On 22 May 2014 at 18:37, Dennis Miles via EV wrote: > I have lived in many cities around the this world from New York to Tokyo > and they all had autonomous vehicles for the drunkards and transients > unfamiliar with their city. We called them TAXIs.
Interesting that you mention Tokyo. I think (but haven't dug up corroboration because I'm lazy ;-) that it was in Japan that one of the defining trends of our time emerged. That trend is an increasing desire among consumers to get the products they want WITHOUT interacting with sales and service people. For years, Japan has had vending machines offering beer and sake, fried chicken, crepes, ice cream, fresh bananas and lettuce, eggs, rice, and bread. Vending machines there even dispense underwear for women, and neckties for men. There are also some fairly icky machine-vended products for men, but I think I'll stop here. Japanese, I would argue, are the world's most enthusiastic users of anonymous, non-interactive purchasing. But they're not alone; the trend has gone worldwide. Self-service filling stations have been around so long that most younger EVDLers probably don't even remember full service filling stations. (Some European stations are partly or totally unstaffed.) Redbox has replaced the corner video rental store. Touchscreen ordering and payment is taking over at some fast food eateries, including hundreds of McDonalds restaurants in Europe. Supermarkets and big-box stores have self service checkouts. The upshot is that we have an entire generation of kids growing up for whom anonymous, non-interactive purchasing will be the norm. If they don't particularly care to buy from human cashiers, why would they want to ride with human taxi drivers? Meanwhile, I know women who now are afraid to take a taxicab because they've heard or read stories of women being attacked in cabs. They'd go for self- driving taxis in a second. Maybe the whole idea of self-driving cars strikes some folks as over-the- top. Maybe it is. And yet I don't think EV developers can ignore them. If it turns out that self-driving cars are really what people want, and if they're willing to pay the price for the convenience, monetarily and perhaps in privacy, then we'd be foolish not to plan for self-driving cars with electric drive. If nothing else, it's one way to ease range anxiety. If the car knows the way to the train station, it can also tell you whether it has enough charge to get there and back, no? And if not, it can take you to the nearest public charging station, where it can ingest just enough electricity to accomplish your mission. David Roden EVDL Administrator http://www.evdl.org/ _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
