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How Would Driver-less Cars Change Motoring?
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that as Nevada licenses Google to test its prototype driver-less car on public roads, futurists are postulating what a world of driver-less would cars look like. First, accidents would go down. 'Your automated car isn't sitting around getting distracted, making a phone call, looking at something it shouldn't be looking at or simply not keeping track of things,' says Danny Sullivan. Google's car adheres strictly to the speed limit and follows the rules of the road. 'It doesn't speed, it doesn't cut you off, it doesn't tailgate,' says Tom Jacobs, a spokesman for the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles. Driver-less cars would mean a more productive commute. 'If you truly trust the intelligence of the vehicle, then you get in the vehicle and you do our work while you're traveling,' says engineer Lynne Irwin. They would mean fewer traffic jams. 'Congestion would be something you could tell your grandchildren about, once upon a time.' Driver-less cars could extend car ownership to some groups of people previously unable to own a car, including elderly drivers who feel uncomfortable getting behind the wheel at night, whose eyesight has weakened or whose reaction time has slowed."
Another reader points out an article suggesting autonomous cars could eventually spell the end of auto insurance.
Any municipality that allows cellphone use while driving is, essentially, endorsing driverless cars. If someone gets engaged in a deep conversation on the phone, their driving skills drop below that of someone with 0.08% blood alcohol...
Efficiency and navigatability, plus, as opposed to London, most American cities have several thousand years worth of city road building experience built right in.
They will handle the issue just like they did when the driverless trains started to crash in DC. They put drivers back in them. Any automated system given the shoddy maintenance of your average beater on the road is a death machine.
Wow, that's a lot of FUD to come from one person.
There are too many other things insurance pays for besides hitting another car. For example hail storm damage, tree falling on your car or an unavoidable cow jumping in front of you on a bind corner. Not to mention cruising at 50 miles an hour and hitting an ice patch or getting hit by that guy who still actually likes to "drive" his truck.
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
Is this even a real question? Personalism has nothing to do with city planning. It's all about efficiency.
While driver-less cars would allow some people who currently cannot drive to have their own car, it will raise the price of cars so that some people who now can afford to own a car would not be able to afford one. It would also mean that someone other than you would ultimately determine where you could go. For example, only the cars of those authorized to go to certain places would even have the roads to those places in the maps in their cars. Since driver less cars will need to receive roadmap updates, you might discover that a place you went to yesterday was no longer accessible.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
1) First time poster
2) Post appears within same minute as story, despite being well over 500 words
3) Subtle plug for Bing maps
4) General gist of "Google Cars will kill people!"
Either bonch is again trying out his sockpuppets, or someone is trying to astroturf Slashdot again.
In the meantime, I look forward to hopping into my Google car and taking a nap while driving to Tahoe. As a matter of fact, driving might become really something you do while you have other things to do - like sleep, eat, work, or just read. I'd love it. There is no reason for anyone to drive.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
America has many well designed cities. And many poorly designed cities. However, if all cars were converted to driverless, then the increased efficiency may be such that you could have far fewer roads because a road could handle that many more cars without becoming congested - especially with some sort of inter-vehicle communication protocol. You could have cars traveling 100 mph almost bumper to bumper on highways that are currently at 55mph. This would allow you to have more roads designated cars-only to avoid many of the pitfalls of mixed traffic. The next step will likely be driverless cars with the option to switch to manual (think Demolition Man) for areas that are not driverless-friendly.
I think this will be mostly the end of private cars for the majority of us. It seems ridiculous now, but once people start looking at the cost of owning a car versus a well priced car service I think the transition will be fast. Especially among the young.
We'll probably be able to get by with a fleet of super-effecient driverless taxi cabs. I image paying a couple hundred bucks a month to have car come and pick me up whenever I need one.
You could get even more efficiency by offering a reduced rate for those willing to share a car. The system could efficiently route, pickup up multiple passengers and dropping them off.
Anybody who equates breaking the speed limit as automatic excessive speeding is a tool. The speed limit on my local highway is 55mph, the average speed is close to 70. It's a safe speed. Many areas put an artificially low speed to collect tickets at will.
In fact, it would be highly dangerous to go 55mph. You'd get rear ended in no time not to mention road rage.
There is a good rule in driving: when in Rome, do as the Romans do. The rules say one thing, but the reality is, most of the time, that it's far safer to go with the flow than to fight it. Any driving system that doesn't adhere to this within reason is one I don't want to step foot in.
I wouldn't know about that. My Mac gets the spinning beachball of eternal limbo often enough.
I would hope they WOULD tailgate so as to increase gas efficiency from decreased wind resistance. No reason this optimization wouldn't be any more dangerous than other typical driving characteristics of driver-less cars (I still prefer auto-autos).
Since in real life the first car goes first when the light turns green. Then a split second later the second car would start moving. A moment later the 3rd and so on. So movement at red lights propagates down the line of cars like a wave. With this technology all the cars could move together in a group.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Problem is NOBODY goes the speed limit. If everyone else on the road is speeding and your goody goody car is not able to keep up then it is a liability that INCREASES the possibility of an accident everywhere it goes.
What are you talking about? I use Bing Maps because it is much better here than Google Maps. On top of that much faster too, as Google Maps seems to use LOTS of bandwidth. OpenStreetMap is good too, but Bing wins completely.
As a side question, why are American cities planned without any personal touch, but so "professionally"?
The same reason you lay them out in a grid when you play SimCity; it works, its efficient, it's easy to build around, it's easy to navigate, etc, etc, etc.
Pretty funny: all those "advantages" can already be had by using public transportation. Cheaper too. Kind of easy to overlook nowadays.
S
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
This is in fact the most important feature of the driver-less car. Particularly for teenagers.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If I could use my laptop during my commute to/from work, I could shave an hour off my day as the first and last half hour are typically paperwork/desk work anyway. Suddenly I can sleep in 30 minutes later and be home in time to make a much nicer dinner (yeah, I'm my gf's bitch around the house).
Agreed. Please mod GP as flamebait.
Ending Congestion? Seriously?
Will driverless cars magically create more capacity on the roads so that there is enough space for all the cars that want to drive on the same road at the same time? Because that would be a neat trick.
As a side question, why are American cities planned without any personal touch, but so "professionally"?
To a large extent this is just because they have been planned, whereas many older cities in Europe and Asia were built up well before modern city planning. There are other factors as well- cities that are planned well become less well-planned as time goes on. You see this in Europe with some of the old Roman cities. Also, when one didn't have cars and trucks, smaller alleyways weren't a problem, whereas many expanded American cities happened just as cars were showing up (remember the frontier in the US doesn't close until the 1890s). There's also just a long tradition in the US of careful planning, that's dates back to the very early settlements. New York was gridded out when much of the city was still wilderness, and that started a general precedent. There are some cities that aren't as carefully gridded (such as Boston) but many cities modeled themselves in a similar way to New York. Also, in much of the US land was pretty cheap. Gridding with big roads takes a lot of land up- when you have the room it is easier to do it.
And the driver-less car isn't drunk. I can do the drinking and not worry.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Yeah! RIIIGHT!
Call me when you catch the tooth fairy.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Is no Google-related thread safe from MS shills?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
A good point. When playing Sim City, "fun" designs are nice for small towns (only practical at all in SimCity 4) or very small neighborhoods but they completely lack scalability. I don't think the roads add a personal touch half so much as the buildings, businesses and homes alongside them.
I'm sure you do. See, this is the problem with posts like yours. I can't take anything you say seriously, because your post fits the format of someone who lies about their status, their intention and their actual opinion. Go hunker down somewhere else.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I have a much cheaper solution. Anyone going 45 up the onramp or going 60 in the fast lane or basically anyone driving a Buick and causing a 10 mile backup behind them should be detected and pickedup by a giant robot arm and dropped on a county road instead of the highway. Getting rid of dumbasses that can't drive would effectively double the overall throughput of every highway, guaranteed.
Also, automation would do nothing for cement trucks and large equipment, which cannot easily be robotized and would still slow down traffic.
You'll be able to pick your nose using the fingers of both hands. That's how.
One thing we'll never have is autonomous cars driving fast or flying through uncontrolled intersections inches apart from each other, because unfortunately it scares the shit out of people.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I already can't read while in a moving car, and in a bus I still need a view of the road to avoid getting sick. Doubt robots would improve on that.
Let's see... driverless cars...
As the article says, there'd be fewer accidents due to less speeding and fewer red-lights run through. The lack of speeding wouldn't be much of an issue because you can sit in the car and play on your iPad just like you're riding the subway. Transportation costs would decrease because trucks could just be told where to go. You don't need to go pick up you kid from school or soccer practice because you can just tell the car to go do that. Taxi cabs will probably notice a decrease in business since you won't need to call one when you're too drunk to drive. We'll see cars with some kind of built-in beds so you can set the car for a long trip and just hop in the back and snooze while the car takes you there. Because of how much more feasible this makes driving long distances, air/rail travel will suffer a drop in their business.
We might see an eventual elimination of drivers licenses for most people. Basically, driverless cars would be like a private subway train which can go anywhere you want, and you don't need a license (or be of a certain age, really) to ride the subway.
Oh, and they'll park themselves (and retrieve themselves to pick you up outside of the sports arena or amusement park), so there will be no more trolling for a good parking spot. The car just drops you off at the curb right outside (so I guess obesity will go up even *more*...).
What did I miss?
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
A truly automated roadway will *require some politician, at some point, to pull the trigger and kick every other car off the road.
America is a loooooong way away from that happening.
*Unless you think a parallel system of roadways is a viable idea.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You can get drunk and still get home (with your car) without getting arrested!
Hell, you can go bar-hopping and no one has to stay sober!
I can't friggin' wait!
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
I would absolutely use a car that had an auto-drive mode. If everyone did, then you wouldn't even need stop lights or other controls at intersections, or speed limits, as the vehicles would work together to melt traffic into a perfect flow. It might be a bit unnerving at first, watching traffic weaving through intersections, but we would get used to it.
Google or not.
And alternatively again, while some people wouldn't be able to afford a car that they have now, some families will be able to get by with fewer cars. Imagine a world where my wife goes to work 30 minutes before I do, and sends the car back for me to use; then I send it to pick up my teenager from school, who sends it back to my wife, who picks me up on the way and we all go home. If we're postulating a world where trust is high enough to read and do work while in the operator's (I hesitate to say driver's) seat, there's a very small jump from there to the car that can go to a destination sans passengers entirely.
And of course, that says nothing about how it would revolutionize the statistically very dangerous world of truck driving (though I suspect the truck drivers might not be too happy about that, I'm sure they can get a lobby together to make sure that entirely autonomous semi's never get approved).
Since driver less cars will need to receive roadmap updates, you might discover that a place you went to yesterday was no longer accessible.
I don't think anyone is seriously considering cars without some kind of manual override. Though in the long term I suppose it's possible.
I remember when flying cars were going to solve all our problems.
Back in the real world there are a few tests followed by hype followed by 'this invention will solve every problem we currently have!' followed by glowing endorsements of the first release followed by a huge collection of new problems discovered by the early adopters followed by a new technology that will 'solve every problem we have with the last new technology that turned out to be nowhere near as magical as predicted!'.
Yeah, these cars will be better in some circumstances but they'll be worse in others and they'll create new problems of their own. They certainly won't bring an end to insurance because they will hit things and they will crash and they will leave you with a huge payout to the victims if you're not insured.
They almost got it right when they said people would see vehicles as a service provider.
Driverless cars mean vehicular multiplexing. A car that can transport people on its own is wasting resources sitting parked in a garage.
First, services will spring up that allow you to rent your personal car out while you are at work (that provide insurance against internal damage). Then services will spring up that operate fleets of vehicles (taking advantage of economy of scale for maintenance). Then people will realize that owning a vehicle is more way expensive than using a fleet service and doesn't add much, if any, convenience.
End result, individuals will stop owning vehicles (except for driving hobbyists). Ride sharing will increase. Parking will become less valuable and a lot of parking real estate will be turned toward more productive use (commercial/residential).
Fuelling stations will become centralized. This will allow adoption of gasoline alternatives (like swapping out banks of slow charging batteries).
plus, it works on a flat piece of land. Where I live in the south, there's so many hills that the winding roads make more sense (or at least it did back in the days). I liked the OP's comments until he/she had to bash on America. Seriously, not everywhere is set in a grid due to "professionalism" or have curves for "personalisation" - the latter is a waste of money, in my opinion. I'm sure cities love to develop roads just for the enjoyment of spending money. What a load of crock. I've been to Asia and the name of the game is also efficiency, albeit with motorcycles in mind.
New Orleans in the state of Louisiana is not. It's streets follow the original path- the river. Expansion into the swamps added some rectangular sections, but they join awkwardly.
Some former cross streets have been cut by interstate highways...
And then there are the occasional alligators that block the way...
Any city/town that is built in a restricted level area will have odd streets, no matter what the age of the city/town.
For an example, look at New York City - the old section of Manhattan Island. The origin of the city still has streets radiating out from the original wharfs for sailing ships.
The decision came about after the design of Washington, DC (US Capitol) where politicians admired the organization... and took that idea home where it spread. It also helped to have a LOT of open, relatively level, land to build on. Since there were no legacy portage (ie, river traffic) roads were more significant. Since roads a made by people, they tend to be or "logical" and ordered. That lead to a simple Cartesian coordinate system used for addressing.
I think you are trying too hard to disaparage the technology.
Let me guess, in the future my car can drive me safely home when I go get schnockered, but let me guess that will still be illegal :(
I trully can't understand your post. You're blasting Google for trying to improve cars eficiency, prevent accidents, and traffic jams? And you call americans lazy just because they are building a self driven car? Are you lazy for not having to kickstart your bike or your car?
I'm European and i can't wait for a self driven car. It will be a revolution in private transportation. A good revolution.
And yes, it's easier to build a self driven car in the large, straight roads of America, but this technology is only taking his baby steps and you're already blasting it. Jesus...you would probably be in Kitty Hawk with the Wright Brothers and say something like "Yeah, it can fly. But like, it only takes one person and if it rains you get all wet and probably crash. Why not use a bicycle? Are you lazy?".
Relax dude.
On April 21, TrafficNet became self-aware and decided to play a giant game of bumper cars.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Epic Fail.
The first time that a "driver-less car" runs over a pedestrian, or is involved in some other traffic fatality, the resulting trial and damages will bankrupt Google. I can already see the trial lawyers salivating at the prospect of collecting their percentage of the money awarded to the victims.
Your "fair share" is NOT in my wallet.
How anyone thinks this will be the end of traffic is beyond me.
and +1 insightful for first 2 or 3 that if this happens, it will be the end of personally-owned vehicles.
Traffic is a result of ( volume of cars) > (capacity of road).
Unless these driverless cars can also change work schedules, the majority of people will still be hitting the roads at the same time.
Heck, we can see this now. In any larger city, we all know how internet performance degrades after 4PM when the tweens & teens get home from school, and on weekends when the rest of us are fragging those little buggers online. Wait for next Sunday (Mother's Day, at least in US) when all the Skype, oovoo, and other voip calls are getting placed. If the algorithms that govern ethernet collisions have not eliminated "traffic" delays, how is Google going to eliminate traffic with reality-based steel& rubber boxes that cannot be resent if the 'packet' doesn't reach a destination address?
Besides, I take my "it will happen in the future" clues from the Sci-Fi of today.
I haven't seen anything with (plentiful cars) && (no traffic)
- Blade Runner, Futurama, The Fifth Element, Dr.Who" gridlock", Total Recall, and probably many more.
Traffic may be more organized, but it will still be dense traffic.
