What will humans do when cars drive themselves?
I had never been more excited to part with hard earned dollars than when I submitted my pre-order for the Tesla Model 3 a few weeks ago.
Part of my excitement was to finally own an electric vehicle, but the remainder was all about autopilot and (eventually) fully autonomous driving. I obviously wasn’t alone in my enthusiasm:
But I wondered: how many of the 316,000 customers have considered what they will do in their car when it’s driving itself? From the perspective of the car, we will be merely “human cargo.”
According to WNYC, the average commute time is 25.4 minutes across the US, but in places like the Bay Area it can be almost double that:
I can think of a lot of things to do with an extra 2 hours of your day:
- Catch up on social media
- Read a book
- Watch online video
- Skype with your kids
- Sleep
- Do work
The first four present a ton of opportunity for companies like Facebook, Netflix, Snapchat, Amazon, Microsoft, and others to grow their addressable market. The commute is pretty much the only large chunk of our day left for companies to place media in front of your face.
The last two present even greater opportunity for human productivity. If you get an extra 2 hours of sleep on your commute, what do you do with the extra 2 hours at home, or at work? Maybe you throw it back into work itself. That’s certainly the behavior that Google and other large technology companies have promoted in the Bay Area with their Wi-Fi connected buses. Or, you could, of course, just waste it:
To the contrary, maybe we will just supervise driving, since the first autonomous cars will require some human supervision. It turns out that, according to some research coming out of Stanford, supervising is exactly the wrong thing for human cargo to do. Why? We kind’ve suck at it.
The research suggests that, when humans try to supervise an autonomous car, they tend to fall asleep. Moreover, they are more awake when they are more distracted! Note the below incidence of drowsiness for students engaging in (1) supervising, (2) watching a video, and (3) reading:
This evidence flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that distracted driving is unsafe driving. For instance, the same paper cites data from the National Safety Council claiming 21% of automotive accidents in the U.S. involve a mobile phone. Yet, when it comes to semi-autonomous driving, it would seem that distracted driving is — to some extent — safer because it keeps you awake!
As semi-autonomous cars become mainstream over the next 5 years, the technology and media companies that want to entertain human cargo may be driven to do so, not simply by our desire to be distracted, but by our need. Virtual and augmented reality, which at some point will make it into the car, could be inherently safer technologies than simply letting a human watch the road.
I’m curious to watch this new field of in-car media blossom as Tesla and others bring these vehicles to the roads of America, and beyond. I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on what you’d like to watch or experience while your car is driving you around!
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Thanks to my colleague at Lightspeed Meredith Kendall for reading a draft of this post.
