Is this how cars will work in the future?
With news that Sony has now decided to enter the future car market, attention has turned to what impact such vehicles will have on transport as a whole.
According to CNBC, Sony recently invested about 100 million yen ($842,000) to buy a stake of roughly 2% in ZMP, a Japanese startup making robot cars.
“The two firms ultimately hope to develop self-driving car technologies by combining Sony’s expertise in image sensors with ZMP’s robotics knowhow, according to people familiar with the deal.”
And Sony has good reason to start investing, judging by what the experts are saying. Aside from the fact that self-driving cars are expected to be the future, there’s another aspect to consider, what experts are labelling “self-owned cars”.
Mike Hearn is a Zurich-based software developer who is both an ex-Google engineer and one of the leading Bitcoin software developers. His idea, as the BBC summarises, is “that once driverless cars become commonplace, most people won’t want or need to own a vehicle any more.
“And in a world dominated by self-steering taxis, each ride becomes cheaper if the vehicles are autonomous rather than owned and run by major corporations.”
The infrastructure would be similar to how we use taxi services with apps today, such as Uber.
“You would be using an app that goes onto Tradenet and says: ‘Here I am, this is where I want to go, give me your best offers,'” the developer says.
“The autonomous taxis out there would then submit their best prices, and that might be based on how far away they are, how much fuel they have, the quality of their programming.
“Eventually you pick one – or your phone does it for you – and it’s not just by the cheapest price, but whether the car has a good track record of actually completing rides successfully and how nice a vehicle it is.”
Should Hearn’s vision materialise, there would obviously be a major impact on how transport is administered.
For example, if every car is run like this, there would be no need for traffic lights. We would not have to worry about parking spaces and so on.
This would indeed make a different world to one we’re used to – pre-owned cars would also have an entirely different meaning.