Google is testing this on the Las Vegas Strip. I'd thought they'd be spending more time in the emptier parts of Nevada. Actually, though, automated driving in congested areas at moderate speeds may work out well. Automated vehicles can have sensor coverage in all directions at all times; humans are limited in that. Computers can react faster than humans, and don't get distracted.
smoke they're using out there.
True, you gotta start somewhere, but the technology is so far behind.
We wont see this in out lifetimes; proper driving is not about your skills -
it's about the other guy's skill (or lack of) and hazzards that can't be
accounted for in a program. Tree branch - animal runs out, (a child's)
feet under a car - how do you program these except by learing about a
particular's course's topology...?
It may also mean some roads would get redesigned to better accommodate automation. I somehow doubt the plethora of signs about hidden intersections, white and yellow dotted lines, reflective signs etc existed in the era of horse and buggy, or even in the early era of cars.
The challenge is getting automated cars to the point that such modifications become worthwhile.
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=468
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
The most navigable cities I've driven through have a layout where most of the city is a typical grid (often North/South/East/West) but have a few major avenues going at a 45 degree angle (NE/SW and NW/SE) just to help cut across the grid. Most of the cities here also have one expressway looping around the outside of the city and another one cutting through the heart of it - between them, you can get fairly close to your destination pretty fast.
but 127.0.0.1 seems to be just filled with porn
When I was on a business trip a couple of years ago, I used Google Maps to figure out how to get to my hotel. The direction at the end of the journey was to drive through the crash barrier at the side of the highway and fall thirty feet to the hotel parking lot below.
So poor maps and stupid routing software are other potential hazards for 'smart' cars.
your trolling is reaching epic proportions, but just in case you're serious...
1. Look up the pythagorean theorem. It's a^2 + b^2 = c^2, not a+b = 2c
2. Many major cities also have diagonal cross streets, not just north/south and east/west streets.
3. your alternative, cities which were not planned, very rarely have "straight" roads for long distances, so no road in those cities is ever going to get you directly to your destination in the fastest way possible unless it was designed exactly and for the sole purpose of getting people from where you currently are to exactly where you want to go.
Until they got hacked then it is mayhem with no way around it.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
There is no reason for anyone to drive.
Actually I enjoy driving most of the time. But I don't commute or drive in rush hour traffic often.
I work when - guess what - I'm at work. I'm not going to do an extra couple of hours work for free every week by working in my car.
In any case, I like driving. What kind of sad boring person would you have to be to sit with your nose in your laptop ignoring everything around you?
How would driver-less cars change motoring? Well, you see it would be the same except without a human driver who must pay attention to driving.
Next question!
I wouldn't mind having a self driving car, but i have a feeling your view of the intersections of the future wouldn't be safe for pedestrians.
Next thing you know all babies will be created in a test tube.
What if a tire blows out (has happen to me)? What if something goes wrong with the engine? When cars are moving 170-180 KPH with-in cm's of each other, what happens when one car stops working?
What other sites are like slashdot that aren't so f'ed up?
Or how about no one no longer needing to own a car becasue they are autmated and have a car sitting not doing anyting is a waste.
You just pay your 50 bucks a month to be a member of a car pool.
Buses won't be needed any more, fewer parking lots, less congestion.
I suspect there will be different kinds of pools at different cost.
A pool of automated vans that ;pick up 12 people on the way to work, comfort car pool where a luxury car picks yo up. Sports car pool.
It gets real interesting with automated Motor Cycles.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What did he lie about? He has a very specific opinion about effectiveness (or lack thereof) of driverless cars in the environment he lives in. If you have seen the city traffic in some other parts of the world, you will totally 'get' what he means.
I don't think it is possible to produce an automatically driving vehicle for the extremely chaotic and dense traffic conditions in some parts of the world. I would say that Google's driverless car is not designed to work in such environments.
To drive in such traffic you need 'guts and balls' that perhaps algorithms have not yet captured :). If you are too careful you will not move an inch. You have to take calculated risks, fight for your right of way, play some form of game of chicken to convince the other guy that you will not give in an he needs to back-off. Then you have to calibrate your strategy depending on which part of the city you are driving in, whether there is a cop around the corner, whether the adversary seems like an important fellow (some vehicles have designations that signify VIPs) etc etc. Automate that!
No it's not. Efficiency as a metric in city planning fails if the result isn't appealing to residents (present and potential). I thought we learned that when we stopped making concrete jungles and urban housing blocks and turning our cities into inert wastelands.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Oh, so it's unlike any computer controlled device I use today. I've had to reboot (or worse) every electronic device I own at some point because it locked up - every cell phone, PC, DVD player, video game system, MIDI devices. I've had the computer go out on my car before and it needed to be replaced.
And how is bloat not going to be a problem on these? What sort of integration is restricted?
These problems are not going away any time soon. System crashes will happen.
Great! My workday just got longer! Yay!
If only this type of futuristic service existed today. You could even have them move to popular places when they're idle and have them line up in front. Maybe even paint them yellow so they're easier to spot.
They left of this quote from the future: "I fixed y'alls autodrive fer yew. That'll be eight hunnert dollars."
Can't wait until I have to share the road with those!
There are problems with people noticing brake lights, stopping and then resuming flow that computers will not have. MOST of the traffic problems are with people stopping, starting and not knowing how to merge with traffic and other drivers not letting them merge. All of these things will go away and while the actual capacity of the road won't change, it will seem like it has increased because people will get off the roads quicker and the capacity is used more efficiently.
Phantom traffic jams can last for hours, you seem hopelessly stuck going 5 mph or less and then over one hill and its back up to highway speed for no reason, these are Phantom trafic jams, the original source of the problem has been gone for hours, but the backup caused by the backup has caused more backup its like a zombie process for humans, only computers won't have it.
I'm not quite sure the cars will be fully driver-less. Computers have bugs and glitches, and having one of those occur at highway speeds sounds kind of scary. The driver would need to still somewhat pay attention to what is going on in case this happens. That is, unless the fail safe is breaking and pulling over to the shoulder.
Reddit. It's seriously much better at this point, and doesn't have overly paranoid users thinking that anyone who says anything positive about Microsoft or Apple, or validly criticizes Linux and FOSS, is a paid shill.
If I could use my laptop during my commute to/from work, I could shave an hour off my day ....
It could ... or it could add an hours more porn.
accidents would go down, intentionals would go up. It's very easy to make a driverless car screw up, remotely.
you still wouldn't get work done during the commune for all of the reasons that passengers don't today. that's just stupid. if you can do your work from a safe car seat, then your work isn't very important or doesn't require much focus in the first place.
the big change would be something way different -- parking lots. why park nearby when I can send my empty car back home for the day. similarly, why have a car of my own when the car isn't forced to stay with me. car "pooling" can actually be exactly what it says, on a city-wide level. pay a subscription, have access to a car any time. pay more, get a better car. the taxi industry in new york city would change drastically.
but most importantly, you'd lose out on all the fun of driving, if, like me, you enjoy driving.
Someone made an intriguing animation:
http://vimeo.com/37751380
There would be a change in the law enforment economy as there would not be DUI arrests, and they would loose the fines and the cost for jailing would go down. So both sides of the law enformement balance sheet would be affected.
Drinking would become more rampent as there would be no need to stop drinking, just sleep it off in your car in your driveway.
Speeding tickets might go away if the software required speed limit driving only. So that source of income would dry up. They could still stop you for lights not working etc. But we would see a whole new set of taxes and fees increased or created to cover that shortfall (possibly a auto car tax).
A whole segment of lawyers will have to find other things to take a percentage of in court. The courts will have much smaller traffic court activity.
Terroists would only have to hack into your car and cause multi-car accidents on busy expressways to cause havok or run trucks into buildings, possibly in swarms. It will be interesting how the systems will be hardened.
A new equilibrium in the society will have to be reached. I suspect it would take 10 years.
It will be interesting.
Most of these guys do look rather suspicious, but you are reading as much like an astroturfer as they are...
It could decrease fuel consumption in city traffic as well. You wouldn't need to slow down or accelerate all the time, thus saving energy.
Ezekiel 23:20
You think there won't be after market programming for these cars? They can't stop you from rooting your iPhone or Android. New root kits are available within hours of a new "fix" to prevent them.
On the other hand, self driving cars would help in interesting ways. It could drop you off in front of your destination in a big city while you tell it "go park somewhere". Parking would be assigned based on availability and expected duration -- it sure would make airports easier to deal with.
You could take public transportation most days, and if you needed your car for an alternative destination after work or had to leave early, you could have it meet you at the office, or some half way point train station.
Long drive cross-country? Why stop? Just go to sleep and let the car take over for a while.
These are just a few that come time mind.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I don't think Google's car is designed to operate in such environment. I can relate to what you described as perhaps we are from the same region of the world :).
However in such environments, for the people who care to offload the concerns of driving, there is another way: hire a driver. Not true automation, but for his employer, pretty good alternative which will function in the environment you described :). Also affordable in certain regions of the world.
One aspect of driverless cars that people haven't generally noticed is that the cars don't actually need *people*. This is huge.
Your car could take the kids to soccer practice, and pick them up afterwards. It could go out for an oil change while you're at work.
One idea that I like a lot is sending your car out to get groceries. Order online, and when the order is ready the car drives to the shipping station and helpful baggers (human or robot) place your order into the car, which then drives home.
This would be wildly productive for society. You wouldn't have to spend time shopping or traveling to and from the supermarket, and the supermarket wouldn't need a massive display space within easy drive of the city. The groceries "terminal" could be something more akin to a UPS shipping space.
Other useful increases in productivity are: driverless semi trucks which operate continuously (no need to stop and rest every 8 hours of driving), driverless delivery vans (UPS, USPS, &c), driverless delivery of parts to automotive repair shops and so on.
If a neighborhood could coordinate on times, several families could send a single car to pick up everyone's shopping.
Overall, driverless cars should result in an enormous quantum leap in efficiency, productivity, as well as safety.
(sigh) I love drafting a nice post, then clicking OPTIONS below that post, and then LOSING the post I just spent time writing. Really nice. (/sigh)
AMMalena (www.Malena.net) "The avalanche has already begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote." (Kosh, B5)
The first major expense that you would face are the increase of law suits. Lawyers will make out better than Michael Milken on this.
As for insurance you will have to pay more as you still need all of the coverages that you have today, PLUS you will now need a new "driverless" insurance against malfunctions by either the mfg'r or from lack of maintenance on the owners behalf.
While the idea sounds nice to have your own private bus/limo, and I would love it, at the same time I would fear it enough to avoid it for many years to come.
Wow, did Google Maps also not tell you when you had to stop for lights and other cars? I guess automated cars that use only map data and have no awareness of their surroundings will never work, what a shame.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
These visions of old people taking to driving again couldn't become reality because a basic requirement of these automated vehicles would have be manual override capability. Just like autopilot for planes, you really need a qualified driver willing to take control of the vehicle quickly should something unexpected happen that the programmer didn't account for. Sometimes things fall out of the sky, or a police officer needs to take control of an intersection, or a child on a bicycle in front of you is behaving erratically, and you know as an experienced human that he could swing out in front of your vehicle at any time.
Isn't it possible the deployment of self-driving cars AKA Google cars would reduce the chaos and allow the dense traffic to actually move?
Europe has tons of cities which aren't planned like that
When London, Beijing, Cairo, and most other ancient cities were first laid out, their main roads connected little groups of buildings, in whatever way was convenient at the time. Maps didn't exist commonly, let alone a postal service, so the only important measure of efficiency was transit time on foot. With nothing else around them, those roads could be made straight, bending only around geographic features. This is clearly evident in rural Africa, where the roads between farms are generally straight, but run at odd angles.
Newer cities (including all the ones in America, which were all built in the last 500 years) were designed for people and postmen. Cities were expected to have a high population density, so their roads are designed to make the biggest buildings possible: rectangles. Their addressing was designed for efficiency, to the extent where cities like Salt Lake City, Utah have primarily numbered streets, with names being used only for main routes. There are still many odd angles, but they're generally old major routes that the city has grown around. Even landscape is getting ignored in favor of efficiency, with roads often stopping at a river's edge and continuing on the other side.
All of this means that outside America, Google Car has little use.
Conveniently, modern routing algorithms have absolutely no problem with any of these designs. Modern algorithms treat the city as a graph of intersections, knowing what intersections connect to what other intersections, how far apart they are (by time, distance, and even traffic density) and knowing what building numbers are between what intersections. The actual placement of those intersections doesn't matter when planning a route, but only when actually making a map for humans to follow.
In fact they would be fatal to others on the road.
As I'm sure has been pointed out by others by now, this is ridiculous. An automated car can be just as sensitive as any human-driven car, and often moreso. An automated car has cameras and laser sensors on it, that can poll thousands of points each second to construct a map of the world. Unlike humans, the sensors don't suffer from blindness, distraction, or optical illusions. If there's an elephant in front of the car, the car will know that there's an elephant-shaped object in front of it, and it will recognize the turning lights on its ass. the moment they come on.
Also unlike humans, an automated car is capable of communicating with other automated cars on the road. Despite what the summary says, they can tailgate, and they can cut each other off. The difference is that they'll be in constant communication at the time, so that if one car needs to stop, it will give plenty of notice to other cars, who will all apply their brakes at the same time at different strengths, so they will decelerate in unison. Cars traveling a half-meter apart on the highway will stop a half-meter apart, too.
With this communication, it's fully possible for a car to see around corners. Not only are there sonar sensors capable of making a decent guess as to what's approaching, but there are also projects to make stationary sensors, to be placed near intersections. These would watch for regular old dumb cars (and people, cats, dogs, and elephants, too), monitor their position and velocity, and send reports to automated cars in the area, which can then make fully-informed decisions about what to do.
I doubt Google has thought of this and they will be in for a big surprise when nobody but Americans can use them.
I can assure you that Google has thought of this. That's why Google Maps works for routes outside the United States, and why self-driving robots have been a major field of research for a few decades.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Two points
the ggp post you made, #3 is wrong - it wasn't subtle.
Also, Bing maps did appear to be faster than Google maps when I tested it just now, but then again, it's less popular, so it's probably getting hammered less. That being said, it was very confused by rather simple directions request. I'll happily take the 3x longer load time for google maps, since it can not only get me within the right zip code, but to the right place.
Note - this was a simple query - street number, name, and city. Google maps had no trouble, Bing Maps gave me four results, all in the wrong zip coes.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Does anyone else get horrible crippling motion sickness riding as a passenger in a car?
This would not work for me.
"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" - DNA
Pizza delivery, and many other things, don't require an autonomous vehicle to carry human cargo. All it needs is a sufficiently large compartment that is unlocked by a credit card swipe. And of course it doesn't need a big gasoline engine either.
Oh wait! I should patent that...
um... you can do that already if you take the bus. >.>
I wonder about this kind of scenario, since a driverless car won't necessary have quick-thinking-ethics built into critical decision making.
Imagine a scenario where there is an accident or debris suddenly in front of you, and you absolutely cannot stop in time. Your choices are to ram a truck, or ram a pedestrian on the sidewalk.
While many human drivers would hit the truck, the AI would have to be pretty smart to aim for the bigger and harder object instead of the soft and small pedestrian.
There is no reason to have pedestrians and motor vehicles sharing the same space.
Use an overpass/underpass design to keep the cars away from where the pedestrians are. Designate actual bike paths, separate from walkways or motorways.
In areas with large amounts of foot traffic, such as downtown/shopping/dining districts put in car parks a block or two away, and allow only foot traffic -except for designated cargo loading access points (aka alleyways).
