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Google Cars Drive Themselves, In Traffic
An anonymous reader noted that "At the TED 2011 conference this week, Google has been giving extremely rare demos of its self-driving cars. TED attendees have even been allowed to travel inside them, on a closed course. The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver."
Will it cut off the slow car parked in the fast lane too? That'll really be mimicking human behavior then.
A link to the video of driving in traffic here
Does it track you everywhere you go?
This is a sad day for the robot chauffeur industry ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaGJ6nH36uI&feature=player_embedded
Not shown in summary, but here is the video of google car merging in the traffic.
Drive!
Push it to the floor 'til the engine screams
Drive!
Drivin' like the demon that drives your dreams
Drive!
I just found a page on how their car AI works
its just amazing.
The referenced article describes Google taking a car out into traffic on US 101.
In other words Google turned all the other drivers on the road into involuntary, unpaid, unknowing guinea pigs.
There's a word for that - irresponsible.
there is no way a @#$ robot can judge what to do about oncoming accidents, like a pedestrian, a deer, a squirrel, a semi jackknifing, an ambulance passing, a crash ahead of you, a gigantic pothole, a box full of dishes that fell off a truck, a big tree branch, a patch of black ice, a tire blowing out, a semi weaving in a strong wind, etc etc etc.
the solution to the 'i dont want to waste my time driving' problem is to build more trains, and make cities more walkable. to do that, you first have to win over the 'trains = communism' crowd using some kind of distributed jobs program (like the military does for its socialist money wasting mega-projects) and through targeting conservative locations for building up the rail infrastructure so they will get pork from it.
Does it track you everywhere you go?
Its from Google, of course it harvests data to better deliver targeted advertising. The real question is will it deliver targeted ads while driving. A pleasant voice telling you of the sponsored sites you are driving near.
The code they use for navigation actually runs on Linux.
And they plan to open source it! and hardware design too!
(They use 8 cameras and few dozens of sensors)
If they have a cutoff where the driver can take over, not so much. Driving instructors do it all the time.
It will seach the internet for what to do about oncoming accidents!! DUH! its Google
Classic fear mongering. The car always had a driver in it (with override capabilities) while on public roads.
... the way Bill Gates allegedly said they would by now if they followed Moore's Law?
Notice, I did say "allegedly".
Have you seen the lunatics out there? Give me a robot any day! We are given a licence (one test only) in our youth and then out you go, rain, hail or shine, fit or unfit, tired or not, drunk or senile or both. That's ignoring the meatheads who want to deliberately drive dangerously and those not paying attention on a mobile phone texting "RORL" (roll off road laughing). I see your point but lets move on.
I can't drive due to my disabilities. This would be useful. Of course, it has to be bug free (OK almost). It probably won't be ready until after I am dead though. I always wanted KITT type of car! :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The 2nd order effects from this are going to be interesting. If you only have robot drivers (and you will, cause with lower accident rates, you'll have lower insurance rates if you always let the computer drive), you won't need visible signs or traffic lights. How would this affect pedestrian crossings? Would pedestrians feel irrationally unsafe crossing a road with robot drivers on it? Will we remove speed limits as computer reaction and cognitive ability gets faster?
Seems to me they need an override and learning mode where a person can see when the car is starting to do something wrong and tell it what to do, same as you would to a sixteen-year old learning to drive.
You may be have a name with "ubuntu" in it...but what you did was far from "humanity to others"
What is seen cannot be unseen.
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
It really doesn't matter how safe it is, there are regulations for testing of devices with human subjects, those standards are there for a reason. They are included in HIPAA, to give a concrete starting point. A few decades ago it was a lot more lax, and a lot of really awful experiments took place, the bar now is set really high, and its a lot more strict than just being "safe". The FAA created the Class 3 license for experimental space vehicles, the NHTSA should be doing something similar if this kind of thing is going to proceed legitimately.
I for one am surprised that Google legal department would let this one slide, then again maybe they were never even told about what was happening, typical arrogant kids (I mean that in the best possible sense, of course).
So you'd trust Average Joe to do the same with something he built?
In Soviet Russia, car drive you.
well... an average human driver could take the wheel.
I hate to give credence to hollywood scripts like IRobot but there could be potential downfalls to having a pure AI computer controlling a potentially fatal machine on public streets. Suppose for whatever reason, an accident occurs in which a computer going 70 mph must choose between hitting a 7-year old girl or killing the driver. The human driver might sacrifice himself at all costs. A purely logical computer might not.
