Jason Yum
Jason Yum
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read

Some of my favorite excerpts from Reid Hoffman’s other article, Driving in the Networked Age (published in 2015!).

  • Elegant explanation of the value proposition.

Today, as individual drivers compete for space, they often work against each other’s interests, sometimes obliviously, sometimes deliberately. In a world of networked driverless cars, driving retains the individualized flexibility that has always made automobility so attractive. But it also becomes a highly collaborative endeavor, with greater cooperation leading to greater efficiency. It’s not just steering wheels and rear-view mirrors that driverless cars render obsolete. You won’t need horns either. Or middle fingers.

  • Interesting statistic. Drivers who resume control of a Level 3 vehicle are surprisingly disoriented.

According to my friend and colleague Stefan Heck, a Stanford professor who is also founder of Nauto, a Silicon Valley startup developing autonomous vehicle technologies, research that Stanford has done shows that drivers resuming control from Level 3 vehicles functioning in autonomous mode take 10 seconds just to attain the level of ability that a drunk driver possesses. And to get back to full driving competence takes 60 seconds.

  • Cities can unlock significant economic opportunities by being among the first to adopt autonomous driving.

All of this recalls the early 20th century, when some cities, recognizing the transformative impact cars would have, made efforts to accommodate them sooner rather than later. Detroit, for example was the first city to adopt traffic signals, one-way streets, and many other conventions that helped usher in a new age of automobility.

The rewards for the places that lead the transition to a next stage of automobility will be substantial.

  • One way that cities can support autonomous driving is to build infrastructure around it, facilitating a vehicle-to-vehicle network.

In these vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) networks, cars share information with each other and other smart infrastructure elements — traffic signals, sensor-embedded roads, roadside cameras, eye-in-the-sky traffic drones, etc.

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