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
A disturbing scenario. One would hope there would always be manual mode like in AI.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
I would imagine that auto manufacturers would get a huge initial sales boost for something like this as society converts over. But consider the ramifications:
Taxis and car rentals become fungible. You need a car, you call a number, and it appears 30 minutes later.
The proverbial "two car family" becomes "one car + on-call spare". Why sink tens of thousands in a car that you only use occasionally?
I expect car rental companies will grow, auto manufacturers will shrink (instead of selling X spare cars to families which are only occasionally used, they sell a much smaller Y spare cars to rental companies, which see a much higher usage rate).
Car rental companies who buy by the tens of thousands have more negotiating strength that the average person. That means a reduced profit margin for the manufacturer.
So between the drop in individual sales and the drop in profit margin, I expect the auto industry is going to be more competitive than before. "Competitive" does not usually make stockholders very happy.
Given the strategic position auto manufacturing has in national economies, expect bail-outs instead of bankruptcies. This will further hurt competitor's bottom-line.
Think the auto industry is cutthroat today? Just wait.
Why did your parents choose to isolate themselves?
S
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Hell most of houston wasn't planned until post WW2
But who would drive me to the bus stop?
I would absolutely use a car that had an auto-drive mode. If everyone did, then you wouldn't even need stop lights or other controls at intersections, or speed limits, as the vehicles would work together to melt traffic into a perfect flow. It might be a bit unnerving at first, watching traffic weaving through intersections, but we would get used to it.
Google or not.
I don't know if that is completely true. You still have to account for mechanical failure. A overlord system would have to monitor for such failures externally and space traffic enough so that it can compensate when a failure occurs.
Exactly, European cities are the end result of hundreds or thousands of years of small settlements growing together and merging. Those settlements weren't located on a grid, they were located where the resources were favourable. The roads that formed by inter-settlement traffic then went fairly directly between the settlements, although hills and private estates had to be navigated around. In my opinion these cities feel far more organic and pleasant, but driving around them is more difficult until you know the roads. What people think of as London is actually two cities and hundreds of towns that have all grown together.
Hmmm...
-goes off to patent electrically activated, self darkening windows.. ON A COMPUTER^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H CAR!-
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I was thinking along these lines. I think for urban areas, car ownership will plummet. It could go to non-profit car pools or to a for-profit system. Unless the tendency is for several people in a car (I think unlikely), the average size of cars would go down - think mostly smart car size. A few larger vehicles, pickups, cargo vans, but mostly tiny cars.
I don't think anyone is seriously considering cars without some kind of manual override.
And thus the utopia dies.
Well, we learned a little too late then. I don't know of any city centers that have been built in the US since the '70s.
I LOLed at this.
And of course, that says nothing about how it would revolutionize the statistically very dangerous world of truck driving (though I suspect the truck drivers might not be too happy about that, I'm sure they can get a lobby together to make sure that entirely autonomous semi's never get approved).
I doubt it will come to that. Autonomous individual personal vehicles, maybe, but not the big rigs that transport hazardous / heavy / wide / etc. loads on public roads. We'll still need someone in the hotseat to deal with situations that the computer doesn't recognize, or take over if the autopilot fails out. It could make trucking a whole lot more fuel efficient and less physically taxing on the drivers, but we'd still need them in position and sharp enough to be ready to take over if required.
After all, we recognize the fact that we still need pilots flying planes, even though, technically, today's autopilot systems are pretty much capable of doing everything a pilot has to do during a normal, uneventful flight. It's the potential (and magnitude of consequences) of abnormal, highly eventful flights that keep us needing those highly trained hands and brains on tap in the cockpit.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Eliminate auto insurance, raise taxes a similar amount, and use the money to make raised (or tunneled) crosswalks standard issue in high traffic density areas.
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I think if these take off (and I hope they will) we'll see a substantial increase in miles driven. Not just from people sending their cars back home to get someone else (it will be a while before they allow unoccupied driverless cars, I imagine), but from trips which were previously too tedious. If I can come home from work on Friday evening, get in my self driving car with the family, and wake up in Orlando or Cape Cod, I'm much more likely to take such trips over a weekend. I bet it would double the miles I put on in a year; if everyone was doing that type of thing, it'd put a big strain on gasoline supplies. Hopefully their introduction will tie in to increases in efficiency.
...I'm actually quite excited for them. But
'Your automated car isn't sitting around getting distracted, making a phone call, looking at something it shouldn't be looking at or simply not keeping track of things,'
Let's see if they still make that argument when my car has Siri and Facebook installed. Could give a whole new meaning to crashing. "You really should have went with the dual processor, higher RAM model..."
Not that I think this is a likely scenario either, just having some fun.
As the cars are now, they actually use those human-oriented navigation aids for their own benefit. That's how they can operate safely in spite of weather and surrounding drivers and possible map errors. I'm sure more efficient aids could be designed for automated cars, but that's a bridge we have yet to cross. I can't see the ones we have going away anytime soon, until it becomes illegal to drive cars manually.
It will be interesting to see how network security is handled on automobiles as we'll soon be in an age of constantly connected automobiles. How long until someone remotely hacks into a car and takes control?
I think your premise is right, but for the wrong reasons. Driver-less cars likely will eliminate car ownership, however, it will be in the form of a public commodity. Instead of hopping in my car to drive to the nearest mega-shopping extravaganza, followed by a restaurant, then a movie, I would just hop in the nearest available car, have it drive me to the first destination, then repeat for each subsequent destination. There's no need for the car to park, it can simply join a queue nearby, or head off to the next waiting passenger. You could keep a large portion of the fleet on the road with no reason to ever park anyway. The roads become your vehicle storage area and parking lots go away.
Driverless car = no need to park and wait for me = why not give a ride to someone else originating from my destination = on-demand carriage = very few personal cars.
Driverless is safer = politicians mandate use = no driving for you anyway = why own a car if I can't drive it? = no ownership
There's always the desire to be able to hop in a car and go with no pre-planning, no waiting, no calling for a car to come and waiting until the next available one can arrive, but we're already seeing strong social pressure to forgo some of those conveniences for the sake of reducing emissions and fuel usage. Given the rather large profit motive of being able to effectively charge per mile, the ease of scheduling cars to congregate in areas of high demand at proper times (a lot of cool statistical data modeling that Google is pretty good at doing), and the necessary communications infrastructure to make it all work, it seems the commercial application will be to provide fleet vehicles equivalent to taxi cabs. Taken to a logical conclusion, laws will eventually be passed that prohibit human drivers (since it's the human that adds most of the uncertainty to the equation), and it will become easier and cheaper to simply summon a driverless cab to go anywhere you want to go.
Cross country road trips can also work on the same principle. The logistics become interesting, but not insurmountable. Considering the cars can always drive themselves back to their origin if they aren't needed in the destination city, and you have a simple one-way rental method that simply includes the cost of the return trip as well.
Of course, this entire scheme will have to be nationalized at some point and fully regulated. That would allow cars to be shuttled from city to city and state to state as demand requires. What politician wouldn't love to be able to control how the entire country transports itself? I could see them outlawing "dumb" cars simply so they can hand out goodies in the form of more cars for cities that will vote for them. Imagine the politics then.
I leave it to the reader to decide if this is utopian or dystopian.
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
FTA - "Google's car adheres strictly to the speed limit and follows the rules of the road, says Tom Jacobs, a spokesman for the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles...".. and from the summary... "They would mean fewer traffic jams. 'Congestion would be something you could tell your grandchildren about, once upon a time.'"
Wrong. I know it's counter-intuitive to those who believe strict adherence to current traffic laws is the best way, but according to a study of traffic flow done in 2009, traffic flow actually IMPROVES when some drivers break the laws. The ideal percentage of law-breaking drivers (the speeders, the "jerks who cut you off" and fill in that space in front of you, etc.) was discovered to be about 40%. Above or below that threshold made traffic worse...
So, this means that if cars were actually forced to follow ALL traffic laws to the letter, as this Google system would, traffic would actually get quite a bit worse for everyone, not better, as the summary above incorrectly suggests.
Of course, automated cars COULD over time force some fearmonger-driven (or revenue-driven) draconian traffic laws to be updated or repealed due to automated technology. That's assuming that the government officials could be as cold and logical as the automated cars and their algorithms, however, and that's probably not going to be happening - at least not until Skynet takes over...
BTW - I want no part of a car-tracking system like this. Even if it was designed to be anonymous from the start, certain government officials would sooner or later find a reason to override the anonymity. Maybe it'd be under the auspices of a "per mile tax", "disease/pest vector tracking" "terrorist monitoring", etc., but they'd find an innocuous or necessary enough of a reason to convince 50.1% of us that anonymity is "bad", and it'd all be over.
Or how about no one no longer needing to own a car becasue they are autmated and have a car sitting not doing anyting is a waste.
You just pay your 50 bucks a month to be a member of a car pool.
Buses won't be needed any more, fewer parking lots, less congestion.
I suspect there will be different kinds of pools at different cost.
A pool of automated vans that ;pick up 12 people on the way to work, comfort car pool where a luxury car picks yo up. Sports car pool.
It gets real interesting with automated Motor Cycles.
So...like driverless taxis that accept monthly/annual passes? That would be intriguing...New York would never be the same.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
At least when the weather is nice, shopping downtown could rival the convenience of malls.
'Congestion would be something you could tell your grandchildren about, once upon a time.'
I find that claim highly suspect. Just because a car can self-drive doesn't mean the highways wouldn't be congested. In fact I'd argue that the exact opposite is true.
I live outside of Boston where we had to deal with the Big Dig for roughly a full decade. For those of you unfamiliar with it, this was essentially a project to replace the central elevated highway through the city with a larger underground tunnel (along with other new highway improvements). Before the start of the Big Dig the highway through Boston was designed to handle an estimated 90,000 cars per day, but that capacity was exceeded just one year after the highway had been built in 1960, and traffic jams were commonplace.
Since the completion of the Big Dig there have been studies that suggest the increased capacity of the highway hasn't resulted in less traffic. Instead, more people are now driving (and driving by themselves instead of carpooling) because they see the highways as better able to handle the capacity. If anything the traffic jams are bigger and extending further out from the city.
Driverless cars are likely to invite more people to hop into cars (and likely be alone rather than carpooling), so there will likely be many more cars on the road thanks to this technology. How does having a much larger number of cars, even when some or even most of them are automated, reduce or eliminate traffic/congestion if a road is only designed to handle so many cars per hour/day?
As a motorcylist, I very desparately want to see the day where most of the cars on the road are driverless.
When there's no traffic, cruising along on two wheels is the best thing in the whole world. When the road gets filled up with cagers, however, you start to fear for your life. Motorcycles are effectively invisible to car drivers. No matter how observant, courteous, cautious you think you are, studies have shown that you only *really* pay attention to objects on the road that are a threat to you. Or in other words, vehicles that are as big or bigger than you.
When we have driverless cars, I know I'll feel a lot better around them than their human-handled counterparts. They won't not notice me because they were too busy putting on lipstick via the rear-view mirror. They won't suddenly accelerate or change lanes for no reason at all, or pass me in my own lane. Most importantly, they won't "mess with that biker guy" via brake-checking, tail-gating or otherwise try to get me to crash by coming too close or throwing things at me. (Yes, this actually happens and if you don't believe me I can forward you a few dozen YouTube videos to prove it.)
I would absolutely use a car that had an auto-drive mode. If everyone did, then you wouldn't even need stop lights or other controls at intersections, or speed limits, as the vehicles would work together to melt traffic into a perfect flow. It might be a bit unnerving at first, watching traffic weaving through intersections, but we would get used to it.
Google or not.
That's all well and good, until Suki connects to the control system.
I once had a t-shirt with the 10 laws of Murphy's Laws of Computing. The 10th law said:
"To screw up is human, to screw up royally requires a computer".
I wonder what kind of outcry there will be when a section of a bridge collapses or something, and instead of 1 or 2 dead, hundreds or possibly thousands of cars will drive off it like lemmings to their death. Unforeseen circumstances are just that - unforeseen. When that time comes, will all of you who are pushing this as a good idea take the the responsibility for the death toll?
A huge amount of city planning actually could be called car-planning. Roads, traffic, parking, fines, licencing, pedestrians, safety, refueling, etc. Most importantly, space - roads, parking and car-services stores take up huge amounts of space. Changing the cars changes a lot of how the city works. Every uban planner is always complaing about the limitations cars impose on the possibilities. Look as Masdar cars.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Cruise control allows a car to speed, a driverless car should do the same. Slow drivers cause accidents; not for themselves, but for other drivers. The safest driverless car goes with the flow.
Also, once computers drive most cars the speed limits should increase; speed should be a dynamic, while safety and efficiency should be guiding factors. We need to end backwards thinking.
Presented with two unexpected obstacles with which collision has become inevitable (from mechanical failure or some other reason), which will it choose to steer towards? The blob on the left (a traffic barrel) or the one on the right (a human changing a flat tire)? Or even choosing between hay bales and a concrete pillar?
I'm a tech-savvy person. I've worked in IT for my entire career. Much as I hate distracted/drunk/other impairment drivers, I'm not ready to trust computer-driven cars.
No there would never be a system failure as you go careering from a highway bridge into a school yard full of kids.Ya and Airliners have never crashed while on auto pilot. Ya cant even trust Google to do the right thing anymore and im going to trust them with my and my family's life?? Not a chance.
Jack of all trades,master of none
This is like saying that a human never needs to operate the car, no matter what. Absent that strong interpretation of "driverless cars" , the the human still has to "watch out" and "take over" if things get hairy. That is not a "driverless car" anymore than cars are now "no panic breaking" cars. If something happens, you have to stomp on the brake. You'll only know if something is happening if you're watching. If yo're watching and making decisions, then you're driving.
But imagine such a thing as driverless cars existed. What would that look like? It would be something like the rail system- there's "something " in place to keep you in your lane, to avoid contact with stuff that jumps out at you, like humans and bikes and crap in the road.
Do we have driverless trains?
Perhaps it's something like planes- they're basically driverless. Nevertheless we still require trained pilots.
So given that in no other form of transportation do we have driverless anything, and those forms of transportation are LESS risky and obstacle challenged than driving BY FAR, and also MORE price sensitive and therefore motivated to instantiate such a system, how realistic is this?
OK just pretend then. Suspend disbelief. And there's the problem. Suspending disbelief by that amount requires that we talk about a thing whose specifics are unknowable.
Suffice it to say that programs malfunction and "crash" .
Right. Worst case is about 1.41x, and that's if your blocks are square. The more rectangular they become, the lower the penalty for going around two sides.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You can bicycle to the bus stop? I assume you are not too far from one, and live in an urban environment.
'If you truly trust the intelligence of the vehicle, then you get in the vehicle and you do our work while you're traveling
And if I don't trust the intelligence of the vehicle? Then what? I'm a programmer and as a result of that, I have an inherent distrust of computers, especially if it's autonomously hurtling me around at 70 mph.
And second, I don't want to "do my work" while I'm in the car. I don't understand this interest in always having to be doing something productive. Today was a nice day, so I drove into work with the top down, enjoying the weather, and listening to the radio, and I don't feel that time was wasted at all.
I would like to go to a bar with friends without one of them suffering the fate of the designated driver.
On the other hand, if you have a problem with drunk dialing, imagine if you had a car that could drive you to your ex's house with a voice command...
The last science fiction story I'd read with automated driving as a significant story element was the second book from Kim Stanley Robinson's California Trilogy, The Gold Coast, where cars powered inductively via cables buried in the roadways usually ran on autopilot once one was onto major streets or an expressway. But, chaos creeps into all systems, man-made or not, and a couple cruising effortlessly down a freeway in dense - but high speed - traffic could suddenly find themselves awaiting the jaws of life to extract them from the resulting tangle of aluminum, glass, and plastic.
