Self-driving cars will profoundly change the way people live
ROAD TRIPS. DRIVE-THROUGHS. Shopping malls. Freeways. Car chases. Road rage. Cars changed the world in all sorts of unforeseen ways. They granted enormous personal freedom, but in return they imposed heavy costs. People working on autonomous vehicles generally see their main benefits as mitigating those costs, notably road accidents, pollution and congestion.
From article, (Cars transformed retailing, giving rise to suburban malls with lots of shops and plenty of parking. AVs, combined with the rise of e-commerce, could transform it again. “The Walmart of the future might be fleets of vehicles ready to drop off anything that you might get at a Walmart,” says Peter Norton of the University of Virginia. Or you might order an AV to take you home from work, and arrange to have your groceries, or a meal, waiting for you when you climb aboard. And why should shops, restaurants or other facilities be fixed in place? Coffee shops or food stands could restock at a central depot and then migrate to business neighbourhoods in the morning and entertainment districts in the evening, suggests Chenoe Hart, an architectural designer at the University of California at Berkeley. Mobile shops selling items such as shoes, clothes or cosmetics could visit particular neighbourhoods on a regular schedule, or when hailed by a customer. “It gives us flexibility to reassign space,” says Ms Hart.
Carmakers are experimenting with delivery vehicles that draw up outside a customer’s home, announce their arrival by text message and allow items to be retrieved from a locked compartment by entering a code. Low-cost deliveries using AVs could stimulate local production of all kinds of things, most notably food. Already, food-delivery services like UberEats, Deliveroo, Seamless and GrubHub have given rise to “ghost restaurants” that produce food for delivery only, centralising food production in a few kitchens. Cheap autonomous deliveries could make this kind of model more widespread.
Another possibility, says Johann Jungwirth of Volkswagen, is that restaurants or retailers might cover the cost of travel to encourage customers to visit them. Fancy restaurants might lay on luxury AVs to ferry sozzled customers home, as part of the cost of a meal. Retailers could offer to pay for shoppers’ rides. Ride-hailing networks have a lot of customer data that could be used to target in-vehicle advertising. Hail an AV to go to one shop or restaurant, and you might see ads for a rival. Riders may be offered cheaper rides with ads or more expensive ones without them.
Moreover, AVs could give rise to new kinds of social activities, just as cars provided teenagers with new social opportunities. Ride-hailing networks might group together people with similar interests or friends in common when assigning rides. Or they might work with a dating app, pairing people up with a potential match when they take a ride. AVs might also function as mobile party venues, or double as sleeping pods on long trips, offering an alternative to hotels and low-cost airlines.)
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