Industries that will be disrupted:
- Taxi, shuttles, buses and limo services
- Truck drivers, Delivery, Food delivery (auxilary: train and air transportation as well)
- Insurance industry
- Fleet management (time to write an app for managing 1000+ automated self-driving vehicles)
- Policing. We won't need the CHP much in the future
And that's just from ~20 seconds off the top of my head. I'm glad lawmakers are allowing the future to happen and I hope this puts pressure on other states to join in.
It's fun to speculate on what will happen when driverless cars become mainstream. Essentially, the question boils down to: "What would happen if every car owner in the world suddenly had a 24/7 personal driver?"
- 7 year old kids can now own and "drive" a car.
- Need a lift? Ask your dad/friend to send his car to pick you up.
- Forgot your laptop at home? Send your car back and ask your flatmate to put your laptop in the car.
- Leaving New York for some vacations in Miami? Take the plane and pick up your car whenever it arrives.
- Want to take a nap? Pull down the windows and windshield curtains.
- Traveling abroad for a few weeks and don't know what to do with your car? Set it to taxi mode and profit.
I think eventually, car ownership will go down significantly, since companies managing fleets of electric cars can do it far more efficiently than private ownership of long range cars. Uber is faster than walking to the car you parked half a mile away. There's always 'free parking' for your large house party in the city. You can also create small cargo only cars for small deliveries like that laptop situation. It's far more efficient from an energy/vehicle cost/liability stand point. Amazon prime 'local' might just replace stores from a pure efficiency standpoint. The number of total cars neccesary will decrease and the large amount of real estate devoted to cars will decrease significantly. Car maintenance costs will decrease with predictable schedules, and economies of scale that come with fleets.
Car sharing only works well for urbanites without children living with them. The rest of us keep a lot of stuff in our cars: strollers, child seats, spare clothes, shopping bags, diapers, pens, ski racks, toys, first-aid kits, etc. Even with computer driven cars I'll still be willing to pay a lot to avoid the hassle of loading and unloading every day.
It's one of the great cost distortions of private car ownership: Anybody who is parking a car in public, filled with surfboards and strollers or not, is actually storing private property (car and contents) on public space. And even worse, "regular" parking spots are often free, even though they minimize the number of cars that can be "stored" on a given surface area as opposed to garages. Thus, we incentivize wasting urban space that is inherently scarce.
If this stays the same, using a more efficient, stackable, standardized cargo pod that is auto-loaded onto your self-driving rental car, will be more expensive for you because you now actually see the cost.
This is one of the many hidden costs of driving that people will suddenly have to face with on demand automatic car rental.
What if you kept all your car stuff in some sort of modular compartments that could be easily loaded and unloaded? At the moment there isn't much incentive to do so, but that might change with this scenario.
What I'm getting at is while your argument seems sound, and may in fact prevail, when you change one piece of the puzzle sometimes other solutions become possible.
Maybe your driveway is replaced by a compartment container. Maybe (certain kinds of) cars will be able to automatically load the compartments. Or maybe you're completely right.
I can't leave my stuff in the street, especially since it isn't the same location every time I park. In other words, there's not necessarily a dedicated space that will be empty if I'm renting instead of owning, let alone one that I control
In fact, folks who don't have dedicated/owned spaces are probably the best audience for rentals.
Moreover, even if I'm willing to take said stuff into my residence, I may need said stuff on my way to the drop-off.
It's getting kinda pointless. I'm suggesting something that might happen in a future where self-driving cars have completely disrupted all of transportation. You're countering "there's no dedicated space" - well, just maybe, that can change? It's not even a full space, it's just a "dock" to load the containers.
In fact, even today, people who don't have a dedicated space (even if that space shifts around a bit, ie. is a "pool" space on the street) can't own a car: Where would they leave it? People who are renters today already have to deal with not leaving stuff in the car, so this discussion doesn't apply to them.
Long story short: Your original argument was that not owning your own car will not be be an option for you, because you leave a lot of stuff for your kids in your car. My argument is that, with a bit of fantasy, maybe this isn't an insurmountable obstacle.
> I may need said stuff on my way to the drop-off.
Why would you drive your self-driving vehicle to the drop-off?
One of the small but nagging issues which will need to be resolved is how to deal with "items left behind".
