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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?"
This is for targeting...right?
Jon Bardin
Is that they'd get the turn signal thing fixed. Seems like 80% of the vehicles here in Seattle don't even have them.
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.
Last summer, I saw a guy talking on a cel phone while riding a bike. What call is so bloody important that you can't pull over or take it later?
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
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).
idiot next to me who's eating cereal and reading the paper while driving ... all those types of folks can do that safely if we get robot cars!
They are already in robot cars. You need to upgrade.
Free XBox, PS2
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.
What I'd like to see in the vehicles of tomorrow are better drivers.
Speak truth to power.
On the subject of "pedestrian recognition systems," I'm reminded of something my dad once said while trying to teach me to drive.
"When you feel a bump, stop."
At the time, he was referring to concrete parking separators, but I think it reflected a more general approach.
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.
It's the next logical step. Then you have a car which can drive itself...
P RT/
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/
http://www.cprt.org/
http://www.acprt.org/
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.