Why autonomous vehicles matter

For years cars have been associated with personal freedom, part of our first real independence from our parents. You learn to drive and then, if you have the means, you get the ability to go wherever you want whenever you want completely independently.

Just like most of my generation I learned to drive and then borrowed my parent's car when it was free, they had a second car that my Dad spent time underneath at the weekends maintaining. I helped, but only when it wasn't raining.

Unfortunately, in the first few of years of being a driver I was in four fairly serious accidents, one of them as the driver, I wasn't at fault in any of them. The incident where I was driving I was very lucky to walk away, and if there had been a passenger in the car then I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't have been.

So to be clear, I think that cars are (potentially) dangerous. I also think that driving as an activity, is not one that is particularly suited to people. I'm not talking about blasting round a race track, thats fun, engaging, and something that requires complete focus. I'm talking about an activity that is very high stakes (1.5 Tonnes moving at 70mph is a shedload of kinetic energy) but also extremely tedious, not a great combination.

We ignore the risks because it suits us.

The vehicle itself is also a tremendous drain on a household, the second most valuable thing that you own is only used 5% of the time. No business would tolerate those economics. Then there is the space that is consumed by all those unused vehicles, drives, on road and car parks.

If you want to get really picky, we can talk about the suitability of a single vehicle for every task, the "we have an SUV because we go camping once a year" thing is err, odd.

This is a bit of a rant, obviously. The reality is that the alternative options to cars are not great and not as flexible. I don't drive so trust me I know. The could be improved but even then there are last mile issues etc.

So whats important about self driving vehicles?

Firstly, they are measurably better drivers, and by better I mean they hurt less people and break less stuff. Waymo have so far driven 3.8 million miles with zero injury. The human baseline for that distance is 4.8 people injured.

Also, autonomy means that ownership of vehicles becomes a non thing. The expensive part of a taxi at the moment is the driver not the car. Imagine a situation where you get the right vehicle for every journey. In my case that would be something sensible to get to the garden centre and then something very different to bring back the outsized plants that I've bought. This applies as much to a camping trip or a night out on the town.

Road congestion becomes a very solvable problem, there are arguments that autonomy will mean more journeys, but this could be counteracted by more appropriate vehicles. I'd also imagine that supply and demand pricing will play a factor.

Many things are talked about as a paradigm shift, autonomous driving has the potential to actually be one. A change that increases personal freedoms making them available to people that don't have the means to have a vehicle sat insured and unused most of the time.

So how to we get from here to the future?

I'm very interested in the adoption of technologies and what drives (sorry) change. To quote William Gibson "the future's here it's just not evenly distributed". The tech works, if tomorrow every car the the road used the current state of the art tech then it would mostly just work.

Personally I think that the force for change in this case will be the insurance industry. Firstly I'm interested in seeing any companies that are willing to insure by the mile and then secondly the point at which you get charged less per mile if the car is driving itself. "Actuaries as a force for change" is not something I ever thought I'd ever say.

Tesla, are vertically integrated and are talking about offering insurance, have a chance to pull this off.

Hopefully the next five years will see some significant changes.