If you own a self-driving car and it happens to be electric-- we didn't ever even think
about our own body being in on that trip.
Now the single most expensive thing we're taking out of the car.
Your time, or a paid driver's time.
When you take that out, it's really-- the cost to move an electric car is about a penny
and a half a mile.
So I ask you, what would you not do for a penny and a half a mile?
You don't have to park it.
It's going to be your personal servant, doing whatever in heck you want.
You know, I left my iPhone at home.
Please run back and get it.
You know, my kid wants an apple that I didn't pack in his lunch.
Whatever.
It's peak times, I don't care.
Go get it.
You will be sending it as your runner everywhere.
We want to do the easy and cheap thing, and it's going to cost me no money, and it's not
even my time.
We will be using them all the time for very low value errands.
And they might not be low value to us, but for a city clogging those streets is a really
big issue.
If I think about our personal infrastructure, what's going on in my brain?
There is a man, Daniel Kahneman, who wrote this beautiful book, Thinking, Fast and Slow,
and his thesis -- he's a behavioral economist -- is that we want to do the easiest thing
every time.
Like, every time I want to do the easiest thing, and the economics comes in second.
Christmastime, my husband was telling me that Amazon had a thousand products in which you
could get 2-hour delivery.
And if we think about Amazon Prime, you pay one time and then you get the whole year for
free delivery.
So I'm watching my husband, who consumes way more than I do, and the packages are coming.
And, you know, one toothbrush delivered to my house.
A screw delivered to my house.
He said it was a difficult screw.
It was a complicated screw.
We needed this particular screw.
And you're watching these deliveries come, and so what happens is there's this car driving
around and coming to my house one at a time, because I like things really easy.
So now throw into this, self-driving cars where we can have at our beck and call these
cars doing whatever we want.
If I think about when we layer in self-driving cars into that equation from a retail perspective,
it's also all based on economics.
I feel like everything comes back to the economics of the situation.
So you're a liquor store and you can be on a fancy street where you know lots of people
walk by, and it's a high rent.
Or, whoa, I can put all of my goods into a car and not pay a driver and do home delivery.
And so I'm going to close my shop and I'm going to be warehousing my inventory on the
street so I can deliver to you in 10 minutes, 15 minutes.
And so just picture that every store is going to be doing that.
So the drugstore, there'll be little mini drugstores driving around.
There'll be little mini liquor stores, little mini clothing stores, little mini whatever
it is.
The thousand most-purchased items at Amazon.
City governments right now make a huge amount of money from you paying for parking, and
from you doing the wrong things and getting parking tickets.
Those two are really big sources of revenue.
A selfdriving car is never going to park.
And when I talk to people in the suburbs, they don't get that.
But in a city, if I'm going to have to pay $2 an hour to park, I'm not even going to
do that.
Because it's going to cost me less than that to have it drive back to my house.
And these cars won't ever get parking tickets because they're not going to be doing anything
wrong.
They're programmed to not break the law.
When I'm talking to people who run self-driving car companies I feel like they're sending--
like, darts out of their eyes are being sent at me.
Like, ugh!
Robin, stop talking about this.
This is a brand new industry.
You're ruining it.
You know, give us some time to get it together.
And I think, you know what?
Cities have spent the last 100 years learning what it means to have metal boxes moving on
scarce city streets.
That equation is not changing.
You take out a driver or not, you still have metal boxes trying to fit through our scarce
city streets.
And that's what we have to deal with.