On Jun 9, 2015, at 6:02 AM, brucedp5 via EV <[email protected]> wrote:
> How Uber's Autonomous Cars Will Reshape The Economy By 2025 > By SeekingAlpha, May 31, 2015 By Zack Kanter Couple more thoughts on this.... First, I think there's still a logistical challenge to be faced with replacing the commuter car fleet with autonomous Johnny Cab taxies -- namely, that there's a reason why rush hour is a clusterfuck of single-occupancy vehicles. To a first approximation, we'll still need roughly the same number of self-driving public / private cars as we do today, because we'll still have roughly the same number of people going to work at roughly the same time. And those people will be as interested in sharing a ride with other people in the future as they are today. That is, it seems to me like the estimates in the article are naïvely assuming a fleet sized for the average demand will suffice, whereas the fleet still needs to be sized for peak demand. Electric grid operators could offer some insights to these analysts. But, of more immediate interest...an autonomous fleet _might_ potentially be practical with much more limited per-vehicle range than is traditionally assumed for personal BEVs. A car with "only" the Leaf's 100-mile range could be in use for a couple hours and take a few fares to their destinations, break for half an hour for charging, and get back on the road. With computerized dispatch, passengers would never even have to think about range unless their one-way trip exceeded the vehicle's practical ability -- possible in a sprawling metropolis, but rare...and, in such cases, it'd be only the most minor of inconveniences for the system to have a transfer vehicle ready and waiting at the halfway point, which is geometrically very likely to be close to the center of the biggest downtown area anyway. Of course, even then, more range is better; a car with a 400-mile range could run fares all day long and only have to stop to charge in the dead of night...but that's a question of minimizing capital investment for the cab company, shaving the number of cars needed for the system and permitting them to better centralize charging facilities. ...and, of course, it may well be the case in the interim that an autonomous ICE-based taxicab will be a more practical initial platform than a BEV version, with the operators starting with a central fueling station whose facilities get converted to an electric charging station as they replace the fleet with electrics.... Cheers, b& -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 801 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20150609/2ebbfe39/attachment.pgp> _______________________________________________ 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)