All in all it would probably be better than normal drivers out there but food for thought.
What, are you saying every time someone wants to drive for the first time every existing driver should sign a form? Explain how this is less responsible than when Drivers Ed kids hit the public streets for the first time.
google has deep pockets.
so you get hit google pays you alot to shut up.
But why are we stopping at J.C. Penny's? Hey car!!!
It'll be interesting how the governments of the world choose to deal with self driving cars. They are bound to be statistically much better than humans but I bet it will be a long time before you don't need a license holding, sober, able-bodied person behind the wheel even though most of them will be checking their Facebook updates on the dashboard screen rather than "supervising" the car.
Google isn't the first to do this, not by a long shot. Last year, there was a story about an autonomous car driving from Italy to China. There were humans on board to take over in the event of a problem, of course. I'm sure there are other examples as well.
It is cool tech, but I think it'll be a long time before it's mature, and an even longer time before it gains acceptance. People want to be in control of their lives, even if they're better off relinquishing control. Whether it's long road trips due to fear of flying or keeping a gun in their nightstand, people often choose to do something that is statistically more dangerous rather than put their lives in someone else's hands. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing or a stupid thing, just that it's human nature. Not many people will be willing to trust a computer to drive them, even if it's safer.
I would prefer that it makes better decisions than human drivers.
"Car turning left in front of me...better change lanes, I'm sure its clear, no need to look or signal."
"Motorcycle coming, should I wait before pulling out right in front of it? Naw"
you have to deal with the people who have been stopping the building of trains, for the past 100 years. there are many different groups that oppose trains, but they are in general, on the conservative side of the spectrum model of political opinions.
the 'individualists' would
Do you trust student drivers with instructors in the passenger seat? At least in this case a capable, trained driver can take over at a moments notice. Being cautious isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there comes a point with every new technology where it has to be tested in the real world (or are suggesting that it never be allowed off the track? I can see it now: fully automated stock car races... And you thought NASCAR was boring before).
Jesus loves me, he loves me a bunch, because he always puts Jiffy in my lunch.
which would easily be attained by an automated transportation system, is nothing to sneeze at. Or 30,000 fewer US highway deaths per year. Or a reduction of 3-5 Million ER Trauma admittances per year (if you want to see medical costs go down). There's no technical reason we couldn't have a completely automated transportation system in the next 15 years, except for the fact that the US couldn't even switch to Metric. But yeah, because there would probably still be a few thousand (instead of 36,000) deaths per year, it simply wouldn't be good enough. Go figure.
They were right - the revolution did not get televised. It was posted on YouTube instead. All in 120 characters. SLOOSH!
i am thinking about every unforseen situation that car drivers encounter, that could never possibly be predicted. then i am trying to imagine a robot taking over those decisions. it doesn't work.
deer and pedestrians jumping out in front of a car are one thing.
i mentioned several other things that the robot has no clue how to deal with. pulling over for a fire truck that is trying to get down the road? not going to work. there are a ton of other things that can happen that there is no way you can ever predict.
what if the car is going up an icy road, and then it starts sliding backwards because it couldnt make it? how is the robot going to slide back down the hill? it doesnt even know where the road is, the road is covered in ice.
how about your wheel falls off? it happens. what does the robot do?
what if the robots sensors go out? get jammed by some unforseen event?
most of all what it lacks is judgement. the robot can hit the brakes, but maybe it should have been going slower in the first place. drivers know in certain neighborhoods you slow down, they know when its dark to slow down, when its wet you slow down, they know where blind corners are, they know about the semi trucks that cut too close on the sharp turn on the way to work every day (and how you might have to back up) , people understand how to deal with a 4 way stop if the lights go out, they know the highway has a bad bump here and you might lose traction for a half of a second, they know there are drug dealers on this block so dont go this way,
they know that if you have two choices, one goes by an accident up ahead and the other goes through the parking lot of the church, you go through the church parking lot so as to not be a rubbernecker. but you slow down because its sunday and old people are walking through on walkers and, they are driving and their reaction times are bad.
etc etc etc.
"the real reason for progressivesâ(TM) passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americansâ(TM) individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism."
Not quite calling trains Communism, but in the same league.
