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Tesla, Ford, Amazon Hint At Cloudy Future For Cars
Nerval's Lobster writes "The automobile, once the most analog of technologies, is rapidly becoming a smartphone on wheels: Amazon announced Feb. 13 that Ford SYNC Applink-equipped vehicles will include the Amazon Cloud Player, allowing drivers to access their music libraries via voice command or dashboard controls. Ford isn't the only automotive company seeking to integrate cloud computing into the driving experience. Tesla Motors' Model S electric sedan boasts a 17-inch capacitive touch-screen in place of the usual dashboard buttons and dials. And who could forget Google's self-driving car? This isn't a future everybody wants—there are more than a few wannabe Steve McQueens who won't feel complete unless they can stomp on a pedal connected to an internal-combustion engine, flick a physical dashboard knob to the radio station of their choice, and peel out their driveway in a cloud of burning rubber. But as the latest technology migrates into automobiles, it could well be the future we're going to receive."
Oh! I see what you did there!
The more things you add to a car that distract the driver the less safe they'll be.
Entirely unrelated: the more digital cars get the more unreliable they will become.
Just what I need, the reliability of Amazon cloud systems in my vehicle.
it doesnt move depending on what mode my screen is in or require me to look to change the volume
This stuff has a ways to go. It's a major software undertaking to get it all to work. As an example, we recently bought a Prius with some web-enabled computer thingy in the dashboard. It's supposed to talk to the smartphone via Bluetooth and do all sorts of stuff. However, according to a list published by Toyota, only half of the integration features work properly with our iPhones. Basic things such as MP3 song time display are missing.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Until that key moment when the Royal American Federation prohibits manual control that you'd actually lose your freedom, & that's not due for another 50 years. Besides, road deaths account for 1/50 of all deaths; we COULD undo that cause of death almost entirely, but no, let's just let them die because people might end up too stupid to know how to turn the governor off & then can't play IRL Mario Kart.
I didn't think there was anything worse; but in the rush to jam inappropriate technology into everything, they've outdone themselves. I'm going to have to replace my canonical, "I can't use my word processor, the network is down" with "I can't start the car, the network is down".
Except most of the manufacturers won't want to expend the effort to keep their old products up-to-date. Look forward to drive-by hackings of your buggy car firmware. And new web technologies relegating your $60k+ car to the status of a 5 year old PC.
The golden age of automotive technology was 1946-1965. Plastics and electronics ruined them. The snot-nosed little cunts who need ABS and traction control should ride a short bus and wear a hockey helmet.
A touchscreen dash is an absolutely horrid idea. Physical buttons can be accessed via muscle memory. A dynamic control with zero tactile feedback requires you to focus on it for every function. How can anyone in the automotive industry not see this as an enormous liability?
Having a video or computer display in the line of sight of the driver is already illegal in most states (distraction) and having a computer in the front seat of a vehicle is illegal in at least California. I can't help but wonder how a 17" touchscreen with computer controls will be viewed by the police and court systems.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
What they are really afraid of is the fact that once cars become self-driving, no one will need to own one anymore.
Technology is actually upended the business model of the entire autoindustry. They might innovate themselves right out of business.
I mean seriously who cares about cloudplayer in a self-driving car? If it can drive itself I'll just leave my earbuds in.
The most common vehicle in 10 years will be the autonomous Dodge caravan, taxiing us all around. Rich people will have maybe their own auto-Bently's or something, but the rest of us will just share a car.
Nowadays it's pretty clear that anything with a processor will be connect to some cloud some time in the future, like it or not. What I don't get is the logic in the middle of the summary: how is having a touch screen a hint for cloud computing on the car? Not only having to take the eyes of the road just to change a radio station or increase the AC quite dangerous due to the lack of mechanical feedback, but the Amazon/Ford and Google efforts seem a lot more concrete when it comes to cloud uses. It just feels out of place not being relevant to the article and it's there just for the sake of being trendy.
