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Will Our Cars Become Our Chauffeurs?
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to this long article from EE Times about the 'Self-Navigating Vehicle,' the answer is a resounding yes. Many car experts think that autonomous vehicles which avoid collisions and communicate wirelessly with other cars will be the norm in two to three decades. In the meantime, the enabling technologies for self-navigating cars are emerging, from sensors embedded in the brake or accelerator pedals to more powerful computers. Already, partial solutions exist for adaptive cruise control or for staying in a highway lane. One day, we'll be able to do something else than driving our cars through traffic jams, saving us about two hours per working day. This is the future that engineers are building, but will you accept to be driven by your car? So many people like driving that the concept of a completely autonomous car might be delayed for psychological reasons, not technical ones. This summary contains selected details of the original article."
I can't wait for the time when people don't over-break during a slowdown. It's the #1 cause of a traffic jam.
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
If it's so usable, start a company and build it.
Oh wait, you'll do like most other mass transit projects and LOSE YOUR DAMN SHIRT.
There are criteria that must be satisfied before mass transit is practical and cost effective. There are places in America it works, and places it doesn't.
I'm in Portland and I ride the bus to work every day. In Dallas, it simply wouldn't have been practical.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The parent is not quite as insightful as people apparently think.
;)
Consider the fact that the distances one typically covers in the States are quite a bit greater than almost anywhere in Europe or the UK. Most areas are not that densely populated, and thus do not have many -- or frequently serviced -- transportation options. As a result of this, public transport is not nearly as well-developed or as efficient as the equivalents in other countries. It's not terribly convenient to use public transport to go anywhere unless you can stay within city limits all the time. That happens to be much less feasible in the states than in Europe.
Here're a couple of examples to illustrate my points.
1. I have to commute about 12 miles (~19km) to work every day. Time by bus+subway+bus: 1 hour
Time by car: 20-40 minutes, depending on traffic.
Multiply by 2 (commute back home) -- the difference is between 40 and 80 minutes per day, an hour on average.
2. I have to drive about 220 miles (~350km) to see my parents who live in another city every month.
Time by public transportation:
bus + subway+intercity bus+subway = 10 min + 20 min + 4 hrs + 1 hr = 5.5 hours.
By car, the trip takes 4 hours door-to-door.
Again, multiply by 2 for the way back, and we have about a 3 hour difference. Seeing as I typically go late Friday night or early Sat. morning, and come back on Sunday, 3 additional hours of time that I can spend with my family makes quite a difference. So does not having to be aggravated by crappy buses
I hope this somewhat illustrates my point. And just to make things clear, I'm not talking about some tiny towns in the middle of nowhere--the above trips concern Boston and New York.
What I'd like to see is a guage that determines what the recommended speed limit is in advanced based on traffic conditions and other factors. People love tailgating and are too stupid to realize if you drive a car length away you can avoid stop and go traffic. I swear people in California have the easiest DMV test in the whole US. The major problem during traffic jams is when a few people stop it stops the people behind them slightly. There's a few studies on this, and basically when we have too many people going to fast and too close you get stop n' go traffic. In all honesty I wouldn't mind going 45mph down a freeway if it meant I wouldn't wear and tear on my brakes as much.
Lots of those people have hepatitis and shit like that
You'll be allright as long as you don't have sex with them on the bus, or exchange blood samples.
No seriously, you are paranoid. Anytime you get out of your house you're going to be exposed to all kinds of people and germs. Unless you're an hermit or live in a bubble, it can't be avoided. I don't know Santa Cruz (or even where it is) but there are billions of people in the world that take public transportation daily (granted, few of those in the US) and somehow, they survive the experience...
One of the key aspects of the automobile, in contrast to other forms of transportation, is that it is more deadly to anyone getting in the way or disobeying the unwritten rules of the road. It's like the Mafia - they don't have to kill everybody, just enough to send a message.
Now, if suddenly we have cars which don't run red lights, and which stop every time for pedestrians or dogs, cats, etc. which appear in front of the vehicle, chaos will ensue.
Imagine walking down a crowded sidewalk. You're constantly being blocked, jostled, and otherwise impeded by people who show little concern for your presence, because you're not a threat.
If the motor-death equation is suddenly removed, the same situation will occur on our sacred highways - walking, bicycling, and other un-American forms of transportation will take over the streets!
