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COY WIRE: Hello, hello, hello.
You made it.
The weekend is almost here, and you
already know Fridays rock, especially
when it's a Halloweekend.
Hope you're getting into the Halloween spirit.
I think my daughters have chosen my costume,
and I'm pretty sure it involves a Disney Princess.
I'm your boy Coy.
This is "CNN 10," and we're going
to start this show by sending a special shoutout
to Kokomo, Indiana.
Bon Air Middle School, rise up.
Did you know that the state motto for Indiana
is "crossroads of America"?
Very fitting, because today we're going
to bring you on a ride with us.
Welcome to a special edition of "CNN
10," where the topic of self-driving cars
is in the hot seat.
Yesterday, I told you about a new pilot
program of fully autonomous robot taxis in Los Angeles.
And it got us to thinking about the future of this technology.
Fully autonomous vehicles do all the driving
without any input from humans.
They rely on detailed maps, GPS, cameras, radar,
and artificial intelligence to navigate
their computer-powered journeys.
Manufacturers worldwide are investing in this technology.
It's said to be eco-friendly, and it
could offer an affordable mode of transportation
for non-car owners.
And some believe that computers will
be safer drivers than humans.
But there are a lot of questions.
There are concerns about safety and the readiness
of this technology.
There have been court fights, injuries, even deaths caused
by self-driving technology.
And some privacy advocates are concerned
that your every movement and destination can be tracked.
Who gets access to this information?
It does seem, though, that the world is moving
closer and closer to fully autonomous
vehicles becoming mainstream.
Some wonder if humans will even be driving
vehicles at all in the future.
So for today's show, we're going to take a look
at what a completely driverless world in the future
could look like.
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- Americans love their cars.
Getting my first car was one of the happiest days of my life,
and I've loved driving ever since, especially fast cars.
Yeah, that's not actually my car.
But hey, look.
This is my story, and I can dream if I want to.
But what if I'm part of the last generation to get
excited about driving a car?
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I've spent the past traveling the country,
talking to entrepreneurs, engineers,
and test drivers who are building the cars of tomorrow.
And when they imagine the future, driving a car
isn't part of it.
They envision roads full of cars driven by machines, where
traffic jams are no more, where the death rate by car accidents
drops to zero--
the end of car ownership as we know
it, even to the point of human driving
one day becoming illegal.
I asked them all the same thing.
What will the future look like, and what
will it take to get there?
What I found was really exciting but also a bit shocking.
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- OK, so as soon as I turn out of this parking lot, I'm going
to engage in self-driving mode.
'Cause technically, we don't need a driver in the car.
So you and I are basically, in a way, just passengers now.
- Yes.
- We're test driving a car powered by autonomous
vehicle startup Drive.ai on the streets of Northern California.
It's one of several companies working to utterly
transform how we live.
This test car could be the prototype of an automobile that
not only takes you out of the driver's seat,
but creates a future where you might not need to own
a car at all, at least that's what the people building them
think.
SEBASTIAN THRUN: Ownership will probably be abandoned.
We mostly have cars that we summon on our phone.
The car will come empty to us and pick us up.
And we get inside in front of our office or a house,
and it drives us straight to the restaurant.
And there's no time wasted with parking.
STERLING ANDERSON: In a world of self-driving cars,
the utopia of the future, the only vehicles
operating in the city are driverless,
electric, emissionless vehicles.
They can position themselves in a state
where you or I, hailing one from our smartphone,
has one there within a minute.
GABE KLEIN: We will look back and say,
wow, people own cars to get from this point to that point.
- Eliminating car ownership would drastically change
the way we shape our cities.
GABE KLEIN: The thing I'm most excited about is the ability
on the street to reallocate space away
from the storage of vehicles.
Right now, cars sit idle 94.8% of the time.
I mean, that's staggering.
And I think we could literally close 30%-40%
of our streets to automobiles.
You don't need cars on neighborhood streets anymore.
You just need them on the perimeter of your neighborhood.
CHRIS URMSON: All of those parking facilities today
get turned into residential space or parks
or offices or restaurants.
And we can kind of give back the city
to the people that live in it and take
it away from the automobiles.
I think that the quality of life and the opportunity
to kind of reuse that space is going to be pretty magical.
- Imagine it, never driving again.
The nation of muscle cars, NASCAR, and the open road--
you're going to tell Americans they can't drive?
Well, eventually, maybe.
RAJ RAJKUMAR: There may be a law in place that basically says,
50 years from now, humans cannot drive on public roads.
And if a human does want to drive,
they actually go to a private car ranch,
where you can basically drive to your heart's content.
- All right.
I know what you're thinking, a car ranch?
But it's actually not that crazy.
Remember, when we transitioned from horses to automobiles,
we didn't shoot all the horses.
Well, guess what, these car ranches actually already exist.
Think of car companies that build
high-end sports cars that are meant to be
driven by humans, not robots.
They're already building driving courses around the country.
And yes, they're as fun as they sound.
ANDRE OOSTHUIZEN: We opened in May 2015.
You'll come in.
You'll register and meet your driving coach,
and then the driving coach will then take you onto the track.
We believe this destination that we've created
has got a long-term future.
- Porsche knows that driverless technology is
around the corner, but they still
want people to love driving, even if they do less of it
on public roads.
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- Woo!
- It's like being a kid in the candy store.
- Yeah, seriously.
All right.
Let's get back to the real world.
The rise of carsharing services has
already made people accustomed to the idea
of not owning a car.
Today, human drivers pick us up when we use Uber or Lyft.
But that's not going to last.
TAGGART MATTHIESEN: Autonomous ridesharing
is absolutely coming.
It is right around the corner.
And you'll see it in pockets at first,
and slowly and surely, you'll start to see these vehicles
all over the place.
There is an opportunity on a long enough timeline
where we may have a fleet that is fully autonomous.
As you start to see people adopt to transportation as a service,
the hope here is that cars will--
car ownership will slowly decline.
- All of these changes won't come easy.
Perhaps the biggest fear, what will
happen when all these robots get better at our jobs than we are?
Will they replace us?
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