An existing example in another market is the Boeing/Airbus duopoly. In the current world market no one outside of Europe or the US has a lot of control over what kinds of long and intermediate passenger planes are built. (Short range passenger aircraft are a different story.) The Chinese are already working on joining this club, by the way.
The future is cloudy because the manufacturing base is shifting. Everything else is a secondary effect.
Why is Snark Required?
This needs a "donotwant" tag.
How long til a malicious person is able to crash (potentially lots of) cars in the real world by hacking into some cloud servers? Or make the cars run over pedestrians instead of avoid them?
This is potentially a really serious problem, that people so far are ignoring. Maybe we need a law requiring physical isolation of a self-driving car's control computer from all networks. They need access to GPS data, but this can probably accommodated with special hardware that does its best to ensure only GPS data is passed in.
I really like the idea of abstracting the console to the point where I can customize/control my interface with the car's computers. I'd like to be able to connect my own control device (tablet, bluetooth handset, mp3 player, GPS, ...) to enhance the driving experience.
However, the CAR needs basic built in controls to turn OFF all non-essential options and simply drive, especially if an input device/accessory FAILS. If done properly, with open connectivity standards, this is a great trend. There's the problem though: too much integration without open connectivity standards.
Cars' computer systems are becoming powerful. They need to be treated like any other advanced tech resource. Think: Security, connectivity standards and graceful failure modes.
Happy V-day, btw!
How about a truly smart car? You know, one that doesn't let your cell phone work while you are driving? No, texts, no calls, nothing. Maybe it can also warn you that you are speeding and then automatically slow you back down to the posted speed limit (or ask if you would like to continue and then notify the authorities).
Otherwise, all of these cloud conected cars seem to be one more way to distract drivers on an already overcrowded highway system.
The biggest problem I see with these systems is very rapid obsolescence. You'll generally replace a phone or tablet a lot more often than a car. There should be a standard port to attach a tablet to and the car manufacturer can offer software for all the major platforms, or you can choose to use something else. Instead we seem to be getting a bunch of built in tablets running code that we have no control over and can't replace. Is anybody sorting this out?
he's on a motorcycle.
#DeleteChrome
The problem I see with more and more electronics is the loss of control, not just of the vehicle but also of your privacy. You are already driving with a black box in most vehicles, and access to that is not restricted to accident investigators - data gets pulled every time you have the car serviced, with you having nil control over how it is used.
A secondary issue is that entertainment electronics is subject to far less security checks than the stuff that makes sure your engine runs best and that steers traction control and ABS, yet they are interconnected. Research teams have already shown it is possible to use the one layer to affect the other by completely killing the brakes of a car on remote - do you really want to make it possible for a script kiddie to do this to your car?
The privacy issue is very current. I can already see Google powered systems enter into some vehicles, without any alternative options being presented. Not only does that require the most expensive wireless connection you can get as a family (mobile/cell), especially if you travel internationally, it's also handing data in large uncontrolled gobs to a company that has as yet to prove it can be trusted with it. I don't want to become part of the Streetview data collection system, thank you - not even if they paid me for it.
Insert
Everyone is going to have a smartphone in their pockets, which they'll change every 2 years. I'm hoping a new car will last longer than 2 years, so let's just leave the smart phone capabilities up to my smart phone.
How about they just wifi up the car and leave me a slot to put a tablet or something?
Given the recent NYT review, I don't think Tesla can afford to waste the battery life on this.
NYT article showed it was dropping projected miles way faster than actual miles, even though the reviewer had slowed it and put it on cruise control. The most likely cause was that, Tesla told him to turn off the heater (in freezing conditions no less!) and he turned it down to the minimum, as low as he could bear and still function.*
So most likely they don't factor things like heaters, radio, wifi etc. into their distance calculation, and the less of those the better. Until you have spare power you shouldn't go wasting it on unessential things!
* Yes I read Teslas claims, however they didn't dispute the article key points on range.