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Trains are cool. People love to love them but they are:
because of their massive weight, per passenger they use more fuel than an SUV
They cost more per passenger than an expensive car while providing worse service. Riders don't see that high cost because most train systems are heavily subsidized by tax money so the general population ends up paying for transportation for the train riding people as well as their own.
When's the last time you got out of a train at your doorstep?
"I'm sorry sir but the hoses from the fire train won't reach your house. It'll just have to burn. Hopefully the EMTs from the ambulance train will be able to walk here in time to save your wife though."
We need to stop blindly looking to those cool train things (aka mass transit) to solve our transportation problems. They can't do it.
The right solution to most traffic problems is to simply build more highways (not expand existing ones, build new ones between the old ones.) It's politically difficult because it requires government to pry people from their homes but it's a realistic way to create an efficient economical transportation system. States should build the roads, then increase gas taxes to pay off the construction costs. Your children will thank you.
Or, we can stick our heads back in the sand an pretend the issue will go away. Trains will make the traffic jams go away. People in the future will probably drive less. Flying cars will solve everything! There, don't we all feel better now, nice and comfy warm in the sand.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
In my youthful-indiscretion period I had a tendency to put as little money as possible into my car, meaning that sometimes my tires were as bald as Dick Cheney.
Would cars know how well they're being taken care of, and what their actual stopping distance is? Would they know to increase the distance from the car in front of them if the roads were wet or icy? If cars did adjust their distance to correspond to their individual stopping distance, would this allow other cars to be set in "agressive mode" (or manual mode) and cut in front of cars with larger stopping distances, forcing them to slow down more? (One of my pet peeves, now that I do tend to leave one car/10 mph distance to the car in front of me.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
anyone who has used the AirTrain will tell you that the system is a huge step backwards from the human-driven buses which used the local roads. The AirTrain has no drivers to ask questions of, is poorly documented, and occasionally stops in between stations with no information to any of the passengers about what's going on.
also, when it reaches a station, it leaves the doors open for either much longer than it needs to (when no one is waiting on the platform to come in, or on the train to go out), or it closes them too quickly (yes, closing doors on people's luggage or their arms!). Human conductors of the subway are much more efficient with these sort of things.
it was even delayed for several months when it killed a person during a test run!
Now stop and consider the constraints on the system that the AirTrain deals with: no other traffic at all, no pedestrians/animals on the tracks, no intersections to speak of, and an extremely simple, well-maintained route. And it still sucks. An autonomous car would need to deal with a much more unconstrained system (potholes, construction, children, broken traffic lights, aggressive drivers...). We should all be hoping that these sort of vehicles aren't unleashed on our public streets soon.
Taking a Sunday afternoon drive on an open country road to the local apple orchard in the fall is fun.
Speeding along a winding ocean lane at sunset in a convertible with the top down in the summer is fun.
Taking a midnight drive to Makeout Point is fun, as long as you have a companion.
Making the 45-minute morning commute on the 8-lane, due-east freeway into the city for the 500th time is NOT fun, but I don't really have much of an option if I want to keep doing the job I like that pays my bills. What fun is a "journey" that I've already made 499 times before that involves little more than putting on the cruise control, keeping the steering wheel straight, and hoping I don't get stuck in a traffic jam?
See a difference? That is what an auto-driving car would fix -- I'd be free to use that time to catch up on the news, read a book, browse slashdot wirelessly, do some work, take a nap, shave, actually LOOK at the scenery around me instead of staring 30 feet in front of me, whatever.
I'd ENJOY the journey, instead of dread it!
The goal is to have cars that can drive themselves when you want them to, and turn over the controls when you want them to. I can't imagine car makers would plan for a future where personal transportation vehicles with manual controls will disappear. Despite being 2 miles from a major highway right now, I can drive for 5 minutes and be on any number of dirt roads, which may well never be paved. No one's taking away your steering wheel.
If you read the article to which you linked, you would see that the test run had concrete weights simulating a 60% passenger load.
The death was caused when these weights broke loose in the passenger compartment and crushed the hapless man.
Hopefully, it would not continue to carry these weights when there are people in there on production runs, and (presumably) individual people would be easier to move off you if they were to "break free" during the day.
Dude, read your own article.