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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?"
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But who will be in the driver's seat?
Whoever's driving the car, duh.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
Where is my flying car? It is the 21st century and we were promised flying cars. Where are they?
What do you know I wrote a novel
What will they be fueled with?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The vast majority of accidents are caused because human beings are either incapable or unwilling to drive a vehicle safely. Because of this, we have lost many civil liberties. Due to safety concerns, the police can pull you over and search your vehicle at almost any time without real justification.
I'd rather have robots drive.
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!
my genetically engineered chauffeur-lemur
duh
I really do think they need to start focusing on a rail type system that does all the driving for us. If we finally would convert roads to a electromagnetic railway system (like the bullet train) and just program cars to drive and stop when they need, then we would have a much much better system than we have now. This completly gets rid of Car insurance, gas, 95% of death related accidents(I would have the 5% is left for cars that malfunction), drunk drivers, pollution, and many other negative aspects.
I definitely think it would takes a lot of time to complete and would cost a ton of money. But we as citizens and as a country would save a whole lot more money having this implemented as a final solution to all of the stable and rising issues that circles around transportation.
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!"
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The vast majority of accidents are caused because human beings are either incapable or unwilling to drive a vehicle safely
This is plain truth. Most accidents are caused either because the drivers chose to drive wrecklessly and/or under the influence, or were caused simply because human reaction time is not as good as computers' reaction time.
Because of this, we have lost many civil liberties.
This is also true, and quite an insight. Think about random road blocks where you're tested for being under the influence even if you're NOT driving wrecklessly or even swerving. The equation is simple: am I willing to give up a little bit of my privacy to prevent myself from being killed? Generally, yes! Of course! But, if drunk driving didn't cause accidents because people weren't driving, there would be no need to pull this person over.
Mods, please please please stop modding based on your own beliefs, and rather based on the intelligence of people's responses -- I'm going to get modded down for that, eh?
Me. I'll have no parts of these new cars.
They suck. Assembled in Mexico from Chinese parts.
Garbage. OVERPRICED garbage..
My car is 30 years old and it still runs fine and looks fine. How is that? It was made in Germany where they appreciate and exercise quality control.
I have several trucks that are 20 years old or older.
Guess what? I can fix them all myself. There is nothing in any of them that I can't troubleshoot or repair.
I wouldn't have one of these new cars that you can't work on without $100,000 car-o-scope and a PHD..
Screw that. I've never taken a car to be repaired by someone else except one time when I was traveling and had no tools.
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. That was the LAST time I ever took anything to someone else for repair. And that means anything.
I get the service manuals, schematics, tools and test equipment for every thing I own, what tools or skills I don't have, my dad can cover as he's good with cars.
Bottom line, I'll never purchase a new car, ever, for any reason. The older the vehicle, the better I like it.
It has generally been the trend that the more complex a system becomes, similarities it will have to the foundations of the modern operating system. ATMs are a prime example of machines that started as moderately sophisticated PCBs and now routinely run Windows Embedded.
If a vehicle is "smart" enough to handle driving, it will have the computational power and flexibility to run reasonably sophisticated software. Consider that increasing wireless bandwidth (WiMax, anyone?) will lead to offloading the heavy-duty positional and map processing to a remote service over the Internet, with the software to display becoming a thin client for a remote database. A clever programmer will find a stack overflow in MapQuestClientForYourCar and BAM! Suddenly cars are automatically veering for each other instead of away.
The level of scrutiny and security applied to such systems will have to be on par, or higher than, such applications as air traffic controlling before it can be considered safe.
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Of course non-destination based travel idiosyncracies(sp?) arise because it is taken for granted that someone has to drive the car. Hence you have "cruising the strip", "joy-riding", "drive-in movies", and other random and BASICALLY useless things.
The main point im trying to make here is that there is no BIG, SCARY revelation in... "OMG WHO IS DRIVING THE CAR?!?!!! W3 4R3 S0 PWN3D!!!"...who cares, we will always get where we need to be and if worse comes to worse i bet they will even let us sit in the front seats so we can feel like we are still driving.
