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You figure they will have a camera trained on every passengers crotch?

That is unnecessary. The person renting the car is responsible. That is how it already works with rental cars, and with Zipcars, which are pretty much exactly analogous to this situation. This is already established law.

And for the basic person who perhaps hasn't done anything illegal, such aschange a child's diaper and leve the soiled diaper on the seat?

There are examples of what I'm talking about already - unattended public restrooms. A vehicle with a driver can at least clean up. Not that I'm familiar with cab driver's lives, but I do suspect they have to clean up the cab interiors fairly often. And if the cab has to head back to HQ every hour, that's missing fares.

Or is this some sort of slashdottian solution where the drivers are replaced with an equal number people watching security cameras and charging people for leaving litter in the cab?

You figure they will have a camera trained on every passengers crotch?

That is unnecessary. The person renting the car is responsible. That is how it already works with rental cars, and with Zipcars, which are pretty much exactly analogous to this situation. This is already established law.

With UBER, taxi companies are fighting back by lobbying cities against "unlicenced taxis". A self-driving car can...
* drive from a parking lot to pick you up at location X... JUST LIKE A TAXI
* drive you over to location Y and drop you off... JUST LIKE A TAXI

But the corporation will argue that it's actually a car rental business, renting the car to you on an hourly+milage basis, sorta like Zip-Car http://www.zipcar.com/

replace "automated" with carshare. you get to the same place.

No you don't. Zipcar and other carshare services are not the same. They don't come when summoned, you have to go to them, which means they only work in dense cities. They cannot transport people that can't drive, like children, blind people, or the elderly. They cannot park themselves. They have none of the safety advantages. You can't take a nap during your commute.

Private car companies can (and do) decline service to customers who make the car unfit for the next customer. This already happens today. Why would automated cars be any different?

Here's a link to zipcar's 'rules for sharing', which covers cleanliness, among other things: http://www.zipcar.com/is-it/ru...

Imagine owning one of those things for several years.

Or imagine renting one by the hour from a company like Zipcar. A commuter could leave their "real" car at home, and take a train or bus into the city, and then rent one of these, as-needed, to get around downtown.

I imagine there may be a handful of people who are interested in this technology

Old people... and there's lots of them.

Also absent-minded people. My mind tends to wander when I am driving. I have never been in a serious accident, but I have come close a few times. I would love to have a robotic car to "pay attention" while my mind was focused on designing an algorithm or whatever.

But there seems to be an assumption that this would cost a net amount of money. I think that as the price falls, this will be very quickly not true. You may pay a few thousand more for the car, but you will pay much less for insurance. You will also save gas because the car will adjust its speed to time traffic lights and smooth out stop-and-go traffic. If the government is smart, they will offer tax incentives to encourage adoption of this technology since they use the roads more efficiently (the carrying capacity of a single lane can increase five-fold once cars are capable of "platooning"), so that also will figure into the net cost.

Autonomous vehicles make car-sharing services like Zipcar work for many more people, so car ownership will become less common, saving people even more money. My wife and I each have a car, but in the future we could become a one-car-family if a temporary 2nd car car could be quickly summoned with a click on a smartphone.

>

If I had space to park two cars at my house, I'd have an electric one as a regular vehicle, but with certain transportation needs, I'm not able to find them in an electric vehicle yet and I can't afford the conversion costs.

If you live in a city, one option to having 2 cars might be to join a city car share program. If you rarely need the range of a gas powered engine, it could be a cost effective alternative to owning two cars. Plus you can choose the car that best meets your needs - take a sporty convertible for a weekend getaway with your wife, take a minivan on the long trip with the kids, take a pickup truck to the hardware store, etc.

http://www.zipcar.com/
http://www.citycarshare.org/

I can currently do this with my Zipcar app http://www.zipcar.com/iphone/ . It allows you to unlock, lock and honk your cars horn. It does this using your EDGE/3G connection, so not near-field/RFID however, same kind of thing is currently being done.

http://www.zipcar.com/

Already exists in most major metro areas. The question is of course critical mass: needing more ridership so they can get more cars so they can accomodate more riders.

