There must be at least 50 million residential garages in the US alone. If we automate all cars and switch to a Cars-as-a-Service model that is 50 million large rooms suddenly available. That's a lot of reclaimed real estate.
Edit: If the average garage is 250 sq ft (pretty small), average cost of real estate is $100/sq ft (pretty low), then this is a $1.25 trillion windfall. Not bad for a small side-effect of autonomous cars.
Well, that's if you assume that Cars-as-a-Service don't need to be stored anywhere and magical disappear when they are not in use.
I know Google has magical fairy powers, but last I checked, a self-driving car is exactly the same size as a regular car, and takes the same storage space.
Part of the storage space requirements for cars in normal use is access space for human drivers and to allow random access entrance and exits. Cars as a service can eliminate much of the storage space requirement.
As well as 'redundant' storage, since each car effectively gets multiple parking spots at the moment (a dedicated garage, plus a guaranteed spot at work, etc). Once cars are automated you only need enough storage spots for the cars not on the road, which is much smaller.
Not everyone is driving at the same time, so Google can use their "magical fairy powers" (also known as statistics / data analysis) to determine how many cars are needed to support a city, maximizing the number of them that are constantly in motion, dropping one passenger and picking another. The ones that are not needed at the time can be stacked tightly in a dedicated multi-storey parking garage.
I think it's pretty unlikely that we're going to see most of the market for family vehicles be turned into a short-term rental model. Some, perhaps! Cars-as-a-service will have some advantages over, say, ZipCar today (primarily convenience, some amount of cost as well).
But owning a self-driving car sounds pretty sweet as well. Not only will you be able to get the status symbol car you want, you'll also be able to leave your stuff in it (without paying extra to rent it for times you aren't driving). And it's better than the cars of today! You don't need to worry about parking! You can drive when drunk or tired! You never need to worry about your cars-as-a-service being unable to send you a car during peak times!
Cars are popular to own today. Self-driving cars would be more valuable to own than normal cars are today. You have to imagine immense benefits to cars-as-a-service for it to displace most of the market for self-owned cars.
That $100 is only low for highly developed wealthy areas.
Square feet of livable housing is cheaper than that in most of the country.
Undeveloped land probably mostly sells for less than $0.10 a square foot (that's still high at $4000 an acre). But that's partly because large sales of relatively isolated land will dominate the acreage transferred.
Way to only see everything with rose-colored glasses.
Has it even occurred to you there might be any possible cons to your scenario?
First of all, the lot the cars come from is going to require real estate, so subtract that from your windfall. Where will they be at night or other low-use times?
Second, subtract the additional resources in gas/electricity it takes to get to my house from god-knows-where it came from.
Third, subtract the time I'm waiting in my driveway with the kids screaming and my wife in labor for a car to show up from god-knows-where. Or else the premium I'm paying to get ahead of the other guys in the queue. And while we're at it, all of those times that I wanted something from the store 5 minutes before it closes? Guess what, if I can't get a car in time, that's lost productivity. Have to buy lunch from the cafeteria b/c I couldn't get to the supermarket. Unless you're telling me that in order to accept this vision of the future, I have to be perfect and plan everything. Telling me in the future no one will be able to get to the store 5 minutes before it closes is just unrealistic, undesirable and unacceptable.
Fourth, subtract again, the additional energy needed to take the car to its next destination.
Fifth, consider all of the extra cost of adding, servicing, verifying, maintaining LIDAR and servoes to all of these millions of cars. With thousands of dollars of extra parts, they're going to require thousands in extra maintenance, inspection, training and insurance. Yeah, I know that's boring. It's not an interesting technical problem, but that's the reality of motor vehicles. If anyone thinks this won't make the price of vehicles go up significantly, they've never been in charge of anything critical.
I'm not "against the future," it's just that all of these digit-heads are seeing a grandiose signal-processing problem and doing multiplicative math like yours to make it look attractive and not even operating at a practical level whatsoever.
Interestingly, people pay 100% the price of a microwave oven, which is usually used just a few minutes per day.
Going that direction ... Did you know? A typical microwave oven uses massively more electricity simply powering the LED clock compared to the amount it uses actually cooking food.
Apparently a Microwave typically uses about 1.5W on standby, so that's: 24 * 3600 * 1.5 = 129600 Joules per day
So, if it draws about a kW in use, that means that if you use it for less than 130 seconds per day, or just under 2 minutes, you'll actually use more power on standby than on cooking / heating.
I think I use my microwave more than 2 mins each day, but there are days I don't use it at all, so I'm not sure how it would even out.
1.5W is a crazy amount of standby power. Not that I don't believe older models may use that much, but there are now regulations and standards for that kind of thing which push that to a much lower power.
You sound like you live in the suburbs. I suspect car-as-a-service wouldn't be popular there. Honestly, if you live close enough to the store that you can drive there in under 5 minutes, to me that's a sign that you don't need to drive there.
Where I live (Berkeley), and in the Sf Bay Area in general, car as a service would be remarkably effective and popular.
That already happens in mega cities where parking spots are around $500k. I take taxis all the time so I'm already living in the future, the western developed world will catch up eventually.
