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How Would Driver-less Cars Change Motoring?
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that as Nevada licenses Google to test its prototype driver-less car on public roads, futurists are postulating what a world of driver-less would cars look like. First, accidents would go down. 'Your automated car isn't sitting around getting distracted, making a phone call, looking at something it shouldn't be looking at or simply not keeping track of things,' says Danny Sullivan. Google's car adheres strictly to the speed limit and follows the rules of the road. 'It doesn't speed, it doesn't cut you off, it doesn't tailgate,' says Tom Jacobs, a spokesman for the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles. Driver-less cars would mean a more productive commute. 'If you truly trust the intelligence of the vehicle, then you get in the vehicle and you do our work while you're traveling,' says engineer Lynne Irwin. They would mean fewer traffic jams. 'Congestion would be something you could tell your grandchildren about, once upon a time.' Driver-less cars could extend car ownership to some groups of people previously unable to own a car, including elderly drivers who feel uncomfortable getting behind the wheel at night, whose eyesight has weakened or whose reaction time has slowed."
Another reader points out an article suggesting autonomous cars could eventually spell the end of auto insurance.
Any municipality that allows cellphone use while driving is, essentially, endorsing driverless cars. If someone gets engaged in a deep conversation on the phone, their driving skills drop below that of someone with 0.08% blood alcohol...
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
1) First time poster
2) Post appears within same minute as story, despite being well over 500 words
3) Subtle plug for Bing maps
4) General gist of "Google Cars will kill people!"
Either bonch is again trying out his sockpuppets, or someone is trying to astroturf Slashdot again.
In the meantime, I look forward to hopping into my Google car and taking a nap while driving to Tahoe. As a matter of fact, driving might become really something you do while you have other things to do - like sleep, eat, work, or just read. I'd love it. There is no reason for anyone to drive.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
America has many well designed cities. And many poorly designed cities. However, if all cars were converted to driverless, then the increased efficiency may be such that you could have far fewer roads because a road could handle that many more cars without becoming congested - especially with some sort of inter-vehicle communication protocol. You could have cars traveling 100 mph almost bumper to bumper on highways that are currently at 55mph. This would allow you to have more roads designated cars-only to avoid many of the pitfalls of mixed traffic. The next step will likely be driverless cars with the option to switch to manual (think Demolition Man) for areas that are not driverless-friendly.
I think this will be mostly the end of private cars for the majority of us. It seems ridiculous now, but once people start looking at the cost of owning a car versus a well priced car service I think the transition will be fast. Especially among the young.
We'll probably be able to get by with a fleet of super-effecient driverless taxi cabs. I image paying a couple hundred bucks a month to have car come and pick me up whenever I need one.
You could get even more efficiency by offering a reduced rate for those willing to share a car. The system could efficiently route, pickup up multiple passengers and dropping them off.
Anybody who equates breaking the speed limit as automatic excessive speeding is a tool. The speed limit on my local highway is 55mph, the average speed is close to 70. It's a safe speed. Many areas put an artificially low speed to collect tickets at will.
In fact, it would be highly dangerous to go 55mph. You'd get rear ended in no time not to mention road rage.
There is a good rule in driving: when in Rome, do as the Romans do. The rules say one thing, but the reality is, most of the time, that it's far safer to go with the flow than to fight it. Any driving system that doesn't adhere to this within reason is one I don't want to step foot in.
I wouldn't know about that. My Mac gets the spinning beachball of eternal limbo often enough.
This is in fact the most important feature of the driver-less car. Particularly for teenagers.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If I could use my laptop during my commute to/from work, I could shave an hour off my day as the first and last half hour are typically paperwork/desk work anyway. Suddenly I can sleep in 30 minutes later and be home in time to make a much nicer dinner (yeah, I'm my gf's bitch around the house).
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.
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.
I would absolutely use a car that had an auto-drive mode. If everyone did, then you wouldn't even need stop lights or other controls at intersections, or speed limits, as the vehicles would work together to melt traffic into a perfect flow. It might be a bit unnerving at first, watching traffic weaving through intersections, but we would get used to it.
Google or not.
