking about nuclear pulse propulsion. I wish, yeah, in the in the actual study, they call it advanced propulsion systems, and I thought plasma. What's going on? It's like, yeah, sadly there's there's specifically talking about electric vehicles and whether it's pure electric as in a battery powered vehicle or fuel cell. They also mentioned fuel cell vehicles, which are

you know, they're also electric cars. It's just they're using hydrogen as a fuel to create this chemical reaction that generates electricity, and then the output is electricity, heat, and water. Uh, whether it's fuel cell or electric battery there. That's really what they were looking at for advanced propulsion. So they wanted to see what could we do if we really concentrate on these five things and combine them in some way.

The ideal future personal transportation system would be a combination of all five of these things in one form factor. So they're creating like their fantasy football team version of the New York transportation system. Yeah. Yeah, And they said that if you combine all of these you could save a huge amount of time, money, energy, I mean pretty much across the board. You would be making a better choice for getting people around an urban environment. That seems intuitive,

but I guess the question is how much better? Okay, so we talked about that seventy nine thousand cars around New York City. Uh, specifically they were looking at the yellow taxi cabs, which, let's be fair, let's eliminate everything else but the yellow taxi cabs. So that's back to the thirteen thousand, four hundred or so. This study said that you could replace all of those yellow taxi cabs with nine thousand electric autonomous vehicles. So you have already

wiped out a ton of those. Now. The other thing to keep in mind is that those yellow taxi cabs, while they represent only a fraction of the overall driver service cars out in New York City, they have the vast majority of the fairs. They are by far providing the most trips out of all the different cab services and liveries in New York City. So you could just boost that nine thousand number up a little bit and presumably you would have enough to cover all of those

drivers services in New York, which is pretty phenomenal. And the way you do it is through being incredibly efficient and having next to no downtime. So and if you're a driver of a cab, a yellow cab, and the only way you get fares is when you see someone flag you down or you have to drive around with an empty cab, yeah, tons of downtime where you don't have someone or at least enough downtime so that it

is a problem, it's wasted potential. But when you have this master system that is scheduling things out and keeping things as efficient as possible. There's very little downtime involved. As soon as a car is dropping off, it's on its way to go pick someone else up, and uh, it's you know, I'm really curious to be able to dive deeper into their research because some of it sounds almost magical. They were talking about nine thousand cars doing this, and your weight time would be less than a minute

from when you hailed the cab. So you open up your smartphone, you say I need a ride. Less than a minute later and autonomous electric vehicle pulls up and you get in. Now, if you're talking about your average yellow taxi cab weight time, if you are actively looking for a cab and trying to flag one down, the average weight time is closer to five minutes, So you've already saved time just with that. And you're using fewer cars, so there are fewer cars on the streets of New

York City as well. That also means that there's less traffic, so you've also sped up the amount of time is

anyone on the road to get anywhere exactly. Yeah, So there those are huge benefits there so yeah, a slightly larger fleet would probably do that for all those So the imagine that you now can remove seventy thousand cars from the New York City area and those are replaced by let's be I'm gonna double it, just for the heck of it, eighteen thousand electric vehicles, less than twenty thousand vehicles can replace seventy thousand that exists right now.

And that's again just the driver's services. You could also eventually see people say, well, I don't need a personal vehicle now I can get to where I need to go by taking one of these cars. So you get rid of the personal vehicles. Because when you think about it, personal vehicles, of the time they're parked, you're not using them. And in New York City you're paying for that. Most people are paying more for a parking space than you would find for an average house. Here in Atlanta, it's

kind of crazy. Um, it might be a slight exaggeration, but not by a whole lot. So also, because we're talking about electric vehicles and not gasoline powered vehicles, there is the environmental factor to consider. According to another study done by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the per mile greenhouse gas emissions of an autonomous electric vehicle would be lower than that of a two thousand, fourteen gasoline powered vehicle.

That was even taking into consideration how the electricity is being produced simply by the reduction in the amount of travel and the right sizing that being a huge part it, because if you're right sizing, meaning that you're sending out only the vehicle necessary to carry the passenger and there you know, to meet the passengers needs, then you're not using the same bulk vehicle that's going to be drawing the same amount of electricity as every other bulk vehicle

out there. You're gonna be using a lot of smaller ones that are just gonna be sipping at electricity instead of gulping at it. Sure, and here's the part where we do have to say, as always that the way that you generate that electricity through the grid matters. It does matter. Like in California, this would make way more sinse than New York. And the reason I say that is that California has a lot more green power plant

technology incorporated in it than New York does. So in New York City, most of the power plants, in fact I think all the power plants in New York City are gas fired power plants. That means they're using natural gas, and some are using a combination of natural gas and coal. So you are using fossil fuels to generate electricity. So while the cars themselves are lean, the electricity may not be, and in the case of New York it isn't. So

