The bottleneck is the delivery: unless there are sufficient deliveries to be made in your neighbourhood, sending a van to just your house then back to depot is very expensive. For hundred-dollar-and-up items this works, but not for the kind of consumer goods that people want within an hour (food, namely). And for $9.99 for one-hour delivery, who is not getting paid very well here?
I think food already has its systems in place (think eat24.com). The only leftover gap is the retail items. That said, many retail items aren't that expensive, but utilizing GPS and logistics tech is the key here. You don't have to make one-off stops if you coordinate. Hell, can you imagine how much UPS or FedEx would like something like this? Their overhead would go down to almost nothing, and they could replace fleets of big air freight with many electric powered local trucks.
What is still left to be done? Google has extremely detailed mapping and the self driving car works well in real traffic. (One advantage a car has over planes is that if things go horribly wrong it can just stop.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car
There aren't any technical unknowns left. Obviously the algorithms will continue to be tweaked and improved. Importantly it can operate in the existing environment - there is no need for every car to switch to driverless at once.
Amazon already has "Amazon lockers" scattered across Manhattan where you can go pick up your packages from a kiosk inside a grocery store / drug store. You enter a pick-up code on the touchscreen, and a specified locker opens up with your goods inside it. It's easy to see how similar tech could be adapted for use inside a robovan.
Nope. But self driving vans can do things humans can't. For example they can wait in a neighbourhood until an order comes in so they don't need to drive back to base. Or care that the wait is 3 hours. Or that they are working at 3am. Heck they don't ever even need to return to base, instead just making small efficient local journeys (and using electricity instead of petrol).
Remember that anyone locally would also need to spend a similar order of magnitude in fuel (and likely more) if they went to get things themselves.
For example they can wait in a neighbourhood until an order comes in so they don't need to drive back to base.
I don't think people have fully thought through the impact of this yet.
A year ago I dared to suggest on HN that self-driving cars could potentially cause congestion (because it would be cheaper for an electric car to sit stationary traffic rather than paying for a park).
Back then I was downvoted to oblivion. I hope now people think it through a bit more.
You are being too negative. In high density areas there is far less likely to be downtime, and the vehicles can wait just outside that area in a sensible parking place, such as one with electrical chargers. It is the suburban areas where they are more likely to need parking, and more likely to have it.
I reckon self driving cars will also lead to significantly less car ownership. Taxis will become cheaper, more flexible and more plentiful (political shenanigans aside). The Zipcar model works too as the car can come to you.
And of course the cars can be coordinated to alleviate congestion. For example the system may work out that a particular car going at 29mph for a stretch instead of the limit of 30mph would avoid a glut of traffic 5 minutes ahead, or take a different route, or tell it to wait 5 minutes when it is empty.