When more people begin to use public cars for personal use/hire people will begin leaving phones, strollers, jackets, wallets in these vehicles. Unless the cars are to have omnidirectional cameras or electronic trackers to monitor everything, people are going to lose things. This is going to be a pain point. It might be just becoming aware -as people do in taxicabs but at least honest cabbies will return items as its in their interest to maintain good reputation --a stranger is only bound by altruism.
There's something that I am genuinely wondering. Will car ownership really decrease?
Where I used to live in 2003, in China, taxis were really cheap, and public transportation was functioning OK. Yet, after some economic boom, people started to buy more and more cars. It was very provable that cars were a negative in every possible way. More expensive, PITA to maintain, inconvenient to park, incompatible with drinking alcohol or being tired, but still, people preferred to own and drive their own cars!
I know a self driving car is not exactly like a Taxi driver (or even like a private driver), but the parallel is close enough for me to wonder about the consequences.
I think there's another factor in play in a place like China. Many of these new car owners probably grew up with cars being an unattainable luxury - now, suddenly, they can actually just own one. I can't blame such people for jumping on the opportunity, practicality be damned.
For the average chinese person, is it cheaper to use taxis & long range busses & subways to go everywhere, or a personal car? Will the taxis come out to your residential area, at any time? Your still paying for taxi labor on top of a car.
> - Leaving New York for some vacations in Miami? Take the plane and pick up your car whenever it arrives.
Alternatively, in say 20 years or so, going to Miami which would take 21 hours (at 65-70 mph), could probably be done on an overnight sleeper-car (at probably something more like 120-130mph).
Even a cross country trip would only take a day or so at such a rate, and with a few strategically placed stops, you could have a nice week long cross country trip at a fraction of the normal cost.
Here's a few negative thoughts though:
These driverless cars might significantly increase road usage and wear since driving becomes less of a burden.
Suburban sprawl could grow out of control since it's no longer necessary to either have public transit options or be attentive to have a long commute.
Some people might even choose to buy automated RVs instead of homes, decreasing a sense of community and investment in place.
> Alternatively, in say 20 years or so, going to Miami which would take 21 hours (at 65-70 mph), could probably be done on an overnight sleeper-car (at probably something more like 120-130mph).
Believe it or not we already have this. It's an Amtrak train between DC and central Florida. You are a passenger aboard the train but your car comes with you! http://www.amtrak.com/auto-train
Let me guess, this costs quite a bit more than flying and renting a car for a week?
This is not a cheap stab at US rail, I looked into this on the similar service that the German railways offer - and it did not make financial sense over flight+rental.
Fully automated cars let's you have all sorts of crazy solutions in the 200+ year time-span.
Think 100% electric high speed trains that let cars 'board' at highway speeds. Evacuated underground tunnels for low drag long distance high speed trips. Hybrid Maglev cars that rocket down the highway on a cushion of air while being inductively charged. Even things as simple as highways without road signs of any kind.
"Evacuated underground tunnels for low drag long distance high speed trips."
That's interesting because while I've heard of and thought about the concept of a vacuum tube train that could go ridiculously fast, I didn't think of a merely low-pressure tunnel that ordinary cars (with pressurized compartments, anyway) could use in flexible manner. You wouldn't go 15,000 mph, but you could do several hundred pretty easily.
If the cars could drive themselves, they would probably be more like taxis without the drivers. We no longer need parking lots because the cars are constantly in use, that will free up a lot of space and mirror what already happens in dense urban areas (which depend on taxis, public transit, parking is very $$$). The cars will wear out in a couple of years from constant use (or maybe not if electric?), but we won't need as many of them. Rush hour commutes are a problem, but road capacity is limited anyways and peak pricing + mass transit + car pooling can lead to a workable solution.
Eventually, since all cars are automated, safe highway speeds could be increased dramatically (reduce space between cars, more predictability, reroute and reduce speeds to prevent full stop bottlenecks). Accordingly, you won't even be able to enter the highway in manual mode.
I agree, it could definitely be a situation where owning a car is like owning a plane. Sure, some people do it as hobbyists, but why would you when there are extremely efficient (computer operated) and inexpensive (no taxi driver, 100% uptime except for filling up/charging) taxi services that can take you around. Especially as more people use them (thus reducing wait times) I could see taxis being usable/profitable even in the suburbs.
I wonder, since cars also have a large social signalling aspect, at least in many societies.