I want my car reporting my rural speed transgressions directly to the cloud-connected police, so law enforcement can be efficiently vectored to intercept me.
Better still, it can be wired to go "driverless" automatically and take me straight to the nearest court-house for doing 66 on a deserted back-country road posted 65.
Judge Dred meets Knight Rider!
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Am I the only one who thinks a touch screen is a *terrible* idea in a car, especially if the touch screen device is supposed to be used while driving? With conventional knobs and switches, you can often find what you want to do just by moving your hand to the approximate position and feeling for the appropriate control. I can operate my car radio without looking at it. But you're forced to look at a touch screen - in other words, stop looking where you're directing nearly two tons of metal to fiddle with some device.
Hopefully there will be some statistics taken on crashes as to the accident rate of touch screen equipped vehicles vs non touch screen equipped vehicles. Intuitively, it would seem that touch screens would have a negative safety consequence.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The future is, where you do not own a car. If you need one you borrow one. Of course it can communicate with your phone otherwise it would not know what you mean by "drive me home". Furthermore, in metropolitan areas, other means of public transport are much more efficient and easier to implement. For example, street cars, underground trains, smaller and bigger buses, which are easy to access and allow you to bring stuff with you, like buggies, trolleys or bikes. Cars supplement that, can be called, like cabs, but without a driver. Wonder where all the aliens will work in future ;-) In some countries the use of mass transport facilities will be (kind of) free, as it is financed through taxes. Some towns already do that, others subsidize mass transport, as it is cheaper than building new roads. Ah yes, gasoline cars will be extinct.
In one hand, you have the greed of the entire industry, wanting to put every single communications device they can think of inside a car, and connect it all online, and then sell all the statistics we all will generate to target advertising.
In the other hand, I have the countless deaths racked up by just texting on the road today. I believe if we left it unchecked, it would likely surpass every other killer (including alcohol) on the road, if it already hasn't received this coveted title of dishonor.
Not everyone wants self-driving cars? Something tells me that should be the first damn thing on the mandate list before they start dragging the rest of the internet into the car.
Can't wait until the spoiled 16-year old down the street with a week-old license steps into Daddy's new car and gets online, to pay about as much attention at 70MPH as they do walking and texting.
Gee, I feel safer already.
What they are really afraid of is the fact that once cars become self-driving, no one will need to own one anymore.
Technology is actually upended the business model of the entire autoindustry. They might innovate themselves right out of business.
I mean seriously who cares about cloudplayer in a self-driving car? If it can drive itself I'll just leave my earbuds in.
The most common vehicle in 10 years will be the autonomous Dodge caravan, taxiing us all around. Rich people will have maybe their own auto-Bently's or something, but the rest of us will just share a car.
...like me, they'll own motorcycles, probably. Riding a bike (full disclosure: I love my Ducati 1098) is about as close to flying as you can get in two dimensions. The subset of the population that enjoys driving cars and riding bikes for the sheer exhilaration of it (vanishingly small, to be sure, but extant nonetheless) are immune to the marketing gimmicks you are basing your argument on. I have a BT-enabled comm system in my helmet that already lets me voice control my phone -- I can drag a knee at a buck-twenty while listening to Moby *and* send a sell order to my broker at the same time. No amount of autonomous vehicle goodness (and it is a goodness, btw) will alter that in the slightest.
The engine, body and other car-ish stuff may be good for thirty years, but in five the in-car entertainment and cloudy navigation systems will be as obsolete an eight-track. Time to go out and buy a new car. Welcome to the upgrade cycle: The computer and smartphone industries got there long ago.
I don't want to know what a 17" touchscreen will cost, even a decade into the future, just to get your fan/heater/AC controls working again.
More than that: I can work the controls on my 2003 Golf TDI without taking my eyes off the road. The folks at VW did their homework enough that most knobs and buttons having a unique enough feel and movement that I can adjust settings (audio, HVAC) with my right hand while keeping my left hand on the wheel, and my eyes on the road because of the tactile feedback.
