First, nobody is proposing that AV use will ever be FREE. Why didn't they charge a fee for every trip? Making a new service free when the current service costs money is a poor way to assess how the novelty will change car use.
A better study design would have estimated the cost per mile of future AV use, then charged participants accordingly.
Second, no AV comes with a human who can run errands for you, like enter a grocery and push a cart around buying goods. At most, future AVs will only drive up and wait for a preordered purchase to be loaded aboard.
If the study's AVs included any service more than moving passengers around, it crossed well outside the foreseeable use for AVs, especially short term. It's at least as likely that companies like Amazon will offer the same delivery service much more efficiently at lower cost to the customer.
It sounds like the virtual AVs in this study delivered more than real AVs ever will.
> nobody is proposing that AV use will ever be FREE. Why didn't they charge a fee for every trip?
What is the future of self-driving cars (SDCs)? Are they going to be deployed as a service, or are they going to be privately owned by individuals and sold as an option when you buy the car?
If SDCs are a service, then a study needs to charge a fee to match that.
If SDCs are individually owned, then the incremental cost of an extra trip is just fuel plus wear and tear. In this study, the chauffeurs used the study participants' own cars, so the participants presumably had to pay fuel costs and wear and tear. So this seems to match closely what they'd pay.
Another major issue, beyond the comment in the article about how people may have shifted around usage temporarily to take advantage of the service, is the all-you-can eat effect. Compare how much you eat and drink your first few days at an all-inclusive resort versus how much you'd consume each day after a couple weeks there. The novelty of gorging wears off, and if you were paying gas and maintenance per trip that would happen especially fast.
I'm certain lowering the cost (and opportunity cost) of driving will mean more driving, but the magnitude of the change can't be predicted from a short study.
First, nobody is proposing that AV use will ever be FREE. Why didn't they charge a fee for every trip? Making a new service free when the current service costs money is a poor way to assess how the novelty will change car use.
A better study design would have estimated the cost per mile of future AV use, then charged participants accordingly.
Second, no AV comes with a human who can run errands for you, like enter a grocery and push a cart around buying goods. At most, future AVs will only drive up and wait for a preordered purchase to be loaded aboard.
If the study's AVs included any service more than moving passengers around, it crossed well outside the foreseeable use for AVs, especially short term. It's at least as likely that companies like Amazon will offer the same delivery service much more efficiently at lower cost to the customer.
It sounds like the virtual AVs in this study delivered more than real AVs ever will.