Vehicles of Tomorrow?

Human Factors Guy writes "We've seen here before car manufacturers putting more and more technology into cars, but what are the cars of tomorrow going to look like? Driver monitoring through head and eye tracking (which Volvo is already implementing), Adaptive Cruise Control systems, maybe even pedestrian recognition systems. With cars becoming more like semi-intelligent robots every year, what do /. readers think will and won't make it?"

Comments

Just one small request

[nharmon]

If I could make one small request to the car making industry, it would be: Please do not dumb down driving.

Driving is a learned exercise that requires experience to become good at. The introduction of things like traction control, and anti-lock braking systems have caused much of the driving public to ignore time-tested techniques for maintaining control over a vehicle.

Case in point: A cousin of mine was recently endowed with a driver's license. However, nobody thought it necessary to tell him how in certain vehicles under certain conditions, pumping the brake pedal is necessary to stop. They assumed anything he drove would have anti-lock brakes.

Things like smart cruise control are going to make us become complacent about things like safe following distances and paying attention to the conditions ahead of the vehicle you are following.

Until we're ready to turn over 100% control to the robots (which shouldn't happen for a very long time), please make vehicles safer by encouraging driver experience, not by doing things for him/her.

Re:Just one small request

[tie_guy_matt]

Maybe the problem isn't drivers who are dumbed down, maybe the problem is drivers that are too aggressive. I had a car with ABS for several years and the only time the ABS would ever turn on was in the snow and ice. When I drive cars without ABS I really almost never need to pump the brakes because I almost never have to slam the brakes hard enough to get them to lock.

The trick is to leave plenty of room between you and the car in front of you. It might also help if you don't drive that much faster than the posted speed limit. In this way if the car in front of you suddenly stops you have plenty of time to react and to stop the car. I realize that this may burn a few precious seconds from your life but in the end it may allow you to live longer.

I am just saying that in normal driving (even in rush hour traffic) if you have to slam the brakes hard enough to get them to lock more than a few time per year maybe the problem isn't with the car, or with other drivers, maybe the problem is with you!

Remove the driver.

[Moderation abuser]

It's the next logical step. Then you have a car which can drive itself...

But if cars can drive themselves it doesn't really make sense that everyone has one, after all, it isn't really a good use of resources to have a car or three sitting idle in office/mall garages for an individual when it can be off transporting your children to school and your wife to the shops or her own job. There's no longer a need for a 3 car family, you simply call the car and tell it when and where you want to be picked up. Why spend 80 grand on multiple cars when you can spend 30 grand on one car and the other 50 on something more enjoyable?

But wait, we can take this a step further, why limit it just to private transport, the same applies to public transport. Why own a car at all when you can simply call an autotaxi and it'll pick you up when and where you want and deliver you when and where you want. Instead of investing 80 grand in hardware which depreciates by 30% the second it rolls out of the showroom and then continues to cost you 2 grand a year in fuel, servicing and insurance. Simply call an autocab.

Course there's still the problem of traffic, just because most of the cars are driven automatically doesn't reduce the numbers on the road and there are still going to be normally driven cars on the road so you're still going to get stuck in traffic jams during rush hour. You could take the public autotaxis off the road and put them on separate raised "roads" which allows full computer control and which bypass the normal roads, thereby bypassing the traffic jams.

e.g.
http://www.skywebexpress.com/

and
http://www.atsltd.co.uk/

and
http://www.yorkprt.com/

and
http://www.austrans.com/

The concept is called Personal Rapid Transit and is basically a packet based mass transit system. It's perfectly possible to implement today.

More info:
http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/P RT/
http://www.cprt.org/
http://www.acprt.org/