I guess that can still be maintained, with various levels of luxury in taxis/rentals/however it works.
But then where will all that social signalling money go? I guess since it's mostly financed money anyway, that capital will have to seek other venues? Will consumer debt drop due to this? Or will something else pick up the slack?
I think simply owning a car will be such a signal, similar to how owning a plane today is a mark of the super-wealthy. There will be "automotive Boeings" that produce cars for transportation companies, boutique shops that produce them for the wealthy, and not much in between.
Yes, this is already the case in China and I suspect in many places around the world. In Shenzhen, taxis are very cheap and available within 100m around the clock pretty much everywhere. Even if you drive on average 1 hour per day which is very unusual in a high density city, owning a car would probably be more expensive then always taking the taxi. Yet, a lot of people still purchase cars (mostly luxury brands).
I suspect this is the case almost everywhere in the world. A car's purchase price + gas + maintenance + taxes easily surpasses what you'd spend on taxis, even in a 5 year period. The keys to car ownership are convenience and the emotional aspects.
You're right that people now use their vehicles for a variety of tasks, but I think that's actually part of the problem.
My dad has a pontoon boat that he has to twice yearly haul around. It might make more sense to get something specialized for those two days than drive something sufficiently powerful and fuel inefficient year round.
Averages are nice, but I'll be interested to see what happens to the workforce that depends upon them entirely, as mentioned above: truckies, taxis, FedEx, etc.
I say, leave it for a year to lull the companies into a false sense of security, then tax the hell out of companies using them for a few years to pay for some re-education for the old employees.
Maybe it's because I'm Australian and have got used to the free ride of healthcare and education, but I'd gladly take a minor tax increase if it means a significant portion of the population gets into an entirely new career quicker, instead of remaining unemployed and being MORE of a strain on the economy.
Career is a strong word, though. The sorts of people we're talking about usually have no other option, and education can change that.
You should be used to this kind of talk by now. It's the modus operandi of socialism and the Democratic party. Who ever heard of personal responsibility?
How dare that person get cancer, become unemployed because of unforseen shifts in the job market, etc.
Social safety nets exist for a reason. You may opt out by moving somewhere else if you would prefer not to participate in a society with said safety nets.
I say this as someone in a $200K/year+ household. People who preach personal responsibility are oblivious to the realities of the world.
Well every one knows that becoming severely ill is a possibility for anyone, that's what insurance is for. Can't afford insurance? Give up unhealthy habits to lower your rates, get a better job, look after family so that they will support you if you need help.
Get made redundant due to unforeseen shifts in the job market? Educate yourself, get a better job, work harder. Innovate, invent, think, mow your neighbors lawns. Use your brain and don't embark on a dead end career.
I agree that some social safety nets are needed for a civilized society (No one that is ill should go without out treatment if they don't have any money etc) but at the same time there are limits and I think paying for people who lose their jobs because of new technology is way past that line. We need to encourage people to be smarter, not dumber.
"People who preach personal responsibility are oblivious to the realities of the world." I live in South Africa and government handouts do nothing but keep the poor oppressed and uneducated. They are used as a tool for control by populist politicians. People will have more children just for another R250/month from the government instead of creating value. Socialism is a huge threat to everyone everywhere. It keeps the populous dumb and gives governments way too much power. Please don't preach about the realities of the world from your $200K/year+ household pedestal. Socialism is obviously working out great for you.
>I live in South Africa and government handouts do nothing but keep the poor oppressed and uneducated.
I live in Australia, one of the best examples of how government handouts can ruin a race, and I'm saying this as someone coming from a low-income family with poor education and working+educating myself to a $100k/y job before I'm 30.
>I think paying for people who lose their jobs because of new technology is way past that line.
I think completely supporting them would be a bad idea, but as said in my original post, assistance in re-education should be partially paid for. I am always of the opinion that education should be at least partially subsidised - full subsidy encourages a poorer quality of education.
Example: You're 26 and have just spent $80k and 8 years of toil studying furiously for a degree, and the market for your chosen field evaporates. Sure, you've got the rest of your life ahead of you, but now you're significantly in debt because of something you had no control over.
This is a difficult analogy to compare with taxi drivers, but I hope you see the point - and over the next 10-40 years we will see this happen more and more as machine intelligence replaces more and more jobs.
