I mean, for sure there are some cool moonshot ideas. However I think it's pretty important to have some proof of concept or even a technical idea of how that would work before dismissing all of the concerns around congestion. Waving around "tech will save us" is really easy to do. (Especially when the solution to congestion already exists and is criminally underfunded.)
You're right that I did predicate that little rant on the idea that the majority of AVs would be personally owned and not part of a fleet. I'm sure that car share will come into play to some degree, but I do think it's tough to convince people who are used to their car being a personal, (relatively) private space that they can store nearly for free on public roads, to give that up. It's especially hard to convince the automobile industry that the incredibly profitable 1-2 car per household model should be pushed aside in order to manufacture fewer, shared vehicles. Cruise (i.e. GM) will not cannibalize their personal car sale business: they're using this as a way to get test data to build personal AVs. Maybe car share will increase over time, but we're not about to witness some revolution, especially if it reduces consumption or profit.
> (Especially when the solution to congestion already exists and is criminally underfunded.)
I presume you mean mass transit, but that's disproven by induced demand: cars removed from the roads will be replaced by others, either drivers who were previously taking other forms of transportation or by new trips. Removing cars frees up capacity, which is effectively no different than new capacity from expanded roads.
I’m not sure why the idea that the cars will talk to each other is so “moonshot”. We have much more impressive pieces of infrastructure in place already. What might be moonshot is my proposal that it should be run by the US Postal Service.
I think it's a moonshot because it expects that we will have shared, open standards and protocols for all of this, which will either need to come from industry, or from regulators. Neither feels very likely. But then again, it could happen :)
They can't even get a standard way to cast your phone onto the screen in the car. It's just a fucking touch screen, and we can't figure that out because Apple and Google just can't let some portion of the money go and make their user's lives better. They have to have all the money or none of the money, and if they can't get all of it, then fuck you. Car manufacturers also won't even put in any sort of standards just so that I can upgrade the terrible stereo that comes in even the nicest of cars. God forbid they put a 2 cent RCA jack on the back of the stereo, maybe give you a read-only connection to the CAN-bus to display some data, and a rectangular hole in the dash (where the ugly ass screen is going to go anyways).
You're right that I did predicate that little rant on the idea that the majority of AVs would be personally owned and not part of a fleet. I'm sure that car share will come into play to some degree, but I do think it's tough to convince people who are used to their car being a personal, (relatively) private space that they can store nearly for free on public roads, to give that up. It's especially hard to convince the automobile industry that the incredibly profitable 1-2 car per household model should be pushed aside in order to manufacture fewer, shared vehicles. Cruise (i.e. GM) will not cannibalize their personal car sale business: they're using this as a way to get test data to build personal AVs. Maybe car share will increase over time, but we're not about to witness some revolution, especially if it reduces consumption or profit.