Big Brother, of course.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Automatic speed control will never happen. Not because the tinfoil-hat brigade will be successful in lobbying against it, but rather it'll be the law enforcement personnnel who will kill it. Speeding fines are too large a part of the police budget, and that opportunity must be maintained. The police vehemently oppose any measure that justifies a reduction in the number of officers required. The insurance companies will probably oppose anything that eliminates fender-benders, too. Fatal accidents cost them money, but the fender-benders are income generators.
I'm not paranoid, just following the money.
I think the future of the car is dual-mode vehicles. That is, a car which operates as today's cars do, but which can also drive up onto a monorail. One design is the RUF. On ordinary roads, it runs off batteries. Not a trunkfull of lead-acid batteries, but a modest battery, sufficient to get from home to the nearest monorail. Maybe a 50 mile trip max. Once on the monorail, electrical pickups power the vehicle. On the monorail, the vehicle is mechnically inherently safe. Braking works by gripping the monorail, not relying on the weight of the vehicle and a constant coefficient of friction with the road. So with reliable braking, vehicles can form a phalanx, to increase traffic density and reduce wind resistance.
Vehicles on a monorail will drive a 90 MPH, and do so with great safety. Even grandma, because the cars are computer-controlled on the monorail. You designate your exit, and the computer takes care of routing you. Each car does its own routing based on global traffic announcements. Just like BGP4 on the Internet.
Damn but I'd like to say "Take me to Boston and exit onto Boylston St." and then read a book, or fall asleep, or use the Internet access provided by the monorail connection.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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.
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.
I've actually worked for a number of years on autonomous vehicle technologies, and am more than passingly familiar with most of this stuff.
Wireless ad-hoc traffic information networks run into some major security issues. How do you establish trust? If the trust model is basically wide open, then antisocial people are going to put together systems which look at your route and start telling other cars "Avoid these roads at all costs! It's backed up for miles!", so that their own personal drive is relatively free of cars.
How do you prevent this? Do you require warnings from multiple sources before you believe them? Then you've just increased the required critical mass before usability by an order of magnitude. Do you trust that automobile makers can put together some sort of embedded crypto system that's "secure enough" and "tamper proof"? Well, that's worked so well for the DRM people, hasn't it?
Of course, if you're relying on the wireless system for safety, you're essentially giving the ability to swerve/brake hard to systems you don't own, so the matter of trust becomes even more significant, and liability becomes killer. Any way you tie the systems together to try to keep people safer, there's someone who's going to argue (with a non-negligable probability of success) that you should have done it a different way, and now you owe someone $millions.
In addition, liability is going to keep this stuff down for a while yet. No autonomous system is ever going to be perfect, and when dealing with loss of human life, liability more or less demands perfection. If I could put together a fully autonomous system tomorrow which provably had 99% fewer accidents than human drivers, I'd still get sued by the 1%.
This is the primary reason all remote sensing tech on the market today is in the form of "driver assist". If your system screws up, it's still primarily the driver's responsibility to avoid accidents.
I'm not a complete pessimist. I don't think the issues I'm raising are insoluable, and I believe we'll have good autonomous systems eventually. I just think the problems are fundamentally hard, and the legal environment doesn't help; it may be a few decades before the more exotic stuff gets into production cars.
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
Why, Clippy, of course.
a t/winauto/default.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/getstart/devpl
Clippy: "I see that you are attempting to apply the brakes. The Microsoft Brakes 2006 feature is not currently Installed. Please insert Microsoft Automotive Disk #7 in order to Install Microsoft Brakes 2006."
What? You'd prefer a "Johnny Cab?"
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?
Engine fuel consumption is based on displacement and load. To use less fuel, you need less of a load (weight), or reduce the time (final speed). If you are accelerating slowly to 50, you'll find it has the same load as accelerating quickly to 50. This is, if you integrate the fuel consumption curves for both, the area is very close (around 1-2%).
A better way to minimize load (since romping on the gas doesn't affect mileage nearly as much as people think it does) is to make your average speed higher. By having your average speed higher, you reduce the time you spend loading your engine with acceleration, and keep it in the nicer "maintain velocity" part of the curve. It's even better if you maintain velocity at a slower speed, so as to reduce wind resistance. Most cars have a pretty bad wind resistance, even today!