I don't have much to add to tetomb. While certain safety nets can be successfully argued to make sense in a large, wealthy, productive, and strongly-led society, that doesn't imply all safety nets make sense in all societies. It also doesn't imply that even the desirable nets can be had feasibly at a good quality of service. For deductive reasons why they don't, see Carlyle, Mises, et al. (If you prefer inductive observation, you can also look at a wide variety of examples across history of failed and failing attempts.)
Lest you think I have no experience with the US situation and system, I've never lived in a 6-figure income/year household, I have a family member who was unemployed for over a year, who broke her arm only months after losing her job and medical insurance (all the years of medical insurance payments wasted, she having never been injured or seriously ill during that time--but that's a risk one takes when deciding (when one has a choice) to pay for insurance), finally getting a job that paid less than half of what she used to make--she's just trying to make it to retirement because all the money the government has forced her to "save" is effectively untouchable until then. I have a cousin who recently got knee cancer (but he'll be fine because it hasn't spread, his dad's an attorney, and a lot of cancers are curable), and I have another family member with a mental illness who without medical treatment could not function. He has paid the (often brutal) consequences of going off the medication enough times, fortunately he's been stable now for some years. (And mental illness is far worse than cancer, from the underfunded and incomplete medical understanding and treatments to government systems for aid to the social stigmas that make making friends, getting family support, getting a job, and a whole bunch of other things incredibly difficult.) I'm not oblivious to realities of the world. I see the causes deserving of aid as well as the crappiness of institutionalized aid systems.
I rather doubt a self driving car in the hands of a 7 year old could possibly be more dangerous than a manual car in the hands of a 7 year old. It's fairly trivial to keep kids from using an iPhone inappropriately. A simple password would easily stop it, or we can keep using physical keys.
7 year old kids can be kidnapped in non hacked vehicles. It's considerably easier to track down a stolen car from 2012 with OnStar than one from 1992 without.
For the foreseeable future cars will have manual overrides, and I can't see any attack or series of attacks, no matter how horrifying, resulting in 32,885 deaths over the course of a year.
Certainly there are many scenarios and details to consider, but the typical objections seem to be red herrings, strawmen, or just totally bogus.
Modern cars are 100% dependent on computers, yet this doesn't happen. Why would it begin happening in the future? Note that the Google car is designed to be autonomous, it has no dependencies on external systems - there is nothing to DDOS. Yes, you can blind/obstruct it's sensors in a variety of ways, but it's much easier to just aim a laserpointer to a driver's eyes today.
The auto industry itself; a family will far more easily be able to get by on a single car: "Take Little Joey and Little Suzie to work, drop dad off at the office, go pick mom up at home, then at 3:30, pick the kids up at school, drop Suzie off at soccer practice, and have dad home in time for dinner at 6."
For that matter, shared, scheduled cars on a neighbourhood scale would be pretty great.
I've made this point many times on driverless car threads. The auto industry sells cars on the basis of miles driven, not number of families. As the passenger miles will increase with driverless cars, the car makers have absolutely nothing to be concerned about, and much to be delighted about driverless cars.
> The regulations would allow vehicles to operate autonomously, but a licensed driver would still need to sit behind the wheel to serve as a backup operator in case of emergency.
That alone limits the potential "disruptiveness" quite a bit.
It reminds me of the "Red Flag" laws, passed in the early days of the automobile, that basically made cars useless, so you'd have to defeat their very purpose in order to obey:
In the United States, the state of Vermont passed a similar flurry of Red Flag Laws in 1894. The most infamous of the Red Flag Laws was enacted in Pennsylvania circa 1896, when Quaker legislators unanimously passed a bill through both houses of the state legislature, which would require all motorists piloting their "horseless carriages", upon chance encounters with cattle or livestock to (1) immediately stop the vehicle, (2) "immediately and as rapidly as possible... disassemble the automobile," and (3) "conceal the various components out of sight, behind nearby bushes" until equestrian or livestock is sufficiently pacified.
I strongly suspect the "Quaker legislators" part is untrue, because I'm pretty sure Quaker dominance of Pennsylvania government had ended long before 1896. (I couldn't find a reference on this point though, so I might be wrong.)
I don't know if the rest of the quote is accurate.
Law makers are uncertain about the technology right now. When they're the ones sitting behind the wheel in one of these cars, reading a book while it drives, then we'll probably see new legislation removing the necessity of the driver.
