Slashdot Mirror
The Future of the Car
Gandul writes "Radar, lasers, wireless radio networks and other embedded tech will enable our cars to sense faraway traffic and stop accidents before they happen. But who will be in the driver's seat?"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
What will they be fueled with?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
1. people will still drive
2. cruise control will advance to auto-following
3. diesel hybrids will take over, achieving awesome, high double digit mileages
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Imagine having your own car that can drive you on its own, and you can sit in the back doing whatever you want, be it getting another hours rest on the way to work, watching a movie on the way home, fooling around, getting drunk, you name it.
The drinking aspect alone would make this a best seller. Can you say "Designated Driver comes standard with this model!"
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Or the Saudi's will be in the drivers seat.
My new BMW was built in South Carolina using American and German parts. My Toyota was built in Ohio using American and Japanese parts.
Isn't there some saying about it being better to not say anything and avoid looking stupid than to open your mouth and remove all doubt?
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I do agree with wireless communications being hard to implement because of hacking. Most games are hacked because they send false information to the servers. What happens if terrorists drive around sending information to other cars to swirve, which makes them crash. So I do agree on that.
Most cars are locked down. You can't access their operating systems and other information. At least you can't create anything for them. The computers are locked down. They need to remain locked down and only available to change by unavailable devices (I think this do this today?).
Sure, you fixed the cars, but tagging all the deer that pop put into traffic will be a bitch. You know crap like this would only fly in places where the only scenery is either pavement or desert.
. . . by humans at the wheel: acceptable risk. One death caused by a computer at the helm: lawsuit of Biblical proportions.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
This is the outrage/hazard formula. I forget whom developed it, but it basically states that if people become more outraged about something (than the hazard the thing presents) they will be willing to give up basic civil liberties.
Basically, if you fire enough people up about some 'thing', they will take action even if the the 'thing' doesn't pose a direct risk/hazard to them directly.
Kind of like the war in Iraq: scare enough people and they will do _anything_ to prevent it. In the USA for example, a country of 500 million people, the odds of being killed by a terrorist attack is infantesimal. Yet here we are, giving up our basic civil liberties in droves.
If you don't think our [US] society as become over-paranoid, try boarding a mass-transit vehicle while wearing a ski mask. You'll be stopped/searched/seized faster than you can say, "Land of the free".
They'll say they have 'probable cause'; you'll say 'it was cold out' or possibly 'I didn't want security cameras recording my every move'.
Welcome back to 1984!
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
The upper-middle-class (both those that have lots of money and those who have lots of education) will be buying hybrids and other smaller cars that get very good fuel economy.
As the price of gasoline continues to go up, people who are currently driving giant SUVs (here I'm talking about Mommy going a mile to the supermarket in a vehicle that is almost as big as a space shuttle) will sell them off to the lower middle class and working class people.
Then as they break and wear out, the working class people won't repair them. Instead they will strip out the non-functioning systems. Here's a scenario from 2008:
Some light on the dash goes on that says "Engine problem". You take it to the dealer who charges you $80 to plug in an OBD cable and find out what the problem is. They say that it's a bad Bi-Nitrogen Catalytic Emission sensor (don't tell me that this doesn't exist, I know it. This is a scenario). It has an 89 cent microcontroller and a $3 relay in a $2 little plastic box. It costs $369.87 and you have to replace all four if one goes out because there 'calibrated' to each other.
So is the working-class guy going to replace the dohickey? No way. He goes to his brother-in-law's cousin who knows this guy who can take care of these little SUV problems. Year after year the car works less and less. Finally it doesn't pass emissions testing and can't get a registration renewal. Joe Six-Pack just say's the hell with it and drives it anyway, maybe even with a fake license plate year sticker.
One day the cops stop him and run the VIN through the DMV computer. They confiscate the vehicle and tow it. It gets sold at a police auction to a wholesaler who sells it again to an illegal immigrant no questions asked, no papers. It's back out on the street.
This is the real future of the car. Millions and millions of loud, junky, polluting, giant stupid and ugly half-broken SUVs. All driven by guys with no money and serious attitude problems.
Thanks a lot, Detroit. It's nice to know that we can count on you for well-balanced long-term positive solutions to our tranportation needs! How's you stock ratings? Still as junky as the SUVs that you sell?
The future of the car is very bleak given that at the current rate of oil consumption we have enough reserves (optimistically) for 40 years. Even that is irrelevant because oil production will peak over the next few years when demand is soaring in Asia.
Forget about Hydrogen, it's only a means of energy storage not a source. There is no way we could biuld the infrastructure let alone produce enough hydrogen or hydrogen powered vehicles.
Forget about LNG, there's no way we can replace even 5 million barrels of oil equivalent given that natural gas will peak in the next 15 years and North America has peaked already.
Forget about biogas/biodiesel, most of it doesn't even have a positive net energy return.
I would hazard a guess that if we maxed out all the alternative liquid fuels that we could use for air/road transportation we might make up less than 5% of global oil demand. That's a guess, I would be interested in some real numbers.
Don't give me any of that "The markets will automatically react, adjust and allow alternatives to become economically viable" BS. The economic system that we live in depends on growing energy supplies to feed the system so that people can pay the interest on their loans. The energy supply is going to stop growing then start declining and the worlds economies will crash to various degrees: The larger they are, the harder they will fall.
Personally I think hardly anyone will be driving cars in 10 years time.
You must be talking about American cars, since you can still buy well made German cars and well made Asian cars.