However, I would expect the crash rate to go down significantly, once almost everyone was on the same system. During the transition, the rate would likely go up a bit, as a subset of drivers pitted their increasingly irrelevant subconscious driving psychology against the software in other vehicles.
As others have pointed out, the need for auto insurance wouldn't go away, physical insults against a vehicle's appearance and performance coming from a number of chaotic elements other than getting t-boned at an intersection. I'm sure claims would drop dramatically, but remain far from zero.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Julian Beever and Edgar Mueller would join the ranks of graffiti arts and be arrested for obstruction of traffic because these driver-less cars would likely fail to recognize the difference between an object and a road with an illusion drawn on it.
What the hell is motoring?
Efficiency and navigatability, plus, as opposed to London, most American cities have several thousand years worth of city road building experience built right in.
I suspect you mean thousands of years of road building experience built RIGHT OUT.
Instead of having to make all those mistakes that you must accept forever, (because the cost to undo them is too high) cities developed later tend to be developed better. Learning from the mistakes of the past.
But in any event, I fail to see how this issue affects driverless cars. After all, its all in the maps.
Narrow twisting one way streets would be avoided, just like any good GPS Nav unit avoids them now, unless your destination is one such a street. Route preference can be built into the maps as well. I don't see old-city design issues being a major impediment. Speeds are slower in these places, and the guidance system has time to react.
Italian drivers are another issue.
What worries me is the increasing incidence of big-rig drivers to run GPS Jammers just so their cargo can't track its own route. I've had my GPS jump two states away just because an 18 wheeler pulled up behind me. I whipped out my phone only to find it couldn't get a fix either. 10 miles this went on, then the trucker tuned onto a different highway, and everything went back to normal.
Can the Google cars handle this?
Do they have inertial nav, or dead reckoning built in for GPS failures, or do they just rely on following a lane to its destination?
See-vehicle - Avoid vehicle, See Lane - Stay in Lane?
Do they hit the pot hole at 50mph that the car in front drifted slightly left to avoid?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Driverless car is a car that, by definition, is a perfectly law-abiding driver.
One, trips will take longer, as the car will adhere strictly to speed limits, won't roll through empty intersections, and will always drive within its limits. It won't drive without its registration (verified wirelessly with the DMV)
For another, this means no more traffic tickets, which are a huge source of revenue for the city and state. What's more, revenues from gasoline taxes will go down as well, as a car that isn't speeding is a more efficient car. This will dramatically increase property and income taxes.
I'm OK with this, as traffic fines were essentially a regressive tax, applied inequitably to minorities and the poor at the whim of the police.
My two most recent auto insurance claims were a deer hitting me (I obviously had the right of way on the interstate) which was over $2500 and it just got hailed on by tennis ball sized hail and totalled the car. While it sucked, it would have sucked more without insurance.
simple, fast homepage with your links: http://www.ngumbi.com/
Letsee... an AI that always will get better with time versus a human behind the wheel who is pissed off, nervous, drunk, stoned, high, tweaking, huffing, or just otherwise in some state not fit to operate a multi-ton vehicle.
I'll take the AI.
This site died long ago, and the paid astroturfing you are complaining about is the reason why. Time to put 127.0.0.1 in the hosts table again for slashdot.org.
And yet you post.....?!
The mind boggles.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
It would likely make little difference in time or levels of congestion. In fact it would likely put more cars on the road going slower, albeit with fewer accidents. But in around town driving, while people are straight retarded when it comes to making left turns, eventually, because no one will ever yield, you just go for it and hope for the best. I don't see automated cars making left turns into traffic which NEVER EVER YIELDS being any more effective or efficient at that. Moreover lights are designed to SLOW traffic down, not speed it up. So making sure no one runs a red light or leaves early isn't going to improve on the flow which experiences that now.
Where it will or could improve things is what I can the fat bastard asshole syndrome. Those people in front of you who cannot stomp their hoof on the gas when the light eventually turns green. For some reason they're messing with their phone, scarfing down fries, scratching their ass, yelling at their kids or all of those things at the same time and the miss the light completely. Or, they feel a need to let every single bicycle, pedestrian, baby stroller in the entire known universe cross in front of them so they can finally go after the light turns red again.
But on the whole, what I see is a bunch of drunk stupid shitheads driving randomly all over the road at all times. I don't know if machines can compete successfully when most of the cars on the road are barely aimed by morons. Last but not least you and I know that if this were to ever be ,mainstream the FIRST thing that would happen is that a million rednecks and homies would Youtube themselves sitting on the roof of the car as it drove around. After a few thousand fell off and got killed, every state government would REQUIRE that a person must be driving the car along with the computer to 'ensure safety' and thereby killing the whole concept.
Oh and I forgot, your insurance rates would not go down even if the number of accidents dropped to zero. Because your rates never go down.
We were promised Flying Cars to solve all the same problems.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The difference is that they'll be in constant communication at the time, so that if one car needs to stop, it will give plenty of notice to other cars, who will all apply their brakes at the same time at different strengths, so they will decelerate in unison. Cars traveling a half-meter apart on the highway will stop a half-meter apart, too.
I wonder about this. You make the assumption that all vehicles are created equally. My little red sports car has a different stopping distance than the SUV carrying a family of four and their dog. And at least in areas like Southern California, where you are what you drive, I don't think everybody is going to run out and buy identical pods.
doesn't have overly paranoid users thinking that anyone who says anything positive about Microsoft or Apple, or validly criticizes Linux and FOSS
Reddit has invisible barriers. Voluntary barriers actually. If you don't follow Linux you won't subscribe to any of the Linux subreddits and you never see positive posts about Linux. (Or alternatively: Windows) However, if you express frustration or distaste for the product of topic, you'll get down modded into oblivion. Compare that to Slashdot's single facing main news page and you can see (hopefully) why. If Reddit forced every main story to the front page for every logged in user you'd get a lot of people commenting negatively on "New Microsoft app has Ribbon" stories popping up on their main page. With subscriptions though, you would likely never see this story unless you subscribe to /r/microsoft
Reddit makes for a great echo chamber. You can subscribe to your favorite topics and get all warm fuzzy news about it all day long and anything that seems too critical will be quickly shunned.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
we're already seeing strong social pressure to forgo some of those conveniences for the sake of reducing emissions and fuel usage.
Except that the real reason we are seeing that pressure is control. This is about who gets to control where you go and when you go. Just as the push for reducing emissions and fuel usage is driven more by a desire to control people's behavior than it is by a concern for the environment.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
You keep saying 'will' and 'would'; I think you meant 'could', 'might' and 'hypothetically but unlikely'.
In order: system costs: stagnant incomes over the last 30 years are a greater risk to who can afford what than the depreciated cost of autonomous tech. What you're complaining about here is akin to thinking cars became unaffordable due to OnStar. Visit any used car lot with cars under $2000 and you'll see an increasing number have airbags, even though the **replacement** cost of a couple airbags is $1400-1800. Besides, at some point in automotive autonomy, about half of my 'pick up kids', 'take kid to soccer practice', 'pay X for something my kid signed up for' PITA's that waste a few hours of my household's adult time become the seriously sweet: "tell car to get/deliver X". For people just scraping by while working 2-3 crappy jobs, that could be amazingly helpful. Especially in the 80% of america where public transit (or even bike/pedestrian-friendly paths) don't exist. Ditto for seniors with failing senses. Ditto for long family trips: parents are too tired from work to drive HOURS to a family party over the weekend, but if dad or mom can doze in the pDriverseat and we just wake up in Sheboygan.... SWEET!
Authorized Roads: I'm pretty sure that nobody's even remotely to a point where your car gets to overrule you. If we get there, maybe I'm ok with being able to ban dumbass kids from leaving ruts across my fields in spring.
Roadmap Updates: First, from a sensor perspective: it can't just be GIS/GPS data -- that alone doesn't let a car drive safely. And given how quickly reality stops resembling GIS/GPS, there's little chance a car will ever be able to consider GIS/GPS as a primary decision source. Detours (especially crisis-caliber-but-geophysically-tiny ones, like some temporary asphalt laid to let cars avoid a huge hole excavated in a roadway) and hackers and overrides FTW.
Since considering these is a good idea, here are some others:
Waste / Carbon Dioxide / Peak Oil / Global Warming: Removing the opportunity cost of having to drive a car might dramatically increase miles driven annually, since the car might evolve from dumb tool into a much busier courier.
Elasticity of Traffic Demand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Other paradoxes of tweaking the ease of driving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs-Thomson_paradox , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox
At the 2nd of 3rd generation of driverless cars. As a second priority,after a few years of use, consequence of many people having automated routing, driverless, more secure, economical and faster cars. After the end of faulty drivers causing accidents, cars get much smaller, lighter, and faster. The only reason we cant go 120mph all the time is accidents, most people couldnt even control the vehicle.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
That really depends on how the system in the car responds to traffic. If they respond like people and accelerate and decelerate rapidly in response to the stimulus of another car moving, then we're not going to have a much better commute time. There will be some gains as (assuming something like a 95% driver-less car density) in that there will be fewer accidents and fewer people driving erratically, but if the patterns of movement don't change, traffic won't either.
Building in a larger buffer between cars and giving preference to a lower average speed in traffic to a higher burst speed would go a long way in alleviating jams. Even driving like this in traditional cars helps, but not if you're the only one.
Nearest bus stop is about 2 miles away (not too bad, just very hilly)... but what do I do with my bike once I get there? Don't think it would fit on the bus too well. And what about the six months a year that it tends to be very cold and snowy? Or the other six months of the year where it rains almost as much as not? And then there's the fact taking the bus would be two hours each way instead of 30 minutes. I'd have to get up at 4:30 instead of 6 and wouldn't get home until at least 7pm. Hardly ideal.
They definitely wouldn't be one of those drivers that thinks they can travel down an alternate lane until the very last minute and cut over causing both lanes to have to accommodate, but they likely will be the cars that travel three wide going the same speed because that happens to be the speed limit and somehow the right lane was triggered to slow down causing the others to pass.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Mini-cars that that are automatic and take you door-to-door. The cars can be private or public. That's called a PRT system, which has been implemented in Masdar.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Now, Google can deliver your eyeballs to advertisers by routing the vehicle past billboards that have paid them to do so. Also, I can see the nanny state evolving into this: The car says --- "I'm sorry, Dave. This would be your fourth trip to a pizza parlor this month. According to clause 123.62.21 5(b) of the Citizen Obesity Prevention Act of 2014 this trip is being re-directed to Veggie Heaven. The order for your salad has already been placed for you, Dave. Enjoy your salad, Dave. Following your dinner, you will be delivered to the gym to complete your required one hour on a treadmill. Have a nice day, Dave."
Your "fair share" is NOT in my wallet.
There would be so many things that would save money with cars and roads designed for auto-driving cars:
Cars about to break down can be moved off highways and to nearby garages before they obstruct traffic. If they do obstruct traffic, things can be easily routed around.
Intersections with pedestrians and bicyclists would be better for them. Cars WILL stop and STAY stopped when the other traffic on the road gets the green light. No buzzing cyclists, no mirrors brushing pedestrian shoulders, no ignored crosswalks.
Intersections between highways can be made into simple four-way ones, with the car computers slowing down or speeding up traffic so cars can zoom through at near full speed without colliding.
Construction workers don't have to worry, because cars will route around them automatically.
If done right with cars having an electric subsystem, cars can pull over and refuel/recharge automatically. This would be nice for RV-ers who could sleep, read a book, troll Slashdot, or hop in the shower while letting the vehicle do the driving for them. To boot, instead of having to tow a "toad" behind the motorhome, it could follow autonomously.
It would allow people to not have to have a car, but yet have full freedom to go places, if someone set up a pool of self-driving vehicles that would be ready when the commuter needed to go places.
There are just so many transport logistic problems that would be solved for the everyday person here in the US by self-driving cars. Car in shop? Get a ride home, when the vehicle is done, it drives to the house or office ready to go.
Aircraft autopilot failures are exceptionally rare, and considering how they have to deal with a much more complex environment I can say that I'd trust the driverless car a lot more than I'd trust someone on the phone, emotionally distressed, or chemically impaired.
I guess pedestrians can be planned for just as other cars can. Separate roadways, levels, or sensors and driving system avoidance.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
The demos of Google's system show human detection and avoidance. Hit the walk button, all the cars stop for you.
I bet it will take people who prefer to do their own driving about three seconds to figure out that the driverless cars will have all kinds of collision avoidance hardware/software built in.
This will make aggressive driving 'way, 'way more fun. ;-)
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I think that it is very likely that a family will still own a single car (or maybe more), as in the GP. At least, in the foreseeable future. This is in part because people take care of their own toys, but they do not care as much about our toys. Just take a ride on any public transportation - overall, it is usually kept in pretty good shape, but you can always see where some jackass took a knife or lighter to a seat. Also, because people like to have the car they are in kept how they are comfortable with it - my parents cars are always clean on the inside, but I know people who almost constantly have at least one old bag of fast food wrappers on the floor in the back. And finally, I think that having a car at your disposal is probably too well worked into people's lives at this point (at least, in any part of the world where this will make a difference). However, I do think that you are right that there will be car pools; but as an addition to ownership, because then the kids can get to school in the family car while a parent commutes at the same time in the opposite direction. I know I would probably go that way with it.
Wait, Houston has planning?
Given a choice between Google's AI, or the guy in the other vehicle who is probably incapacitated by some form of recreational substances, i'll take the AI. We already deal with hostile/oblivious/incapable people behind the wheel. At least the AI will be consistent and improve over time with regard to driving decisions.
Where AIs succeed where people fail are reaction times. Where a rear-ender occurs because someone weaved in a lane, paniced, and brake-checked, an AI would have already detected the event and the vehicle would have slowed down, possibly announcing via some wireless mesh about the emergency stop, causing other car AIs to be able to slow down without as much force. For the most part, the only communication between meat drivers on the road is a middle finger.
Wasn't there just a story on slashdot regarding positive bias? This article smacks of it!
Before there could be any statistical reduction in accidents, traffic jams, improved commute times, etc. Enough drivers have to switch over to automated cars to make a difference. For instance, these cars have been tested in California for quite some time, and yet there has been no impact on the overall accident rate or traffic conditions. Why not? Because there aren't enough of them to make a difference, yet.
Driver errors are only one problem. What about natural occurrences? When driving along ocean highway and the rocks give way in front of you ("Beware of falling rocks"), how will such a vehicle be able to sense that the rocks are about to fall? I have no problem that it can sense that they did fall and avoid them in the road, but if they are in the process of falling, what then? Likewise, with animals and tree limbs, etc.
We can't even predict, with 100% accuracy, where a thunderstorm is going to go. How do we think a car will be able to take in all of the data analyze it and figure out what to do?
NOTE: I am not claiming that the thing won't be safer than people driving cars. I am only questioning the hype and hyperbole surrounding what is being said by supposed experts as to what will happen. To claim one of these cars will end all of our problems is ludicrous. The last time such a claim was made was just over 100 years ago with a ship named Titanic.
There is no reason for anyone to drive.
Thank you for trying to tell people such as myself what we can and cannot do. I like driving. The visceral fell of shifting gears, pushing ones car through the corners, spinning in parking lots when it snows (when no one else is around).
This seeming need to reduce everything to a binary value is getting on my nerves. From people on here bragging about how they don't have to waste time going out shopping because they can order online, to people, such as yourself, who seem to look down on or dismiss anyone who would dare to do anything so pedestrian as drive a vehicle. The horror that someone might enjoy driving a car for its own sake!
