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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?"
I'm still waiting for foam to fill the car when you have an accident... Sandra is hot.
Automated freeway cruising.
Honestly, the technology exists right now to automatically drive my car along a freeway. I could probably set this up today with a few thousand dollars in hardware and a lot of code. Self-driving car projects are incredibly expensive and not yet fully reliable because they try to use them in the city. This is an extremely difficult environment to deal with.
But a freeway is perfect. All you need are cameras to watch the lines on the road, radar (or more cameras) to watch for other vehicles and objects in the road, servos to actuate the car's controls and a computer to run it all. I've actually thought about designing such a system for my RV, since long trips in that thing are very taxing. I'd still have to sit in the driver's seat and keep an eye on things, but that's infinitely less stressful than the driving itself.
But this will never be a mainstream product in our society. Too many lawyers and other disinterested parties (such as insurance companies). We'll have flying cars before you can go down and buy a self-freeway-driving module.
I want the prices to go down. I want everything that is in a Cadillac now to be in a KIA price in the future. Maybe some new stuff in Cadillacs, but the stuff that is in the present I want a lot cheaper in the future. I think it will work that way.
once we're past the gimmicks we should see some improvements, but come on, that auto park option that Toyota presented last year feels like the latest update to curb feelers! I see cameras on the back bumper (already in some fancy cars) and cameras instead of rearview mirrors to be the most important; anything that doesn't force you to look away from the road will help.
CB$#%^&*!
free ipod and free gmail!
i dont know about the future, but what I would like to see is vehicle controls (like cruise control and computer dvd games crap) regress.
;)
My mother just bought a new dodge durango, and it has way more features than she'll ever need. advanced engine control systems and emissions control systems are great, but i have too much crap in my car, and it's a 92 civic.
all of that stuff is just leading to driver distraction, and adding more stuff like cellphone speaker things just makes it worse. sure you dont need your hands when using a "handsfree" device, but you still need to look at the phone to see who's calling, answer the phone, and set up the device (volume, etc.). if it was available, i would choose a vehicle with a simplified, functional interface so i can concentrate on driving. one interface that would be very functional without being unnecessarily distracting would be voice control with either a HUD or voice feedback (with a customizable voiceprint, of course
It will have pedals.
Seriously, decades ago pedal cars, not toys, were sold widely in Spain. They could easily average 25 mph and if you didn't have to go long distances (over 10 miles) were reasonable. Problem with many people is they're lazy and they want to take all their crap all over the place with them. There was even a design in the early 60's or late 50's of the car of tomorrow in Popular Science, which carried a spare car for zipping around in away from the collosal family mover (which actually puts the Hummer to shame.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Need a ride? Walk to the closest community car and touch the handle. The door opens, seats/mirrors/radio/temperature adjusts to your preferences and away you go.
At your destination, you get out of the car. Your account is debited the appropriate fare and you... just... walk... away (and into the next car you need).
I can tell you one they won't do: they won't ever do anything to keep you from getting a speeding ticket. I.e., wtf does my car go faster than any legal speed limit in any state of the union? Do they imagine a time when I need to go that fast? If so, where are the laws that would allow for speeding? Why do cops never hide waiting for speeders going uphill?
/rant
Insurance companies, cities, states, local governments are running a racket with speeding tickets, and I can promise you this will never change no matter what technological advances there are. They're always going to allow drivers to break it and they're always going to profit from it....
Ok, ok, yes, I recently got a speeding ticket....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Proper starting. Automobile engines are started all wrong. Cranking, compression, fuel, and spark all start at the same time. Oil pressure comes later. As a result, half of engine wear occurs during start. Many big engines (locomotives, marine diesels, some big tractors) are started properly - oil pressure first, then a few turns with compression released to oil up the cylinders, and finally combustion starts. Wear is much reduced.
Once 42-volt electrical systems become popular, and valve control goes electrical, we may see electric booster oil pumps and valve actuators. Once you can crank the engine with compression off and oil pressure up, you need a much smaller starting motor. The starting motor and alternator can then be combined.
