ULTra Robo-Taxi

irksome writes: "Found a link on msnbc about a driver-less taxi pod. According to the article, the vehicle has begun road tests in the city of Cardiff, Wales. The pod, known as ULTra (Urban Light Transport) could make driver-free transport a reality and not just the stuff of futuristic fantasy."

Comments

NYC

[SilentChris]

10 bucks says NYC won't allow it unless it travels at a minimum speed of 45 mph.

Impressive

[mosch]

Wow, a maximum of 25MPH. This thing could change everything. It could be bigger than the Segway!

And instead of running on inconvenient roads, you just need to build a special 1.5 meter track to your destination. My, this IS cheaper and easier than driving!

Re:Impressive

[Ooblek]

Actually, I don't know if that is the bad part. A smartcard has to be programmed that tells it the destination. People can't program VCRs....

And the camera at every stop "to increase passenger safety." Well, I remember these western movies where people in this thing called a stagecoach that moved at about 25mph would get stopped by these bad guys on horses. Just find a place where the pod goes out of sight from the road, put your jacket over the rails (auto-stop if it detects something in the track!), and wait for the prey.

there must not be any vandals in whales...

[Narcocide]

that thing wouldn't last 10 minutes on the streets of LA.

Has to drive better than the locals

[linzeal]

Welsh drivers are some of the worst in the world especially when considering the prodigious amount of alchohol in they consume. I doubt that even their livestock could pass a dui.

Whooo

[delta407]

Wow, they plant to make thirty pods in two years for a price of $65 million. Great, and they're battery operated. Plus, they move at a whopping 25 miles per hour. I feel like this could easily become the sweeping revolution in mass transit.

"Passengers will 'hail' the pod from a designated stop, where they select the required destination along a set route." Sort of like a bus. Except buses don't cost $2 million to build, and they seat more than four passengers... additionally, they expect a trip to cost as much as a bus, except buses are cheaper, higher capacity, don't require a renovation of an infrastructure, already available, and in many cases faster than these pods.

Seriously, though, what if someone swipes the battery, smashes the windshield, or perhaps "disables" the potentially raised rail? Who would get sued? Or would they make you sign a disclaimer (the "you can't touch us if you get killed" variety)?

Basically, what I'm seeing is that we'd be better off *not* investing in these things: too expensive for too small of a gain.

Re:Whooo

[squiggleslash]

That's one way of looking at it.

The other is as an experiment. There are going to be limitations, and the first version is going to be expensive, but what's remarkable is how cheap it is for an early prototype system, not how expensive it is for a "replacement" for the car/bus/motorcycle/taxi/whatever.

As the kinks are worked out while a real system is loose on real roads, you should see a real decrease in cost, especially as others take up the same ideas. Remember, the cost is high for the system, but the system involves upgrading infrastructure and building a tiny number of vehicles. A city that's upgrading its infrastructure anyway, and a populace that's buying more and more of these things, should see costs plummet.

And 25MpH... That's about twice the average speed of a bus in most cities. Seriously - look it up. In Oxford, where I came from, they did a survey in the mid eighties and found that busses there were driving at an average 8-15MpH while in service!

Although...

[xfs]

For atmosphere, an indian with a turban will be placed in every pod. He/she will be payed to ask random things in a deep foreign accent, and yell at you when you ask him what he/she said.

Umm. This is a repeat.

[SWPadnos]

Hmmm. Looks suspiciously like this.

I guess it takes a while for MSN to get old news from the BBC.

gangway!

[pangloss]

from the faq:
"We also plan a detection system that will automatically stop the vehicle if there is an obstacle in the guideway."

Oh that's a nice feature to plan for ;)
I suppose the original plan was to add big nerf-style bumpers instead so that at 25mph the unobservant kiddies would just bounce off gently :P

heh, i just noticed this one:
"What about vandalism?
We hope that the system will be a source of pride to the community it serves so that vandalism incidents will be limited."

In _some_ communities, *vandalism* is a source of pride, so "vandalism incidents will be frequent, persistent and guaranteed" :P There's a reason why this is debuting in wales and not nyc, eh?

Technical Article

[jbennetto]

For a more technical description of the ULTra, try

Personal Public Transport

Lots of discussion of transportation systems, network layout, engineering, control, etc.

Electric Eye...

[rufusdufus]

I met a guy at CMU working on vision technology for Mercedes. Ostensibly, the technology would identify pedestrians and make a warning sound.

It sort of worked too, at least from video tapes from a car driving down the street. It could identify human shape and draw a little box around it.

The guy seemed a little distressed when I pointed out to him that his technology looked a LOT more useful as a robotic machine-gun targetting system.

Funny how people can fool themselves.

Am I the only one?

[SaturnTim]

Am I the only person who actually LIKES to drive? My commute is the best part of my day. Everyone talkes about the idea of cars that drive themselves as something great... Personally It is something I dread. Do you think this will make cars safer? Do you trust the software that much?

By god, I don't see the wonder in it.

--T

It's been a long time coming. . .

[Bagheera]

This looks like another take on the Ultra-Light Rail Vehicle concept that's been around for a long time now. Basically replacing the "light" rails and trollies we're used to from a lot of cities with really light vehicles running on even lighter rails. Removing something the size and mass of a locomotive and replacing it with something the size of a Honda Civic with even lower mass.

From a pure engineering standpoint, these things are a great idea and are a much better solution to the "public" transit (as opposed to "Mass" transit as we're saddled with now) problem. The rails are relatively inexpensive to fabricate. They're much less intrusive. They can be switched easily to give better coverage. And the vehicles are light, quiet, and cheap.

The vandalism problem is probably the hardest to solve. And the obvious problem of pulling "unusable" vehicles out of service. Still, it's nice to see a city willing to try a project like this.

Repeat!

[CaptainCarrot]

Sheesh, don't the editors read /. themselves? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/17/131721 8&mode=thread