The quote is from George Will,http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/27/high-speed-to-insolvency.html
There are a lot of great tech coming out for the handicapped. I live in a house with 3 other drivers that I feel would be less capable than most automated cars, and I'm afraid to get in the car with them after dark. I'm by far the better driver, and have better eyesight and faster reflexes but can't have a drivers license now due to unpredictable seizures. I say bring on the handicapped tech.
I always pictured Matthew Sobol exactly like this
http://img.timeinc.net/time/2010/poy_2010/poy_mz/poy_cover_z_1215.jpg
made the book a lot better.
This video has three important features. 1: the car drives really fast. 2: the wheels make a noise that shows the whole steering/speeding control scheme is badly implemented (good driving will never make your wheels cry like this, here you can predict a high risk of losing adherence). 3: the people engaged in the test are not stressed, it seems to be quite a usual task to them, which may prove to be a high level of confidence and/or a low level of security measures.
The fact that the article was published in a very bad website (here bad means full of bullshit) makes me wonder if any information given in it is reliable. Given the loose structure of the video, I would say "hell no".
And could these inputs be hackable? If "secure" electronic passports can be hacked with a laptop and 1k's worth of extra kit, I'd like to know that my driverless car won't even listen to anything that isn't exactly what I want it to know. Alternatively, if I get fed up with too many cars driving near my house / work, how long would it take me to figure out how to get them to take a detour or how traceable would it be if I doubled the speed limit (increasing the noise level) near an ex's house?
Thirty thousand people dead each year in US car accidents. That's over half a million dead each generation. Robots could not do worse. And I think they could do a lot better. Especially if the cars talk to each other.
In fifty years people may well look back upon our manual driving culture as next to insane. That said. I love to drive. But really. It's hell out there
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
It'll take you anywhere you want to go, discreetly routed past the shops and billboards that AdSense reckons you should see, while quietly logging your every breath, word, and glance for later analysis. Within a week you'll be wondering why every time you pick the kids up from school, it seems to drive home via the Lego shop!
Really, I can't wait for the first DIY experimenters to hit the highways in their homemade robocars. Slogan: DIY Robocars - making safety dangerous - your car, your code, our road.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
It would make huge sense for the alcohol industry to invest heavily in this technology.
Cars which breath-test their drivers and serve as 'designated drivers' could give a huge boost to bars and nightclubs. And, no more alcohol-related traffic deaths.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Access to all the worlds information, self-driving cars.. just imagine if it were to become self-aware.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
While I can't wait to get my own self-driving car, this method of testing is completely irresponsible and reckless. The other drivers on the road did not sign up to be guinea pigs in Google's little experiment.
quite a lot of cars seem to be drive without the engagement of a human brain. Perhaps Google is on to something here?
Not only are there significant technological hurdles, of course, since you have to make your self-driving car capable of coping with all the regular cars and pedestrians and so on, but there are legal hurdles. The first time your car gets in a major accident, you are getting sued big time and it'll be humans, not car computers, on the jury. Say your car hits and kills a pedestrian because there was simply no way to avoid it at all. Their family will sue you for tons.
As such you have to be able to prove, beyond any doubt, that your car did the right thing, that the choice it made was the very best possible choice in that situation and no human could have done any better. It can't be as good as a normal human, you'll lose because that's just how people are. You have to be able to completely demonstrate how you car handled the situation so much better than a human and even still couldn't do anything to prevent the accident because there was just no way it was preventable.
I've confidence that will happen. We will get to the point where they can do that, but it'll take a long time in development. The cars will have to be certified under the most adverse conditions and still have exemplary performance. Then they can be brought to the mass market.
I'd be interested in seeing how this car holds up to real life extreme situations like black ice on a freeway in heavy traffic at high speed when the cars around it start spinning out of control.
And then they let Italians and Belgians drive them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Trains and buses are generally referred to as public transport. Public = state run. State run = communist.
And if you allow socialized transport, it's the thin end of the wedge - they'll soon be socializing everything.
Plus public transport can be stopped at will by teh gubmint. The second amendment isn't much use if you can't get within range!
The clincher: people in favor of it call themselves green. Watermelons are green, but they're red on the inside.
QED
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Ahh yes, "fix it with a law". That's right, there's no amount of danger or risk that a good ol' Form 544813 written by a bureaucrat can't mitigate.
