But we should be - go forward with our eyes wide open. It'll look like a hospital room or a doctor's office - a place to be examined by a doctor remotely in which a remote stethoscope listens to your heart, and your blood pressure is taken, and all those types of things are possible. And I see that as a real potential - as a meeting place, a sleeping place, an eating place. So others are beginning to think of these vehicles as being something totally different - different uses. It - there's no reason to think it's going to look like a car, other than that's what we're used to. It could be, you know, the width of a house. It could - the autonomous vehicle of the future, most people think that by the second half of the century, at least, and maybe sooner, will have no steering wheel, will have no brake. And today - the cellphone of today doesn't look anything like the cellphone that I had in 1982. And the cellphone came - with a man carrying it - on a 12-volt battery and this huge phone. I had one of the first cellphones that I could use during emergencies. And a lot of them look - they kind of look - the Google car looks like a smaller car, like a smart car, and it's got some intelligence on top of it. SCHWARTZ: A lot of people have the image that you have, Terry. So give us a sense of, visually - like, of how a car might be designed differently. Our cars are designed for, like, the gas engine under the hood, and the steering wheel and the brake pedal. But as you point out in your book, once you have an autonomous vehicle, you get to rethink the whole design of the car and probably also what the car is made of. GROSS: You know, I've always - until reading your book, I thought of AVs - autonomous vehicles, driverless cars - as looking a lot like my car, except that I wouldn't have to sit in the driver's seat, or if I was in the driver's seat, I wouldn't have to do anything. GROSS: So kind of nobody's going to have a job, is what (laughter) - is what you're saying. There'll be less of a burden on the court system. And if we have fewer crashes, there are going to be fewer cases in court. The insurance industry, certainly, will be affected since we will have fewer crashes, and about a third of the insurance industry is based on crashes. Truckers, of course, are going to be impacted - how we move about in so many different ways. But it also means that there're probably going to be fewer repair shops because AVs lend themselves to fleet operations, especially if they're going to be offering rides, as opposed to selling maximum vehicles. SAMUEL SCHWARTZ: I think everybody is expecting fewer drivers, and, you know, that's no surprise. Give us a couple of examples of industries or jobs or roadways that we might not realize will be profoundly affected by AVs once they start to really dominate. In your book, you write that AVs, autonomous vehicles, will be the most disruptive technology to hit society worldwide since the advent of the motorcar. We're going to use the words driverless car interchangeably with the words autonomous vehicle, or AV. Later in our conversation, after we talk about the future, we're going to talk about traffic problems that plague us today. He now has his own consulting firm and has worked with cities around the world on transportation-related issues. He served as the traffic commissioner of New York City and chief engineer of the city's Department of Transportation. He knows a lot about transportation systems. Schwartz is the author of the new book "No One At The Wheel: Driverless Cars And The Road Of The Future," which he says is about the good, the bad and the ugly of how driverless cars will change our world. My guest Samuel Schwartz expects it to be a very disruptive technology. But driverless cars are also likely to transform roads, cities, suburbs, jobs, the economy and daily life. The future of the driverless car is going to affect the future of how we travel and what we do in cars.
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