So far I've been here about two months, and I don't have a car. In Dallas. I do not have a car in Dallas. That should give you some idea of the kind of opportunities I have to go out and do stuff.

Ouch. I sympathize. I had the same situation in Washington, DC, last year.... although they have the Metro, and I was able to rent a car for a few hours from Zipcar a couple of times on weekends when the train didn't go where I wanted to go.

If you can somehow get to one of the DART stations, that will give you some options. Another possibility: ask your employer if they will allow you to expense a car for a weekend day. Even if they don't, you can rent from a place like Enterprise starting at $32/day. Enterprise will bring the car to you.

The reason I say this is that if you have to build one car per person and maintain the cars and the system for the cars, that's a huge environmental impact.

But in a shared-car system you don't need one car per person: you just need as many cars as are required at peak usage. For any given hour of the day, many cars are actually just sitting parked.

With fewer cars in total, it becomes more practical for those cars to be well-maintained, energy-efficient, and so on. (Convincing everyone to buy new energy-efficient cars is impossible. Migrating a communal fleet of vehicles to a new greener technology is more practical.) And if well-managed, there is no reason that such a fleet could not be just as convenient (in terms of getting a car as soon as you need one) as owning a car. (In fact there may be added conveniences like not having to worry about parking.)

In a sense it's not too different from mass-usage of taxis (as seems to happen quite a bit in New York City, for instance), of rental vehicles, or car-share services (e.g. zipcar).

(That's the theory, at least. I'm well-aware of the practical problems of any such system, such as people not keeping the communal vehicles clean, the dangers and inefficiencies of the added bureaucracy, being reliant on someone else's (mis)management, etc.)

Having run a DARPA Grand Challenge team, I've been through most of this line of reasoning. I'm rather less optimistic.

First, Templeton writes "The cost of accidents is arguably the single largest component of the per-mile cost of driving a vehicle", but doesn't provide justification for that statement. Total US gasoline consumption costs about $600 billion per year. The American Automobile Association says that US auto accidents cost about $164 billion per year.

Second, while we can do automatic driving in a situation where all the players are reasonably well-behaved vehicles, we're a long way from being able to do it safely in a populated area. Today's robot vehicle technologies have minimal "situational awareness". That's one of the hardest problems in AI. Right now, sensing systems are up to recognizing "obstacle" and "moving car-like thing". Pedestrian and bicyclist behavior prediction is a ways off.

The whole section on robot vehicles with incredible evasive ability is bogus. Vehicles are limited by inertia and maneuvering room. Cutting the reaction time from 500ms to 50ms would help some. Half of all collisions would be prevented if braking started 500ms sooner, according to a Mercedes study. Chain collisions are an artifact of human reaction time; with minimal inter-vehicle coordination, all the cars in a lane could come to a fast stop without colliding. But evasive action requires room.

Most of the estimates of huge savings come not from automatic driving but from electric cars. Especially little lightweight electric cars. You can get little electric cars now; I'm in Silicon Valley and I see them now and then. But they're about as common as Segways.

Zipcar indicates that the car sharing concept can work. With automatic driving, the car could be delivered to you, so it could be used in less-dense areas than central cities. But it's really for people who only need a car occasionally. Zipcar is $10/hour.

They already have this for car sharing. See ZipCar for example.

Using the same logic, many people can do away with a car altogether: bike/walk for local errands, rent a car a few days a month (perhaps using a service like Zipcar) when a car is really needed.

I sick of hearing that X technology is more efficient then Y and there are merits to Z technology - I want a vehicle with X, Y and Z technology. Combine them all and make something decent.

Yes a light car will be mashed by a truck or SUV - but I think you'll find in the vast majority of cases it will make sod all difference and in any case SUVs are a dying breed. Ken Livingstone coined the phrase "chelsea tractors" for Londoners who collected their offspring from school in vast 4x4 vehicles.

