CES & Self-Driving Cars

The Consumer Electronics Show opens in Las Vegas today, so the next few days are likely to see new hype (some say overhype) about self-driving cars. Last month, Yahoo reported that Ford and Google would announce that they would build self-driving cars together, but Ford’s announcement yesterday about its electronics plans didn’t mention Google. Ford may still make an announcement with Google later in the show, but it is curious that Yahoo’s original story doesn’t seem to be live anymore.

A combination that has been confirmed is between General Motors and Lyft. While their goal is to create a system of shared, self-driving vehicles, the only substance in the announcement was that General Motors was “investing” $500 million in Lyft. So it isn’t clear which, if either, company will be developing the software and hardware needed to make GM cars self-driving.

A Ford-Google partnership probably makes more sense than a GM-Lyft combine. With the former, Ford offers car-making expertise while Google offers the software and the resulting products could be used for car sharing, individual ownership, trucking, and other services. The GM-Lyft partnership is limited to just sharing and neither of the partners has the software to do true autonomous cars.

More substantively, Nvidia has announced a computer that it thinks will be capable of controlling a self-driving car. Most experimental self-driving cars have their trunks loaded with computer equipment, but the Nvidia computer puts the power of 150 MacBook Pros on one small board. Nvidia claims that Audi is successfully testing the computer.
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The show also features hype about electric cars. But the Antiplanner suspects that self-driving cars will be affordable before electric cars.

Meanwhile, as Las Vegas–one of America’s largest cities that hasn’t succumbed to rail-transit madness–looks to the future, Atlanta is learning that obsolete technologies like streetcars no longer work in the modern world. Ridership on the city’s overpriced streetcar has been low despite the fact that has been free. Now, the city is about to begin charging fares, leading some to argue “that this was a dismal failure and that once people actually have to start paying to ride it, we’ll see ridership plunge.”

“We’ve got 2.7 miles” of streetcar route, says one of the line’s defenders. “A lot of people complain, ‘Oh, it doesn’t go close to me.’ Well, there was a finite amount of money that we had that we could spend.” That’s kind of the point: if you have a finite amount of money, you don’t want to spend it all on something that will serve few people. The Atlanta urban area has 25,000 miles of roads, including more than 5,000 miles of arterials and collectors, yet the city seem to think that building a mere 50 miles of streetcar lines, at a cost that will probably be something like $2.5 billion, somehow makes sense.

Atlanta is not the only place where people are learning this lesson. Edmonton Alberta just opened a new, $600-million light-rail line. “It’s slower than a bus,” writes journalist Tristin Hopper. “It has slowed down the buses that existed. And it is almost certainly increasing Edmonton’s net amount of carbon emissions. In short, it fails on every single possible justification for why cities should build light rail.” Of course, that’s true of most other light-rail lines as well, it’s just that the transit agencies and rail contractors hope that people don’t notice.