While I suspect you're right in that the # of miles driven would increase, I suspect that automated hypermiling would more than compensate for it, leading to a net decrease in energy usage.
I doubt it. How much more efficient do you think automated cars would be? Now think about all the people who will decide to live farther from work because they can work (or play!) on their commute, all the people who will take long overnight road trips while sleeping in the car, all the cars that will drive empty from place to place for various reasons, and most of all the businesses that will all have free automated delivery. I could easily see all that resulting in a 5-10x increase in car-miles driven.
How much more efficient do you think automated cars would be?
Potentially a lot. In a 100% automated environment you don't need stop lights and traffic jams are substantially reduced. But yeah, I agree that the increased use resulting from greater convenience would outweigh that.
This. A 3 hour commute would not be a big deal if you could sleep/get online/watch tv/do most of the stuff you would do at home. Commutes would also be shorter, all else being equal, since near-optimal automated driving would mean fewer traffic jams.
You'd find automated commuters living way out of town in areas that are currently nearly uninhabited. There probably aren't many places in the lower 48 that are too far from a medium-to-large city to commute with automated driving.
Road trips would also be easier - you'd have to be in a pretty big hurry to pay for an airline ticket when you can go 1500 miles or so in 24 hours with no effort, and without the need to pay for a hotel.
This is already possible, until recently, my commute was 1.5 hours (each way) in which I would normally sleep or read, and occasionally watch TV. It wasn't a big deal, but I wouldn't have wanted to go much further, and there's no way I'd have gone twice that far.
It's still rare for people to commute that far on a daily basis. Everyone I know who travels more than about 2 hours from home to work tends to take weekday lodgings within walking distance of work.
A 3 hour commute will always be a big deal, because even if you work a strict 8 hour day, never staying late, that means that 14 hours out of 24 are spent away from home. If 8 of those remaining 10 are spent sleeping, you now have 2 hours left in which to indulge in any kind of leisure or childcare activity. Not everything can be done on the move - I can't imagine it being very likely that you'll be able to go for a swim or play rugby or cricket whilst travelling to and from work.
>you'd have to be in a pretty big hurry to pay for an airline ticket
That probably wouldn't result in a large net increase in total fuel consumption.
According to wikipedia the average commercial jet gets 49 passenger miles per gallon. It wouldn't be to hard to get that out of a driverless vehicle, add a second passenger and
you're twice as fuel efficient as an airplane.
Even if you get more passenger miles, there might still be an increase due to more total trips taken. Imagine if you could get off work on Friday, head out at 7 PM and make 600 miles by dawn while still getting a good night's sleep. You have the weekend to do what you want, and then Sunday night you sleep through the drive home, and are ready to go back to work Monday morning. I'd probably take a road trip twice a month. As it is, I wouldn't consider going 600 miles unless I had at least 5 days off, which essentially means once a year.
That is a possibility. But I imagine that when driverless cars become ubiquitous, most people won't own them.
If you did want to pay for a car to swing by your house to pick you up, it probably wouldn't be a car, but something more like a small bus with sleeping compartments that could pick up and drop off people along the way.
If you could fit 10 people along most of the route (and you could assuming it was between 2 moderately populated areas and road trips were as common as they probably would be), your passenger miles per gallon would be incredibly high.
Given that this doesn't happen today and that subtracting the cost of the driver isn't going to reduce the overall cost of such a trip significantly, I really don't see that happening. The biggest benefit for bus-like operations is not needing to have driver rest time, but lack of flexibility is still going to push people to their own private transport.
Combine driverless cars with maglev trains that can combine multiple cars into one long train with individual cars coming and going, and you may have something. I'm not holding my breath that I'll see anything like that in my lifetime. Transportation infrastructure in the US has gone nowhere in my nearly 40 years; I don't expect a great deal of change (to the infrastructure) in the next.
> subtracting the cost of the driver isn't going to reduce the overall cost of such a trip significantly
I'll calculate the costs 10 passenger van, if you could work it out so that it gets an average of 40 mph for say 20 hours out of the day. That's about 300,000 miles per year divided by 20 miles per gallon that's 15,000 gallons of fuel. At $4 dollars per gallon thats $60,000 per year in fuel costs.
I'll assume another $60,000 per year in maintenance and depreciation (this is probably high b/c you can buy a new large passenger van for under $30,000)
We're at $110,000 in variable costs so far.
Now at $30,000 per year per driver in total costs (could be less, could be more depending on area)
Driver works 40 hours per week with sick time and vacation time. You'll need around 5 drivers in order to keep the van operational 24 hours per day.
That's $150,000--more than half of the total costs.
There are also other factors to consider. Drivers, don't want to operate that far from home, so you have to pay more.
You have to set up a logistical solution so that you can refresh the driver every 6-8 hours. That means depots where you can exchange them.
