Why Uber's self-driving cars won't last, according to an expert at MIT

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Uber self-driving car

Business Insider/Danielle Muoio

Uber recently rolled out a fleet of self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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It's an astonishing development, just a few short years after the taxi-replacement company began to transform the way people get around cities. Even though the cars have their limitations, it's easy to imagine a future of robotic Volvos ferrying us all around urban centers like in a scene from a sci-fi movie.

But Kent Larson, an architect, city planner, and leader of the Changing Places group for redesigning cities at the MIT Media Lab, said that self-driving taxis will likely just be a short blip in the history of transportation in cities.

The self-driving Ubers are significant, he said, because they further cut down on the need to clog up cities with heavy, expensive, wasteful personal vehicles. But he believes they're just a step on the way toward even more sensible shared-transportation options.

Most trips in the city, he said, involve individuals moving around their own neighborhoods far below the maximum speeds of cars.

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"Why have a 4,000-pound automobile that seats five to move one person a short distance at low speed?"

Self-driving shared vehicles, even if they cut down on the total number of cars a city needs, still require major parking and driving infrastructure. The more you can cut into that, Larson said, the more you can expand living, working, and communal spaces for a city's residents.

Which isn't to say self-driving cars don't excite Larson. In his own lab, he works on a variety of self-driving vehicles. But they're smaller, and lightweight, not geared toward the specifications of a family on a long-distance road trip.

"[A driverless Uber] is a logical step towards this vision," he said, "an intermediary step."

But he thinks in the future they will look archaic.

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"It's just like, you had the horse and buggy," he said. "You got rid of the horse, it still looked like a buggy." But those buggy-like cars did not last long, even though they almost certainly seemed futuristic at the time.

An important note: Larson wasn't talking about the company Uber when he said this. Who knows what role they'll play down the line. But Uber's self-driving car fleet? If you accept his vision, don't expect your grandkids to ever see it.

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