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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.
Looking at Bing Maps I understand that roads in the U.S. cities are planned quite, well, systemically in grid (like in SimCity). But it isn't like that anywhere else in the world. Europe has tons of cities which aren't planned like that (hell, London too!) and Asia even more. In my city in Asia the roads are curvy and by looking at maps, there isn't any planning whatsoever.
But my city is also much older than any U.S. cities and much more personal. The streets are narrow, there's small little alleyways everywhere and most of all, most people use motorbikes to get around.
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. Sometimes this includes going in front of cars if the way is blocked and they need to move to the other side to get to the front of the lights.
Then there is also the issue of cats and dogs roaming around, bumps on the street, and sometimes an elephant in front of you (and the elephants have turning lights on their ass - I kid you not!). In many places you also cannot see if someone is coming behind a corner. You honk to let them know. How is Google car supposed to see them when their censors can't see the car or motorbike?
All of this means that outside America, Google Car has little use. In fact they would be fatal to others on the road. And no, we aren't going to change the cities and driving practices just because some lazy American wants to use his self-driving car. I doubt Google has thought of this and they will be in for a big surprise when nobody but Americans can use them.
As a side question, why are American cities planned without any personal touch, but so "professionally"?
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...
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.
About as much as electric cars have.
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!
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
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.
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
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!!!
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
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).
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 :(
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...?
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=468
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
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?
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?
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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" .
'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?
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.
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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'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/
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.
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/
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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/
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.
No one to give the finger to!!
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.
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.
"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
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.
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?
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?
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! :)
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.
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.
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 ?"
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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?