Shops that come to you

Cars transformed retailing, giving rise to suburban malls with lots of shops and plenty of parking. AVs, combined with the rise of e-commerce, could transform it again. “The Walmart of the future might be fleets of vehicles ready to drop off anything that you might get at a Walmart,” says Peter Norton of the University of Virginia. Or you might order an AV to take you home from work, and arrange to have your groceries, or a meal, waiting for you when you climb aboard. And why should shops, restaurants or other facilities be fixed in place? Coffee shops or food stands could restock at a central depot and then migrate to business neighbourhoods in the morning and entertainment districts in the evening, suggests Chenoe Hart, an architectural designer at the University of California at Berkeley. Mobile shops selling items such as shoes, clothes or cosmetics could visit particular neighbourhoods on a regular schedule, or when hailed by a customer. “It gives us flexibility to reassign space,” says Ms Hart.

无人驾驶汽车在改变着零售行业，和电商结合在一起，可能又会带来一次变革...

Carmakers are experimenting with delivery vehicles that draw up outside a customer’s home, announce their arrival by text message and allow items to be retrieved from a locked compartment by entering a code. Low-cost deliveries using AVs could stimulate local production of all kinds of things, most notably food. Already, food-delivery services like UberEats, Deliveroo, Seamless and GrubHub have given rise to “ghost restaurants” that produce food for delivery only, centralising food production in a few kitchens. Cheap autonomous deliveries could make this kind of model more widespread.

Another possibility, says Johann Jungwirth of Volkswagen, is that restaurants or retailers might cover the cost of travel to encourage customers to visit them. Fancy restaurants might lay on luxury AVs to ferry sozzled customers home, as part of the cost of a meal.Retailers could offer to pay for shoppers’ rides. Ride-hailing networks have a lot of customer data that could be used to target in-vehicle advertising. Hailan AV to go to one shop or restaurant, and you might see ads for a rival.Riders may be offered cheaper rides with ads or more expensive ones without them.

还有一个可能性，以后的餐厅和零售商家都要承担顾客的交通费，来鼓励顾客选择去他们店光顾...(这个就真的脑洞有点大，要看到技术能带来什么改变，提出自己的设想，这就是传说中的critical thinking，也是中国学生最该锻炼的部分）

Self-driving vehicles could also deliver other services, letting you work out with your personal trainer on the way to the office or summon a hairdresser to your home. Toyota’s e-Palette vehicles are boxes on wheels in different sizes that can be kitted out as mobile shops, offices or beauty salons. Moreover, AVs could give rise to new kinds of social activities, just as cars provided teenagers with new social opportunities.Ride-hailing networks might group together people with similar interests or friends in common when assigning rides. Or they might work with a dating app, pairing people up with a potential match when they take a ride. AVs might also function as mobile party venues, or double as sleeping pods on long trips, offering an alternative to hotels and low-cost airlines.

summon: to order someone to come to a place

这段继续各种可能性：无人驾驶汽车可以让你在上下班的时候约个剪头发的，私人健身教练，还有美容的，路上就把这些给完成了...

A watchful eye

What unintended consequences might there be? One much-heralded benefit of AVs is that they will offer freedom and independence to people who cannot drive cars: the very old, the very young and the disabled. Such vehicles are already ferrying around people in retirement communities, and one of Google’s videos shows a blind man doing errands in an autonomous car. But AVs could also encroach on freedom by invading people’s privacy. Robotaxi operators will chronicle their riders’ every move, so they will end up knowing a great deal about them. Some taxis already record riders for security reasons; robotaxis will surely surveil both their passengers and their surroundings to protect themselves. Police investigating a crime will ask AVs in the vicinity what they saw.

errand: a short journey that you take to do or get something

encroach: to gradually move or go into an area that is beyond the usual or desired limits

If people no longer drive cars, one consequence may be new forms of segregation, notes Ms Hart. Access to some places may be restricted to certain riders or robotaxi networks, just as some online services are “walled gardens” or cannot be accessed on all devices. She thinks there may be a need for a physical equivalent of “network neutrality” rules, to ensure that all locations are equally accessible to all AVs. In authoritarian societies, AVs could be a powerful tool of social control.

AVs could also trigger a shortage of organ donors (many of whom are young people killed in car accidents) and a drop in smoking (more than half of all tobacco sales in America are made at petrol stations, which will vanish, notes Mr Evans). And if cars are no longer symbols of independence and self-definition for the young, other things will have to take their place. Like cars before them, AVs will change the texture of everyday life.

segregation: the practice or policy of keeping people of different races, religions, etc., separate from each other

无人驾驶汽车会使捐赠器官短缺（很多年轻人死于车祸捐赠器官，无人驾驶汽车能避免很多车祸），会使抽烟率下降（美国一半的香烟销售在加油站，以后会消失）...

总结：无人驾驶汽车改变方方面面，以后可能不用考驾照了，没有驾驶证这一说了~

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Results

Lexile®Measure: 1200L - 1300L

Mean Sentence Length: 19.59

Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.16

Word Count: 725

这篇文章的蓝思值是在1200-1300L， 是经济学人里普通难度

使用kindle断断续续地读《经济学人》三年，发现从一开始磕磕碰碰到现在比较顺畅地读完，进步很大，推荐购买！点击这里可以去亚马逊官网购买~