That's true, but it's probably a temporary measure (a decade or so?). And even with a backup driver, automated cars have the potential of vastly decreasing traffic jams.
I'm very annoyed by this requirement. It doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny as being necessary yet completely hinders most opportunities for true disruptiveness.
You don't think the novelty and risk associated with a fully automated system that's still in the experimental stages warrants any immediate caution?
Commercial planes have had autopilot for years, but they still require at least the pilot or co-pilot to sit behind the yoke.
When driverless cars have had a few million or billion hours without statistically significant incidents, I think we'll see the laws adapt to not even requiring a human fail-safe.
Actually, for commercial airliners its "worse". They require both a pilot and co-pilot behind the yoke, even in autopilot.
If an airliner is flown with less than two crew in the cockpit, even for a short period of time, the remaining pilot/co-pilot must wear a mask when flying above 25,000ft.
A friend mentioned that non-scheduled (no passengers or commercial freight) flights in large aircraft (eg. 737) can still operate with a single-pilot and a rated flight engineer only. The pilot had to have her mask on (or clipped to the helmet) for the entire flight. This option is rarely done commercially, obviously.
Unfortunately there is a very, very, large set of possible situations a car may find itself in that requires 'user intervention'. Especially without much context-aware systems, or AI, the best error handler a driver-less car has is "stop, inform driver". Is there a curb to pull over to? What if the system is unable to determine if the path is clear because something like a branch is in the way?
Well, my line of argument is that any driver in a self-driving car is going to be completely inattentive (think available-to-public, not a test-phase car). For any self-driving car to be considered safe enough for public use, the car will need to be proven absolutely safe in "emergency" situations (i.e., auto-shutoff, etc.).
So, if the car is proven to be absolutely safe, then why do we need a driver? To pull it off the road after it shuts off or stops?
Take professor Thrun's course on building self driving robots at Udacity, and then you'll see why this requirement is necessary at this stage of the development of this technology.
The whole purpose of the new autonomous vehicle law is to allow development of the systems in real-world conditions, before they can get to the next level of driving without a driver behind the wheel as a backup.
I seriously doubt this will disrupt any of those industries, except possibly shuttle buses that cover very restricted routes. It will be years before these get past the handful of people that will likely rush out to buy one (Woz, for example, if they put the tech into either a Prius or Hummer)
The technology pundits are ignoring the human factor, giving up control, trusting your kid's lives to a computer, the same technology that crashes on the desktop, and on our smartphones. What happens when the first car has a BOSD and the backup human driver isn't paying any attention and the accident happens within seconds of the crash? These things will likely kill a bunch of people and will go the same way that the C-5 or the Segway did.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but until we have HA computers that exist outside of a datacenter, I doubt a proof-of-concept by Google will go anywhere in this or the next decade, let alone disrupt anything. The idealism and flying cars optimism is well placed and I'd love to see it happen, but the future nearly always takes much longer to happen than people predict...
>trusting your kid's lives to a computer, the same technology that crashes on the desktop, and on our smartphones
This is all math here. If a computer is statistically better at driving than a human you can ask the same question as "Would you give up control to decrease the chance of an accident? Or would you risk your kid's life just to feel in control?"
>What happens when the first car has a BOSD and the backup human driver isn't paying any attention and the accident happens within seconds of the crash?
People will probably die. The the same thing that happens when a human crash a car which is already happening everyday.
While I agree, the problem lies, as in most cases, with our education system in this country. The general public has proven time and time again to have a very tenuous grasp of mathematics.
If they actually work in real-world conditions and if they can be made to be reasonable in cost, I can see the conversion happening in a very short time frame. A few years.
But given the conditionals of my first sentence, the conversion may not start in earnest for a decade or more.
> but until we have HA computers that exist outside of a datacenter
We do, in many places - your car is one such place. Another is every single hospital in the civilized world. You know, there's a continuum of world between HA datacenters and your smartphone.
Not to mention the huge revenue shortfall when parking meters and public parking lots are no longer used. You tell your car, orbit the building for a while I'll be about 40 minutes.
The car doesn't need to orbit. It can go off and park itself somewhere else, and come back as you are about to leave. Think of it as an automated valet.
This does mean we don't need the huge car parks around places of interest as everyone can be dropped off and picked up at the front door.