Private cars will never be a substitute for a decent, affordable mass transit system. My preferred future has public transpot the norm with shared cars available on demand for subscribers (think the ZipCar model) for when a train is inconvenient.

http://www.zipcar.com/

And yes, I know I am in fantasy land here.

and ditched my car 7 years ago. I live in Boston across the street from a subway stop. There's another one a few hundred yards away, a third line 1 mile away and a fourth 1.3 miles away. I ride my bicycle year round for many trips 5 miles or less, and arrive faster than the subway or a car. Walking a mile is also no big deal, and I occasionally car pool if a neighbor and I are both headed to a meeting or event.

What about groceries? Smaller trips or deliveries. What about big purchases? If I ever needed one, I'd borrow a friend's car or sign on to zipcar. What about weekends in NYC? I take Acela or the bus. What about weekends in rural Vermont? I rent a car for $40 a day. The combined total of non-air travel for my wife and I: $2500/yr, and that includes a combined total of 5 months of time out of Boston. Can your car ownership costs -- insurance, gas, tires, lubes, car payment/depreciation, parking, tickets, tolls, taxes, and repairs match that?

Yeah, you can ditch your car. Doesn't mean you'll never have to borrow or rent one, but it does mean you'll likely save money, operate an auto for fewer miles per year, get a bit more exercise, have a chance to read a magazine or book while using transportation once in a while, and contribute to a higher quality of life for yourself and your community. Don't let the perfect [a completely car-free society] get in the way of the good [a society where the average miles driven per driver is under 5,000, or even less].

Really? A car with a collapsible frame that "may even be capable of topping 100 miles per hour." Ok Ralph Nader...

Kidding aside, while I'm generally in favor of this sort of outside the box thinking, this concept as is is ridiculous to anyone who understands automotive engineering.

1) the shared car concept is already in place, both Taxis and Car sharing. Not to mention public transportation, Public bikes, etc.

2) Saftey! His design is effectively reversing one of the biggest innvovation in car safety from the last 100 years, the safety cage surrounded by collapsable structures. Modern cars are designed to have the rest of the car collapse while the passenger car remains whole. In this, the passenger compartment is by definition collapsable, a serious danger. You aren't even as safe as a motorcyclist, who at least isn't trapped inside anything.

3) Comfort. His design puts the motor inside the wheels. Great for efficiency, awful on real city streets that aren't smooth as glass. Heavy wheels have more momentum as they crash into potholes and other road irregularities. Real automotive engineers strive to take weight away from suspension, not bolt the heaviest components to it.

At least the Segway had novel thinking behind it. MIT should be ashamed of this guy...

I rented a Zipcar the other day, which just happened to by a Subaru Outback PZEV. Didn't even notice it until I was loading some stuff in the trunk and thought, "How can it be partially zero? Sounds like a marketing term for low ". Anyways, the car was fine, but I didn't know how rare they are. Zipcar is good service, and they always seem to be trying to get greener cars. They've got a few dozen Prius's in Boston and a few Hybrid Escapes too. Only thing I noticed (I haven't driven an outback before this) is that the car had little 'omph'. Not that any car needs it, but when I tried to push it down the Jamaica Way, it didn't kick like a Mini Cooper even would have (nor did it hold the corners) but it's a station wagon so I didn't expect it to.

The car sharing franchises already exist, at least in some of the larger US cities. (For example: http://www.igocars.org/, http://www.zipcar.com/). I'm not very familiar with them- i-go was just getting started when I lived in Chicago, and where I lived, public transportation was more convenient, and the fees were high enough that for as much as I would have used one, I could just rent a car from a regular rental place when I needed it. All that this company would have to do is partner up with some of the existing companies, and maybe provide them with some marketing brochures and the like.

You could get by with one tenth the number of cars on the road today. You'd have exactly the same number of cars on the road as you have now.

It's likely that there would also be less cars on the road at any one time. Car sharing systems like Zipcar find that users use cars maybe 25% as much as they did before...? I don't remember the exact amount, and it's something they brag about in some forums and not others. Basically, if the cost of car use is entirely incremental -- you pay the real cost of every trip -- people won't use cars as much. But if you pay for most of the costs regardless of any trip (up-front cost of buying the car, plus up-front cost of insurance) then there is an incentive to make use of your investment by driving more.

