Quote:
Originally Posted by speakingtohe
Missing your point.
A community would have to be a certain size to make it financially viable to maintain the ground vehicles.
If the community is big enough say 10,000, which IMO will still not be financially viable, the possibilities for traffic problems would be there. Lot of small towns you have to go on a freeway to get where you are going. I doubt that an autonomous vehicle would be permitted to go at freeway speeds and I imagine, perhaps wrongly, that road rage at being stuck behind a robot vehicle, that may be seen as taking away jobs, as being a possible problem.
It is mildly amusing to contemplate though.
Helen
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The point is not all communities are close enough to distribution centers or UPS regional operations or command enough volume for overnight deliveries, much less same day.
An autonomous vehicle fleet could do drive-by drops to some locations and other deliveries to Amazon lockers or Post Offices by leaving as soon as a reasonable load is available, following custom paths, instead of regular departures and routes. Maybe following one way cross-country, multi-stop "missions" or circuits no human driver would stand for.
In the airline business, one key metric is utilization--not just number of seats sold--but also number of daily round trips. Sometimes an airline will run a redeye route to an otherwise unprofitable, out of the way, location during time the plane would otherwise be sitting Idle. Similarly, an autonomous fleet of delivery or transport vehicles can be scheduled for extreme efficiency not possible or desirable with human operators. In particular for small cargo volumes.
The thing we are starting to see are ripples from new enabling technologies that go beyond the obvious; crop-dusting and monitoring drones in agriculture, robot cars, warehouses that track inventory location automatically... The internet of objects isn't just a Cisco series of ads; it's an ongoing transformation happening right now.