Self-Driving Cars Aren’t Just About Safety
By: Paul Cipparone
Tags: Technology, Cars, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, AI

Self-Driving Cars Aren’t Just About Safety

Time, energy, human life quality- FSD would improve all of these.

Photo by Bram Van Oost on Unsplash

One thing that you hear a lot nowadays is how stressed out people are. There’s a good number of reasons for this. So good, in fact, that I probably don’t need to spell them out. You’re probably well aware of the stressors in your own life. But there is one major stressor that we never think about anymore- having to drive.

Of course, not everyone has to (or gets to) drive. Some places have robust public transportation or they live within walking distance of most places that they go. Some people use scooters or bikes. That said, about 227 million people in the US, or 69% of the population, have driver’s licenses. This doesn’t mean that all of these people drive every day- however, there’s probably also a lot of people that drive without licenses. I’ll assume that these differences pretty much even out to this number of drivers.

By the way, that’s 69% of the total US population, including children and people who otherwise can’t drive. So the percentage of drivers taken out of people who actually could drive is even higher.

Driving is one of the most stressful things I do every day, and yet if someone asks me on a particularly stressful day what’s wrong, having to drive will be the last thing on my mind. And yet it is stressful. When you’re driving, there is the ever-present need to be alert at all times. If you mess up, maybe you die. Or maybe you plow into another vehicle. Maybe that vehicle has a family in it. Or maybe you run off the road and crash into a building.

These are all real things that happen every day. For all I know, after I get up from writing this and drive to work, one of them will happen to me. And my articles are set to automatically post, so who knows if it did? I mean, probably there will be articles after this one if I lived.

So imagine self-driving cars. If you actually have a car with a computer installed that can drive better than a human, all that stress is taken off of your plate. Yes, you’re handing the car over to a machine. But if the machine has been properly validated, then you’re doing the safer thing.

Now think about all of the time you’ve gotten back if you don’t have to drive any more. My current commute is 20 minutes. That’s one of the shortest commutes that I’ve ever had. It’s still 40 minutes a day, and currently I commute to the office 4 days a week. So that’s 160 minutes a week, or 8230 minutes a year, which is 138 hours a year. That’s about 3.5 work weeks per year.

It looks like the average US commute time is 26.9 minutes. Crunching the same numbers as before, you get up to 4.6 work weeks per year. And this is with just four commutes per week.

So self-driving cars get people back time and energy. That’s not as talked-about as the lives that will be saved. But I think it’s an important part of the story. Here’s an example:

It’s sometime in the future, maybe 10 years from now. Self-driving cars are now fairly common and have made themselves available to the mid-market. You are looking at car options and the self-driving computer option is available for an extra $2500 (because it’s the future, the price has gone down despite the value being basically the same as it is today). Do you buy it?

Well, let’s crunch some more numbers. Let’s say that you do get the computer. Can you justify that financially? Let’s say you use the computer to spend your newly freed-up 4.6 work weeks working an extra job on Fiverr that pays $15/hr. After a year, you’ve made $2797.60. That pays for the computer. And then you have an extra 4.6 work weeks every year for as long as you have the car. Think of what you could do with that time.

I’m optimistic about the potential that these cars have to improve not just safety, but human life quality. I believe that humans driving cars was very necessary for the 20th century- I am less sure about the 21st.