GM’s Former President Calls for the End of Car Ownership
The &#x27;electric&#x27; part of the article here is fluff. Electric cars already exist and will take over the market within a similar time frame to any proposed self-driving car takeover (it&#x27;s primarily a matter of manufacturing capacity, which affects this company too, and waiting for older cars to die out at this point).<p>Aside from that, there are three main ways I can think of that a self-driving car could reduce pollution.<p>a) More people fit in the same car and an intelligent mechanism can pair riders. This exists today in the form of things like Uber Pool. Without a driver you might get one additional passenger in a car.<p>That&#x27;s the main mechanism. In the best case it can reduce energy use per passenger by around 20-25% - in a realistic case it would be more like 10% or less.<p>b) Cars can drive closer together and with more intelligent traffic lights. I think this is incredibly overblown - pedestrians exist and cars are already pretty close together in cities.<p>I doubt this will make much difference especially given that electric cars use ~zero energy at idle.<p>c) Over a long time-frame, cities are redesigned such that parking spaces don&#x27;t exist and so things are closer together.<p>This is both a multi-decade (possibly even a century) change, and likely to just result in people commuting further - the 1 hour sweet spot isn&#x27;t going anywhere, all people won&#x27;t stack in cities unless they&#x27;re forced, if we&#x27;re being charitable, say, 50% of people actually prefer that lifestyle.<p>It also works for taxis.<p>Basically, the whole thing is nonsense.<p>What I see as being more likely if self-driving takes off is crackpots sitting at desks in the back of their van, or chilling on a sofa watching movies, and doing multi-hour commutes, offsetting the savings.<p>I&#x27;ve not even mentioned here the fact that a significant amount of people just like to own their own car and have the funds to do so. Particularly if you&#x27;re in a rural area, the idea of some SV startup self driving to your ranch is absurd, you&#x27;re almost certain to either be priced out or just directly geofenced out.