Further, I have yet to find any piece of software, put in a similar environment, which does what it is supposed to do 100% of the entire. There has not (yet) been developed anything that will work the way Google thinks it will without some issue cropping up at the most inopportune time or which seemingly decides to what it wants at random. Not to mention the endless hours the various crackers will spend trying to get in and finagle the software in the car itself. See overclockers and modders for prime examples.
If you want to eat, sleep, work on your way to Tahoe, get a bus or train. There are those of us who will enjoy the growl of an engine as we wing our way to our destination, doing what we want, when we want, without having to confer with a computer.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Straight line: Nowhere in the world do you get a straight line for most routes. Only in small roadside towns, and the salt flats. Not even planes fly in a straight line to their destination - there are designated flight paths - air roads, if you wish.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
autopilot does not cover all and bad sensor reads can end up with a very bad crash happening.
That can be part of the communication. In previous braking maneuvers, the car monitors how its speed decreases with braking force. That gives the computer an estimate of (brake condition + vehicle weight + occupancy + road condition), which can be broadcast to cars it travels with. Those cars can then apply less force than usual to accommodate a slower-stopping car. Effectively, your little red sports car will reduce itself to the stopping rate of the dog-toting SUV.
Now, these things I speak of are theoretical, of course... I know there were some tests in the 90's and early 2000's of such systems mounted in disparate vehicles on closed courses, but I don't know if features like this are realistic expectations for Google or others in the near future, as I've been out of touch with that field.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
so pedestrian over / underpasses will need to be put in all over the place?
You could make this same argument for any safety system - airbags added to the cost of the vehicle, and yet, most cars come with them now.
It would probably also lead to the development of affordable car sharing (think: zipcar, but where the car can come pick you up) services - why buy a car, when you can get a vehicle sent to your house to take you where you want to go at any hour? I suspect that the availability of reliable services like this would mean many people would choose *not to own* a vehicle. Let somebody else worry about maintenance, upkeep, etc, I'll just pay for transportation as I need it. In fact, mass transit systems already operate on this same principle.
There will come a point where having a car at your door within 10-20 minutes of your request, ready to take you wherever you want to go for a reasonable fee, will be cheaper than car ownership, parking fees, maintenance costs, insurance costs, fuel costs, etc. The cost of the vehicle will be shared with the other people who use that car during the day when you're not paying for it to be parked in the lot behind your building.
"Car ownership" may become a status symbol of the rich, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the poor people's quality of life will suffer from not owning a car. In fact, they might actually save a lot of money that they can put to use elsewhere in their household.
You might look into the prototypical city of the future called Masdar City. You could not even own a car, even an electric one in Masdar City. If you drove to such a place, you would have to leave it on the outskirts of the city and use the driverless personal transport system built into the city itself.
We'll play around with a few driverless privately owned cars on the current roadways and then they suggestion that we turn all the cars over to a community based co-op and no one actually owns a car of their own is the next step.
Level 1: automobile traffic, garage entrances
Level 2: pedestrians only (an elevated platform from building to building... plenty of room to walk)
With autonomous drivers, there's no real need for street signs/business signs. Just tell your car where to go and it takes you to the nearest garage. From there, you can walk up (or escalator/elevator) to level 2 where the storefronts are. The only problem is that the cities/buildings aren't designed for that. ;)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
It would also eliminate the arms race of people having to buy bigger and bigger vehicles so they have a better chance of surviving a wreck. If an AI is moving vehicles around, what would matter would be the creature comforts in the vehicle, and not the size of the gold-plated plastic testicles hanging off the rear bumper.
Cars would be chosen for what amenities they sported, be it an entertainment center, a wet bar, couches that jack-knifed into beds so one could sleep during a long commute, showers, and so on. On a long commute, one could just get out of bed at home, hop in the vehicle, take a shower and eat on the trip, saving time.
And building a nationwide infrastructure of above ground (or below ground) roads is cheap and what? parking garages every block since there needs to be something that allows a car driver to become a pedestrian without mixing the two in the same space. And your designated handicap free zones are kindof bad too. (Me thinks this problem is a bit more difficult to solve than you are thinking. It might really be easier to make cars smart enough to know when there's a pedestrian in the road or about to cross.
Each technology is double-edged, but IMHO, the benefits outweigh the cons. Yes, in some scenario, the government could press a button and strand every single citizen by taking away their cars, but they can easily do that now (demand GM send the "OMG, I'm stolen, stop right now" signal to all OnStar vehicles, and it would accomplish the same thing.)
Personally, if given the choice, I'd rather be able to get in a vehicle, read a book, and catch a snooze on the ride to work than have to actively deal with the general insanity. There are just too many benefits for everyone involved with self-driving cars for this technology to be ignored, especially with cities that cannot or will not expand road infrastructure.
Why would anyone ever buy a Porsche, or Vette or even a high powered Camero again..if you couldn't take it out on the streets and drive it like you would today?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
can't wait for a self driven car. It will be a revolution in private transportation.
Likely it will evolve quickly through driverless > self-parking > self-fueling > outsourced service, until you simply make a call, say where you want to go, and something shows up and takes you there.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
The automated cars never exceed the speed limit, and will act inhumanly fast to avoid a collision so I can imagine a lot of drivers cutting closely in front of them and doing other dangerous things. The computers won't even honk or flip them off.
At some point we might even decide that people are too dangerous to allow onto busy roads.
Sure, if you want to sit next to smelly bums/street people....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
What happens when the lights are out and a cop is directing traffic? Especially on a really wide boulevard with multiple left turn lanes etc. Does the car have a "Norman coordinate!" button?
We can't afford the crumbling infrastructure we currently have, much less tear everything down, and start from scratch...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
For the simple pleasure of driving. That's why. Just because you find it a chore (or so you seem to imply), doesn't mean we all do. My record for longest drive is 26 hours stopping only for the necessities.
How can self-driven cars co-exist with driverless cars? It needs to be all or nothing, or else the driverless cars will slow to a crawl trying to avoid every bad or aggressive self-driven car out there.
There will certainly be some pain. Suppose the first step is to make the Interstate highways auto-drive only? People would rightfully object to that.
GPS is not even close to being enough data to drive cars. It has to be intensely based on sensors and cameras, with some extreme image processing, environment building, and prediction. Tons of unpredictable things happen in traffic, that depend on vision. Seeing signs, road stripes, seeing the road when the stripes are wrong, the other cars, predicting the other cars actions, seeing and predicting actions for pedestrians and bicycles, seeing brake lights, debri and obstacles on the road, etc.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
No, we forgot everything you learned until we started to head west. Boston vs Chicago.
Houston is unique among large American cities in that it doesn't have zoning. It does, however, have private CCRs covering some tracts which creates a private zoning of sorts. Nevertheless, there is more freedom in Houston and the ability of people to open some types of small businesses in their homes without fear of zoning restrictions has been cited as one benefit. For those who prefer "manicured lawns", attractions like the beer bottle house are seen as a pitfall. If Houston were not located in southeast Texas (miserable climate) it woulud be really interesting.
You could have cars traveling 100 mph almost bumper to bumper on highways that are currently at 55mph. This would allow you to have more roads designated cars-only to avoid many of the pitfalls of mixed traffic. The next step will likely be driverless cars with the option to switch to manual (think Demolition Man) for areas that are not driverless-friendly.
What part of the driveless-car AI suspends the laws of physics? No more traffic? So has Google rewritten the rules of fluid dynamics?
"100 mph almost bumper to bumper on highways that are currently at 55mph"? So the AI-driven car won't have any mass or momentum? You think the people inside the car won't mind being throw around the interior as they whip around curves designed for slower speeds? Heck, maybe they'll enjoy a sudden introduction to the dashboard when the AI slams on the brakes.
So the AI will respond to conditions faster than a human driver. How does that change the speed rating on your tires? Or lessen the braking distance of the car?
I don't see where all this magic is coming from.
No one to give the finger to!!
Ya know what your right there are plenty of jerks behind the wheel. But I want control of my car not some mega corporation like Google whose first and foremost responsibility is to its stock holders not car drivers. Too much control has been handed over already.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I would like to add, there are cities/areas that do have a 'looks like a bowl of spaghetti' lay out to them in the us: Schenectady, NY. Granted there's a number of 'gridded' sections as parts were built and/or replaced, but it's quite the maze and getting from point A to point B requires a map if you haven't been there before.
They would also dramatically increase the ability to share cars, dramatically decrease the cost of a taxi, to the point where needing to own a car would be much less necessary. Even if you doubled the price, making it sharable by a group would significantly decrease the total per person cost.
You're not going to get a much better commute time as long as there are other cars on the road trying to do different things. As for large buffers I assume you mean the space between cars. If all drivers left a large space between cars there would be fewer cars on the highways and drivers would have to wait longer to merge into those highways during peak hours. If they strictly only merged when there was a big enough gap they might only be able to merge onto the highway after the peak hour traffic has passed ;). Whereas if they went in anyway they would cause the car behind to slow down because that driver will try to maintain a large gap and so have to slow down and that slow down will cause all the cars behind to slow down. Once there are enough cars trying to merge regardless of the gap, the traffic will come to a stop. And you get traffic jam.
I really would like to know how well the driver-less car system detects objects and obstacles. Because once in a while I see trucks and other vehicles that illegally carry stuff that sticks out past their rear bumper. So if the driver-less car's sensors and lasers don't pick those up the passengers might get impaled when the AI tries to drive up to the offending truck at a stop.
If Google's driver-less car actually requires a human driver to pay attention all the time to back it up then it's not really good enough for most people. The tech has to improve to be at least 10 times safer than the average human, then most humans will be willing to give up control the way they give up control when using an elevator or passenger airplane.
What makes you think so? I'm very much in favor of reducing pollution and the use of fuel, but this is for environmental and efficiency reasons. If cars (and a car centric lifestyle) were not harmful or wasteful, I really wouldn't give a crap.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
You realize it's not pure GPS as there is a margin of error right?
The car also has sensor that detect objects around it / in front. GPS isn't reliable enough to purely drive on that.
What about other cars? It would hit them if it didn't.
GPS navigation is good for general location. People should still need to know how to drive, and if the car detects an issue with a route, it can slow down, stop and require the users to take over / recheck reset destination.
I'll be looking down at you all from my pilotless jetpack!
"It gets real interesting with automated Motor Cycles."
Ha, as a motorcycle relies on a riders balance, that simply isn't possible, not without some amazing gyroscopes or something.
Sorry but auto insurance will not be going away any time soon in the US. Insurance companies will simply pay more lobby dollars to generate laws which prevent that.
Chances are insurance companies will place all driverless liability on the manufacturer and expect them to pay for this. The manufacture will then buffer the potential costs + some extra as an additional fee when purchasing the driverless option.
You as a consumer will then have to fight with both the insurance company AND the auto maker to determine if any claims were due entirely to driverless OR human error.
Actually, your boss will still want you in 8 hours a day (Did I say 8? I meant 9 because you get a lunch, that you're expected to work through). Now you'll just also be expected to work on your commute, too.
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Rare but they DO happen. How do i know the person who put the car together was not impaired while at works? There are NO guarantees in life
Jack of all trades,master of none
"Take the next exit, please, car."
"I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave."
"Why not?"
"We both know that you only want to stop to get a cheeseburger, and your home health system tells me your cholesterol is too high."
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
What systems do these cars have for collision avoidance?
Granted, we've all sat there in the midst of an open highway and thought "gad, I wish I had a computer to drive this, it could do it" but when an animal or, god forbid, a child runs out - what are the parameters, response time, and strengths/weaknesses of of the systems in-place?
Driving is less about the routine, than being prepared at all times for the UNexpected.
-Styopa
Better yet legalize and tax drugs, reduce police force and put that money toward pedestrian bridges. No need to worry about drug use nearly as much if people aren't driving under the influence, and if all of the carts are following traffic laws no need for as heavy police enforcement.
However, the AI really has to be good to drive properly. For example - see a puddle of water - drive around it because there could be a deep pothole (or an open manhole) under the water. In my city, potholes are really common (to the point that some streets are worse than unpaved roads) so driving there means sometimes going to the opposite lane to avoid a pothole (checking to see if there are no incoming cars of course) or driving very slowly (walking speed) into the pothole if there is no way around it.
Where AIs succeed where people fail are reaction times.
Agreed, but where AIs fail is the decision making - people are much better at making new decisions than a computer is. All possible decisions have to be programmed in the PC.
All cars in the U.S. come with airbags now...because the government mandates them. They have increased the total cost of ownership of automobiles more than most people realize and are going to shorten the useful life an an automobile by a significant amount. We are just starting to come into the time period where the typical "old, but not antique" car on the road was manufactured after the government mandated airbags. There is some question as to how long an undeployed airbag remains functional. However, in an older car, if the airbag deploys, the cost of replacing the airbag probably means that the car is totaled as the cost of replacing the airbags will exceed the value of the car.
Based on my experience, if the system you postulate comes into existence the cost of it will exceed the cost of owning a car over the current lifespan of a car. It will be a very profitable business for some and like many such businesses the government will impose barriers to entry to protect the profits of the early entrants to the field (unless they are competing against someone with better political connections).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
A long useless commute is one of the factors that keep exurbs from growing. If people can work, play angry birds, etc. while their car drives them to work that is one less factor when deciding if they want to live in their inexpensive large houses sitting on cheap land. Now switch the car to electric and recharge at work and you've eliminated a large commuting cost for people living in the exurbs.
Not to mention the endless hours the various crackers will spend trying to get in and finagle the software in the car itself. See overclockers and modders for prime examples.
One of the first modes probably will be a way to override the speed limit so the AI can speed. Just tell it the speed limit is 60km/h instead of 50 in the city and enjoy speeding.
taking the bus would make my commuting time 6 times as long as driving
Actually, the environment in which an aircraft operates is significantly simpler than that in which a ground vehicle must operate. There's a reason why aircraft autopilots existed decades ago and we still don't really have automotive "autopilot."
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
See, for example, "Effect of adaptive cruise control systems on traffic flow.", Davis LC., which suggests that if just 20% of drivers used ACC we'd eliminate traffic jams (although traffic would flow more slowly at high densities, it wouldn't have the non-laminar jam behavior it does now). So, yes, depending on how you define "congestion", it could happen with a fairly low adoption rate.
And others have mentioned that you could also have closer follow distance, so you could probably at least double vehicles per lane-hour throughput.
On an open road where oncoming traffic precludes passing, where you could easily go 10 or 15 over, and the damned thing
just puts along doing just the limit, with 20 cars stuck behind it. Grrrr
Anyone taking bets on how long until we see the first "Carpool is 1 or more persons per vehicle" sign?
I guess it depends on your location. But people who want to work during their commute, can choose a location that is not too far by public transport and a bicycle ride. Many transit agencies have bike racks, and allow a limited number of bikes on board. I personally, find the bicycle ride just enough to warm up for the day, and enjoy the train commute. Its mostly for emails, but I do get a decent amount of work done. For snow/rain forecast, I use my bad weather bike (it does not snow in North California, so I have not tested it, but should not have problem in moderate snow). On other days, I use a road bike. I always carry rain gear, and one additional layer, that helps with rain and cold.
No not really. We'll still need insurance for accidental damage and theft, as others have pointed out.
Now, if I made my living delivering pizzas for a living, i'd be a little more concerned. Imagine if you will, ordering a pizza from a local joint, and sending your car to pick it up. Cook walks out to the parked car in the spot designated for auto-deliverly pickup, waves the recipt over the optical scanner, some compartment/door opens on the car, puts in the pizza and walks off while the car drives it home.