I happen to enjoy driving. This tech is cool, but I personally don't want a JohnnyCab. I don't even really care for cruise control. Yeah, yeah, and you can get off my lawn, too, but there's something about driving... maybe it's because I lived in a rural area growing up and my first car was pretty much my ticket to independence and freedom -- being able to go just about anywhere I wanted when I wanted, no longer shackled to my parents' house in the middle of nowhere -- that makes me hesitant to give up control of my car. I guess I'd rather have true freedom than a safety net, which is the way I feel about quite a lot of things now that I think about it.
Also, I realize that perceiving automated driving systems as loss of freedom is irrational to an extent; this is because my opinion is based on personal feelings which are more subjective than logical. I merely present my opinion as food for thought.
Yeah, that just happened.
This is just funded by Google. It's the group at Stanford which did the DARPA Urban Challenge that's doing the work. It's essentially the same technology. They're getting very good at this.
The thing on top of the car is a rotating cone of LIDAR scanners. The original version of that was developed by Team DAD for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. The prototype, which was a much bigger wheel of scanners, fell off the vehicle. But they then built a more compact production version, the Velodyne scanner, with 64 lasers. It costs about $100K per unit, but automatic driving became much better once that came out. Most of the teams in the DARPA Urban Challenge used that.
Personally, I think the rotating machinery approach is too expensive for production, and that the Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR has more promise as a production product. The ASC system requires some exotic custom imaging ICs, with a time-of-flight timer behind each pixel. That's the kind of thing that's incredibly expensive when you make 10 of them, and cheap when you make 10 million.
I think this is pretty cool and all, but in my eyes, JR's talk at TED was the real noisemaker. Watch it if you haven't.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Or rather, their employees. Self driving cars are the death of the car industry as it currently stands. There is only 1 reason we need our own cars.
1. Taxis are expensive.
If you don't have a driver, you can put a taxi on every street corner which means that the customer can order one on his iphone taxi app as he leaves the house/office and it's waiting at the kerb before he gets there. No salary to pay, only running costs & depreciation.
An average taxi can currently make something like 30 journeys per day, where an average privately owned car makes about 3. So you will see something like a 10 fold reduction in the number of cars produced when self driving becomes the norm.
Deleted
No, this does not compute. I want my own care in order to arrive with all my "stuff", the briefcase, maybe extra coats, the 2 way radio that _I_ want in it, the external cell phone antenna, the laptop in the trunk, etc. I don't want to think of carrying all that stuff along to stuff in a Taxi when I'm going to work, etc. I want it in the garage when I get up at 4:00 AM and decide to go into work early, rather than waiting for a cab to get here from town, 20 miles away. I want _my_ car to have the "maximum summer grip" tires that will go 'round corners faster than other cars and I want to have an engine in the car that will out-accelerate the pinhead in the other lane that would like to keep me from changing lanes. In the snow I want my own car that happens to be a Jeep with the big, knobby tires to go thru it even tho it is up to the axles.
Because of the giant, corrupt scam which are the traffic laws, the cars will have to be set to "obey the speed limit", making self-driving cars arrive 20 minutes later than one you drive yourself. Around the Chicago area they've gone to 45 mph speed limits on some their interstates where everyone flies along at 70, just to get around the 4th Amendment and be able to stop anyone they want to any time they want to. Can you imangine traveling 45 mph and getting hit by a truck doing 70? The only way this will work is to have _all_ self-driving cars on the road, and prohibit the human-driven kind. Otherwise, the self-driving cars are just going to be a huge, mobile roadblock that will slow down traffic to make rush hour last 'til 10 PM, and get you stopped by the cops for "tailgating" when there's no reason to be following much farther than 10 - 15 ft from the car ahead 'cuz the computers can react instantly, and don't need that distance.
If the gov't could get over using the highways for every purpose except getting people where they need to go, rather than generating traffic ticket money and violating people's constitutional rights to be left alone, it might work. But, probably not in our lifetimes.
Taxis are cheap as hell in South Korea, yet plenty of people still drive every day (way too many people for the city actually, but that's a different story). People like cars because cars afford them some privacy. In places like Seoul, Shanghai, Tokyo etc etc privacy and quiet time is valued as well. Yes Koreans and Japanese are much more accustomed to being in crowded throngs of people, but I've heard many a Korean or Japanese complain about crowded spaces. There is a reason online shopping grew so quickly in those two countries....