that is something to consider that. Yes, the individual cars are not going to be generating greenhouse gases, but the system that provides the energy that lets the cars move does, So there's a larger picture that you have to look at. In that case, According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,

it still makes sense. They go into a great deal of detail, and part of it is that they assert that more and more regions are looking into greener means of producing electricity, so part of it, part of it is rest on the assertion that things are going to change, which might be a little let's let's be fair, let's

say it's optimistic. Well, well, I mean the commercial urge of having, you know, hypothetically a bunch of electric vehicles on the road that all need to be charged would give people more of an incentive to start creating these these greener ways of power. Yeah, and they're tons of incentives to do it. And that's just one of them obviously, I mean, just just wanting to clean up the environment

being another one. Wanting to screw the penguins or too cute, or or for for ones that are petroleum based, wanting to to uh free yourself from the burdens of having to import some of your petroleum and thus the national security angle of energy comes into play. Uh. But yeah, it's all of these things are are they look like

they're positives. In fact, both the Columbia study and the Berkeley study, the Lawrence Berkeley study, both of them came to the same conclusion, which is that, in an unusual turn of events, the greenest approach, also in the long run, is the most economical. It will save you more because the key they're being in the long and the long run, and and not for personal ownership. You have to take that shared vehicle into account. That's what makes it uh

an attractive economical coach. Not for the person who wants to have their own car. This is for the person who lives in a city and wants to be able to get around and maybe doesn't want their own car because they don't want to make car payments, they don't want to make insurance payments, they don't want to be taxed every year on the vehicle that they used to

get around. So if they are using a system like this, then they're paying on a per trip basis, and even if you factor in all the trips, it may be that your your cost per year is lower than that of owning a car, unless you're one of those people who can buy a car and make it last for twenty years, in which case you could argue, hey, no, I'm in my case it doesn't make sense. But but most of us are not like that, right, most of us can't have a car and have it in good

working condition for a really long time. That's getting less and less common these days. So again, because of all that technology and how expensive it is, the average estimation of how much that would add to the cost of a vehicle, adding on top of the already you know, whatever the price tag is is another one thousand dollars. So take a thirty thousand dollar car, toss a hundred fifty thousand on top of it thousand dollars for your autonomous car. Yeah, I don't have that sitting around. I

don't either. I thought I did. Turns out it's more like about a buck seventy three and change, what is it with the true code sealant exactly? Like what if

I want that undercoat treatment thing? Um? Yeah, no. So if we do look at it from that personal ownership, it's prohibitively expensive and would be for quite some time because again, even bringing those costs down, you would have to bring them down an incredible amount to get close to what the cars of today cost, right, so this would be decades or at least a decade to get

to that level. How Ever, if you look at it as you are an organization that wishes to provide driver services in a dense urban environment, and you compare it to the cost of maintaining a fleet of uh gasoline powered vehicles operated by humans, it suddenly starts to make sense because you're not paying those drivers. Robots don't get paid, so they might take our jobs, but at least we

know they're not making a living. You know, there's a little silvery silver lining, and then there they're just as miserable as I am. And I want to point out that these organizations that are providing cab services have some money because it's not a cheap thing to run a taxi service in New York. You have to purchase that medallion that that license to run your cab, and the prices of them vary with the market, but they run in the in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to

the millions of dollars. For for Examp, well, they sold for an average of eight hundred thousand dollars each during the first quarter, and that's way down from like the two million that they were going for a couple of years ago. So on top of that, you've got insurance and industry fees, And what I'm saying is that overall

it's a very expensive business to be in. And whether or not this would make it less expensive is very complicated, but even but I can imagine that like it would lower your insurance premiums, it would if you're using electric, then you don't have the fuel costs associated with fueling a fleet of taxis. Uh. If you're doing the right sizing, then you are also very intelligently storing those vehicles whenever

they're not in use. Usually they're just be coming into charge normally, what you would do is you would have a certain number of vehicles in reserve fully charged, and then have those go out onto the streets while the ones that have to have to recharge come in. Um and you know, even that that high upfront co us, it's not it's not that high when you're looking at the medallion cost. And uh, the long term maintenance may be much lower depending upon what breaks. Because they're also

very sophisticated machines. Right, So if you have something that's beyond a mechanical failure where you know you've got a mechanic coming in there, if it's a computational problem, that actually could end up being a bigger issue. Mechanical cars, most cars are mechanical. You guys, did you know electric cars I've heard can be more expensive to up keep. Yeah. Yeah, so that is one of those things where when something when it's something is a problem, it probably is more expensive.

The argument I have seen is that problems would be more infrequent assuming that you have a reliably built vehicle. Uh, of course that's a that's a big assumption. Obviously. If that's wrong, then that's a problem. But getting back to Uber, where we talked about all those uh that nineteen thousand Uber drivers that are also in New York City of fifteen thousand and nineteen thousand, depending upon the of what

you're looking at. Uber CEO Travis Kalnik said in two thousand fourteen, and here's a way to motivate your employees. That long term plan for Uber it was that the company would replace human drivers with autonomous vehicles, so essentially saying, hey, all you guys who drive for us, your days are numbers. You're super replaceable. Don't forget it by a car. As it turns out, you're replaceable via machine. Uh. Now, we're

not there yet. Obviously, we don't have autonomous cars that are that are allowed on the streets to do this kind of business, and it maybe sometime before we are. But that is Uber's plan um and for Uber it makes perfect sense because even though it's that huge upfront cost of purchasing a vehicle that's going to have a hundred fifty thousand dollar hike on its price tacking which they don't have to purchase any vehicles right now because

they use the driver's vehicles, right. I mean, this is a big expense, but Uber drivers take home you know, the majority of their fairs they are earned, which makes sense. They're doing the work right there. Uber is the facilitator, but they're the person doing the work. And in fact, I remember seeing when they the the rate went down to like they take home the fairs. When that happened in San Francisco, that was huge news because they used

to tell how more than that. But from Uber standpoint, they'd be saying, Hey, look, we'd take home the entire fair. The car doesn't get any of it. We might really we have to reinvest in the vehicles, but the car itself is a machine, a tool. The money goes to the company. So from the company's perspective, it makes perfect sense to make this investment because they'd be making way

more money. Oh yeah, even even taxi services. Taxi drivers perceive about fifty seven percent of their fares or did as of two thousand five, which is the last number that I could find on it. But but that would still make complete sense for taxi companies as well. Yeah, so callen x gun even further than this. Recently, in July of that's when we're recording this. Early July, he said he would be willing to purchase five hundred thousand electric cars from Tesla by if those cars were autonomous.

So Tesla has been experimenting with autonomous cars. I think they've got like twelve prototypes on the road, and Ellen Musk has said that he's very interested in pushing autonomous cars. He says that's the future of cars, and it's not going to be in private car ownership. Now that is amazing. Here a guy who is the CEO of a car company saying personal car ownership is limited, it's not the future.

In fact, he sees a future where humans will not be allowed behind the wheel of a car, that only robots will be able to will be allowed to drive vehicles because they are so much safer than humans are that even once you get past that initial you know, experience of I don't really I want to be in control, once you get past that and you realize, well, this machine that is in control is way better at doing it than I am. And all the other crazy people on the road are in the same boat. All of

their cars are in control. So I don't have to worry about the crazy person who is not really paying attention to driving, but is paying attention to something completely different and would be a danger. Otherwise, well, they're not controlling their car anymore. The robots are. So I think people have convincingly made the case, Yeah, in the future, that we're going to look back on the era of people being allowed to drive their own cars, kind of in the way we we now look back on the

era of doctors not needing licenses. Yeah, it's just kind of like what were So the interesting thing here is that if Kalanick and Musk had struck a deal then, and and if Tesla in fact only made autonomous cars in the five thousand cars that call Nick said he would purchase, that would represent the entire run of that year's Tesla model, because that's how many cars they make

in a year's five thousand. So essentially call Nic saying I'll buy every car you make in its autonomous and remember, nine thousand cars, according to that Columbia study, would be enough to satisfy the needs of New York City. So with five thousand, you could potentially have tons of markets covered by these driverless cars, assuming it were legal for you to do so. And that again is where we

run into the first major roadblock. It's not the technology, which is I wouldn't say it's mature, but it's really close. Like it's much closer than than what you would expect,

considering it's not something that's readily available for consumers. It's gonna be the legal barriers of how do you create legislation that covers a world where both manually operated vehicles and robotic vehicles are sharing the road, Because there's gonna be years of transition before we reach this point where the majority or perhaps even all of the vehicles on the street are operated robotically. And until we get there,

there's gonna be some growing pains. There's gonna be some tough decisions, unprecedented in some cases, and we honestly don't know where that's gonna go because humans are far less predictable than machines, and when it comes to legislation and powerful lobbies as well, it's hard to say how that's

gonna go. I mean, I would imagine if I were a politician in New York City, the Taxi and Limousine Commission probably and and perhaps in you know, organizations representing the drivers would probably want to really have some serious conversations with me about any decisions I might make that would be in favor of autonomous cars and perhaps against

human drivers, I would imagine. So, so one of the things we do have to think about, like if you are one of those those politicians having to make those decisions. An element that comes into into the conversation that is hard to dismiss is what about the jobs of all those drivers, not just drivers, but also mechanics, you know, folks who would be out of work. I saw one study that talked about how you would see a loss

of jobs in auto mechanics because there will be fewer accidents. So, because there'll be fewer accidents, there will be less called for body work. And then you think, well, fewer accidents is good because you decrease the risk to human health, right, I mean, you're you're not going to have as many incidents where someone is going to be injured as a result of an accident. But then, yes, it does have this other effect of eliminating the need for the job. No one has to repair the cars, no one has

to repair the humans get hurt. I mean, yeah, this has kind of fire reaching effects. There's a domino effect definitely, right, it spreads out or ripple effect even and domino is probably not even accurate. Ripple is probably more accurate. So these are questions that we don't necessarily have answers to, and and it's it's something that you do have to think about. If you're thinking, well, the benefits are clear, and it would benefit a ton of people, so it

makes sense to make this move from that perspective. However, there are folks that are going to be negatively impacted by this, at least in the short term, if not longer than that. So what do we do about that? We you know, some people I'm sure would argue, hey, we can't let this stop us from making progress, but we can't just ignore it either. Well, certainly, I mean, I think it's yet another chapter that's pretty similar to

previous chapters in in the story of automating work. I mean, you could say the same thing about farmers in the nineteen and twentieth century, or manufacturing, yeah, I mean, or anyone who worked for Amazon. Lots of the jobs that used to exist just don't anymore. And I mean we would probably all now say that we're better off because that we've got machines doing those jobs instead of people. Um, but I'm sure at the time it was hard for the people who had invested time and money into training

for those skis really yeah. Yeah. So one of the things I think is important is that we have to keep in mind that this this era of automation is going to it's going to continue. It is coming. It's not it's not like this is something that is is. Maybe this is a it will happen. We're not going to stop it. We could delay it, but the question is is it a good idea to delay it? Well, and it's a question of when whether we purposefully attempt

to delay it or not. Because you know, just because Uber says that they want to buy five tho ours from Tesla, doesn't mean that Tesla is going to sell those to them, or that they're going to have an

autonomous car ready to go. Musk thinks it's closer to and get ready twenty to forty years exactly what Lauren was saying that we don't you know, would be that that's Calinic's dream to have that, and and for obvious readings, and it would be a big benefit to us as well as you know, it's a huge benefit to Uber. That would be an enormous benefit for people to for

the reasons we've already stated. Um, but that does mean that we do need to start thinking about what do we do with the people who are these drivers, Like, what other jobs could they be doing? How could we transition them from that role to something else? Because it is coming, it's gonna happen, just as automation is going to take over more and more jobs and lots of

different disciplines. I just think that the driver's one is a particularly visible uh job that is in danger of being replaced through automation in the foreseeable feature what however long that may be from now. But I think twenty years is actually being really super like pessimistic. I think it's gonna be it's going to be less than two one.

Well when you have you know Henrik Christensen saying that kids born today will never drive a car like well in order for that to be true, So uh and I side more with his assessment than I do with Musks. But uh, and it's mostly because there are other players on the field besides Tesla. I mean, that's one company, but Google has been very bullish about this, uh and

companies as well. Yeah, I mean that that's another way of looking at it is that since it's not really a technology problem but more of just like a social and political acceptance or maybe say legal acceptance problem, what

will it take to make this transition. Well, it'll basically take some powerful people with money being behind it, right yeah, and it'll and you know, having the these and if we have that, I mean it sounds kind of like we do well, especially if if they're able to pitch it in such a way where it gets public support where you say, hey, uh, this approach is going to mean less traffic. It's going to mean you spend less time getting from point A to point B and more

time doing what you want to do. You're spending less money because you're not paying for car payments or insurance or yeah, yeah, you don't have to worry about being hit by a car by someone who's who's distracted because the cars are never distracted that sort of stuff. That's if they can, if they can sell that to the public and the public gets support for it, then I see the change happening more rapidly. But if they don't get that support, it's going to artificially increase the amount

of time it takes for this transition to happen. You know, I think there are a lot of parents of some day soon to be fifteen to sixteen year olds who are probably going to be on the on the bandwagon with this too. And I, of course, you guys know me, I'm totally on this bandwagon. Yeah, I would love and imagine the streets of Atlanta if they're if they weren't clogged with traffic all the time. I can't, I can't. I don't have that with mechanical spiders that we rode

the backs of. Yeah. Oh, and actually, what if your car does get distracted? What if it's dreaming? You know what, We'll talk about machines dreaming in our next episode. How about that, Lauren, We'll do that. So, since we're all you determined what our next episode is going to be, as in the one will be recording immediately after we stopped this one, I want to invite our listeners to suggest future topics for forward thinking. You know, let us know.

It'll be like Frank, write us tell us what you think, because that launched into this episode, which was a lot of fun to talk about. Uh. So you can send us a message our email addresses FW thinking at how stuff works dot com or drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus. At Twitter and Google Plus, we're f w thinking. Go to Facebook search fw thinking in the search bar. We will pop right up. You can leave us a message, and we will talk to you again.

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