In the year 2030, booking a robot taxi from Uber or Google (or whichever company has won the battle to establish the most efficient self-driving fleet) could also help the environment.
That s one of the findings of a study published Monday in Nature Climate Change by researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Greenhouse gas emissions from a self-driving, electric-powered taxi would be 63 to 83 percent lower per mile than a projected 2030 hybrid vehicle driven as a private car, and 90 percent lower than today s average gas-powered private vehicle, the study says.
Much of that savings comes from tailoring each taxi trip to the occupancy needed, a practice known as right-sizing. A single passenger booking a ride to work or a bar would need a much smaller vehicle than four luggage-carrying passengers headed to the airport.
Most trips in the U.S. are taken singly, meaning one- or two-seat cars would satisfy most trips, said Jefferey Greenblatt, a co-author of the Berkeley Lab study, in a written statement. That gives us a factor of two savings, since smaller vehicles means reduced energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.
A flourishing of self-driving taxis could also inspire more vehicles to be powered with cleaner energy, the study said. By 2030, electric cars are still expected to be more expensive than conventional vehicles for private car owners, but robot taxis would constantly be roaming city streets — making it more cost-effective for fleet owners to save fuel by using alternative energy cars.
Of course, those taxi fleet operators would also save money by not needing to pay human drivers. Driving is the most common occupation among American men, as The Atlantic noted in its July/August cover story about how technology is making human workers obsolete.
Above: Honda s self-driving Acura RLX travels beneath the BART tracks at the GoMentum automated car test facility at the former Concord Naval Weapons Station. (Photo courtesy Honda)