While I really like this development, there's one thing I'd like to see resolved: eye contact with the driver. When passing in front of a car I always try to make eye contact with the driver. For me this is the best way judge if the driver has spotted me and if I can cross safely. A robot driver should have some really simple visual way of saying: Hey, I've spotted you and I will break for you.
I wonder why they cannot limit speed to 40 km/h (it 's more than enough accepting there is no stops during trip not even on traffic lights ) and make all cars soft OUTSIDE to limit probable impact damage (they already modelling cars to minimize probable harm to pedestrian). You must be very unlucky bastard to die from pillow that struck you at less than 40 km/h.
And i don't want to be on the same roads as you.
I agree that it's irresponsible. One of the drug addled wheel-monkeys might damage the robot. They really shouldn't allow human drivers on freeways.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I am confused on why this is being allowed. If a human requires proper licensing before they can engage in actual traffic, then why is a machine that can still be riddled with bugs allowed to? It just makes me twitch because of all the sub par software we have to use these days. I know that a crash (in this case literal) will inevitably happen. Hopefully, they have got placards all over this thing to let us know what it is, so we can avoid it like the plague when we see it on the highway.
Much as I'd like to believe this, it's not true. People own cars because they want to guarantee they can transport themselves at speed from any location to any other location, in a device they have overall control over. The selling points of taxis are not that they offer a way to do that, but trade driving for expense, but because they offer privacy and some degree of timeliness compared to public transport.
I, and most people in the country, wouldn't choose a taxi to go to work in the morning not because it's expensive but because it's a resource that's difficult to guarantee the availability of. Even a bus or train has a better guarantee of availability at peak periods. The idea of relying upon a version of cars
Would self driving cars kill cars? Maybe, but not because they'd be sharable - sharing doesn't come into it.
I'm a firm believer that cars are a terrible form of transport, and the only reason people tolerate them is because the person who makes the decision to buy and use them is inevitably the person driving them. That person overlooks the discomfort and inhuman conditions of sitting in a metal cage for anything from fifteen minutes, to hours, unable to move because he or she is distracted by the actual act of driving. Such a distraction will cease to exist if the car is driven by Google.
What would happen under such circumstances? My guess is things may get worse before they get better. Successful self driving cars will need to larger than SUVs or minivans are today, and the risks associated with people getting up and walking around in these larger vehicles during a road trip will result in deadlier accidents, despite the reduction in accidents overall likely to result from reduced human error.
What we need are cheaper trains, better buses, and most of all changes to planning policies that make it illegal to build neighborhoods that would make cycling and public transportation desirable, and make the latter profitable.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Now that robots have beat us in "Jeopardy," how soon will it be before they win the Indianapolis 500 or a NASCAR event?
It would be better it it didn't mimic ALL the decisions made by a human driver or else the computer, when faced with some cyclists in the lane, could decide to do something like this:
Brazil driver mows down cyclists in Porto Alegre (BBC News)
I think we can do better.
Doubt it.
To put it bluntly artificial Intelligence software is software of which the behaviour can be different in similair situation based on past experiences.
I would rather have something of which the behaviour is predictable thank you very much.
New things are always on the horizon
A lot of people are employed driving vehicles. They are very expensive per hour. Goodbye! The upside? Automation would reduce cargo speeds to optimum fuel efficiency because doing so wouldn't actually burn up anyone's expensive time. Computer controlled throttle on regular engines already beat the snot out of hybrids for fuel savings. I think there's a 25% energy savings in there, ripe for the taking. But yeah, it'll be a major social and economic game changer.
They were right - the revolution did not get televised. It was posted on YouTube instead. All in 120 characters. SLOOSH!
I don't think self-driving cars will use a different interior layout until most people deeply trust the automated driving system, which won't be for a long time (easily decades). Until then there'll be a human driver ready to take over, and in that case you need something similar to today's interior layout.
Also, while I'm sure larger automated personal vehicles that support walking around would exist, I think they will be too expensive to be common. A larger vehicle is simply more expensive than a smaller one and less fuel efficient/more maintenance heavy to boot. Most people will continue to use cheap but relatively cramped designs out of economic necessity (or a desire to save money for other more important things). Such larger designs make sense for buses or trains because many people share them, but what's the point in walking around in a vehicle with a SUV-sized floor containing just you and perhaps a handful of other people?
That said, perhaps designs that de-emphasize safety in exchange for comfort could appear. I could imagine seats that could be moved around to fit into other less safe but more comfortable or useful arrangements or beds becoming common (perhaps one could get a few more minutes of shuteye before work). Of course, the automated system would have to be fantastically reliable for people to have that level of trust...so I don't think this will be the case for a long time if at all.
