Jim Carroll has some interesting ideas about the implications of self driving cars: “Your car is about to become your concierge. A personal robot. And so much more.”
“the simplicity of design means more companies enter the car and truck industry.”
“driver education will change.”
“not many people realize that light poles are a big part of the self-driving car future.”
Simplicity of design is why we see companies, like Tesla, that can become a competitor with less tradition but more capital. It means that the hobbyist or garage shop can build product that is more cost effective compared to mass production.
Driver education is like those stories you see every now and then how someone stole a car and could get away because he couldn’t handle the stick shift. Much of the base skill of operating a machine is becoming less necessary while the skills for managing the machine become more critical.
Light poles and other infrastructure will gain capabilities in networking and data accumulation to support and facilitate traffic and safety. This is going to emphasize just how deep the data collection should go. I’ve already mentioned how TPMS monitoring can be used to track individual vehicles. Waze and the cell phone location services can aid in routing but also raise issues about just how data collected should be used and where privacy boundaries should be.
It will be interesting. If you can handle it.