Such things would show up in the more expensive cars at first of course, but I could see entire industries developing around this. Heck, we dont buy groceries online because the hard part is getting them home in the first place. This sorta takes care of that problem. Wouldn't even need to be your car, you could build an entire company around a driverless food delivery service for a major city. Want McDonalds? Sure! The Nickle Company? No problem! Who needs to deliver, when the car does it for you?
Europe has tons of cities which aren't planned like that (hell, London too!) and Asia even more
I think lack of city planning is pretty much universal. Look at this map which was even more retarded before they closed the rail road crossing on Hiland. Cross the tracks and you're not on Highland any more, you're on Iles... for two blocks, then you're on East Oberlin for five blocks, and it ends on 11th street.
On top of that there are little traffic laws and/or people don't follow them so closely. You drive carefully and defensively, not aggressively. You consider other drivers too. Also, when stopped at lights all the motorbikes go around the cars to get to the front...
I think they pretty much addressed those concerns with their testing. It's not like the car's going to be blindly following a map and GPS like some idiot humans do (often to the point of driving into a river or over a cliff). An self-driving car will be far safer than a human-driven one just for the reasons you pointed out that they wouldn't.
many places you also cannot see if someone is coming behind a corner. You honk to let them know.
I'm pretty sure the horn will still be accessible to you. I'm also pretty sure you don't have a clue how these self-driving cars work in the first place, judging from your comment.
Free Martian Whores!
Top Gear would be pretty boring for one. Unless they built driverless cars using 5,000$ and then had to complete several challenges. Then it would be entertaining! :)
Most are forgetting to take in to account that some people, and most in Asian countries, ride motorcycles, and or bicycles. This throws a huge wrench into the works causing it to fail. Just watch the Top Gear Vietnam episode to get a feel for what thousands of bikes on a street can do.
The best part is, if the government finds you to be in the unwanted part of the society, they can simply lock the doors, and drive your car with you inside it, straight to the barial grounds somewhere...
That depends on whether or not you factor in the life-saving (and thus labor-saving, and medical-expense saving) nature of airbags. Estimates suggest that the newest mandated side-curtain airbags will add about $33 to the cost of the vehicle. Cost of *replacement* after deployment seems to be in the 500-1500 range.
Since I can't find any references on the additional cost of front airbags, I'll assume it's a similar per-vehicle cost; I'd be surprised if it was much more than $100 per vehicle more for front airbags.
So, let's assume worst case scenario: you're in a car wreck, and driver & passenger front & both side airbags deploy. Your car's cost was increased by, let's say $200, by the inclusion of those airbags; You find your airbags are $1000 per airbag to replace. Total cost to you for those airbags: $4200.
Now, do a little math for me - how much medical care does $4200 buy you? (If you answered "not much," you're correct.) Now consider, you avoided some major injuries because of the air bags, and you're back at work in days, rather than weeks or months? Remember that the working-class guy who makes $40k a year is also the one who can't afford to be out of work for months, too, or who can least afford to be out of work on disability for the rest of his life. They are effective insurance, and rather cheap insurance when you figure in the lifespan of the vehicle.
Nah, once you get a job that's worthwhile (and a decent boss too) you're paid for what you do, not just being another warm body that shows up on time and leaves on time. As it is, I can usually leave early/come in late if all of my work is done and there's nothing readily available for me to help with. I haven't touched a timeclock since before college.
Why would anyone ever buy a Porsche, or Vette or even a high powered Camero again..if you couldn't take it out on the streets and drive it like you would today?
For the same reason you don't take a horse on the freeway. Progress is funny like that. Things become obsolete.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
You're forgetting the importance of owning a car... no one but you will be in it.
If you think this stupid car pool idea is useful, then let's do the same with your house. After all, you're not using all of it all of the time, so we can just all pay $50, and other people can sleep in it when you are not home right? It's all good by your standards isn't that correct?
One reason cars are affordable now is that the value of human life ended by motor vehicle accident is much less then in other contexts. This is because the minimum liability insurance coverage required for autos can be very low (30K to 50K). Unless the party at fault has deep pockets, it is hard to get much more than that in a wrongful death lawsuit.
If, instead of Joe Sixpack, your heirs can sue Google for causing the accident, they will be able to get $500K to $10M. Thus even if Google eliminates all alcohol-related motor vehicle deaths, they could wind up saddled for more cost then they save.
Most highways that are 55mph are designed for higher speeds and even those that aren't can be adjusted over the course of regularly scheduled maintenance. Any idiot should also be able to figure out my example of 100 mph where its currently 55mph is for areas with consistent cruising speeds... nothing there says its for stop-and-go areas (which would become more rare with all-driverless traffic) or the initial acceleration. Smart cars could also compensate for tight curves by slowing down ahead of time.
You wouldn't want to ride in one of those. It would be abused, puked in, with bodily fluids everywhere. If you owned the car, you would have some incentive to keep it clean and functioning properly.
one that'd have all the lower priority empty cars and trucks in it, running the most efficiently up and down hills, maximizing energy use by the vehicle, drafting just the right amount .... and does the EZ-pass for the ZOV get charged less or more ...
and ... maybe you could send your car out to troll for riders while you're at work or after work ... leading to .... "it's 10PM do you know where your car is ?"
Let me rephrase that: "there is no reason anyone has to drive". If you like driving, knock yourself out. In the meantime, I don't particularly enjoy the tedium of working for 5 hours to avoid stupid drivers, and where the main activity is keeping a steady foot on the pedal and two eyes on every single mirror and out in the front at all times.
There are those of us who will enjoy the growl of an engine as we wing our way to our destination, doing what we want, when we want, without having to confer with a computer.
Visions of James Dean abound. On multiple levels.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
So basically, your AI-driven car can go 100 mph any place a human driver could go 100 mph.
Unless the small cars have really good suspension, I would not want to sit in one while it drives on an unpaved road (or just a street where all manhole covers are a few cm below the road level, making small potholes).
I'd rather have a big and heavy car, so the ride is smoother.
I lived in China for many years. One of the perks is that it is very cheap to get a driver - about $200/mo. Let me just say that if you haven't had a driver, you have no idea how liberating it is.
Commute time is returned to you. I would do email or catch up on my reading on the way to work in morning and arrive at work ready to be productive. I would sleep on the way home in the afternoon so that I was totally refreshed by the time I joined the family. Compared to how exhausted you feel after driving yourself. The other massive perk is PARKING. Imagine never having to park. You hop out right at your destination, and then your car goes and finds a spot to tuck away on its own. You could have parking lots that are only for automatic cars. They could pack themselves in without needing a valet. Then you would just call your car when it is time to get you.
I am back in US so a driver is outside my income range now, but man do I miss it. I will be first in line to get an automatic one and never drive myself again.
And please - public transportation doesn't compare at all. Even leaving the inconvience aside, the crowding, the pain of getting that last three blocks in the rain, the crappy schedules, etc. there are just many advantages to having your own car. For instance - you can keep stuff in it that you care about - your books, snacks, etc. You can keep your bags in it when you are out shopping. etc. I don't think people are going to stop owning a car just because they can be automated.
It can also mean a rental delivered to your door. Fewer people may find they don't need a car of their own if, for a monthly fee, one is waiting for them to go to work in the morning, or get you out of town for the weekend. A family may decide they only need to own one.
If you're trying to suggest that they'd only let you commute to Sears when you want to go to Macy's, that's crazy talk. First, they'll probably have manual control modes. Second, what a way to alienate your customer base. "Oh sorry, you need to pay for the map to go there." No one would buy these cars at all if they did that.
No sig for you!!
I'm sorry but the protest you are driving towards to has been declared a terrorist organization. I am to drive you to the nearest police station while playing the Law & Order theme. Different music backgrounds are available as DLC if you'd like to unluck...
But... the future refused to change.
Gross navigation is handled by GPS and fine navigation uses cameras and other sensors to figure out what to do locally or if GPS fails. It has to factor in other cars, after all.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
why own a car if I can't drive it?
Because I can customize it (maybe install 1kW (or high-end) amplifier and speakers, or a tape deck) and keep it like I want (maybe keep some items in the trunk or whatever).
Also, the car I own is usually parked next to where I am (my home, my place of work etc), I do not need to wait for the car to arrive after ordering it or go to the nearest car-stop.
How about the fact that computer driven cars have no sense of compassion for other drivers? Imagine a busy street during rush hour bumper to bumper with driver-less cars. No computer is going to stop short to allow you out of that driveway of the gas station. It's the end of common sense judgement as well. I can see the kid who may be speeding down the sidewalk towards an intersection. That driver-less car will only see the kid when he/she is in it's path.... Too late for the kid. What happens when your car is hacked and you can be assassinated by remote control? Ever hear of buggy software? Better hope your car isn't run on Microsoft Windows.
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
(demand GM send the "OMG, I'm stolen, stop right now" signal to all OnStar vehicles, and it would accomplish the same thing.)
That remains a possibility. The government won't do it just for the fun of it, but if it feels a threat from the people, cars may stop. Especially if that could be done for all cars. Just imagine - an uprising is brewing up and the government disables all cars so that the people who live further away from the capital cannot get there. Gaddafi probably would have liked this option. Same is true for your government.
Why would anyone ever buy a Porsche, or Vette or even a high powered Camero again..if you couldn't take it out on the streets and drive it like you would today?
For the same reason you don't take a horse on the freeway. Progress is funny like that. Things become obsolete.
There would be dedicated "amusement roads" for such purposes, much like there are horseback tours today.
More Twoson than Cupertino
The end of auto insurance? The police and government will never allow driverless cars -- once they realize they'd have to lay off 80% of cops, traffic court judges, etc.
But is THIS the intersection at which it should turn, or the NEXT intersection?
GPS seems to put it in another part of the continent, (because the driver of that 18-wheeler wants to visit his favorite Nevada house of ill-repute without the boss knowing).
Can it read street signs? Does it pull over and stop? Wander aimlessly? Does it cache maps and dead-recon its way thru them?
Navigation is central to transportation purpose. Collision avoidance is merely process.
If a human is on board and can take over, fine. But I get visions of unmanned delivery vehicles wandering aimlessly after the Teamster's Union buys all its members GPS jammers.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
And a world where a car thief doesn't have to do threaten anyone to hijack the car. No operator, don't have to pull a gun. Just hop in and re-purpose.
It would certainly take all the fun out of driving, that's for sure.
If you want to drive for fun, take your damned muscle car to the racetrack and risk your own damned life. I don't need you risking mine by your driving like a moron. Cars are for transportation, not fun... unless you're at the races.
Free Martian Whores!
p>What worries me is the increasing incidence of big-rig drivers to run GPS Jammers just so their cargo can't track its own route. I've had my GPS jump two states away just because an 18 wheeler pulled up behind me. I whipped out my phone only to find it couldn't get a fix either. 10 miles this went on, then the trucker tuned onto a different highway, and everything went back to normal.
Where was this, if you don't mind me asking? In the US, I'm pretty sure the FCC prohibits jamming devices, so if a cargo company is deploying them wholesale it would be a very interesting allegation.
More Twoson than Cupertino
it will raise the price of cars
Uh.... why? I think you failed to explain that bit. I mean, sure, it's another component. Possibly a lot of components. But they still sell cars with AM radios and manual transmissions. Also, the electronics parts and aren't that expensive when you compare it to the price of a car. The sheer amount of engineering that goes into it will need to be paid by someone, but really, it'll be a luxury item at first, and latter everyone will have it. Duh. If you think that progress is inherently more expensive, and so only the rich will be able to afford it, you're that's just displaying an amazingly pessimistic view of the future.
Come on Mr. McSadPants, put on a smile, the future is bright!
. It would also mean that someone other than you would ultimately determine where you could go
That only works if there's no manual override. Who would be crazy enough to buy a car without one? Especially if there are places you want to go but aren't on your map.
I could say the free market will solve it, but honestly this is just common sense. The only way these issues would be even remotely possible is if someone had god-like power to try and enforce a dystopian future.
Self-driving cars not only use a variety of sensors to assess the environment, but also have systems based on algorithms like SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping) to help them position themselves relative to the environment, and position landmarks relative to them. All kinds of sensors are involved, but especially laser range sensors which would prevent the kind of problems caused by GPS returning invalid results (the car won't just drive into a wall, it will avoid the wall and reduce the belief associated with the current location). GPS is just an extra sensor, not a bunch of set-in-stone instructions.
They don't hit the pot hole because there are computer vision systems that, along with the range sensors, can make a reliable guess at whether that is a pot hole or not, and avoid it. Speed would be irrelevant as the computer can react faster, and more accurately than a human driver could.
When it comes to this kinds of algorithms, sometimes they are *too* efficient, and you have to route around that: a good example is going around walls, in which the car might decide to hug the wall and take a turn very, very close to the corner - but this is not optimal as a) the driver would probably freak out b) Movement and location sensors are not perfect, you always have to consider actuator and sensor noise. So, the algorithms are complemented by a penalty for getting too close to objects, even if it wouldn't cause a collision.
I hope that helps paint a broad picture of the system to make a bit more understandable.
Erm, yeah, if the car can't do everything you describe in your post, it would be pretty worthless. I strongly suspect Google's engineers are well aware of that. GPS is very helpful for navigation, but in no way necessary; I assume any actual marketed autonomous car would work fine with no GPS signal or internet access ever. That is certainly a harder problem, but one that I am sure Google's engineers are aware of.
True. I think many families will continue to own cars, because on long drives it's nice to have a comfortable space that is one's own. Also, I keep certain things in my car so I'll have them when I need them - a few basic tools, a flashlight, an extra coat - things like that - and I think that is common. Still, many families that now have two or three cars may discover that they need only one - and even that would free up an awful lot of space and reduce costs considerably.
It was in Nevada (and not near any military installation), and I'm pretty sure it was just Joe Contract Trucker.
That wasn't the first time It happened, just the first time I figured out what it was. My Garmin literally had me in North Dakota one minute, then Texas the next. It was useless. The phone simply couldn't get a fix. The Cell towers told it one thing, but the GPS signal said something totally different.
Its becoming a big problem. These units are not hard to find, and the problem is becoming fairly serious as even a cursory Google search will find:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/uk-research-measures-growing-gps-jamming-threat/
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/02/gps-jamming-a-clear-and-presen.html
http://www.jammerall.com/categories/GPS-Jammers/
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I concede. You sir, Win.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Just browse at 1. Every single one of humbleguy's four comments is sitting at -1, either troll or flamebait (I just looked him up, he has exactly 4 comments, all astroturf, all modded to oblivion).
Free Martian Whores!
I would absolutely use a car that had an auto-drive mode. If everyone did, then you wouldn't even need stop lights or other controls at intersections, or speed limits, as the vehicles would work together to melt traffic into a perfect flow. It might be a bit unnerving at first, watching traffic weaving through intersections, but we would get used to it.
Google or not.
I don't know if that is completely true. You still have to account for mechanical failure. A overlord system would have to monitor for such failures externally and space traffic enough so that it can compensate when a failure occurs.
There aren't a whole lot of mechanical failures that couldn't be predicted. Granted, cars use "miles/km" for wear instead of a more appropriate "hours" like everything else motorized, but with all the datapoints a proper AI car would have to gather, a subsampling can easily detect if the tires are near blowout, if the shocks aren't absorbing what they should, brake response is delayed, and the car can refuse to function until it's corrected.
Even things like roadkill or debris on the road could be noticed by one car's sensors and communicated to all others in short order.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Is that a world you'd actually want?!?!
