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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
"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.
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."