And alternatively again, while some people wouldn't be able to afford a car that they have now, some families will be able to get by with fewer cars. Imagine a world where my wife goes to work 30 minutes before I do, and sends the car back for me to use; then I send it to pick up my teenager from school, who sends it back to my wife, who picks me up on the way and we all go home. If we're postulating a world where trust is high enough to read and do work while in the operator's (I hesitate to say driver's) seat, there's a very small jump from there to the car that can go to a destination sans passengers entirely.
And of course, that says nothing about how it would revolutionize the statistically very dangerous world of truck driving (though I suspect the truck drivers might not be too happy about that, I'm sure they can get a lobby together to make sure that entirely autonomous semi's never get approved).
Since driver less cars will need to receive roadmap updates, you might discover that a place you went to yesterday was no longer accessible.
I don't think anyone is seriously considering cars without some kind of manual override. Though in the long term I suppose it's possible.
I remember when flying cars were going to solve all our problems.
Back in the real world there are a few tests followed by hype followed by 'this invention will solve every problem we currently have!' followed by glowing endorsements of the first release followed by a huge collection of new problems discovered by the early adopters followed by a new technology that will 'solve every problem we have with the last new technology that turned out to be nowhere near as magical as predicted!'.
Yeah, these cars will be better in some circumstances but they'll be worse in others and they'll create new problems of their own. They certainly won't bring an end to insurance because they will hit things and they will crash and they will leave you with a huge payout to the victims if you're not insured.
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
If I wanted to wait for a vehicle to turn up every time I had to go somewhere I'd take a bus.
The only public transportation that even comes close to all of the advantages of an automated car is taxis... individual vehicles that go from Point A to Point B. Buses, subways, etc all fail hard when you start talking about suburbs, rural areas, etc. Automated cars would be able to handle all of these and more.
It is impossible to do this in a human system. If I am the 4th car in line and just start going and the 3rd person does not, then I rear end him and get the citation. So I have to hesitate to be sure he truly is going before I match his speed.
The turn signal thing I TOTALLY agree with. How freaking lazy is it to just change lanes without signalling?
The most navigable cities I've driven through have a layout where most of the city is a typical grid (often North/South/East/West) but have a few major avenues going at a 45 degree angle (NE/SW and NW/SE) just to help cut across the grid. Most of the cities here also have one expressway looping around the outside of the city and another one cutting through the heart of it - between them, you can get fairly close to your destination pretty fast.
but 127.0.0.1 seems to be just filled with porn
I wouldn't mind having a self driving car, but i have a feeling your view of the intersections of the future wouldn't be safe for pedestrians.
Pretty funny: all those "advantages" can already be had by using public transportation. Cheaper too. Kind of easy to overlook nowadays.
S
Well, they were not comparing it to public transportation. They were comparing driverLESS cars to cars with drivers. If they were comparing it to public transportation, they would have mentioned things like, you can leave directly from your house, you can change your mind mid trip, you can leave whenever you like and not be tied to a bus schedule, there are no transfers, you can make impulse stops at stores and restaurants, you car does not have "hours of operation", and many many other advantages to driving your own vehicle as opposed to public transportation.
Eventually, though, this system will be much like public transportation, except with the advantages I listed above. There will be routes designated for driverless travel. For example, the freeways may have a driverless lane, much like an HOV lane, whereas you may have to man the steering wheel while in neighborhoods. Efficiency will be greatly improved with constant speeds and drafting. Maybe not to the level of public transportation, but certainly better than now. It may even be possible to put rails on these roads to power electric vehicles, which would surpass public transportation (it would be more efficient as your vehicle does not have to stop and every single stop and then start back up again). The way I see it, driverless cars could be better than public transportation in every way, maybe with the exception of efficiency.
In the end, our cars will be more like a small bedroom, living room or office. We'll have a couch and a TV/monitor or a desk with a computer or whatever you want. There will be no steering wheel, gas pedal, or designated seats. If the system works well enough, we won't even need seat belts. Every car will be like a limo without a driver. I don't know if any of us will live to see that day.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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
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.
Please, tell me how public transit can get me from my front door on a minor city street with no bus service to my parents' house outside of a small town about 30 miles away. Public transit is a fantastic option if you live in a large city and don't leave it very often, but it's no where near good enough to replace a car for a lot of people.
