Brad. If I wanted a car like this I would take a L'Eggs Pantyhose container, enlarge it, and glue it to my bike.

I truly hope this is not your car. You are much sexier than this thing!

It is yours, isn't it (((hangs head in shame)))

I will be forced to find a different guru.

Most trips over 10 miles involve the use of highways.

Highways are a tiny fraction of the road miles in the United States.

The power and energy storage requirements for electric vehicles are dominated by the problems associated with highway driving.

Highways almost never have people walking around on them. People walking around on highways are already at very high risk of being killed, and this risk is widely understood.

Therefore, it would be reasonable to deliver electricity from metal strips flush with the surface of the highway to the cars on the highway. Cars with pickups underneath (similar to the overhead pantographs on electric trains) would not need batteries anywhere near as large as cars without, and would have unlimited range.

The same pickups would be used in garages where users would install charging devices into the floor.

An APS system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-level_power_supply) could be used in a few areas where pedestrians are possible, but either cars need large amounts of power (San Francisco's hills?) or range boosting (El Camino Real, down the spine of the San Francisco Peninsula).

According to Rough Guides, the US road system has over 5.7 million miles of roads. Doing anything to a system that size is, as you say, big infrastructure, and takes forever.

But look at this, especially page 2: http://downloads.transportation.org/Kane-2006-03-10.pdf

There are just 15,300 miles of urban interstate highway. 24% of travel in the US occurs on just 1.2% of the road system. Some very high fraction of longer trips use the interstate system along part of the length. This is a huge lever.

At $200/foot, it would cost just $16 billion to put electrical track into the whole system. And note that there is no reason to do it all at once. 250 miles ($264 million) would open a large market in the San Francisco Bay Area. Twice that would open a much larger market in Los Angeles.

Consider the size of the market. The Bay Area population is 7 million people. A the average rate of US car ownership, that's 5.7 million vehicles. Vehicles have a life of around 16 years, so that's 356,000 new vehicles a year required in the Bay Area. If 10% of the market purchased cars with electrical pickups, the infrastructure would be serving over 260,000 vehicles in 8 years, at an infrastructure cost of under $1000/vehicle. For comparison, the minimum avoided cost of a 16 kW-hr battery (minimum for all-electric government designation) is $3600 (lead-acid, 100% of cycle, totally impractical).

I think your vision of the future of transportation being a lot like the present (individual cars) is compelling, and I agree that increased robotics in the car is inevitable. I think the powered roadway idea solves some of the biggest transport problems that we have (pollution, oil imports, global warming), on a shorter timeline and with less acceptance hurdles than robot cars.

Do you guess that in the future will be used only cars with electricity power? Or will be there a regulation for only electric cars?

Brad,

Glad I found someone who can start to see the huge impact of robotic cars. You mention designing more closely for function, but we also need to start designing for robotic manufacturing, in total, and for robotic maintenance. This allows the vehicle to be maintained when it is waiting and getting fueled and whatever. The Army has it started if you look at changing out the power plants for tanks and their more modern heavy haulers.

Also, I don't think waiting for fully autonomous cars is necessary. The biggest issue is keeping the on the road in any weather, so using a system of magnetic strips embedded in the road, cheap to add, could provide micro and macro positional data. This lets the car use sensors for its perimeter protection. Gigabit Ethernet can let cars communicate to avoid each other and cooperate. Intersection Controllers can keep all cars in their area interlacing properly with minimum speed changes.

The impact on infrastructure costs will be huge. Currently on the busiest traffic only about 18% of a freeway is used. With robocars we can triple that and still allow emergency room. That means a 5 lane highway drops to 2. That means land can be returned to other uses and maintenance costs are cut by the same margin. The impact on bridge design, building, and maintenance are hugely curtailed. Sidewalks and greenspaces in cities get larger and fewer peds are whacked each year. Trees have more room to grow and grass can be line the roads because there is far more space because lanes are far narrower.

BTW, The Heathrow Transit system based on robotic/computer controller cars show the effects you mention.

