[Hatman]

The Driverless Car Tipping Point Is Coming Soon
http://mashable.com/2014/07/07/drive...tipping-point/

Here is the 'best parts' version

Here's a recent prediction from Cisco's technology trend watchers: In 5 to 7 years, it'll cost us more to drive our cars than to let them drive us.

[...]

"It’s a best-case scenario, from a technology perspective, but possible," said Chunka Mui, managing director of The Devil's Advocate Group, and author of The New Killer Apps, regarding Cisco's 5-to-7-year prediction surrounding the cost advantages of driverless cars. "There are two types of cost to consider: the cost of accidents and the cost of operation."

The first set leads quickly into considerations of not only medical bills and insurance claims but also ethics and decision-making — that is, costs that come to us on a wholly different level.

On the first point, says Mui, "In the U.S. alone, we estimate that vehicular accidents inflict about $450 billion in annual costs. From a safety standpoint, it costs a lot to let humans drive."

According to Ravi Pandit, an automotive-engineering expert who is the chairman and group CEO of KPIT Technologies, if the human-driving equation were eliminated from the vehicle-safety scenario, insurance companies could create additional incentives for what would then be vehicle passengers/owners.

"When autonomous vehicles are proven safe for roads, at scale, insurance companies will pass on significant rewards to those using such a vehicle," Pandit said. "Even today, many insurers will pass on savings if the vehicle owners allow access to driving parameters such as speed, location, time and acceleration/deceleration patterns."

Granted, there's plenty of research still to come before we can assert for certain what "proven safe" means — and at what scale, in fact, humans will begin to feel right about taking their hands off the wheel for good.

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Here's one model. Fixed annual ownership costs for the average U.S. passenger vehicle start at approximately $8,700, according to Andreas Mai, director of Smart Connected Vehicles for Cisco. In this model, a driverless car — in part due to its ability to communicate with other smart and connected cars on the road, driverless or not, as connected-car tech presumably becomes more commonplace — would help eliminate some 80% of human-caused crashes involving that vehicle. According to Mai, as an average based on AAA, Texas A&M Transportation Institute and DOT numbers — encompassing all U.S. passenger vehicles — that kind of reduction could create some $1,800 in accident-related savings for our owners. So, now the average annual operating cost is roughly $6,900. Then we look at how the very concept of ownership might change.

"Conventional vehicles are used less than 5% of their usable time," Mai said. "The convenience of being able to call an autonomous vehicle when it is needed and easily release it for others to use when it is not needed is likely to make autonomous-car sharing a much more convenient and cost-efficient mode of transportation for many. Assuming the remaining average ownership cost ($6,900) can be shared by three users, this would equate to additional savings."

In other words, now you're into the operation of an autonomous car for $2,300 per year, on average, or just about 25% of what you'd spend to operate a human-driver vehicle. Would 75% savings be a tipping point for the consumer?

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Meanwhile, tipping points, whatever they might be for the consumer, probably won't prevent passengers from sitting in a driverless car now and then if commercial fleets take on the technology faster than the individual.

When Columbia University researchers crunched numbers — considering the possible cost of a driverless taxi, per mile, versus the cabbie-piloted versions we know now — it came out with a significant savings projection. For example, given a robot fleet of Manhattan taxis, The New York Times reported, the cost per trip-mile of your future ride could drop from $4 per to about 50 cents per trip-mile.

For some, that's already reason enough to keep the meter running on next steps for driverless cars.