Even moreso, with a taxi-like system people will use cars less, as many trips do not form a circle coming back to the original location. You could use public transit in one direction and not another. Or bike, but use a car if the weather gets bad by the time you are ready to come home. By actively choosing a car on each leg you won't bring your car around on trips simply because it may later be required. The availability of car-like options without the investment of a car increases the value of other types of transportation.

Rates are different in every city. But for example in Chapel Hill http://www.zipcar.com/unc/check-rates
It is a yearly fee of just $20 and you get a $20 credit (good for a month) when you first sign up. They do provide a RFID card so there is some cost for them in your becoming a member as well. The cost is only $5 per hour and $55 per day (based on the faq they really mean OR $55 a day, but I digress)

Has the poster never heard of Diningin.com?

Not only is it available in multiple major metropolitan (Sorry NYC folks, you'll have to ZipCar [ZipCar.com] this one as well) areas, but you can order from restaurants online and have it delivered to you.

Sure, DiningIn.com not free but as far as I can tell all this service does is make it so you don't have to use a phone to call in your take out order and that doesn't seem that useful to either consumers or restuarants - little wonder it's failed before, I would guess.

As I said in a previous post, Zipcar only requires you to be 21, and we're working to lower that age to 18, if you're affiliated with a participating college or univerity. You can find out a bit more on our web site, or check to see if your school has a special deal: http://www.zipcar.com/join/

Disclaimer: I work for Zipcar.

Plus I have to pay an annual fee of $50 and a 1 time application fee of $25 plus $100 refundable membership fee. They should definately make it cheaper and then a lot of people in NYC would join....

P.S:by the way with coupon codes, Budget can go down to $45 on weekday full day rentals

Plus I have to pay an annual fee of $50 and a 1 time application fee of $25 plus $100 refundable membership fee. They should definately make it cheaper and then a lot of people in NYC would join....

P.S:by the way with coupon codes, Budget can go down to $45 on weekday full day rentals

1999 was when it was founded

I am a zipcar user in Hoboken, NJ. I use it for occasional trips that last a few hours.

This link should answer most questions about the service. http://www.zipcar.com/help/

I want to run the CCC hack thru Babelfish to make it run on Zipcars here in the US.

I just read the headline as: Your Rights Online: U.S. to Get New ZIP Car. Oh, that's nice. I need more sleep.

Well, perfect for people who need cars and who also live in the city. I don't have a car myself, when I need one I use ZipCar.

I walk to work now. I used to bike, but I got hit by a car a few years ago, which knocked some sense into me.

there's already a company that does something pretty close to this - http://zipcar.com/

The jury is still out about whether this business model can be profitable in the long run, but Zipcar and Flexcar are selling easy access to loaner cars for people who only need wheels a few times a month.

Right now, they're not offering large vehicles to owners of small vehicles. They're offering small vehicles to people who primarily use public transportation -- or to single-car families who occasionally need a second vehicle. But if they succeed, it makes sense that they would branch out into a wider variety of vehicle sizes.

How about something like ZipCar, with hourly-rental cars distributed throughout the city/county/interstate, near mass-transit junctions? These automated dispensers would be replenished with a just-in-time supply chain. Now economies of fleet scale, including propane/CNG/electric power, can be available to the aggregated community, amortizing the capital costs across the maximum use.

Every new building in crowded centers should build 150% of their parking capacity requirement into their architecture, and get all parked cars off our congested streets. When the spaces are filled with fuelcell vehicles, the building can autonegotiate with the vehicle owners for competitive power pricing in either direction across their charge plugs. All this possibility makes the Jetsons look like some 1960s cartoon.

I'll probably piss-off the red-bloded Americans here, but man, I can't wait to not drive my car. I want to have fully automated driving. I want to finish work on a Friday afternoon, go home, grab my stuff, go to my car and say "Miami Beach, Please!". I want to watch movies for a couple of hours or finish reading Dune, and when I wake up, I'm parked right at my favorite beach. Same thing for the reverse trip Sunday night and Monday mornings wouldn't be half as bad. Paint fuel-cells into that picture and it wouldn't even tweak the greens.