Why does it have to be an all or nothing proposition? Automated cars could exist on the road with human drivers.
Europe has tons of cities which aren't planned like that
When London, Beijing, Cairo, and most other ancient cities were first laid out, their main roads connected little groups of buildings, in whatever way was convenient at the time. Maps didn't exist commonly, let alone a postal service, so the only important measure of efficiency was transit time on foot. With nothing else around them, those roads could be made straight, bending only around geographic features. This is clearly evident in rural Africa, where the roads between farms are generally straight, but run at odd angles.
Newer cities (including all the ones in America, which were all built in the last 500 years) were designed for people and postmen. Cities were expected to have a high population density, so their roads are designed to make the biggest buildings possible: rectangles. Their addressing was designed for efficiency, to the extent where cities like Salt Lake City, Utah have primarily numbered streets, with names being used only for main routes. There are still many odd angles, but they're generally old major routes that the city has grown around. Even landscape is getting ignored in favor of efficiency, with roads often stopping at a river's edge and continuing on the other side.
All of this means that outside America, Google Car has little use.
Conveniently, modern routing algorithms have absolutely no problem with any of these designs. Modern algorithms treat the city as a graph of intersections, knowing what intersections connect to what other intersections, how far apart they are (by time, distance, and even traffic density) and knowing what building numbers are between what intersections. The actual placement of those intersections doesn't matter when planning a route, but only when actually making a map for humans to follow.
In fact they would be fatal to others on the road.
As I'm sure has been pointed out by others by now, this is ridiculous. An automated car can be just as sensitive as any human-driven car, and often moreso. An automated car has cameras and laser sensors on it, that can poll thousands of points each second to construct a map of the world. Unlike humans, the sensors don't suffer from blindness, distraction, or optical illusions. If there's an elephant in front of the car, the car will know that there's an elephant-shaped object in front of it, and it will recognize the turning lights on its ass. the moment they come on.
Also unlike humans, an automated car is capable of communicating with other automated cars on the road. Despite what the summary says, they can tailgate, and they can cut each other off. The difference is that they'll be in constant communication at the time, so that if one car needs to stop, it will give plenty of notice to other cars, who will all apply their brakes at the same time at different strengths, so they will decelerate in unison. Cars traveling a half-meter apart on the highway will stop a half-meter apart, too.
With this communication, it's fully possible for a car to see around corners. Not only are there sonar sensors capable of making a decent guess as to what's approaching, but there are also projects to make stationary sensors, to be placed near intersections. These would watch for regular old dumb cars (and people, cats, dogs, and elephants, too), monitor their position and velocity, and send reports to automated cars in the area, which can then make fully-informed decisions about what to do.
I doubt Google has thought of this and they will be in for a big surprise when nobody but Americans can use them.
I can assure you that Google has thought of this. That's why Google Maps works for routes outside the United States, and why self-driving robots have been a major field of research for a few decades.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Two points
the ggp post you made, #3 is wrong - it wasn't subtle.
Also, Bing maps did appear to be faster than Google maps when I tested it just now, but then again, it's less popular, so it's probably getting hammered less. That being said, it was very confused by rather simple directions request. I'll happily take the 3x longer load time for google maps, since it can not only get me within the right zip code, but to the right place.
Note - this was a simple query - street number, name, and city. Google maps had no trouble, Bing Maps gave me four results, all in the wrong zip coes.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
um... you can do that already if you take the bus. >.>
There is no reason to have pedestrians and motor vehicles sharing the same space.
Use an overpass/underpass design to keep the cars away from where the pedestrians are. Designate actual bike paths, separate from walkways or motorways.
In areas with large amounts of foot traffic, such as downtown/shopping/dining districts put in car parks a block or two away, and allow only foot traffic -except for designated cargo loading access points (aka alleyways).
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
But who would drive me to the bus stop?
Traffic is a result of ( volume of cars) > (capacity of road).
It's not that simple. The number of cars on the road depends on the average speed of the cars. The slower cars go, the longer they'll be sitting on the road taking up space.