I cannot see how the same thing can be done with an all-screen control panel.
I wouldn't against a large screen for information display, with touch functionality, but I also want (properly designed) knobs as well.
I just want a plain AFFORDABLE electric car. 100 miles a day on an over night charge. $20000 or less. What is so hard about that?
No hour on a horse is ever wasted. Winston Churchill
One single human death due to a robot / self-driving-car is sadly psychologically way worse than 1 000 deaths on the road due to other humans.
If there's one thing that is going to create a mistrust and downright hatred for anything technological (and especially robot), it's that: the first human death due to a bug, a security issue, a "feature" or anything else that shall make a self-driving car hit a kid.
Even if meanwhile 999 other kids have been sparred, nothing is going to make for that loss. The psychological reaction of most humans is going to be scary.
This is going to happen (an autonomous car killing an human) and, no matter if meanwhile a lot of lives have been saved, humans aren't going to like it and I fully expect traditional car makers to lobby like crazy to make autonomous cars illegal.
I don't expect Ford, BMW, Audi, VW, Nissan, etc. to let Google take the market away from them either.
Long battle ahead.
I personally prefer to have the (higher) risk of seeing my kids killed by an honest human mistakes than have a lower kids of seeing my kids dying due to a bug or a script kiddie using the latest 0-day to gain control of autonomous vehicles.
I still want a V8, rear wheel drive, manual transmission car but self driving cars are something I want. I may be a good driver (have not damaged a car in driving since I was a teen, even on icy roads) but being able to spend the time going to and from work productively rather than watching traffic would be awesome. On the other hand I want an override as I'm not sure I'd trust a car programmed in California to West Michigan winters...
This is just the tip of the iceberg though. I keep my "stuff" in my car so I don't have to carry a huge man-purse everywhere. A generic fix-it kit in the trunk, medical kit in the glove box, device-specific holders for my electronics (as well as carefully routed power cords), plus a pen, pencil, utility knife, flashlight, map, and some work-related gear in case I get a call while I'm out. I've seriously considered getting a second, super-fuel-efficient car for longer trips (I drive a full sized truck which gets abyssmal gas milage) but then I realized I'd have to be swapping stuff back and forth - or buy two of everything. I hate having to do that when I have to take my wife's car somewhere...I can't imaging having to do that every time I leave the house.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
All this crap about "unsafe" and "need tactile" is the same fearmongering luddite crap that I heard 20 years ago... and BTW, we true 30-something geeks have had touchscreens and computers with navigation and mp3 players and everything since the early days of mp2s... we had to custom make our own, as our analog predecesors did ala Knight Rider... ppl actually did that shit. And it costs maybe $500 back then, nowadays you could do it with a raspberry pi and adafruit screen, with rear camera (starting next month) for under $100. Sad thing is, the custom worthless 20-year-old "tech of the future" that car companies are putting in now, they will charge an extra $8000-$12000 for. It makes me sick.
You know what else makes me sick? That it isn't what slashdotters are talking about, but should be. Turn in your geek cards guys.
The NYT writer lied. It's over for that story. But the damage is done.
He was told to do certain things. Instead, he:
-Turned the heat up.
-Speeded, consistently. Over 80 mph at some point.
-Didn't stay at the supercharger long enough, almost every time - and lied about it.
-Pulled away for 60+ mile trip even though he knew it only had a charge for less than 40 miles left.
-Circled a supercharger station, for some reason.
-Lied about the car going dead. It did not.
Broder should lose his job. Read it, please!
