Imagine the future of autonomous transportation: robotic taxis, autonomous Uber cars

Have you ever considered how much fun it is to just go out for a walk? In my youth, I did just that, driving sports cars and motorcycles through canyons, and taking road trips just for the hell of it. Today fuel costs and time constraints, traffic and all those rules of the road take all the fun out of it. In the future, real drivers could be a thing of the past, rather we will all be required to be driven everywhere or flown everywhere (in flying cars) by a robotic system, in an autonomous car.

In fact, we may not have a car at all, but will summon a car (flying car) when we have a need to travel. Let’s talk, because people are busy planning this future as we speak.

In fact, the OECD International Transport Forum published an interesting research paper recently titled; “Urban Mobility System Update: How shared autonomous cars could change city traffic,” and the research predicted that a fully integrated autonomous transportation system in a large city would eliminate the need for 80% of street parking and move everyone with only 10% of cars. Additionally, commuters would travel more miles, but do so much more efficiently, and commutes to work would be smooth with little to no traffic in and out of major cities.

Of course, the study also points out that as things change there will be challenges in the interim and such optimal efficiency would not be much better than without autonomous transport. However, once fully integrated, the benefits would be like night and day. We can already see some of the challenges, for example, a recent accident between a self-driving car and another car driven by a human driver in Nevada, it turns out that the car with the human driver was at fault.

As AI improves, our self-driving cars will become safer and people will demand them to prevent the more than 20,000 car deaths each year in the US. Of course, giving up our cars, especially for us die-hard drivers who really love our cars and driving, will be a hard sell. Some people will gladly give control to a robotic because it will simply free up time to play on their personal technology devices and save stress. Imagine the chaos between us drivers and those, at least initially, wealthy self-driving car owners or the Uber-like companies with fleets of self-driving cars ready and willing to pick you up and take you anywhere you can afford to go? Please consider all this and think about it.