Oh, so please tell us EXACTLY about the integration test Google did for this situation: a) Moving in dense traffic at 65 mph b) Vehicle in front has blow-out tire and swerves in front of it c) How does car react? Does it (a) slam on brakes while car in back is tailgating when it could have swerved to the left where no cars are there? (b) swerve to right into mini-van full of kids? (c) Happily plows into car in front d) In the one to two second time-frame which the human has to decide if the Google driver isn't going to do the right thing, can the human driver take over and react in time to properly respond to the situation? Yes, I want a full detailed integration test summary from you, since you appear so sure that Google is on top of this...
This is an interesting thought, but there's a few additional issues.
1. Clearly this is not the only reason we need/want our own cars, several of which are covered by the other posters (privacy, customization, cars are a good place to store things you commonly take with you, etc.). Another such issue is that taxis are icky compared to one's own car (much like a public toilet compared to one's own toilet). Personal cars offer a better experience to people who can afford them.
2. You have to wait for the taxi to arrive after you order it. This can be particularly troublesome if you're not in a high traffic area, making the wait long. If you have your own car you don't have to think about this. It can also be an issue during high-load times as the taxis may not be able to get to you immediately if there's not enough of them (and there probably won't be enough as buying excessive taxis is unprofitable). While you can order ahead, you have to think about this beforehand and if you don't then a wait is inevitable.
3. This technology will probably require a human driver behind the wheel for some time into the future (for safety and/or legal reasons), eliminating the cost advantage until such a day that cars are frequently driver-less. At this point having your own car would be advantageous for other reasons (for instance, sending your car out to do chores on its own). Maybe eventually there'd be no difference, but it could be quite some time.
4. Cheap taxis would have little to no impact on personal vehicles with a use besides passenger transport, such as trucks. Though perhaps this could lead to variants on the taxi model that would lead to an impact on such vehicles, such as a "cargo taxi".
5. At least here in the US there's a car ownership culture. What kind of car you own is an important status symbol and that culture is unlikely to change in the face of driver automation. This will be especially true if taxis are very cheap.
On the other hand, taxis would indeed become a much better choice than they are now, displacing other forms of transport. In particular it would compete head to head with buses, which fill a similar niche. As you suggest, it would reduce the number of personal cars, but just how much is debatable.
Taxis do have certain advantages though:
1. Taking taxis everywhere could very well become substantially cheaper than operating a personal car. As you point out they make more journeys in a single day, spreading the operating costs over many people.
2. The parking situation is insane in certain areas of certain cities. Cheap taxis would be particularly popular in such areas (even amongst people who own a personal car). Though this would eventually lead to a balance between taxis and cars as the parking situation improves due to fewer people parking in the same area.
How much reduction in the number of cars would this create? Probably some (especially in the personal car market), but you could even see an *increase* in the total number of cars on produced. If the cost of taxis becomes comparable to buses then a massive number of taxis would replace the bus system. Unless most people also dropped their personal cars in favor of using taxis then there'd be more cars overall.
So you are saying that driving instructors are also just as irresponsible as they are taking out 16 year olds who have never driven before? Endangering the other drivers! Some of those cars they use don't even have a brake on the instructor's side, let alone a steering wheel. So much more irresponsible compared to Google's car it seems.
I would think there would be a lot of advantages to having a taxi pick you up. For instance being paid the second one get into the taxi to the second one leaves it on the return trip. If one uses a smart phone one could work during commute. Another would be the savings from parking fees. I see this to drastically reduce the number of people in retail as I can see people ordering everything online with driver less vehicles delivering the goods to one's home. This would drastically reduce the amount of space needed for the retail stores. Stores would consist of very tall shelves with narrow passageways since products would be gathered by robots. So stores would need about a third the space to store products and no need for huge parking lots. There would be a lot of savings from every aspect of managing a store but especially from shoplifting. One can see what this would do to impulse buying since one could order something in their underwear and get it within minutes. I can just see the commercial stating that you too can enjoy the benefits of our product in less than an hour by ordering now.
Even if an AI controlled car will cause far fewer accidents the people killed by them will have names but the people saved will not. This will result in the technology being held back 30 years.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
You left out one major purpose of the driver: To prevent vandalism. This is a major expense on bus lines, and of trucks that sit around unattended.
