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Self-Parking Car Available In Japan
sinjayde writes "Yahoo!/Reuters is reporting that Toyota has released a car for sale in Japan that is able to park itself: 'Toyota's new hybrid gasoline-electric Prius sedan uses electrically operated power steering and sensors that help guide the car when reversing into parking spaces.'" No need to rely on the reverse parking formula anymore?
what we now need are cars that merge onto highways for us. Just like how fighter planes take off without the need of pilot input. I dont think many drivers would go for a car that drives for them, but something that makes merging into fast/dangerous traffic would be greatly appreciated.
later,
epic
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
This is why I don't think we'll see cars driving themselves in the U.S. any time soon. They've built the vehicles so they can handle the freeway without a driver (some documentary I saw). However, even if the rate of accidents with self-driving/parking vehicles is lower than with real drivers (and I'd tend to believe it could be) even 1 accident would launch liability lawsuits galore.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
In that case, the state can adopt a no-fault policy, thus eliminating frivolous lawsuits and those "middlemen".
If people ever actually think stuff like this is a good idea, we need to raise the tax on gasoline. No wonder we're so dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
"Enough of these rubbish do-dads that frankly, no good driver would ever need."
Traction control and anti-lock brakes both can accomplish feats that the best driver on the planet Earth couldn't accomplish, given that they are modulating their input thousands of times per second, absolutely optimizing power/braking and acceleration. They aren't necessities, and you could approximate them, but don't fool yourself into thinking that you could do a better job. If you claim otherwise, then I'd suggest that you should have relay wires installed in your dash to let you handle the spark timing yourself as well.
Where technology has just finally offered a better choice is in transmissions: Until recently the "standard" was always the superior driving choice, as the automatic options were hydraulic circuitry turds often with 3 gears. Now there are continuously variable automatic transmissions that achieve the absolute perfect coupling between power plant and road surface all of the time. Alternately the computer controlled 5 or 6 speed automatics are quite extraordinary now as well.
These days, cars are so complex that to even think about servicing one, you need a Ph.D.
I hear people say this, and I wonder if they've ever even seen a modern engine.
Granted, I can't fix a broken engine computer. Luckily, engine computers are solid state devices that almost never break. Other than that, what can't you fix about a new car? You can still change water pumps, do brake pads and rotors, change clutches, replace power steering pumps, alternators, ball joints, etc, etc, etc, same things you would have done on a 60's car.
Of course, instead of rebuilding a carb, you swap out an injector, though I've never had one go bad. And instead of doing timing/replacing points/caps/etc., you do... nothing. Other than some past VW and GM design flaws, solid state electronic ignitions don't tend to go bad, being solid state.
A solution would be to just cull all the teenagers :)
Seriously, though, I think the driving tests need to be 10x harder. If half the people failed them, the roads would be a whole lot safer and more pleasent.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Speaking from complete ignorance, just trying to think through the economics of this--if the self-driving system actually lead to less accidents, then in general you'd expect there to be less money overall awarded in liability lawsuits. The difference would just be who would be responsible--some liability that was previously the driver's would become the car manufacturer's. So you'd expect the automaker to end up spending more on liability insurance (raising the cost of the car), but you'd expect the car driver's liability insurance to decrease correspondingly.
The driver's insurer could say "buy this (more expensive, because of the technology and the costs of the maker's insurance) self-driving car and we'll give you a discount."
So naively it's not obvious that the increased liability on the automakers' part would make the whole project impossible.
Maybe an automated highway is more complicated than something like a self-parking mechanism, because many more parties are involved (e.g., the people who built and designed the highway), but still, if they could prove that there would be a decrease in accidents, then it might be possible to distribute the costs of risks in a reasonable way.
I sincerely doubt, however, that it is possible for anyone at this point to *know* that the accident rates will be lower. Without more experience, an automated highway sounds like a risky venture--it might initially seem to be safer, but then a subtle bug might cause something catastrophic to happen after it's been in use for a while. Perhaps it was the difficult-to-forsee problems that they were worried about in the situation you describe. But if the threat of suits here is encouraging caution, that strikes me as a good thing--surely radical changes affecting something as critical as highway safety *should* be undertaken very cautiously.
--Bruce Fields
"what happens when we forget how to park cars ourselves?"
Is it really all that likely? It's simply a navigation task, not some particular combination of voodoo prayer and the position of the moon. Calculators didn't kill the study of math, elevators didn't kill the climbing of stairs, and even if you made those arguments it's arguable that society has grown to a higher level since both these devices came along. So tell me, why would a self parking car make people forget how to park cars? That's a ridiculous, cliche filled, statement.
"but people are getting too darn lazy these days."
People are smarter than they ever were. They do a lot more these days than they did in the olden days. Lazy?
"is parking really that hard?"
If it were, dontcha think that these things would have been around ages ago? Back in the 50's they had a car with a fifth wheel so you could pivot your car into a paralell spot. Didn't exactly take off. However, technology has gotten a lot better these days, it's gotten cheaper, and car companies are in a competition to get more marketshare. What you're seeing here is a result of competition, not some need to park cars. Besides, have you ever had a valet driver bump your bumper? Happens to my car daily.
"Derp de derp."
The only problem with a road system that relies on magnets would be the construction required to implement it. Down the street from my house, they've been widening an intersection since before Summer began.
I think I read somewhere that in 1995, there were nearly 4 million miles of road total in the U.S.A. If it takes a transit team that long to widen one busy suburban intersection, we'll all be driving floating cars by the time they're finished. At least, we hope.
This guy. This $#!%^ guy.
You claim the Prius rides more smoothly than a traditional car, but I suspect your experience with cars is merely limited to low-end econoboxes. Try hopping into a decent mid-range Benz one day for a smooth ride.
The hybrid concept was not previously embraced because (1) people didn't care about that kind of thing (it doesn't come cheaply or easily), (2) the cars look awful; it is only recently that the national sense of style has been so stunted that the design of the Prius is considerd somewhat acceptable, and (3) the technology wasn't really up to the challenge until recently (in any affordably mass-producible sense). I would also question whether it's actually being "embraced" yet -- I'd say it is still something of a curiosity at best, although it is definitely gaining ground.
We don't have cars that drive themselves because this is a very complicated problem to solve. It may not seem like a hard problem to you because you probably spend too much time watching TV (an admittedly gratuitous conclusion I'm drawing at least partially based on your command of the written word). There are plenty of people doing real work on the problem (here and here are some examples).
Furthermore, "they" would be facing a mighty huge bill to "implement" these sensors you're dreaming up, and your statement that government involvement would somehow magically simplify everything only further detracts from the value of your commentary. The project you can read about here estimates 7.5 miles of highway will cost $200 million to rebuild with a sensor-based system, with 80% of that cost being borne by "them"... who are, of course, actually us, better known by the name "taxpayers".
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