(And when the car is going to self park, it can use speeds and routes that avoid adding congestion to the people trying to get somewhere.)
If we all start doing this we will end up with huge traffic problems. Luckily, the wasted car mileage and fuel consumption will probably make it an unattractive option. One thing you could do though is ask your car to drop you off and go find a parking.
I expect that the way Google would design it is that you tell your car 'come back in X minutes' and the car would do the calculation to optimize for cost and time on target, with a user preference setting which has higher priority to the user.
I've had way too many experiences driving in a city when I've just needed to run inside somewhere for 2 minutes and really wished someone was in the car with me to drive around while I'm inside rather than spending 20 minutes to find a parking spot. An "orbit" feature would be pretty useful for situations like that, and would even save gas occasionally, considering how long you can spend driving around looking for parking.
(Too bad it'll probably be a while before robot cars can legally operate without a human in the driver's seat and paying attention, though)
My car can idle and drive slowly, for an hour on less than 1/2 a gallon of gas (have to watch it more closely the next time I'm stuck in traffic trying to get across the Bay bridge). That is $2 in California today. It costs $3 - $5 for an hour of time on some downtown parking meters, can cost $5 per 20 minutes in the parking garages. Trust me, gas is cheaper, and with a hybrid doing the driving, I could see the 'hover' mode being like 50 cents of electricity.
It's only cheaper because the cost of the space you're taking up on the road and the cost of the traffic you're causing is not accounted for. The solution to this is a VMT tax that accounts for that cost.
Perhaps, San Francisco policy is to use parking prices to discourage vehicle use. They haven't gone the London 'congestion tax' route yet, perhaps they will.
There is a difference between what "is" and how the system responds to what "is". In this case I don't doubt for a moment that drivers of self driving cars would use this technique to economic advantage, and yes if it got too bad it would invoke a response (much like the $5 parking meters with credit card readers in them was a response to cars in general).
And don't forget that with fully automated cars that can at least roll a few meters without starting a combustion engine (e.g. hybrids) you can park the cars without having a "road" between every two rows of cars, reducing space. Similar to this, just not with shelves but the cars themselves moving:http://www.rollster.de/picture/upload/Image/8780a17bd3128fe2...
Also, garages would not need to be standing height, only lit on demand etc.
While it won't go away, the auto insurance agency will certainly change. I wonder if liability will shift from driver (passenger?) to manufacturer/Google.
I for one can't wait until we see car fatalities drop to the hundreds per year if not 0.
Please can you explain how each of those will be affected in a big way? I can't think of ways that most would be affected in a real tangible way. I use taxis because I don't own a car (edit: ignore this one, I wasn't thinking straight, hah), my deliveries (groceries, items from online) are manned because there is management of the delivery needed, not because someone needs to drive. I can see how the insurance industry will be affected in a large way though.
I believe he was implying that the humans would be impacted. Taxis that drive themselves don't get tickets, don't forget to turn on the meter, and don't need to be paid part of the fare. Basically any people moving services are made more economical by removing human labor, insurance risk, and traffic liability.
It remains to be seen if those savings can actually be realized of course.
There is no need for the delivery to be manned. The vehicle can pull up, you enter a code and it provides the goods vending machine style. (Note Amazon already has these in several cities.)
At the moment the delivery drivers have all these work rules and health and safety regulations (eg 9-5, limited hours per day/week, holidays off etc). It makes sense to schedule deliveries around their convenience trying to get as many deliveries per driver hour possible.
But robotic drivers don't care. You can dick them around as much as you want (tell them you'll be home at 6, then tell them 7, then tell them 2am). It doesn't bug them having to wait around for you.
Consequently the vast majority of the time deliveries will happen around your availability. That is probably good enough 99% of the time. As to what happens when you are out of town, the delivery can just wait till you get back.
Challenges it will face: - insurance regulation, moral dilemmas (decision to make when confronted with living hazards), drinking and riding, more time for advertising, and a rash of start-ups pitches that mash up concepts like Uber & Kozmo because they can.
Here's one for you: City real estate dips in price. Suburb real estate rises, especially at the fringe of the suburbs. A self-driving car with a LTE wireless hotspot would make a previously absurd commute manageable.
Heck, you could sleep during your drive in to work.
And that's just from ~20 seconds off the top of my head. I'm glad lawmakers are allowing the future to happen and I hope this puts pressure on other states to join in.