The self-driving car hype bubble inflated and burst a decade or so ago. As tends to happen, the technology disappeared from headlines but continued to slowly progress in the background, and now seems poised to burst onto the commercial scene in a big way.

The key mistake I’ve noticed people making is they don’t seem to realize that autonomous taxis are no longer a hypothetical future technology. They exist, and you can ride in them. Waymo has been operating in San Francisco and Phoenix for a while now and is expanding soon to Austin and to a sort of awkward-to-describe-accurately swathe of Los Angeles County.

Matthew Iglesias

Iglesias says that self-driving cars have been largely excluded from freeways to date and this has limited their appeal in a business sense, but this will gradually change. Driverless trucks and buses will eventually be huge too, although organized labor will fight these tooth and nail as long as it can.

I’ll share a few more thoughts:

• Motor vehicles kill around 40,000 people in the U.S. per year and 1.35 million people globally. There is a double standard where we accept this carnage and yet a small handful of self-driving vehicle crashes or even just nuisances are hyped in the media. Self-driving cars will save a lot of lives and property damage. Amoral insurance companies will surely care about this even if nobody else does.
• Enormous swaths of land are configured the way they are because of cars. It’s not just all the streets and roads, it is all the parking and driveways. Most cars are parked most of the time. And it is not just the physical space those cars need that adds up to a large portion of our landscape, it is the physical space needed for human drivers to maneuver those cars into and out of parking, keep a six-foot-wide vehicle safely within a 12-foot-wide lane, and the spacing needed between cars traveling at high speed due to slow human reaction times. We also want the convenience of parking close to our homes, businesses, and schools to minimize walking. All this will change. Robot cars will be able to park themselves in tight spaces in out of the way places. This will also solve the electric vehicle charging infrastructure problem in cities. They will be able to drop us off and pick us up at our doors on command, which solves the convenience problem. They will be able to space tightly together at high speed. So, they will just take up a lot less space. This may even happen relatively fast. Then humans beings will just sit there and stare at all the space for a long time, maybe decades, but gradually and eventually we will change design standards and zoning codes so that all that space can be repurposed to other things.