But as the number of cars increases past a certain point, the average speed decreases. People get nervous driving in tight formation, for good reason. This leads to roads never actually being used at capacity.
If instead we had driverless cars that would form into packs that move at the speed limit, even when the road is nearly saturated, we'll get more cars off the road faster thereby reducing congestion.
Nifty, huh?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The cities are full, we like trees, air, fresh water, fishing and hunting, jobs were more readily available in less urban areas, closer to family and friends, better schools in the rural areas... and much more.
Traffic is a result of ( volume of cars) > (capacity of road).
That's not the only cause of traffic jams. Some other causes, just off the top of my head:
- Lanes ending, either due to construction or accident.
- Major exit ramps onto another road with traffic issues. Not only does that screw up the right lane, it also screws up the next lane over with the jerks who drive past the line of cars waiting and then try to force their way into the line.
- A single slow driver can wreak significant havoc just by cruising down the right lane at 45 mph. The reason is that now the not-quite-as-slow 55 mph driver pulls into the next lane over to pass them, forcing the 60 mph driver into the left lane, leaving the 75-80 mph drivers going insane behind them.
- Sun glare and other natural conditions slowing down drivers, especially timid drivers.
I am officially gone from
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.
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/
Right now, you're supposed to maintain sufficient distance from the cars around you that if something happens to them, you have time to react. Cars should never be moving at 180 KPH within centimeters of each other for exactly the reason you state. If the car in front has a mechanical failure and starts decelerating rapidly, the cars around need time to react whether they're driven by people or computers.
Efficiency and navigatability, plus, as opposed to London, most American cities have several thousand years worth of city road building experience built right in.
I suspect you mean thousands of years of road building experience built RIGHT OUT.
Instead of having to make all those mistakes that you must accept forever, (because the cost to undo them is too high) cities developed later tend to be developed better. Learning from the mistakes of the past.
But in any event, I fail to see how this issue affects driverless cars. After all, its all in the maps.
Narrow twisting one way streets would be avoided, just like any good GPS Nav unit avoids them now, unless your destination is one such a street. Route preference can be built into the maps as well. I don't see old-city design issues being a major impediment. Speeds are slower in these places, and the guidance system has time to react.
Italian drivers are another issue.
What worries me is the increasing incidence of big-rig drivers to run GPS Jammers just so their cargo can't track its own route. I've had my GPS jump two states away just because an 18 wheeler pulled up behind me. I whipped out my phone only to find it couldn't get a fix either. 10 miles this went on, then the trucker tuned onto a different highway, and everything went back to normal.
Can the Google cars handle this?
Do they have inertial nav, or dead reckoning built in for GPS failures, or do they just rely on following a lane to its destination?
See-vehicle - Avoid vehicle, See Lane - Stay in Lane?
Do they hit the pot hole at 50mph that the car in front drifted slightly left to avoid?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
doesn't have overly paranoid users thinking that anyone who says anything positive about Microsoft or Apple, or validly criticizes Linux and FOSS
Reddit has invisible barriers. Voluntary barriers actually. If you don't follow Linux you won't subscribe to any of the Linux subreddits and you never see positive posts about Linux. (Or alternatively: Windows) However, if you express frustration or distaste for the product of topic, you'll get down modded into oblivion. Compare that to Slashdot's single facing main news page and you can see (hopefully) why. If Reddit forced every main story to the front page for every logged in user you'd get a lot of people commenting negatively on "New Microsoft app has Ribbon" stories popping up on their main page. With subscriptions though, you would likely never see this story unless you subscribe to /r/microsoft
Reddit makes for a great echo chamber. You can subscribe to your favorite topics and get all warm fuzzy news about it all day long and anything that seems too critical will be quickly shunned.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Well he assumes it won't be a flying car.
You're driving along talking to your passenger.
Suddenly the siren goes off telling you to take over.
You turn to the wheel. The computer shut down because something disastrous just happened. You have perhaps a few seconds to switch from 'talking to passenger' mode to 'I have to handle a disastrous situation mode that the computer can't deal with and I haven't looked at the road for an hour' mode.
Are you:
1. Instantly going to recognise the problem and masterfully steer the car out of it?
2. Fscked?
This is almost exactly the same behaviour that killed the people on AF447.
