The Future Of Driving

What will be the impact of driverless transportation in the future?

- Pepe Catala

We’ve all heard about Google’s self-driving car by now, but my favorite part of innovation is to consider the indirect and longer term effects that new technologies will have. In this blog post I will apply some basic principles to envision what a future crowded with self-driving vehicles can look like.

Trucks Before Cars 

Google and their self-driving cars get most of the press these days, but there are also prototypes of self-driving trucks out there. It’s true that the technology for trucks is more complex and it may be behind cars from a regulatory standpoint. But then consider the incentives: While most consumers have mixed feelings about self-driving cars, the trucking industry has a huge economic upside on adopting self-driving vehicles, perhaps in a simplified form (limited to highways, for instance). Even discounting the obvious (and probably notorious) teamster opposition, self-driving trucks will become mainstream before self-driving cars. You can take a look at the video embedded below to see a demo of a self-driving truck from Mercedes.

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