A lot of progress has been made on this over the past couple of decades, and we have a couple more decades of progress to go before it's safe enough to use in the real world, but as soon as an autopilot is invented that drives better than the average human (especially under emergency conditions), there will be a large insurance break for using it. Shortly after this it will become the norm.
My money's on methanol or methane, as both can be stored as liquids (methanol more easily), and methanol can be burned in a conventional engine with a bit of tweaking (making the switch from internal combustion to electric engines much more graceful). You even have interesting hybrid options available, like an electric car with a gas turbine burning methane (or propane, which you can fill up with at gas stations now, making the switchover to _methane_ easier). Methane and methanol can both be synthesized directly from water, CO2, and electricity, meaning that they're suitable fuels for an electric vehicle infrastructure after fossil fuel supplies of them run out (and after we need more than we can get by reclaiming biological waste). We have lots of experience with moving hydrocarbon gases and volatile liquids around, so the transport infrastructure's already here. Methane and methanol have nowhere *near* the storage and handling problems hydrogen has.
It'll be interesting to see when the first point happens (I think it's pretty inevitable that it's going to). A methanol (or a methane) fuel system might or might not happen. If compact energy storage and vehicle efficiency get good enough, a direct electric scheme might work. However, most non-chemical methods of electric storage don't have high enough theoretical densities (even with nanotube-reinforced flywheels and induction rings), and a purely electric vehicle infrastructure is a lot harder to phase in gracefully. Alternatively, we might just keep improving our ability to harvest lower-grade and less-accessible hydrocarbon deposits, and push the fossil fuel problem far enough off that by the time the crunch hits, technology will be different enough to drastically alter the space of possible solutions.
Definitely interesting times ahead.
Unfortunately, emission standards are only going to get more strict in the coming years so unless the clean air technologies in diesels can keep up, we may not see many options on the market.
Here's an idea I had a couple years ago:
Put a liquid crystal display coating over the windshield that can selectively darken specific parts of it. Have a sensor outside the car facing forward that notes any super bright light sources like the sun or headlights at night. It also tracks where the face of the driver is and, if it determines a glare situation is occurring, does the geometry to find out exactly what part of the windshield is between their head and the light source and applies a tint at that one place. The person could still see that the light source was present, but it wouldn't blind them.
Try driving west in the evening as the sun is setting, and something like this starts to look pretty good.
-Better Fuel Economy
-Better sound systems
-Headlights that are bright but dont blind oncoming traffic
-Can run past 100,000 miles without major repairs
-Less rusting, even on newer cars
-And finally, the ability to work on them without the need for 3 different diagnostic machines that cost 10 grand each!
How well do the lane sensors work when you throw some snow on the road?
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
I wish I could set my volume control to a certain level and then it would adjust if for example I rolled my window down, or had the AC fan on high.
The Honda Goldwing (motorcycle) has it and I always wondered why cars never did.
Unless it has zero pollution and runs without petrol I don't see anything innovative.
Zero pollution and no petrol is not very realistic.
What I would like to see is a car that can "scale". By this, I mean that a car for 99.9% of its use is to transport one person and little to no extra payload. It would be cool to have a car that was about the size of an Insight, but it could expand with an extra motor and space to the size of an SUV. Yeah, I said SUV on slashdot in a positive context, so mod me down now.
It would be cool if this car had expandable, temporary compartments for payloads like groceries, and maybe even come with something like one of those roof luggage carriers.
It kills me that so many people buy a big car to drive back and forth to work so that they can have the big car the couple of times a year that they need it. I fall into this category, but my car is 13 years old, has over 180,000 miles on it, and it was free, and it works.