As most car journeys are made with just one person, placing a single seat in the centre of the car where it is safest and gives the passenger more room makes sense. (This is assuming many journeys in the future will be in driver-less taxis)
Access into the vehicle through a single door opening onto the sidewalk increases safety as it is the safer side to enter the vehicle. It also makes the vehicle cheaper to manufacture.
As visibility is not as important if you don't have to drive, the seat could be within a protective shell wrapping around the back and partially around the sides and extending to the roof. Some of the accidents racing car drivers walk away from show what is possible with vehicle safety.
As heating/cooling makes bigger demands on energy as cars get smaller (especially with all electric vehicles)it becomes more important to insulate the cabin. Possibly only the front and forward side windows may be necessary, the back window just increases heat loss and could be deleted.
As many people would be watching a screen of some sort instead of driving, heavily tinting and double glazing the remaining windows to darken the interior would help. As a bonus a vehicle like this would be very quiet inside.
The vehicle could also be more streamline as the boxy shape needed for headroom for side by side seating is not needed.
It should be possible to give the passenger much more room yet reduce the volume of the cabin by loosing space that is not used.
A show like "Top Gear" would no doubt bag a car like this, but in the long term we are going to be forced to make some pretty big changes.

Getting to and from medical appointments is a major chore for millions of seniors. It occurs at the precise time in their lives when their driving abilities are failing. The rapid adoption of a limited automated medical taxi system will be a huge boon to both the seniors and other drivers. I can visualize healthcare systems having a fleet of vehicles to pick up patients just in time for their appointments. A slightly larger vehicle could have space for a medical practitioner to take blood pressure readings and other vital signs on the way to the clinic and to dispense advice and care requirements on the return trip. For that matter, a robo-medical-taxi could automate the blood pressure, weight, and other vital signs on the way to the appointment.

Individuals don't need to own cars:
Go to a subscription model, Subscribe to 10k miles per year, call a car when needed.
Multiple Benefits to this model:
1. eliminate double trips to go somewhere to pick some one up. Send a car to the school to pick up your kid and the car drives your kid back home.
2. A North American Suburban City of 10 MM residents has approximately 5 million cars, these cars sit around for 90% of the day. So on *average*, just 500k cars can satisfy the transportation needs of the 10 MM residents.
3. Eliminate the need for parking everywhere. Businesses, Schools and Shopping complexes don't need to provide for parking or reduce the need for parking. Homes don't need garages either.
4. The subscriber can choose the type of car as needed, Single passenger, Multi passenger, or cargo capacity.

Y'all are focusing on the wrong area here. Private cars will *not* be the primary application for driverless vehicles. Trucking will be. There's an ENORMOUS opportunity for cost savings if fleets can put robots into trucks and drive them 24 hours across the country.

I can also imagine couriers being impacted. You need to get something across town?
Just call a robo-taxi, put your goods in it and give it the destination.
The same could work for local retailers and e-tailers. You could track your delivery via GPS and know exactly when your order will arrive.

I really like your idea of chasing temporarily-parked robocars out of my driveway. Hyah! Git! Mush!

To DonAZ's point: there are something like 4M professional drivers in this country (3.2M truck, the rest taxi and limo), essentially all of whom are going to be out of work. Another line of work down the drain for those without college degrees.

By the way I still have the "I went to Mexico for a corona" button you sold me there in 1991.

I imagine that driver wages is a significant fraction of the price of trucking, making it desirable to drive fast (modulo legality and safety issues). Once that's gone, presumably fuel will be the next limiting factor, especially as it gets more expensive. It's more fuel-efficient to go slower. Get ready for a lot of crawling robotrucks, and pressure from trucking companies to lower the minimum speed on highways overnight.

What a great post. The density of new ideas is very high. Hope Google (and Ford, and GM, etc.) have read it. I wonder if Mr. Templeton has had any feedback from the major auto manufacturers on these ideas?

This seems to be a classic "Innovator's Dilemma" phenomenon, where the established car companies are minimally involved in the next phase of transportation- i.e., self-driving automobiles. Mr. Templeton lays out the many radically new form factors involved with the new cars. What strikes me is that these new cars will depend on legacy automotive technologies to a very small degree, thus setting the stage for large numbers of new entrants.

People are starting to realize that robo-cars remove range anxiety from electric vehicles. Energy efficiency of one thousand mpg equivalent is possible. See my paper from IEEEE Technology and Society: http://www.qi2.com/index.php/transportation

Multi-passenger cars could coordinate pickups on the fly much as a radio dispatched airport shuttle does now but more like driverless Uber for commuters. Regular, semi-regular and ad hoc use would be handled gracefully.

These cars could drive closer in line reducing drag and road are used per car. This saves energy and reduces traffic. ON the highway, they could hook up and travel in a mutually beneficial draft group like NASCAR. The lead car may use more energy but could receive some of the overall savings as a stored on board energy credit.

All cars waiting at a stop light could accelerate simultaneously increasing the number of cars that make the light.