Samuel Schwartz is the author of the new book No One At The Wheel: Driverless Cars And The Road Of The Future. From the transcript of his Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross:Terry Gross: Sam Schwartz, welcome to FRESH AIR. 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. 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.--Marshal Zeringue
SAMUEL SCHWARTZ: I think everybody is expecting fewer drivers, and, you know, that's no surprise. 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. So car dealerships may disappear. So this is going to have wide impacts. Truckers, of course, are going to be impacted - how we move about in so many different ways. But lots of industries will be affected. 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. And if we have fewer crashes, there are going to be fewer cases in court. There'll be...[read on]