I JUST CANT WAIT untill insurance companies offer reduced fees to drivers who are willing to allow various sensors and tracking devices to be attached to a black box (that ofcourse the insurance company will be monitoring) ... I can see it now... " Sir we noticed you took your eyes off the street for more than 5 seconds on 27 ocasions last month so we are going to have to raise your premium by XX dollars."... "in addition to that the GPS locator has indicated you have been spending alot of time in hi risk areas, you will have to stop driving that route or I am afraid we will have to drop your coverage."
Although there really isn't much in place right now for it, a HUD for low-visibility conditions would save quite a few lives.
This plan would be quite effective when driving in heavy snow, fog, or rain. I thought about this while driving through a blizzard and seeing traffic going down a 3-land highway with a 70 mph speed limit doing 25 running single-file in order to avoid driving off the side of the road. A HUD that could display the road's lines would make the risk of driving off the side of the road much less frequent in poor weather. Something like this combined with a warning buzzer or beeper would also wake drivers up if they fell asleep behind the wheel, much like a ridged surface on the side of the road does. Furthermore, it could act as a reminder to signal. If the driver crosses a line without a turn signal on, they would hear a noise, thereby reminding them that they forgot to signal a turn.
The biggest drawbacks to this idea are a lack of infrastructure (spotting lines beneath snow) and cost. We can solve the first problem with durable sensors embedded in the pavement. However, this would increase the magnitude of the second problem, cost.
I know it's just an extra gadget on an already bloated vehicle, and wouldn't revolutionize the vehicle as we know it. However, it could save as many lives as airbags if properly implemented.
This is a little beyond a single industry, but I could see the cost being distributed among the automotive industry ("safety feature" would sell more cars), insurance (discounted rates where the insurance company keeps a cut of the savings), and consumers (safety FOR THE KIDS). Also, decreased traffic from some kinds of accidents would improve care in hospitals (less wait time to see a doctor).
This may be unnecessarily wishful thinking, but something to consider nonetheless.
It's probably worth mentioning again, as we discuss smarter cars, that insurance companies are declaring a car "totaled" more quickly these days, even with relatively minor structural damage, because the cost of replacing all of these electronic gizmos after an accident is adding signficantly to the typical repair cost. Reference, for example: http://csmonitor.com/2004/0419/p13s02-wmgn.html
So as we contemplate even smarter cars with even more electronics installed, even relatively minor accidents might result in a car being declared "totaled" and thereby increase insurance costs overall. Ironically, it may not be the purchase cost of the electronics that eventually constrains the smart-car market (particularly since smart electronics seem to get cheaper all the time), but rather the insurance considerations instead!
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
Bah, have you never heard of the Ford Nucleon?
There's only one thing I hate about Halloween, which is...
This kind of echoes one of the previous posts about powering with anything but the internal combustion engine: Some years back, there was a company called Rosen Motors that developed a powertrain that was all-electric, with the juice coming from a jet turbine under the hood. To start the thing, there was a flywheel that stored a significant enough electrical charge to start the turbine in the morning. The flywheel would spin, unattended for a couple days before needing to be spun back up again. The idea was cool but never took off. I have a feeling that it was because when you reduce a powertrain to four moving parts, you pretty much put mechanics and dealer service shops out of business. Nevermind that the system got something like 120 MPG.
I happened to overhear a guy trying to use his OnStar system when his nice custom diesel truck wouldn't start. It sucked. The voice recognition system they've got is a real stinker. This could be improved a lot.
I saw something on television (like SciAmFrontiers or something like that) about a capsule car idea. The gist of it was that you had a little cube-ish looking car with a steering wheel and a seat and kind of a lounge area in back. You'd drive to a local "station" where your capsule would be taken over by wireless command to fit into a pod of similar capsules and then the whole pod would leave at the same time, keeping about 2-3 feet between capsules, kind of like a convoy. The pod would end up at the destination station where you'd take over driving from there. The idea was to free the driver from the long, middle, highway portion of a lengthy commute and allow the person to do other stuff for that time. It's a little like the cars in Minority Report.
Have cars like the ones in Minority Report!
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
The idea is to get rid of the personal repulsion properties of the drivers.