CMU's robotics program has been working on automated driving systems for years. When I was there I heard one of the professors had outfitted his normal home car with about $1500 of equipment and "drove" to school and back every day mostly hands-off. All based on neural-nets and some snazzy control systems.

And that was like 6 years ago. I'm sure there's wisdom in not rushing into something like this, but I also get the feeling there will be some hard lobbying against it. Like, what happens to truckers, cabbies, UPS/Fed-Ex drivers, etc. etc.? Will the (perhaps undeserved) reputation of dangerous speed-freak truckers come home to roost?

I wonder how Detroit would feel. At first, it's a shinny new feature == more margin. But beyond that, I can't help but see cars become even more commodity. All you really end up caring about is your comfort/ammenities.. there won't be as much attention to "performance".. ahhh.. Detroit will ~love~ it, BMW won't.

You could even share these kind of cars, like the Zip cars, but instead of you going to the cars, they come to you. Or perhaps just the under-carriage comes to you and connects to your personal travel cabin. Then, you pull out of the driveway and merge into a long train of like-designed cabins-on-wheels, all virtually-linked together via 802.11z. The road/car system routes you shortest-dijkstra-path to your destination and then your car parks itself once it's dropped you off. There's traffic density that would make clog up modern highways for years, but its all flow-controlled, so you go 120MpH with only inches between cars, so your trip takes half the time.

The moving sidewalk (armchair) of the future? :)

ZipCar

Boston does have its own car problems, though. Some people move into neighborhoods like the Back Bay and Beacon Hill and still feel the need to own a car. I try not to drive down Newbury Street since I mostly take the T, but whenever I do I'm amazed at the number of Trailblazers and BMW SUVs and high-priced cars. What with everything you need within a block or two, why would one need a car in Boston?

For those who need to drive on occasion, Zipcar offers its services in the Boston area. Much easier and cheaper than trying to own one in town. I'm surprised it hasn't caught on more than it has. It seems so much easier to rent a car by the hour for things like grocery shopping and moving! But it will take time to convince people that owning a car in Boston is simply not worth the hassle, time, and money...

Los Angeles did make an effort to encourage people to buy electric cars- reserved parking with free charging, special lanes on the highway,... Imagine if LA made electric cars available via a Zipcar program? That could have been their public transportation solution. Much more practical than a subway too.

While I can't speak for City Car Share, here at Zipcar we park cars in reserved spaces all around the metro area -- right now we're in Boston, DC, and NYC; you reserve online by the hour, and enter/exit the cars with an access card. When you're done, you park the car back in it's home (generally 5 mins. from your home), and the car sends back your milage for us to bill you. It's very painless, and a great alterative to car ownership, especially in cities where that ownership can run into the tens of thousands per year.

(Hm... Or, we could just move EVERYBODY to Washington, Oregon, and California, set the rest aside for public parks and farming, and THEN build our cool train system...)

Hey, now *that* would be some public park system. But how would we high-speed-train-riding megolopolitans *get* to the 2500 miles of parks? With that kind of density, personal vehicle ownership would be prohibitively expensive. The only hope would be if something like Zipcar became universal and reasonably priced.

1. Reverse-commute on the Logan Express bus from the airport out to a short distance from the cinema. Indeed before the trees leaf out you can see the two buildings from each other; later just ask directions from the station staff, it's a trivial 5 minute walk. To catch Logan Express go to the lower level of the Airport and watch for a large red coach-style bus, the one you'll want is the hourly Framingham one.
2. Take the Commuter Rail out to Framingham station. There are buses that connect from there around Framingham but I've never seen a good map or schedule of them, Google or ask on ne.transportaion for current status. Personally I'd just catch a cab over.
3. Look into getting a ZipCar or just convincing a friend to drive you out. The cinema is a hop-skip-&-jump from the Framingham exit on the Mass Pike. Offering tickets & popcorn is good incentive.

Then what are we supposed to do if we want/need to travel outside the area serviced by this or other public transit systems?

You head over to your local Zipcar and drive there. Or, even better, take one of these little things to the train and then take another little taxi to your destination.

Yes, it's a scary thought, but reducing the number of personal cars on the road by 90% would be a great thing.