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/02/tesla-logs-nytimes/
Tesla Driving Logs Contradict New York Times Claims
...like me, they'll own motorcycles, probably. Riding a bike (full disclosure: I love my Ducati 1098) is about as close to flying as you can get in two dimensions. The subset of the population that enjoys driving cars and riding bikes for the sheer exhilaration of it (vanishingly small, to be sure, but extant nonetheless) are immune to the marketing gimmicks you are basing your argument on. I have a BT-enabled comm system in my helmet that already lets me voice control my phone -- I can drag a knee at a buck-twenty while listening to Moby *and* send a sell order to my broker at the same time. No amount of autonomous vehicle goodness (and it is a goodness, btw) will alter that in the slightest.
I sold my Duc last year because too many clueless drivers tried to take it out. Some like to blame this on texting and cell phone, but it seems mostly because people don't pay attention because they have a million other things to occupy their minds when they should be focused on driving. And these people don't see bikes.
Remind me to not be anywhere near you when you are riding hard enough to drag a knee at 120 and doing a stock transaction at the same time. Doing that is just as dangerous as the distracted mom in the minivan coming at your bike.
Might we end up looking like Cuba (or Bladerunner) with people who like to drive hotrodding 20's thru 90's iron just for the pleasure of being in control of it from the ground up?
going to pay a monthly charge to get an overpriced data plan for my car!
No shit. That dude won't be driving anything in 10 years. He'll be dead.
there are more than a few wannabe Steve McQueens who won't feel complete unless they can stomp on a pedal connected to an internal-combustion engine, flick a physical dashboard knob to the radio station of their choice, and peel out their driveway in a cloud of burning rubber.
This is conflating unrelated things (internal combustion holdouts with "cloud connecteness" and other user interface aspects).
Electric drive is coming, like it or not, and it's a great thing. As for the other, there are good and bad ways to execute, and it's healthy to be wary of change.
Software UI (a la what Tesla is shipping on the model S) can be a great thing, and there are also plenty of ways to do it poorly. I don't want to have to re-learn the controls every time the manufacturer hires a new UI designer and pushes out a software update, for example.
Ditto for connectivity. There are amazing applications for vehicle connectivity, and many that have not yet been conceived, but there's also a bad potential for orphaned products (dangerously close to "planned obsolescence"). Instead of losing content when a game service goes poof, you could lose a big piece of your car's functionality at the whim of the automaker (or a partner third party).
How about Independence and that feeling of ownership? This is my vehicle I will use when, where, and how I want, I do not require any help.
For those of us that were into performance mods for our cars in the mid 80's, one of the big jokes was chrome. You could get almost anything chrome plated: fasteners, covers, radiator fans, gas caps ... the list was endless. This stuff sold well, but it was only a fashion statement. I can't deny that some folks built their cars into beautiful works of art using chrome. But it didn't make the cars any faster.
I see much of the technology being put into cars today as so much chrome. A fashion statement. This New Chrome seems to have some major disadvantages. Controls that offer no tactile feedback requiring one to actually take eyes off the road to operate? Interface components likely to be unsupported in a decade? Consolidated control devices (like a touch screen) that prevents operation of a wide range of vehicle function if damaged? Voice and data communication features that basically duplicate the tech we already carry in our pockets anyway? "Cloud" interfaces which open the vehicle to malicious activity from anonymous third parties? A sophisticated computer controlled component that replaces a lever (lever=$2, computer controlled module=$150)? These things arguably make the car worse: more cost, more things to break, more maintenance, worst driver usability, and arguably no improvements in vehicle operation.
Don't get me wrong. Technology has done great things for cars in the last few decades. Better machining tolerances mean engines last far longer. Sophisticated block and head designs mean much better fuel economy and power to weight ratios. Frame designs that offer greater passenger safety. Computer controlled ignition systems, ABS brakes, per-cylinder fuel injection ... the list of useful and productive tech added to cards is very long indeed.
I'm not sure we need the chrome, though. This time around, it's not just a thin, benign plating...
Here's an idea: THE PRIVACY CAR. Yes, a car with no GPS, no Internet connection, invisible to radar, a license plate that cannot be read by a camera, no RFID tags in the wheels or anywhere elase, and tinted windows.
... and what would one do with one in a car?
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