What about implementing separation techniques (much like IFR flying) that would permit vehicles, first in specialty lanes and then later on the road at alrge, to operate safely at predetermined distances.
Together with reversible-direction lanes, we could save many of the billions of hours (how many human lifetimes is that) wasted sitting in traffic each year.
Owner privacy and fuel economy seem to become two of the most important factors for buyers of new cars. As long as car intelligence helps to protect owner privacy it will be a welcome technology, if it does not it will be doomed to fail.
The famous quote about the Stone Age not ending due to a lack of stones, but because of the advent of a superior technology is from the former Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Sheikh Yamani. And the article you're probably thinking of is from The Economist; it's called The End of the Oil Age and there's a PDF here.
Seriously
Autopilot for Airplanes is relatively easy.
And if airplanes didn't require pilots, they would be more economical than cars, which need to stop and start to avoid hitting each other, which need very expensive roads, which tend to hit pedestrians at a frightful pace, and tend to run into each other - largely because roads are sort of an everlasting game of chicken.
Per mile travelled, airplanes are much safer.
Autopilot would prevent them running into skyscrapers, and actually reduce the threat - who wants to hijack a commuter plane with 30 gallons of fuel and 12 people?
So we convert to electric golfcarts to drive us to and from the community airdrome.
And save gas by sharing a better ride on a point to point nonstop mass transit.
AIK
As for all this fancy stuff that will improve safety, well I doubt it will really have a huge benefit. People tend to drive to a certain risk level. If it feels dangerous, then they drive slower and more carefully; if it feels safe they drive faster and more carelessly. If you pack the car with "feel safe" stuff then all you nend up with is people driving faster in more extreme conditions.
Safe driving, at the end of the day, comes down to the nut that holds the wheel. Expecting electronics etc to significantly improve safety is asking a bit much.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Whatever happened to the ideas of Rosen motors?
Their design was to have a car that has a TURBINE engine (only one moving part really), to generate electricity and then use that to drive electric motors on the wheels.
It is a much more efficent use of gasoline, and could double the life of our oil supply.
A turbine engine and electric motors are MUCH more reliable and efficent than the internal combustion engine.
If you ask me that would be a great first step toward tomorrow where the internal combustion engine is a thing of the past, and eliminates the need for all this battery stuff etc.. but gets us all in the process of using electric motors and can start that whole progress of technological improvements that will surely happen with mass adopton.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
That isn't that bad...
This summer i travelled on a stretch of road in NJ that crosses the state exactly at the mid point, from Trenton to Belmar. Route 195.
Without fail, on every trip I made I saw at least one person reading while driving. Either reports, newspapers, or even books. It is a very straight, uninteresting stretch of highway, but reading. Not just glancing down for a second to check something, but full on, enveloped reading.
Right idea, wrong number.
The most efficient internal combustion engine in the world that I know of is >50% efficient.
The most efficient gasoline IC engine I know of is that in the Prius, which tops out at around 36%, and on average exceeds 30%
1938 Velocar Type H
1953 Velo-Velocar (I'm not sure this is the right picture as it mentions 4 wheels in the description)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I would wager trains are more fuel efficient per person/kg, far easier to automate an autopilot for (speed up, slow down), and don't have the tendency to fall 30,000+ feet when the autopilot for whatever reason, decides to commit suicide. Plus with more dedication on infrastructure, they can go pretty quick too.
Removable lights, windows, locks, stereos, mirrors, wheels, engines etc. Cross compatibility.
I.E. Upgrade engine? Upgrade Headlights? Buy new body? Etc.
Also why don't they just make the speed lane on highways 130 kmph (faster as cars become faster) and force drivers to stay at that EXACT speed. then there will be no bunching etc. If your car cannot do that deal with regular traffic.
I'd also like to see a slowdown in car safety regulation upgrades, it's the number one reason consumers cannot stick with older model cars and designing new ones is the reason for the cost increases, the safety benefits are minimal in each new model upgrade, I'd like to see car weight maximized at approx. 750pd. Then they will be a smaller threat to pedestrians and each other.