Given a choice between Google's AI, or the guy in the other vehicle who is probably incapacitated by some form of recreational substances, i'll take the AI. We already deal with hostile/oblivious/incapable people behind the wheel. At least the AI will be consistent and improve over time with regard to driving decisions.
Where AIs succeed where people fail are reaction times. Where a rear-ender occurs because someone weaved in a lane, paniced, and brake-checked, an AI would have already detected the event and the vehicle would have slowed down, possibly announcing via some wireless mesh about the emergency stop, causing other car AIs to be able to slow down without as much force. For the most part, the only communication between meat drivers on the road is a middle finger.
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...
They already have a type of driverless car for that (at least from you and your friend's perspective). It's called a taxi.
Why would anyone ever buy a Porsche, or Vette or even a high powered Camero again..if you couldn't take it out on the streets and drive it like you would today?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
In the end, whether you see it as utopia or dystopia depends on your confidence level in human nature -- whether you think society can find useful ways of make-work or self-actualization for all the unemployed people made obsolete by progress.
Gross navigation is handled by GPS and fine navigation uses cameras and other sensors to figure out what to do locally or if GPS fails. It has to factor in other cars, after all.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Why would anyone ever buy a Porsche, or Vette or even a high powered Camero again..if you couldn't take it out on the streets and drive it like you would today?
For the same reason you don't take a horse on the freeway. Progress is funny like that. Things become obsolete.
There would be dedicated "amusement roads" for such purposes, much like there are horseback tours today.
More Twoson than Cupertino
It would certainly take all the fun out of driving, that's for sure.
If you want to drive for fun, take your damned muscle car to the racetrack and risk your own damned life. I don't need you risking mine by your driving like a moron. Cars are for transportation, not fun... unless you're at the races.
Free Martian Whores!
Self-driving cars not only use a variety of sensors to assess the environment, but also have systems based on algorithms like SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping) to help them position themselves relative to the environment, and position landmarks relative to them. All kinds of sensors are involved, but especially laser range sensors which would prevent the kind of problems caused by GPS returning invalid results (the car won't just drive into a wall, it will avoid the wall and reduce the belief associated with the current location). GPS is just an extra sensor, not a bunch of set-in-stone instructions.
They don't hit the pot hole because there are computer vision systems that, along with the range sensors, can make a reliable guess at whether that is a pot hole or not, and avoid it. Speed would be irrelevant as the computer can react faster, and more accurately than a human driver could.
When it comes to this kinds of algorithms, sometimes they are *too* efficient, and you have to route around that: a good example is going around walls, in which the car might decide to hug the wall and take a turn very, very close to the corner - but this is not optimal as a) the driver would probably freak out b) Movement and location sensors are not perfect, you always have to consider actuator and sensor noise. So, the algorithms are complemented by a penalty for getting too close to objects, even if it wouldn't cause a collision.
I hope that helps paint a broad picture of the system to make a bit more understandable.
It was in Nevada (and not near any military installation), and I'm pretty sure it was just Joe Contract Trucker.
That wasn't the first time It happened, just the first time I figured out what it was. My Garmin literally had me in North Dakota one minute, then Texas the next. It was useless. The phone simply couldn't get a fix. The Cell towers told it one thing, but the GPS signal said something totally different.
Its becoming a big problem. These units are not hard to find, and the problem is becoming fairly serious as even a cursory Google search will find:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/uk-research-measures-growing-gps-jamming-threat/
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/02/gps-jamming-a-clear-and-presen.html
http://www.jammerall.com/categories/GPS-Jammers/
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Is that a world you'd actually want?!?!
What happened to car culture in this country...people used to like their cars, work on them..drive them...want to have performance vehicles.
Sad to see that go...a car shouldn't just be a utilitarian object to get you from place A to place B. Life is too short for that....drive a fun car, and every trip you take is an adventure.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If they weren't meant for fun...they'd not sell cars that were fun to drive.
You don't generally buy a street legal car...to just drive it on the track.
Like I said on another post...it is sad that one things a car is just a utilitarian object to get from place to place.
