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May 25, 2019
1:27:17pm
Acorn All-American
I thought Waymo has achieved level 4, but not yet at level 5?
I think it will be a lot faster. Moore's Law comes to mind, and probably biases my forecast. Technology improvements are mind boggling and pretty much every time has surprised me at the speed of development.

So many industries will have huge disruption:

Auto manufacturing - People use their cars on average 4%. While I don't think demand will decrease 96%, it will be huge and probably more than 50%. Car services will arise where it picks you up for work at a scheduled time. You pay premiums during rush hour and very cheap most of the rest of the day (supply and demand pricing). When so few people have auto insurance, rates for the rich guys driving their ferraris will be available, but very expensive.

Cars have such a huge capital cost that there is a significant portion of the population that can't afford them and that gap only increases over time. In addition, in urban areas the hassle to park, etc. will become even a greater factor if you can just call up the car service. In my family, it would be hard to justify more than one car if the car can pick up and drop everyone off on demand, and even better, if there is a secondary service for the few times the schedule doesn't work out. Whole lot cheaper than buying, insuring, maintaining and garaging a car...No way do I send a car with my kids to college. That reduced the number of cars in my household by 50% to 67%.

Electric cars are coming - battery capacity is increasing about 15% per year. Combustion engines have 20,000 moving parts. Electric have about 20. Auto mechanics, oil and fuel companies watch out. Another HUGE impact.

Solar Power - price per kilowatt hour is decreasing exponentially. Solar power cost is approaching the cost to transport electricity. How long until the design can put them on the roof of your car, making cars operating on a sunny day almost 100% fixed cost and almost no variable cost? Energy Utilities...?

My prediction is that sometime in the near future, you won't be able to sell your used combustion engine car. No one will want to buy it. You will have to pay to get rid of it.

When cell phones first came out, the experts predicted that we would have around 100,000 cell phones in use in 1999 (something like that, and no I don't have a link). Boy, were they wrong...

All of these changes will be driven by the youngsters. They are not as change resistant as us oldsters. Momentum isn't that fast now, but it will accelerate...just like everything else has.

Periodically I go and check out the Waymo website. Pretty cool.
This message has been modified
Originally posted on May 25, 2019 at 1:27:17pm
Message modified by Acorn on May 25, 2019 at 1:28:30pm
Message modified by Acorn on May 25, 2019 at 1:30:12pm
Message modified by Acorn on May 25, 2019 at 1:32:09pm
Message modified by Acorn on May 25, 2019 at 1:32:44pm
Message modified by Acorn on May 25, 2019 at 1:34:42pm
Message modified by Acorn on May 25, 2019 at 1:39:33pm
Message modified by Acorn on May 25, 2019 at 2:02:08pm
Acorn
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Acorn
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5/25/19 12:52pm

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