What happened to car culture in this country...people used to like their cars, work on them..drive them...want to have performance vehicles.
Sad to see that go...a car shouldn't just be a utilitarian object to get you from place A to place B. Life is too short for that....drive a fun car, and every trip you take is an adventure.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
They don't hit the pot hole because there are computer vision systems that, along with the range sensors, can make a reliable guess at whether that is a pot hole or not, and avoid it.
In traffic, you notice all drivers ahead moving to the edge of the lane, and then moving back. You can't see the pot hole, (dead animal, fallen load, shredded tire), but you know something is there by the way drivers in front are reacting.
Will the sensor system pick that up. Or will the pot hole suddenly appear under from the bumper of the car ahead that straddled it, forcing the computer to break hard, or make an dangerous swerve at the last instant, or will it just drive through it, and maybe lose a tire?
Nevada is a great place to test this. The roads are in very good condition, and traffic is light in rural areas.
But how does it cope with heavy traffic, all of which is moving 10% above the posted limit, and all at following distances that are really too close? How soon does it anticipate a lane closure? Can it read temporary signs propped up by that afternoon work crew that say lane closed, move left?
Its clear Google can navigate down calm streets and largely vacant roads, but the suggestion that we can safely deploy driver-less vehicles in typical American traffic with zero infrastructure changes has yet to be proven.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If they weren't meant for fun...they'd not sell cars that were fun to drive.
You don't generally buy a street legal car...to just drive it on the track.
Like I said on another post...it is sad that one things a car is just a utilitarian object to get from place to place.
With fun cars, like I've always owned....even the daily drive to work is an adventure!!!
Life it too short not to enjoy every minute of it you can...even on a drive to the grocery store.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Much as I hate to answer anyone who begins a sentence with "erm" and posts as AC, I say SHOW ME.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Once we have ubiquitous Johnny Cabs you will no longer need to drive. Therefore, you will no longer need to carry a driver's license. Since the car never speeds there will be no reason for cops to pull you over and search you and your car. Plate scanners will be useless on community owned Johnny Cabs. This will be THE revolution in civil liberties in the 1st century as most government tracking is performed with the assistance of driver's license regime, and the base punishment of not paying fines is revocation of the driver's license. I commend google on there newest disruptive technology.
More motorway sex!
I see this as being a shot at trucking and commerce. The average person gets driven home from the bar is fine and all that but the passenger car isn't being used all that much. Shipping, on the other hand, would benefit tremendously from eliminating the driver. UPS and Fedex and USMail shipping from distribution centers to distribution centers - and then the cargo gets unpacked by humans.
Google will make a HUGE profit on that. John Q Public and his drinking problem? Not so much.
We have some of the 45-degree angle streets here in Chicago. While it may seem like it would be more efficient, in practice it doesn't seem to work out that way. You get a "6-corners" intersection where the N/S, E/W, and NE/SW etc. streets meet. These huge intersections cause a bottleneck of cars for several blocks in every direction because only a few cars can get through the intersection before it's the next street's turn to cross. It can be somewhat unsafe crossing a diagonal street from a "normal" street because of limited visibility of the oncoming traffic. I'm sure a European-style round-about intersection would help, but they didn't think of that when laying out Chicago's streets (or maybe it takes up too much real estate).
Everybody here is commenting on the wonders of the completed system: fully networked autonomous cars communicating and coordinating with each other. But to get there, we have to go through a period of time, perhaps decades, when autonomous cars are mixed with human-driven cars. How are the ultra-conservative and safe autonomous cars going to interact with cars driven by emotional humans who are probably going to throw road-rage fits at cars traveling 55mph on major freeways?
I know from personal experience living in the Boston area that anyone obeying the laws and driving conservatively is not going to make any headway against aggressive commuters. Negotiatiing 4-way stop signs even in quiet neighborhoods is often a game of chicken... will these autonomous cars have enough AI to deal with griefers actively trying to mess with them, and to do so safely?
Liability is another interesting issue. From what I understand, the occupants of an autonomous car will still be liable for any accidents. Even if the driverless cars have just 0.1% the accident rate of human-driven cars, that's still tens of fatalities every year in the USA. Much of the attraction of a driverless car will be gone if you still feel like you have to pay attention to the road to avoid a massive liability in case of a rare accident.
While driver-less cars would allow some people who currently cannot drive to have their own car, it will raise the price of cars so that some people who now can afford to own a car would not be able to afford one.
Stop trying to fit 21st century technology into the 20th century world your mind is still stuck in.
In a world of self-driving cars, Those that can't afford a car will be able to rent one of the 190 million cars in the US that are sitting parked and unused 93% of the time. If I'm sitting at work for 8-10 hours in the middle of the day, I would LOVE to get paid by people using my car as a taxi during that time.
In fact, it's an even than ownership...you don't have to commit to one vehicle. If you need a small car, rent a small car. If you need a truck, rent a truck.
travel down an alternate lane until the very last minute and cut over
This is actually optimal use of the road and should be encouraged. Read Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic.
I'd prefer to put the time I saved driving into my true passion, road rage.
Oh yeah, I want to be cruising down the interstate at 120 MPH when a virus hits the car's operating system... Exponentially more fun when the cars talk to each other and propagate the virus between them. Gives a whole new meaning to the Blue Screen of Death, doesn't it?
Gawd, we can't even run a brower plug-in (e.g Flash) without it being pawned by hackers. And I'm supposed to trust a half ton of steel hurtling down the highway at 176 ft/sec with my life and the life of my loved ones? I'm not a Luddite, it's just that I'm on a first name basis with Mr. Murphey. It's going to take governmental certification (like the FAA for airline software) before I'd touch one of these with a 10 foot pole. (Brake override the throttle? Not needed, couldn't possibly happen...)
"If they weren't meant for fun...they'd not sell cars that were fun to drive."
What if.... they were made fun so you could enjoy a car ride that you had to go for anyway?
Stupid?
Well Zip Cars has already done pretty well for itself with a similar business model, so I don't see how this is stupid at all.
Of course since you're falsely equating a car to a house, perhaps this means you are not merely using your car for transportation. In that case I would agree, this would not be a good option for people who live in their cars.
Current cars can easily maintain 90mph+ on almost the entire length of interstate 10, yet many areas have the speed limit set to 55.
There are several perfectly straight, 4 lane state highways where I live with 45mph average speed limits, and some towns force traffic down to 15mph.
None of this is necessary, it's done simply to increase revenue from speeding tickets.
With automated cars, the arguments they use to justify these ridiculously low limits won't apply, and if my car automatically slowed down anyway, I wouldn't have to worry about getting pegged by speed traps. (thus destroying that revenue stream completely, and removing the motivation for the low limits.)
This mass trend of trading power and property ownership for convenience will be the end of a free society, that's why it sucks. From a legal standpoint, I want the control, especially as long as I have the liability for the car's behavior. In terms of physical reality, I do not trust google's engineers with my life because I know that it's literally impossible to account for every situation, even if the code contains 0 bugs (also unlikely). Humans react slower than computers, but they are also much more situationally aware. We can't even automate our train systems yet and we still have collisions despite instrinsic, well defined physical limits (the track,linked cars) on how they move. There's no way in fuckin hell I'd get into a driverless/automated car at any speed over 15mph on an empty road in a flat midwest state, nevermind a busy suburban commercial area with 14 million events happening every second.
I find it ironic that people here believe that humans are such terrible intellects that they can't handle driving their own cars, yet we are supposed to believe that they are capable of programming computers sufficiently clever to avoid the mass stochastic catastrophes that only automation can bring to chaotic situations.
Forget working or web surfing while the car drives you somewhere... why even be conscious and have to remember the time it takes to get somewhere?
I want self-driving sleeper cars.
Everywhere within 8 hours drive would be just a night's sleep away. Get off work on Friday, sleep, wake up in some mid-point town with a dozen friends from different cities, party for the weekend, as I sleep Sunday night the car gets me back to where I work.
Numerous social and economic knock-on effects follow from self-driving sleeper cars.
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
They will also likely be the cars that don't travel three wide and follow the rules of the road and get out of the left lane when not passing. Unless traffic conditions dictate that the two right lanes are packed, and then they will travel three wide AND move over if they detect traffic behind them that is moving faster. Odd how the laws actually work, if followed.
It gets real interesting with automated Motor Cycles.
You mean like a Segway?
What about the guy trying to buy a car? Who has only about $5000 to spend? What about when the airbag deploys in an accident where the passengers would not have been injured?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Not all of them, of course, but who wants to deal with the TSA and other BS when you can hop in your car, take a nap, watch a movie, and arrive at your destination? For anything under a thousand miles, I wouldn't even consider flying. I live two hours from the airport, flying anywhere means: 2 hours driving +1.5 hours park and TSA theater + 2 hours on the plane + 1 hour baggage and rental car. So 6+ hours, without counting the drive from the airport to my destination. A little less for a shorter flight, could be a lot longer with a layover or unforeseen delay. Driving may take a few hours longer but for the hassle saved it's well worth it, and I can take all the luggage I want.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
"Hello, I'm Johnny Cab. Where can I take you tonight?"
"Drive, drive!"
"Please repeat the destination"
"Oh, anywhere! Just go. Go!"
"Please state the street and number"
"Shit. SHIT!"
"I'm not familiar with that address. Would you please repeat--"
"AhhhHHHHhhh!!!"
It can also mean a rental delivered to your door.
Which will likely cost you more over the life of an automobile (for current automobiles) than it would to buy an automobile. This won't matter to the guys who replace their cars with a new one every five years or less, they will probably break even.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I would agree that the free market would solve it, except that our government has a history of overriding the free market when it comes to automobile "safety". What makes you think you are going to have the option of buying a car with manual override? Have you been listening to how loudly the proponents of this have been saying it will make the roads safer? Have you heard the people who are talking about making a built-in breathalyzer mandatory in cars, one where the car won't start until you blow into it and come back with a BAC below the legal limit?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
place your order into the car, which then drives home
Like the sibling said, a planned delivery route would be more efficient, but I still think this has merit for one-off items. His comment has the connotation that anybody who runs out to the store for milk has a moral failing.
I live about an hour from "every-store" shopping, so I'd be tempted to send my car, but even there, I bet there are several people in my area who will have similar needs, so somebody will establish a regular circuit of traffic from here to there with perhaps 5 vehicles and then automated shipping systems will put in a request for delivery which will divert the appropriate delivery car to the proper pick-up and drop-off location. They'll run more cars at peak times, fewer cars on off-hours, same as everything else.
For commuters, I think the big win is going to be shower cars. If you have a 1-hour commute, there's little reason a car only as tall as a van couldn't have a small bathroom and kitchenette in it - probably a video screen too for reading news over coffee. Too luxurious? They could be mass-produced as a $3K option and everybody who buys one gets an extra hour of sleep every day. That's about $2/hr for sleep if you can count on a 7-year lifespan.
Note to designers: figure in a water fill and clean-out port as part of the recharging dock. Robotically connected, please.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Not even taking into account the results, Bing maps just plain makes my eyes hurt. The very muted coloursheme makes it difficult to tell road types apart (with the exception of major highways). Even major metropolitan arterials blend into the background and god forbid they get close to an area zoned as a public park (green on green).
But nothing ticks me off more than their naming of cities / suburbs. They don't scale down. If I search for a city like Brisbane and zoom to a scale that shows the central suburb and the ones immediately surrounding them, the second "b" covers the entire business district. Along with the already muted tones, a semi transparent letter 3" high in the middle of the screen doesn't do a lot of good either!.
How about a suburb search. Bing only puts a big dot on the map. When you zoom out that dot is somewhere in the city. Google puts it's marker in, but when you zoom out it highlights the boundries of your suburb so you can not only see exactly where in the city it is, but also how big it is.
Bing has a long way to go before I'll even consider it viable. It's a pain in the arse to use on a computer and I shudder to think how it would look on my 4" phone screen.
Okay, well here is where I'm going to attach my comments, since you guys are at least getting close to my angle on these things:
An automated car would indeed be more fuel efficient than a human-driven one, largely because human beings are really stupid at driving: they constantly try to push the car faster than the average speed of traffic, and hence do a lot of standing on the gas and the brake.
(There's another big potential advantage to automated cars, but I bet they're keeping quiet about it in order to keep from scaring people: tailgaiting. If all the cars are computer controlled, they can all brake simultaneously, so there's much less need for big following distances, and hence they can all "draft" each other. Wind resistance is what kills fuel efficiency at highway speeds.)
By fixing a lot of the frustrations with using a private car, these systems are going to encourage using them in preference to other strategies, there's a potential for huge perverse effects: ultimately this isn't a "green" technology, it's a distraction technology that's going to keep people from working on the real problems. (Note: you can say similar things for electric cars-- in the US half our electricity is generated by coal burning, if your electricity is coal-in-disguise it's cleaner to burn gasoline).
Just to pick one problem: if you make it easier for people to live with a 2 or 3 hour commute each way, many more people will do that. Even if you double the energy efficiency, if you double the miles they're willing to drive, that would be a wash.
Another, related angle: one of the big problems the US faces is that after WWII massive amounts of construction was rolled out around the idea that everyone would be driving cars everywhere: the low-density "sprawl" is nearly impossible to retrofit with workable public transit. Does a driverless car sound like a "green-fix" to you? To me it sounds like a "sprawl enabler".
Energy efficiency and environmental pollution isn't everything, there are multiple other problems associated with a car-centered lifestyle from social isolation to gasoline guts. (Oh boy, door-to-door service! I'll never have to walk *anywhere*! I'll never have to sit near anyone with a different ethnic background! Heaven!)
(Brad Templeton's energy numbers on transit are interesting, but limited in a number of ways, largely because he's working solely "per mile": if you take a more whole-system view, a city where people are using relatively dirty buses and trains for short-hops is likely to be better off compared to a sprawl where people are using cleanish-cars to drive 20 miles to buy a gallon of milk.)
If it gets commercialized like broadband internet access, then expect a few large corporations to buy up all the automated cars and lease them to customers at exorbitant tiered prices. You pay more, you get to drive more at faster speeds.
You really mean to say that there's no such thing as a $5000 used car? Because I can point you in the direction of half a dozen used car lots within about 10 miles of my home that will sell you a decent used car for $5000 or less. There's no reason to think that the addition of $50 per vehicle is suddenly going to mean that used cars don't exist anymore.
This is why we have auto insurance. If it's going to cost you $4000 to repair your vehicle, then you pay your deductible (probably just a few hundred, unless you've explicitly taken a high-deductible plan), and your insurance will cover the rest. If the vehicle is totaled from $4000 damage, then you take your $4000 payout, and you go buy a used car somewhere (see my earlier point about used car lots. They do exist, and many of the cars are under $5000).
Again, I'm not sure I see how you're concluding that this is the action of some diabolical hand of The Man trying to crush The Working Man and prevent him from having things like a car.
Well, while anything is possible, I can't really imagine it.
I mean, part of it is being in control of a machine, that is very powerful and capable of extreme driving. I kinda doubt that an automatically driving car, is going to have a nicely tuned exhaust note, that growls, as you (when conditions are safe) allow you to stomp on the gas, and power into a sharp turn at 50 mph, and listen to the turbo kick in...and let you feel the G forces as you swing around the turn....or on a straightaway....stomp on the gas, and accelerate from 10 to 80mph in seconds...or on a long stretch of hwy....kick it up to over 120+mpn when no one is looking.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
What you are missing is that that car is now not available to be sold for $2,000 because it costs more than that to repair it. That $4,000 to replace the airbags removes a significant number of used cars from the market because it costs more to replace the airbag than the car is worth. This results in the cost of used cars rising.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
'It doesn't speed, it doesn't cut you off, it doesn't tailgate,'
No aggressive motoring ethnic individual (a.k.a. DOUCHEBAG) will ever put up with this nonsense. The end of auto insurance will only come with the end of the legal profession.