The real estate requirement with autonomous vehicles is only the difference between the off-peak maximum required parks and the peak (no cars will be parked). Currently, the real estate required for non-autonomous vehicles is typically more than two spots for each car. (one at home, one at the office, and a fraction of the public parking)
Of course I'm way late to the game here, but thought I'd add one more voice of dissent:
The real estate costs can be extremely low for self-driving cars. Imagine a tower of, say, 10 cars stacked vertically with an elevator mechanism to bring them to and from ground-level. Since each autonomous car is interchangeable, you can just treat the vertical parking lot as a stack. When demand is high, pop off the stack. When demand is low, push back onto the stack. No need for ramps or anything else that existing parking garages use. And just to be totally clear, humans don't interact with this tower, it's just a storage mechanism for empty cars after they've unloaded passengers.
If demand is low traffic should be low too, why not just use empty lanes of streets for the same purpose? Or at least, some variation on that theme. Maybe things work out so well that streets usually only have 1 lane.
Theres already an abundance of parking real estate, there's no need to make more. Look into the predictive analytics used by Uber or Citibike to see how wait times can be minimized. When freed from the redundancy of having to use an overbuilt one-size-fits all for everything, the energy savings will more than make up for a car having to drive two or three blocks from the parking lot to the pick up zone. Shit, I could go on.
If the average self-driving car-as-a-service costs $100,000, then replacing 50 million old cars with 25 million new cars is a $2.5 trillion dollar expense to get your "windfall".
Paying for the self-driving cars will likely be a cost savings by itself, since we won't need as many auto-cars as regular cars. Most cars are only used maybe 5-8% of the time, and sit unused otherwise. An auto-car service could probably get at least 50% usage out of a car, potentially much more. That means a 10x reduction in the number of cards needed.
For this to be true, we have to assume that, during rush hour, at least 90% of all cars are parked and unused. 90%? That's a hell of a lot, dude.
It's certainly true that most cars spend most of their time being parked and unused. But they tend to do so during times of day when there is very low demand. The vast majority of cars are unused at 4am (and, indeed, at 2pm), certainly. But even if every car that was on the roads at 4am was shared, that doesn't increase utilization of the car-pool very much. And you have to be able to handle the routine car-use spikes around rush hour.
Or maybe surge pricing equivalents will motivate people to buy their own cars. If the advantage of a car-sharing scheme is cost savings, and then you start charging more, what's the advantage again?
In any case, I don't think that that's a feasible option for the majority of jobs.
Charging more than the cheaper default. Doubt it will be as much as the depreciation, registration, insurance and servicing of a car.
Right now, my wife and I have two cars. One of them is only used 2-3 days of the week. The other is only used for a small portion of each day.
If taxis weren't needing to cover wage costs, I'd already be better off switching from the second car to using a taxi to get to and from work. Registration, insurance and servicing for the second car is $2-3k/year.
I don't think that insurance is a good cost to include in the comparison. In a driverless car world, we imagine that insurance costs will be pretty much a constant per mile traveled -- there are no better or worse drivers -- and probably lower than they are now. And you'll have to pay for them (directly or indirectly) whether you rent or own.
If your costs for the second car are more than $1k in just registration and servicing are more than about $500 a year, that, first, suggests that you're not very cost-conscious today. My car's cost service and registration fees are much less than that. Second, service costs also are basically a per-mile fee -- your car's quality doesn't degrade when it sits in your garage, and you'll pay the service costs of a vehicle you use directly or otherwise.
You didn't mention fuel, but of course again that's essentially per-mile, and costs what it costs regardless of the car ownership model.
That leaves registration, which is a small cost, but would be shared in a shared ownership model.
Now, of course, the actual major expense is the cost of buying the car in the first place, defrayed over the lifetime of the car, minus any price you get for selling it. The big advantage of a car-share service would be that you could share that cost with others. If a driverless car costs $50,000 (and we have no idea how much they would cost), and you use it for only 5 years, then sell it for $20,000, you get $6k per year. In a shared ownership model where you share it with three other people, and the company that you're going through makes about 10% gross margin, you're looking at $2.2k instead of $6k, so yay, savings of $3.8k per year. That's a lot of money.
If, on the other hand, a driverless car costs $30k and can be sold after five years for $15k, then it's $3k per year to own and $1.1k per year to rent, you're saving $1.9k instead $3.8k, and that's still not peanuts, but you suggest that right now you spend more than that for a not-very-highly-used second car. The advantages of owning are considerable.
Great point, was not considering that. I'd love to see some stats on maximum car utilization as a percentage during each minute of rush hour.
You could imagine that in addition to single-serve autocab services, you could have auto "micro" buses, sitting 4 people. Your "bus" is guaranteed to stop at no more than 7 other stops. With tens of thousands of people using the service it should be possible to pick optimal batches of people for each bus, to minimize how far the bus has to deviate from an ideal path for any given rider. It would be a giant logistical problem, but I think theoretically you can get a service working that was almost as seamless as an autocab service. Would be interesting to work on.
If you own your garage, I'll bet you'll fill it up pretty quickly. But people who pay extra rent for garage space will reduce their use. So there will be some extra space, if not 50 million.
Edit: If the average garage is 250 sq ft (pretty small), average cost of real estate is $100/sq ft (pretty low), then this is a $1.25 trillion windfall. Not bad for a small side-effect of autonomous cars.