I can’t remember the name of the comedian, but he had a wonderful ambition, one which will sadly now never be realised. He wanted to interview Neil Armstrong for an hour on live television without mentioning the moon landings once.
I wish he’d succeeded. In fact Armstrong might have leapt at the opportunity to pontificate about baseball or gardening, rather than the Apollo missions. It must be maddening when every conversation with a stranger turns to one brief event in your life: rather like being in the Eagles and knowing that, in a two-hour concert, 90 per cent of the crowd is only there for ‘Hotel California’.
Following in this vein, I have a secret retirement project where I interview the world’s leading minds on trivial and tangential topics. I’ve made a start already. The Spectator has 30 minutes of unreleased footage of me quizzing the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek about toilet design; somewhere on YouTube there is ten minutes of me talking to the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman about a speed camera on the M11 near Chigwell. So you can imagine how interested I was when I heard that someone had asked the top Geordie brainbox John Gray: ‘What would you do if you won the Lottery?’ His answer, interestingly, was exactly the one my father had given to the same question a few years earlier: ‘I would do absolutely nothing except for hiring a full-time chauffeur.’
Users of Tesla’s Autopilot reportedly drive 5,000 miles per year more than those without
I wonder how many people, particularly aged over 60, would agree with this answer. It is certainly a compelling case to be made for driverless cars: that for part of the population, chauffeuring would be the best single luxury they could buy. Even if ‘Level 5 Autonomous Driving’ is unworkable for now, it is interesting to speculate how behaviour would change if driving were automated. Would the streets of London become clogged with bridge-playing pensioners riding around in no particular hurry? Would people avoid parking fees by instructing their cars to drive around in circles? Even existing in-car technologies – satnav, podcasts, Adaptive Cruise Control – increased our propensity to drive longer distances. Users of Tesla’s Autopilot reportedly drive 5,000 miles per year more than those without. What would happen in a world of fully driverless cars?
Remarkably, we partly know the answer to this question. That’s because a team at UC Berkeley and UC Davis ingeniously simulated a world of driverless cars by providing a representative sample of volunteer households in Sacramento with a full-time chauffeur for up to 60 hours a week and then logged the effect on their travel patterns. The resulting paper, Simulating Life with Personally Owned Autonomous Vehicles through a Naturalistic Experiment with Personal Drivers, is fascinating.
First of all, the use of mass transit fell by more than 90 per cent among households with a chauffeur. Overall miles driven rose by 60 per cent overall, and by more than 120 per cent among retirees. What was perhaps most surprising was that much of the increased car mileage consisted of what were deemed zero–occupancy journeys, where the chauffeur drove the car with no passenger present. People sent their car to collect a friend, then would engage in some sociable activity, before asking the driver to ferry their friend back home.
One brutal conclusion is that, given the choice, people really don’t like using mass transit. It also suggests that AVs might lead to a huge increase in road traffic. On the upside, general sociability and quality-of-life gains, especially for the elderly and disabled, would be immense. Many households could also get by owning one car rather than two. Either way, we need far more behavioural experiments like this.