How do you keep a higher average speed? When you know a light is going red a couple of blocks ahead, let yourself coast to it, instead of gasing up to it. If you know the period of the light, slow down very early, coast in at the slower speed, and then arrive just as it's changing. You won't have to stop, and you'll not have to accelerate over whatever speed you kept! This is also good for winter driving (less braking = less chances to lose grip on the tires).
One thing you'll notice with this is that most people tend to gas as hard as they can, slam on the breaks, and then jack rabbit when the light changes. By slowing early, you'll end up next to them at the light for a second, but pass them because you'll still have all your momentum working for you!
Mainaining a higher speed in corners is good, too. Just make sure your tire pressures are correct (check every 2nd time you fill, depending on tire quality), and learn how to handle your car. Note that most SUVs are not stable at cornering above 17mph/27kph, but a car like a late-1980s Accord can do 90 degree turns at around 28mph/45kph!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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.
Uh, sorry, but the actual population of the USA is only just below 300 million. See http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.ht ml - the 500 million figure is from the last election :p
As if the US system is anywhere NEAR being a 'democracy'.
Remind me where you live so I can stay the hell out of whichever state recommends driving faster to avoid accidents as safe driving.
Well I was actually trying to be funny, but in reality when they raised the speed limit in Colorado from 65 to 75, accident rates went down.
It turns out if you make smaller the DIFFERENCE in speed between other cars, you have fewer accidents - that's what people who dislike speeding cannot understand, overly slow drivers are actually just as dangerous as people who speed excessivley. Both cause accidents, as statistics from Colorado show when the speed limit was simply set to the speed people generally drove anyway.
So by avoiding the states that increased speed, you are putting yourself in harms way. Good luck wtih that!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
True, but the design has several nice features:
o The brake is compressing a vertical fin, so there should be a minimum amount of debris sitting on it.
o because the car straddles the rail, it would have to break in half to fall off the trail.
o you get a fair amount of lateral stability, so as long as the rail is installed correctly, the car won't wiggle from side to side like a railroad car does.
o The position information of the car is encoded into the vertical fin as holes, so as the car drives along, it knows exactly where it is.
o If you need to go farther away from the monorail than your batteries can provide, you'll be able to rent a gas/diesel/whatever engine that you drive over. It locks itself under your car and runs at its most efficient speed to charge your batteries.
The whole thing is a very sweet design. The only serious problem that I can see with it is debris (dirt, rocks, ice, loose parts) falling off the cars. That risk can be minimized by putting a deliberate bump into the track above an area in which it's safe to drop stuff. It's also possible to put a skin underneath the car so it doesn't accumulate/shed cruft.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
You can not be cited for driving at the speed limit, and if you were it would be thrown out.
Good. I now know for sure that you are a liar. I know traffic lawyers, so I hear cases that go through. There have been people cited, while traveling the speed limit, for a violation. They may have been going the limit, but they were in the left lane and the other cars were traveling faster. "Keep right except to pass" will get you a citation if you are in the left lane and not passing, whether you are going under the minimum, over the maximum, or anywhere in between. "Slow traffic keep right" means that traffic slower than the others on the road must keep right. This means that if everyone is going limit+5 and passing you on the right, and you are traveling the limit in the left lane, then you are breaking the law.
Also, I would like to know where you get your spedometer calibrated. I once inquired as to how to get mine officially calibrated, and the services were not offered to the general public. I ask because you are obviously not running with the regular spedometers, which I have verified to be off by 10+ mph. If you were on a consumer spedometer, then you wouldn't be so smug about your "exactly the speed limit" attitude. You can't know because you haven't been calibrated. For all you know, you are showing 65 in a 65 and traveling 60, or maybe 70.
As an aside, you are an asshole. It is perfectly legal to drive on the shoulder for long periods of time to allow others to pass in the state I grew up in. So, there are three types of people. There are ignorant people that block people because they are too stupid and lazy to learn the law. There are the people that are too mean and spiteful to pull over when appropriate to let others pass. And there are the people that are safe and let others pass, even if they are already at or above the limit. You would rather purposefully disrupt traffic in order to prove a point than to drive in a more safe and polite manner. You are less safe than the speeders you complain about. And, since the statistics kept by the federal government indicate that the vast majority of fatal crashes take place below the speed limit, you aren't any safer than all those speeders out there.
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