How the private self-driving car might change how we live

A few words from the CEO of Alphabet about Waymo cars sparks speculation and concern.

According to Reuters, Alphabet says Waymo may offer robotaxis for personal ownership in future. CEO Sundar Pichai, when asked about the future of its autonomous car division Waymo, said, "there is future optionality for personal ownership." This has profound implications; transportation expert and writer David Zipper thinks it’s a bad idea.

I believe that David Zipper underestimates the changes that private ownership of self-driving cars or or autonomous vehicles (AVs) will have on society. It might be far worse.

I have been writing about AVs since 2011, when I spent the weekend at the Institute without Boundaries, now the Brookfield Sustainability Institute, discussing the role of the car in 2040. We concluded that the car would be electric, it wouldn’t look like a car today, and it would be a mobile extension of our homes, (shown here in movie and martini modes). Where many AV visionaries thought they would be shared, since our cars are parked 96% of the time, I came to believe they will be very, very personal- like our living room or bedroom. In fact, I thought they might well become our living room or bedroom.

They would also change the way we live. In 2008, futurist Alex Steffen wrote an article that influenced me, titled My Other Car is a Bright Green City, noting, “There is a direct relationship between the kinds of places we live, the transportation choices we have, and how much we drive.” He titled the chapter including that line What We Build Dictates How We Get Around. I thought that was exactly backwards; it should be How we get around dictates what we build.

For example, I live in a streetcar suburb of Toronto, developed after the St. Clair streetcar line opened in 1913, and where “all residents are within a few blocks walking distance of dozens of stores and business, and public transit.” Lots are small to maximize the number of people within easy walking distance of the streetcar. It’s an example of the Marchetti Constant; when Toronto was a walking city it was considerably smaller. Physicist Cesare Marchetti determined that people do not want to travel for more than half an hour; the streetcar made it possible to cover a much larger area in that time. Before Marchetti, Lewis Mumford attributed the idea to Bertrand Russell:

Mr. Bertrand Russell has noted that each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original situation now—by driving him to a more distant residential area—effectually cancels out the gain.

The car eliminated that need to walk to transit, and enabled the modern car suburb, where you can’t really walk anywhere. But it’s location and design was governed by Marchetti’s Constant as well. But Marchetti is measuring the time it takes to get, say, from home to work. What if both of those are radically changed by the AV?

Way back in 2013, Allison Arieff wrote in the New York Times about how AVs might change the way we use our cars and turn them into mobile living rooms and bedrooms, commissioning a wonderful image from my favourite cartoonist, Steven M. Johnson. She wrote, “If you can read your iPad, enjoy a cocktail or play a video game while commuting, time spent in the car becomes leisure time, something desirable. Long commutes are no longer a disincentive.” Marchetti no longer matters. In Johnson’s image, the car has already become a bedroom and living room.

In 2018, Renault proposed bringing the AV right into the living room. I wrote at the time, “A self-driving mobile living room is a dream come true, so why not actually bring it into the living room? It is probably the most comfortable, best engineered object, built with the highest quality of anything one owns, so why ever leave it?”

But it still looked like a car. As Chenoe Hart wrote in her provocative 2016 article, Perpetual Motion Machines, there is no need for this.

“With a system of automated vehicles, transit passengers will no longer need to pay any attention while distances are being traversed. With the possibility of traffic collisions theoretically eliminated, safety requirements mandating fixed seats, air bags, and seat belts would become obsolete. Passengers who no longer needed to be restrained would be able to move around freely. After ease of handling becomes an irrelevant design consideration for new vehicles steered by computers, designers will be free to stretch wheelbases, raise ceiling heights, and specify softer suspensions to make that movement more natural and comfortable. And since the people inside wouldn’t necessarily need to see where they were going, a growing range of possible wall fixtures — storage cabinets, LCD screens, perhaps a kitchen sink — could substitute passenger convenience over views of the world outside. The elimination of the driver will mean the end of the car as a car.”

Sony got this and took the concept one step further with the IeMobi, an autonomous mobile living room that I thought was the future of self-driving cars. They describe it:

The Honda IeMobi Concept connects to the home seamlessly, connecting electricity and entertainment information from car to home, and home to car. When parked, IeMobi becomes a “room” with around 5m2 [50SF] of living space. By using IeMobi matching the user’s lifestyle, such as a guest room to invite friends, or a mobile pantry for weekend shopping, new possibilities in mobility and lifestyle are born.

Now the separation between living space and vehicle has disappeared completely. I wrote at the time, “The key point of the design that designers should think about is that this rolling box is actually part of the home, integrated right into it.”

The next logical step is to forget about the fixed dwelling altogether and go completely mobile. Gadi Amit of NewDealDesign envisioned the “zoom room” I quoted him in my post In the Future, We All Might Live in Our Cars Out of Choice:

"One other possibility, if I wanted to go more, sci-fi, is that along the highways you’ll have moving, crawling communities," says Amit. "Because a few of these zoom rooms could pick up a lane, slowly move, and you’d have a crawling party happening.”

I concluded: It really is all coming together: We have tiny houses, then tiny houses on wheels, people living in buses and now this- mobile autonomous nation.

We are not talking about a glorified electric autonomous camper, but a different way of life. Devin Liddell of Fast Company thought it might be a boon for boomers:

In the future, the emergence of autonomous RV-like vehicles with architectural elements designed to blur the lines between vehicles and buildings could let older citizens stay in their homes indefinitely. Visits to the grandkids won’t mean a grandparent co-opting a bedroom; instead, their micro-apartment will travel with them.

I loved the idea and concluded, long before I worried that I might not be able to cross the border into the USA again,

Soon the nation might be filled with rolling homes full of boomers autonomously moving from buffet restaurant to doctors office to charging station to Arizona in the winter. I love this idea, going to bed in Buffalo and telling my home to take me to Chicago for a ballgame. And if you think the highways are congested now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Alan Berger/ Infinite Suburbia

The last words go to Chenoe Hart, who notes “Our understanding of a house as a stable locus of physical and emotional shelter could become diluted. There would be no reason for homes to not also be vehicles.” She worries that AVs will challenge our definitions of time and space, and that it will not end well.

Contemporary urban-planning guidelines are based on assumptions that the rich pedestrian life of a street or a park emerges from adjacencies with surrounding businesses. Driverless cars posit a possible future without street life and without spaces for spontaneity. As with previous planning mistakes in developing automotive-oriented cities, carmakers and technology companies are moving forward with their ideas without reckoning with the full range of potential social impacts. These futures must be imagined before they can be embraced or resisted. Otherwise driverless cars may steer society into a blind cul-de-sac, and we will discover we have nowhere left to go.

If how we get around dictates what we build, we had better think carefully about where our self-driving cars take us. It may be a whole different world.