Privately owned vehicles will still be in demand for a couple of reasons.
1) Status symbol. The guy who drives the Ferrari is perceived as more important than the guy who takes the bus.
2) No guarantees that the autocab you call hasn't been filled with assorted noxious substances by the last occupant.
3) What chance is there than an autocab will turn up in the same amount of time it takes you to walk out to the garage? What if you're in a hurry? What if you're rushing someone to hospital? What if it's the day of the big game and all the autocabs are busy shuttling fans around?
And the most important point -
4) You have to carry your fluffy dice and oversized plastic spoiler from one autocab to the next.
The number one problem with driving is the other drivers. therefore the only solution would be to get rid of drivers. why put so much effort into monitoring the driver, when a driverless world could be realized with current technology.
for example you would need gps units in each car with detailed maps of all the roads and addresses. the cars would also need appropriate sensors like those used in addaptive cruise control. for extra precision throw in some in-road or next-to-road things that the car could sense. next, use some form of wireless connection to network all the cars together. finaly, mix in some government to regulate it all with some infastructure and software that monitors and control the network.
cars like this could go 100 mph, or as fast as the road allows. they could be sent to park themselves, maybe a mile away, after droping you off. driving drunk won't be a problem, and insurance costs should be lower. when there is an accident, all the cars would automatically know and reroute themselves. as more and more cars became like this highways could be made thiner, 2 or 4 lanes down from 6 or 8.
of course there are downsides. taxi drivers would lose their jobs, as would truck drivers, parking vallets, meter maids, etc.
This isn't actually all that new. About 30 years ago,I had a sidevalve motor Morris Minor, built in about 1952 (it was one of the very early models, anyway), and if I'd wanted to adjust the tappets, I would've had to remove the inlet and exhaust manifolds first. As you can imagine, I put up with the clatter. Shit, you just about had to lift the motor to change the oil. I drove it into the ground, but I wish I'd kept it - they're worth a fortune these days ...
What a long, strange trip it's been.
1) Except he has 100 grand invested in a metal box and I have it invested in my clothes/bank account/bigger house/yacht.
2) You press the reject/service button, it goes off to get cleaned and you get another.
3) PRT will have cabs waiting for you at the stations (there's a novel thought, public transport waiting for you, not the other way round). When really busy during rush hour, 90% of journeys will have a cab waiting, in 98% of cases a called cab will arrive within 1 min and 99.9% a cab will arrive within 3 mins.
When fully computer controlled there's no reason an automated taxi couldn't have similar statistics, you idle them in a grid pattern, there's no driver to pay.
If it's the day of the big game I know from personal experience that all the roads are choked anyway. With something like the skyweb PRT OTOH, the system can handle 36 thousand vehicles per hour, if everyone is going to a stadium, friends would share cabs giving a capacity on the order of 80 thousand to 120 thousand people per hour. No more waiting 3 hours to exit the car park.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Why does the windshield defrost limit the heater? I can't count the number of days I have froze in my car because it's more important to keep the windshield clear than to heat my driver bones. Or the days in a warm rain where I needed to keep the windshield cool, and not the air conditioning on me.
I am not a gearhead. I want a built in diagonistic sensor that checks my car, and lets me know if it's time for an oil change, or to rotate my tires, or even if that strange sound coming from under the hood means I need a belt tightened. I want a car that doesn't require me as a driver to ever pop the hood except in rare conditions.
And On-Star is a good feature for high end cars, but how about a satellite tracking system that checks out the mall/university/other large parking lot, and tells me where an open parking space is?
I want more creature comforts for less money.
Why bother with programming a network of CPUs when nature has given us an animal ready, willing and able to do all the clever stuff we're only now beginning to build into cars?
A hundred years ago, a doctar called out in the night could catch-up on his sleep in the drive home, letting the horse do all the navigation and traffic management.
Then, too, show me the car that can make another car...
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling