It is an assumption that going to A to B with little risk will be slower. With the sensors available and lower reaction times the opposite could well happen. A computer can look every way at once at a stop sign, doesn't have to waste time making a judgement call because it already knows the answer, and doesn't have to wait for its foot to hit the break or accelerator.

Personally I don't really care if it takes 5% longer to get where I needed to go or not.

Especially if I get the huge benefit of not having to drive.

Driving risky really doesnt speed up your commute very much.

>Personally I don't really care if it takes 5% longer to get where I needed to go or not.

>Especially if I get the huge benefit of not having to drive.

>Driving risky really doesnt speed up your commute very much.

A car behaving will be like a student driver (or delivery truck) at every intersection at which it needs to pull into traffic could easily double or triple your commute time depending on your commute.

Pulling out into traffic should be something that a driver-less car can be much better at. If it isn't at least as good as the average perspective customer people won't buy it.

I would say this is particularly critical metric for taxi fleets since they do a lot of driving on city side streets. People will take taxi with the human if it's faster.

If the taxi is 3 times the price, then they certainly won't.

You can already look at Uber pool, which is a direct tradeoff between cost and speed.

Why would the taxi be 3x the price?

The '03 Crown Vic has long since paid off it's capital costs and the cab company gets to blame the driver if things go far enough south for lawyers to get involved.

Until some mythical future where self driving cars are so good and common that the "progressive" states start providing financial disincentives for people to operate their own vehicles (which would be a pretty major about face the vast majority of all transportation and infrastructure related regulation to date) I don't see where the driver-less taxi has a cost advantage in the foreseeable future. Your insurance premium is in large part based on the presence of everyone else around you.

By far the largest cost for a taxi is not the car. It is the driver. Self driving gets rid of that.

It doesn't matter if the cars cost 100K, the driver wages still are larger than the capital costs.

I would live a car like this, because it'll make throughput on the roads go up, and ultimately make trips more predictable and much less risky.