You're quite wrong about new cars being worse than the old stuff. It was not so long ago that a car ran for 100,000 miles before it was at the end of its usable life. Well built modern cars are expected to go well over 200,000 miles before needing major repairs. Even Ford Exploders last longer than the old stuff. Not only that but modern cars use much less gas due to better engine design and electronic fuel injection and are many times safer. Perhaps you've heard of airbags and ABS?
Just because you don't know how to use simple modern diagnostic equipment doesn't mean it's useless or made the job any harder either. It's invaluable to be able to plug in and find out that the problem is the oxygen sensor in bank 2, or that there's an overheating condition in the transmission. I'd like to know when your carb lets you know that the power valve is stuck open and has been spewing gas all over for the last few weeks or that your 13.8 AFR isn't optimal for cruising.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
I don't think this will ever become practical because the calculations and sensors and reliable communications really required to do this properly are going to be out of reach for a long time.
Imagine a simple accident on a crowded highway - most cars slow down but one doesn't get the message, and comes upon the accident simply too fast to stop as dictated by the laws of physics and traction. Blam! An accident that did not have to happen if a driver could have seen the whole thing from further away.
Is a computer supposed to really anticipate if an object by the side of the road is a hazard or not? I guess you bikers are out of luck because you'll confuse the hell out of the AI.
I can also see humerous stories about things like flying debris from a truck going through the windshield of a car, which then arrives at the destination with a dead driver. Great I guess because no-one else got hurt, possibly bad if a real driver could have seen the debris and swerved and didn't have to die to start with.
Take responsibility away from drivers and they really will abdicate all attention away from the road, meaning the most intelligent part of the car is out of commission. How soon to we get AI's that equal human intellect?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Living in a society necessatates giving up liberties. It's as simple as that; if you want to live alone then I really don't care what you do.
However, a DUI is sharing the road with me and if I have to spend 5 minutes going through a ride check once in a blue moon (unless you're out driving when and where the drunks are most likely to pass) so be it.
What I would not stand for is the police pulling me over searching my car without just cause.
So, i'd say it's less of an equation based on outrage vs. civil liberties and more of one based on necessity and compromise. This equation can be estimated, however, by polling the US population of 300 million to see what they will vote for.
Apparently enough of them believed that their chances of being a target are significant enough to require forgoing certain liberties. If you believe freedom is walking around scared of the unknown, then controlling what you fear by allowing yourself to be controlled is your fate.
As for running around with a ski mask? I do it most winters, when i'm skiing.
Peak oil? Who cares? Let's build more SUVs that get 10 to 12 miles to the fucking gallon. While these folks are paying $5 per gallon and up, I'll take the money and run all the way to the bank. I'll be dead before the oil runs out anyway so it's not my problem.
I'd bet anyone $100 that this is ultimately what those fat cats at the big three are thinking deep down inside, and I'll bet another $100 that this is what Dubya and your republican controlled Congress is thinking, too. How else do you explain them passing that piece of shit they call an energy bill?
Son of a bitches told me the transmission was blown and it was going to cost me $800 to have it fixed.
I told them to stick up their ass.
They put the transmission in the trunk and I called a tow truck to bring it home for me. My dad came out to help me with it. The repair cost $24 in parts and took one day.
Sorry to point this out. But the parent poster hasn't given us enough information for us to deduce to whether this repair was truly a huge ripoff.
The repair only cost him $24 in parts, but he didn't specify what the problem actually was. Transmission repairs can be very labor intensive. He didn't say how long the repair took in hours either (and keep in mind this is two people working together). On a front wheel drive, transverse mounted engine, you might find transmission removal to be a simple bolt-off affair, but on an older, rear wheel drive car removing a transmission may mean hoisting an engine or removing major suspension parts.
So to give a more accurate comparision between these two jobs consider:
* The shop is charging probably $60/hour in labor for the repair. The poster had "free" labor (I'm sure beer was involved).
* The shop has various environmental/shop fees it charges. Not to mention state taxes.
* The shop repair undoubtedly has a warranty of some sort (many shops give 1-3 yrs/12-36,000 mi depending on what they're doing).
* The tranny was already off the car by the time the poster started working on it. (I'm sure the shop wanted some reimbursement for the time they spent pulling it).
* The poster had to have his car towed home to work on it - that wasn't free.
The US is turning into a democracy. The founders were very explicit that pure democracy is bad. It is just mob rule. If a majority of people decide that reading /. is wrong, then all of us will be taken away. The US was initially designed as a constitutional republic. Rule of law vs. mob rule. IMO a better choice, but not enough people truly want to be free.
My state government doesn't think speeding is important enough a crime to take my license despite many tickets. They know that speed limits aren't based in reality and are arbitrary laws designed for revenue collection. I have never been in an accident that wasn't an under 25-MPH mishap...due to douchebags who might drive the speedlimit but can't handle a four-way stop, or a yeild sign, or a roundabout, or use their turn signals....
We obviously have different views of what is safe driving.
Blar.
WTF are you talking about? Japanese machining is among the best in the world.
American cars have shoddy assembly, and Japanese and German cars have high-quality assembly. The interesting part is that it doesn't matter much on which continent the assembly took place. What matters is who owns and runs the company. Japanese companies know how to operate efficient, well-run factories, whether they're using Japanese or American laborers. American companies don't have a clue about how to operate factories decently, so they just try to cut costs by moving their factories to Mexico. It all comes down to the quality of management; Japan has it, America doesn't.