Why bother, just take public transit, like the rest of the world.
No, it doesn't. Because there are used cars with airbags available as cheap used cars today. You know, the ones which have NOT BEEN IN ACCIDENTS. It's perfectly reasonable for an old car to be worth less than $5k used, and not have been in an accident. When it DOES get in an accident, it may be totalled. Then you replace it with another car that hasn't.
By your logic, any car with an *engine* or an *automatic transmission* would be impossible to find as a used car, because replacing an engine or a transmission could cost several thousand dollars.
The used car market is still doing fine. Your logic is flawed.
What happened to the horse culture in this country...people used to like their horses, feed them, trust them like beloved pets. This newfangled Model A is going to ruin all that and replace it with a utilitarian object that can't show you affection or eat oats from your hand.
Or to put it another way, humankind has been around for about 200,000 years, and have only had cars for the last 100. I think we'll get over it. We have before.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
gps is only used as nice to have information for the cars used to validate other info if available. They have full 3d and 2d maps on board, and it knows all the current information like direction and speed (with a tricky AI method for minimising errors), and it has a 3d laser camera ontop to create its own 3d map of any environment. It can even draw it's own road, say there was a big accident in the middle of the street it can create a new path over the curb and around the problem (although that is mainly used on Stanley the car built by the same guy but for the darpa grand challenge).
Automotive technology has been moving toward autonomous driving since the advent of cruise control. Now we see features like automated lane keeping starting to appear. Navigation systems are more common, and are starting to provide information in something closer to real-time. Both of these developments bring more information into the car, which is what will enable the next generation of technology.
So far I think it is the case that people are more likely to have cruise control on the list of features they want in a new car, than to actually use it regularly. It is difficult to use it when traffic is even moderately congested and the speed of other people's cars is tied fairly directly into their hormone levels. But as autonomous cruise control becomes more widespread, it will be possible to use it in more situations. And note that that technology also adds more sensors to the car, bringing in more information.
This is how it will go. People who would rather let the car do the driving will be able to do it in a gradually increasing number of traffic situations. Even without help from the aging baby boomers, I believe there will soon come a time when most of the cars on the road will be under autonomous control for most of the time. There will remain some traffic situations or road conditions that the AI can't handle, and auto makers will compete intensely to overcome those.
The key to the liability issues is no fault insurance for the AI, which insurance companies will be happy to offer, once the technologies are proven to be reasonably reliable. Maybe consumers will buy it directly, or maybe it will be included in the price of the car. There will be "black boxes" in the cars to document who was controlling the car in the time leading up to an accident. And the AI will become increasingly able to detect when situations are out of its comfort zone, request human intervention, and if it is not forthcoming, take actions to safely remove the car from the situation. As long as risk levels can be quantified, insurance will be possible, and as long as risk levels are low, it will be affordable.
This whole process could be accelerated by the development of "road drones" that use the same technology and roads, but carry deliveries instead of people. These would be much smaller and much less powerful than cars, and much cheaper, once in mass production. The cost of the AI and its sensors would initially be a large part of the manufacturing cost, but mass production would drive that cost down for both drones and cars. Also, because the drones would be significantly cheaper than cars, they would serve as a platform for evolving the technology at a faster rate than would be possible with cars.
Since road drones wouldn't carry people, the liability issue would also be lessened. They would have to be designed not to create a hazard for manually operated vehicles. But there would be some political and liability issues to overcome. It may be that we see delivery drones in the air before they hit the roads.
There is only one real downside to where I see this technology headed. It's going to make a lot more jobs obsolete than it creates. But that's just one step on the way toward a day of reckoning that will soon be upon us.
the environment given constant gps signal isn't very complex you are right, however it's a lot easier to stop a car that's going a lot slower and is on solid ground than a 747 going 1000 km/h over an ocean. As soon as an overlord system detects a problem with the car, or the different sensors on the car aren't lining up with each others cross references, then you put the hazard lights on, pull over to the side of the road, and call the tow truck. The program in the car would hardly be apply all throttle and aim at school parking lot, not that I'm saying that couldn't happen, because anything is possible just like currently a drunk drug addict could fall asleep at the wheel and accomplish the same feat.
Many families could reduce ownership to only one car. Take it to work, instead of having to pay parking all day long, it then returns under its own power to pick up the kids and take them to school, then trundle to the supermarket where it will pick up the shopping ordered online, and packed by a personal shopping bot (or human). At 3:00pm, return to school where a teacher will confirm my car has arrived for them and dismiss them, the car then takes them home, then return to the city to get me from work. If I'm going to be late, just have the car park outside of the city and wait until I'm ready (the main reason I dont use public transport, my schedule varies considerably, and doesnt coincide with bus or train timetables very well.
Infact, why have my own car for this, just rent a "Jonny Cab" 8)
There are also a couple of highly trained drivers overseeing the autopilots operation.
You wouldnt need parking in may places, the cars could just go somewhere else to park on their own, and already know where a free space is opening up by communicating with a city wide parking management system.
Ideally, we won't even need to necessarialy own cars in major metro areas. Want to get a cab wherever you are? Pull out your smart phone and hit a button, and the closest available car is instantly enroute to your location to take you wherever you need to go. Drunk at the bar? No problem.
Who needs two vehicles for a family of four? You take your car to work, and send it back home. It takes the kids to school and it drives itself home, leaving your wife to do what she needs to. Suddenly, a car of the future that might cost $40k that meets the needs of a family household will significantly reduce the amount of maintenance costs and pollution.
Needless to say, I'm VERY excited about these prospects.
Yeah I have to agree with this. I don't think we'll see an end to insurance but we will most certainly see a reduction in vehicle *ownership*. If you can get vehicles on demand then the largest expense of a vehicle (the driver) will be gone.
There will always be problems with rush-hour peak demand but if a taxi was affordable to shuttle you to a central train station the suburbs could more cheaply integrated into mass transit. We already have this with "ride-and-park" the difference being again with the most expensive component of operating a bus being eliminated you can more efficiently organize transit routes and double the number of express routes.
Also it will also probably reduce cross-country car trips. Significantly reduce the price of a taxi and you are less likely to drive somewhere if it's a short trip and more likely to take something like a train for 2-4 hour car trips.
This would cause significant ripple effects though in car ownership. Cars are currently extremely fashionable and a significant portion of our economy since people's car payments are usually second after housing. If you have a car-on-demand style isn't a concern it's about the robo-taxi's reliability and efficiency. Electric vehicles are great for this with extremely simple mechanics and inexpensive energy. Where a normal car owner might not see the return on additional expense in 5 years for an electric vehicle an on-demand taxi would probably see it in a year or two so businesses would have an additional incentive.
Also most vehicles will be substantially smaller since you can 'on-demand' a larger vehicle (or bus) depending on party size. No need to own a large sedan when 99% of the time you're alone. So we can expect cars to shrink in an on-demand system.
If automated cars result in increased taxi usage we'll see the most substantial shift in transportation in the United States since Henry Ford.
what you need, sir, is the illegal road rage chip that lets you drive in the middle of lanes, drive on the wrong side of the road, and ignores police shutdown commands while trying to make them crash into each other. let the AI wars begin.
To remove this incentive, the automatic car could have a function, activated by the owner, to automatically report every violation that slows it down, or do so on the press of a button. Given the almost perfect proof that the sensor data provides, antisocial driving would bbecome very expensive, given that reporting is painless and fast for the victims.
I submit that driving is a social activity and would be sorely missed if machines take it over. For that reason, their introduction will fail.
E Proelio Veritas.
There is no reason to have pedestrians and motor vehicles sharing the same space.
In a greenfield development, you're mostly correct... things can be designed--at high cost--to allow vehicle traffic to be separate from pedestrian and bicycle traffic.
However, it is NOT possible to accomplish this in the already built up areas without it becoming a mind bogglingly massive construction project that would destroy any historic appearance in many of the places. Not to mention what a nightmare of maintenance it would be--those elevated stretches will not be safe during times of ice unless they are either heated (major expense) or treated with lots of nasty chemicals.
It's not feasible in the vast majority of situations due to costs to accommodate the terrain, but add in historic considerations and maintenance, both due to weather and otherwise, and you'll see that it's really never going to happen unless we're bulldozing entire cities and rebuilding them.
In areas with large amounts of foot traffic, such as downtown/shopping/dining districts put in car parks a block or two away, and allow only foot traffic -except for designated cargo loading access points (aka alleyways).
You're young and able bodied aren't you? Not all of us are... Oh ok so we add handicapped parking near by, that's nice... oh and maybe some pedestrian pick up / drop off areas? Well now we're back to the same problem we had before.
Not the mention the headaches created by having to walk two blocks to get to your car--bad weather? got kids? how about just carrying a bunch of stuff? Now you've got shopping carts and other cargo transportation devices strewn about everywhere with some poor schmuck forced to go lug them all back 2 blocks.
About the only thing I would agree with you on this regard is that the current design of having traffic pass between parking area and store is a MASSIVE design mistake. That area should be off limits to all except emergency vehicles. This would eliminate the problem of people crossing from parking areas into shopping areas while trying to avoid cars going to the parking area. Drop off would still be possible, but in a much smaller zone near the sides of the lot. They could even put up fold-over "do not enter signs" that the emergency vehicles can 'bump" to drop down and then drive over...
Also, if cars become driverless, you have the potential of doing away with the model of everyone owning a "family car". A lot of the benefits of owning a family car instead of a personal transport car are related to needing people to drive. Parents need to drive their children around because the children can't drive. On a long trip, it's useful to have multiple people in the same vehicle so they can take turns driving.
Now if cars drove themselves, and you needed to get your son over to little Billy's house, then you can call Billie's parents and say, "I'm sending him over" and then put him in a car, and have it take Billie where he needs to go. If you were on a road trip with an automated car, then there's no need to take turns driving.
The potential benefits for the environment are huge. Right now, everyone with a family has a big old SUV that seats 8 people, but that car also gets driven around quite a lot with 1 or 2 people in it. If you could change the expectation to "everyone has a lightweight self-driving personal transport vehicle that can carry one person plug some belongings," then we would use far less energy moving people around. You would never even have to drive out of your way to pick someone up. And if you did need a larger car, it would be trivially easy to rent one. Schedule it to come to your house at a particular time of day, ride it where you need to go, and then it returns itself.
Absolutely.
You *really* don't want to k now what for, but.. yes.
Out of interest, and on a completely new topic SMILE and tilt your head slightly upwards when walking down the street in future..
Are there foggy or icy conditions where the vehicle simply refuses to work, shutting all traffic down?
I worked for a place where closing for weather almost never happened. What are the ramifications between an employer/vehicle conflict?
If an override function is enabled when my employer demands I com into work - and I get into an accident - who is responsible? My employer, or me? Typically a "driving too fast for conditions" might be given, but if th echoice was between getting fired or coming to work. There is some serious precedence when the car already determined it shouldn't be driven.
Are these things hardened against emp? I recall seeing some of the old Discover channel shows where they had little RC cars that drove under a vehicle and EMP'd them. A drive by wire vehicle would have a much more interesting stop sequence if everything was fried.
Finally, is the manufacturer insulated against lawsuits? I can imagine possible failures that might lead to whole fields of destroyed vehicles and the humans in them. Oopsies - unless perfection has finally been achieved, and no failures will ever happen.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Accidents would be less frequent, but more spectacular.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
It seems that the Danny Sullivan in TFA is not the Danny Sullivan I would have expected to comment on an article about cars!
bigger != safer... I wish people would start to understand this. In fact I would argue, low CG == safe, high CG == unsafe. In the low CG cars you can make fairly aggressive maneuvers and not roll/lose control of the car, try that in an suburban some time...
Oh also low weight is also safer than high weight due to the ability to change speed/direction faster.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Imagine a scenario where there is an accident or debris suddenly in front of you, and you absolutely cannot stop in time. Your choices are to ram a truck, or ram a pedestrian on the sidewalk.
While many human drivers would hit the truck, the AI would have to be pretty smart to aim for the bigger and harder object instead of the soft and small pedestrian.
A good AI would probably never end up in that situation. It happens in the first place because of human error or lack of attention. An AI can plan in order to *always* be able to stop before it hit any given obstacle. Even if a person ran into the road from out of view around a street corner this could be part of what the AI plans for; avoiding situations which are unpredictable because of lack of information.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
A simpleinertial navigation system helps on the fine navigation, and Google already has tech that compares what the camera sees to its databases to tell you where you are, what's around, and so forth.
Navigation is easy. Collision avoidance is hard and the part that most people care about when it comes to self-driving cars.
Incidentally, any time you suspect someone is using a GPS jammer, take note of the plates or the commercial ID number and report it. The FCC is sensitive to their use and the fines are unpleasant.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
One consequence that does not yet seem to have been mentioned here that is discussed by Jacques Ellul, (http://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/10347/The-Betrayal-by-Technology-A-Portrait-of-Jacques-Ellul-mp4), is the fact that many more people will die from heart, liver and other major organ failure, because there will simply be less available for transplant. Transplant technology has been improving at an accelerated rate, thanks to the massive number of road fatalities every year. This will change completely when driverless cars become ubiquitous.
People care for shared items even more poorly than owned. When's the last time you were in a taxi that wasn't scungy?
Pooled cars would have people smoking in them, saturating the seats with cologne, leaving sticky stains, eating shit from McDonald's etc -- making them intolerable.
What happens when a driverless car blows a tire or hits a deer?
Its clear Google can navigate down calm streets and largely vacant roads, but the suggestion that we can safely deploy driver-less vehicles in typical American traffic with zero infrastructure changes has yet to be proven.
While I can't say what bar you'd have to meet for "proven", it has been tested on much busier roads than you are alluding to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64w-v-RJpk8
Don't worry, kid, by the time self-driving cars are for sale you'll have matured enough to have grown out of those childish ways... that is, if you live very long. Extreme driving is an invitation to the surgeon or the undertaker.
Free Martian Whores!
I kinda doubt it...I'm well in the "get off my lawn" years now already....been driving like a bat outta hell since I got a permit....and many decades since then have passed.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
With that incredibly simplistic system you just replaced 6 cars with 1. But by dividing the number of cars by 1/6th you've reduced cars on the road, so you've reduced traffic.
Nope, that's incorrect. The number of cars on the road (at a given time) will *increase*.
Instead of what we have now:
--Car A driving Worker A to work at 6:30am (and then being parked all day)
--Car B driving Worker B to work at 7:30am (and then being parked all day)
you'll have:
--Car A driving Worker A to work at 6:30am
--Car A driving itself to pick up Worker B
--Car A driving Worker B to work at 7:30am
The same amount of cars will be on the road during the actual commuting part of both workers' journeys (it'll just be the same car in both instances instead of 2 different cars), PLUS you have the extra leg/journey where the car is driving itself to pick up Worker B (which doesn't happen at all in case #1).
This is, of course, assuming that the car will only take 1 passenger at a time (like how most people commute via car to work now).
But this says nothing about actual traffic delays, which I imagine would be *greatly* decreased by communication between vehicles/coordination.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Which means we will never get anything to solve them?
Flying cars did not even get this far - google cars are already tested on the read and it seems realistic that they will succeed on market. Whether it leads to "traffic utopia" or not remains to be seen, but "because flying cars, da-a!" is no argument at all
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
It would blur the line between owning a car and using one, like Personal Rapid Transit, which looks amazing.
Oh, should I have sugar-coated that?