With fun cars, like I've always owned....even the daily drive to work is an adventure!!!
Life it too short not to enjoy every minute of it you can...even on a drive to the grocery store.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Not even taking into account the results, Bing maps just plain makes my eyes hurt. The very muted coloursheme makes it difficult to tell road types apart (with the exception of major highways). Even major metropolitan arterials blend into the background and god forbid they get close to an area zoned as a public park (green on green).
But nothing ticks me off more than their naming of cities / suburbs. They don't scale down. If I search for a city like Brisbane and zoom to a scale that shows the central suburb and the ones immediately surrounding them, the second "b" covers the entire business district. Along with the already muted tones, a semi transparent letter 3" high in the middle of the screen doesn't do a lot of good either!.
How about a suburb search. Bing only puts a big dot on the map. When you zoom out that dot is somewhere in the city. Google puts it's marker in, but when you zoom out it highlights the boundries of your suburb so you can not only see exactly where in the city it is, but also how big it is.
Bing has a long way to go before I'll even consider it viable. It's a pain in the arse to use on a computer and I shudder to think how it would look on my 4" phone screen.
Okay, well here is where I'm going to attach my comments, since you guys are at least getting close to my angle on these things:
An automated car would indeed be more fuel efficient than a human-driven one, largely because human beings are really stupid at driving: they constantly try to push the car faster than the average speed of traffic, and hence do a lot of standing on the gas and the brake.
(There's another big potential advantage to automated cars, but I bet they're keeping quiet about it in order to keep from scaring people: tailgaiting. If all the cars are computer controlled, they can all brake simultaneously, so there's much less need for big following distances, and hence they can all "draft" each other. Wind resistance is what kills fuel efficiency at highway speeds.)
By fixing a lot of the frustrations with using a private car, these systems are going to encourage using them in preference to other strategies, there's a potential for huge perverse effects: ultimately this isn't a "green" technology, it's a distraction technology that's going to keep people from working on the real problems. (Note: you can say similar things for electric cars-- in the US half our electricity is generated by coal burning, if your electricity is coal-in-disguise it's cleaner to burn gasoline).
Just to pick one problem: if you make it easier for people to live with a 2 or 3 hour commute each way, many more people will do that. Even if you double the energy efficiency, if you double the miles they're willing to drive, that would be a wash.
Another, related angle: one of the big problems the US faces is that after WWII massive amounts of construction was rolled out around the idea that everyone would be driving cars everywhere: the low-density "sprawl" is nearly impossible to retrofit with workable public transit. Does a driverless car sound like a "green-fix" to you? To me it sounds like a "sprawl enabler".
Energy efficiency and environmental pollution isn't everything, there are multiple other problems associated with a car-centered lifestyle from social isolation to gasoline guts. (Oh boy, door-to-door service! I'll never have to walk *anywhere*! I'll never have to sit near anyone with a different ethnic background! Heaven!)
(Brad Templeton's energy numbers on transit are interesting, but limited in a number of ways, largely because he's working solely "per mile": if you take a more whole-system view, a city where people are using relatively dirty buses and trains for short-hops is likely to be better off compared to a sprawl where people are using cleanish-cars to drive 20 miles to buy a gallon of milk.)
What happened to the horse culture in this country...people used to like their horses, feed them, trust them like beloved pets. This newfangled Model A is going to ruin all that and replace it with a utilitarian object that can't show you affection or eat oats from your hand.
Or to put it another way, humankind has been around for about 200,000 years, and have only had cars for the last 100. I think we'll get over it. We have before.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Many families could reduce ownership to only one car. Take it to work, instead of having to pay parking all day long, it then returns under its own power to pick up the kids and take them to school, then trundle to the supermarket where it will pick up the shopping ordered online, and packed by a personal shopping bot (or human). At 3:00pm, return to school where a teacher will confirm my car has arrived for them and dismiss them, the car then takes them home, then return to the city to get me from work. If I'm going to be late, just have the car park outside of the city and wait until I'm ready (the main reason I dont use public transport, my schedule varies considerably, and doesnt coincide with bus or train timetables very well.
Infact, why have my own car for this, just rent a "Jonny Cab" 8)