Presumably some way exists to deal with this, but no way that is currently being tried works. Historically it's been a difficult problem, which can be partially addressed only by so arranging things that nobody feels treated too unfairly. And this is quite difficult. This needs to be coupled with intensive conditioning against all forms of vandalism. In the 1950's this worked pretty well in the areas in which it was applied. (Of course, there was also an emphasis on re-use...not just recycling. No throwaway containers, e.g. To pick a particular example, Coke bottles were made of glass, and came with a hefty refundable deposit. About 1/10th of the price. You took them back, the store returned them to the company, which cleaned and sterilized them and then reused them.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
2. You have to wait for the taxi to arrive after you order it.
You are imagining a similar level of availability to current taxis. This is largely caused by the driver, he has to be kept busy and therefore increases the scarcity of the service. Without a driver, idling vehicles close to demand centres is economically viable. This brings the service response down to a couple of minutes. It may be possible to get one to you before you are out the door.
What kind of car you own is an important status symbol and that culture is unlikely to change in the face of driver automation.
This will be a generational thing. I'd expect it to take 15+ years for self driven vehicles to begin to edge out the current fleet. By that time a younger generation is entering the auto marketplace. They just wouldn't see the point of a car, particularly loading up on tens of thousands of debt just to own one when they can call a taxi for a couple of dollars and it's there in less time than it takes to walk to a parking lot.
Some people will continue to think of their cars as status symbols, these types will hang on, but most, don't really want a car, they just want the service it provides and in new generations, they'll find some other status symbol to parade around.
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Actually, yes! In Delaware at least (I bet many other states) the DMV cancels their road tests on the first indication that it may rain. So the actual test occurs in quite controlled environments. Yet, you under normal conditions have to drive on rain, snow, etc. So what's the purpose of this test besides letting the state know that you know the theoretical rules and that you are capable of parallel parking in absolutely good weather conditions?
c) How does car react?
Based on what I see on the roads every day, I wouldn't trust 2/3 of HUMAN drivers to react correctly.
Google actually built an all-star team. They hired the tech leads for both the Carnegie Mellon team (top finisher for 1st Grand Challenge and won the Urban Grand Challenge) and the Stanford team (won the 2nd Grand Challenge). They also hired a bunch of the other developers from each team. I was at Chris Urmson's recent presentation at Carnegie Mellon about the Google cars. The approach the Google team is using looks predominately like the CMU method but with key features of the Stanford team.
Some well known facts within the robotics community, but not outside: The Stanford team was a former CMU prof (Thrun) and his technical lead (Montemerlo) was still finishing his CMU PhD while working for Stanford. His co-advisor was the prof running the CMU team (Whittaker) and his CMU classmate was the technical lead for CMU's teams (Urmson). Google hired three out of four on this list.
Of course, it can't be worse than distracted human drivers.
Except that like 90% of that driving occurs between 7am-9am and 5pm-7pm and not in an even distribution over the course of the day.
Well said. I wonder if camping on the Afghan border in Tajikistan's High Pamir qualifies? It sure was fun.
https://picasaweb.google.com/bdwoolman/Pamir09?feat=directlink
Took a gander at your site and enjoyed your thoughts.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
I would go for a self-driving car ( can be useful on long trips ) , but only if it's also possible to drive manually.
Having your own car has more to do with freedom , than with status. It allows you to go wherever you want to go , whenever you want to.
Slipping shoelaces ?
What's really interesting to me about this concept, assuming they get the computer stuff right, is then what does this do to commuting and living patterns. Do all the cars which communicated and found out they were all getting off the highway at the same exit hitch together and form a train, thereby reducing distance between them to much less than normal (human reaction) stopping distance? Do they hitch together mechanically or merely electronically? How much does this reduce accidents? How much does this increase highway throughput? Does this change the tradeoffs between highways and arterial roads? What about urban roads like ring roads or beltways? Do we have wind effects that increase the efficiency of cars in a "train" ? Has anyone simulated any of this stuff?
You're right, but your numbers are off. Sure taxis would be cheaper, but if the system is cheap enough for 'the average car' you'll find more one-car families, as a car could return after taking dad to the office, or the kids to school, etc. As many still would want to own their car, there will always be a personal transportation market, but cars wouldn't be 'stuck' with one member of the family as much.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
I want one, when can I go to bestbuy and buy one?