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A German Parking Garage Parks Your Car For You
moon_unit2 writes "Tech Review has a story about a garage in Ingolstadt, Germany, where the cars park themselves. The garage is an experiment set up by Audi to explore ways that autonomous technology might practically be introduced; most of the sensor technology is built into the garage and relayed to the cars rather than inside the cars themselves. It seems that carmakers see the technology progressing in a slightly different way to Google, with its fleet of self-driving Prius. From the piece: 'It's actually going to take a while before you get a really, fully autonomous car,' says Annie Lien, a senior engineer at the Electronics Research Lab, a shared facility for Audi, Volkswagen, and other Volkswagen Group brands in Belmont, California, near Silicon Valley. 'People are surprised when I tell them that you're not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.'"
In former German Democratic Republic, car parked YOU!
Priui? Pri?
Table-ized A.I.
'People are surprised when I tell them that you're not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.'
Well certainly not with that attitude, lady. The tech has been available for some time, and legal in-roads have been paved for their use. Now someone just needs to step up to the plate. Thanks for announcing that that someone wont be you.
How will the insurance industry make up for the rates charged if cars are fully autonomous? They will lose a very lucrative market if and when this comes to be.
While it's a neat idea for a self parking garage. I saw a concept(?) previously where you drive your car into a "single car container" and when you left, your car in it's container would be shuttled off to a compact/secure storage array like a tape in a server room storage rack. Even though it requires more track and sensors, that system seems to be more realistic than a system that requires every car be programmed to understand the signals being broadcast by the garage.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Life safety critical autonomy is very, very hard. Think a billion dollars for a system that makes one dectision -- up, down or not. TCAS took a billion dollars and 2 decades from the start of funding to fielding.
Probably what everyone else does when their current business model is threatened: bring in the lawyers and sue sue sue!
How will the insurance industry make up for the rates charged if cars are fully autonomous? They will lose a very lucrative market if and when this comes to be.
By insuring car makers against crashes caused by their software. And, of course, it's not the rates they care about, but the profit....they may be able to maintain their profit whilst reducing rates by paying out less and getting rid of administrative overhead by dealing with a few big customers.
People are surprised when I tell them that you're not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.
Oh really now?
Google has already been testing the cars on the road in Nevada, which passed a law last year authorizing driverless vehicles. Both Nevada and California require the cars to have a human behind the wheel who can take control of the vehicle at any time. So far, the cars have have racked up more than 300,000 driving miles, and 50,000 of those miles were without any intervention from the human drivers, Google says.
Source dated Tue October 30, 2012
Someone's a touch behind...
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
The Germans love driving. They love driving fast. I can see why it is set up so that "the first self-driving vehicles will perform only specific tasks." To numerous of them driving isn't just something to get from point A to point B. Which is why most German cars didn't have cupholders, etc that American cars did back in the 80s.
I was recently working in Germany and a coworker mentioned that some lawmakers want to put a speed limit but there is heavy, heavy resistance funded in part by VAG and Benz. He likened it to America's gun culture. and with that analogy some of the stuff some of our gun rights advocates say makes sense to them. (Not all of it, some of it is crazy rhetoric.) You don't touch Germans' driving/cars and you don't touch Americans' guns.
welcome our new robotic valet overlords.
Furthermore, hot grits.
go after the deep pockets of the big players in the market
wikipedia says:
Another article is here.
If it were up to VW, no advanced technology would ever be ready for the showroom. The company likes to tinker around the edges of existing technology and charge huge amounts of money for it. And Germany isn't going to allow anything that new-fangled on its roads anyway.
True innovation will have to come from other companies in other countries. There are easy ways of getting useful self-driving tech into cars right now, with little of the complications of Google, no laser 3D scanners, and little risk. All it takes is a desire to do so and some political will.
Your arms hang limp at your sides...
SCP-9398237
It is one thing to have an autonomous car that improves safety, and relieves the driver of strain. It is entirely another to make this level of investment for the paltry return of firing a few parking valets.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
How will the insurance industry make up for the rates charged if cars are fully autonomous? They will lose a very lucrative market if and when this comes to be.
Charging people at a risk level that has substantially dropped? They'll be pissing their pants in excitement. The reduction in risk turns directly into profit.
Manual : Those that can drive a real car
Automatic : Those that can drive a real car but don't understand how it works
And Self-Drive : Those that should have taken the train; and should not be allowed on the road without all of their assists.
Obviously the latter fits in with the two former; modern driving aids like auto park, lane detection, radar follow and brake - even ABS and ESP mean that really, if that's all you have ever driven, you should not simply be allowed on the streets, with me and my kids in anything 'manual' - IMVHO
Of course this happens in Ingolstadt.
I'll go back on my meds now.
If GM ends up assuming additional liability for each car they sell, I'd expect them to largely self-insure. Then again, utilizing existing insurance channels might be for the best.
I would NOT be surprised to see a legislative bill that indemnifies manufacturers of a autonomous car and puts the onus on the owner/operator, or even a switch to 'no fault' type insurance, in order to encourage them, so long as
I don't read AC A human right
don't take you car in on the last day even more so if you are a poor / no tipper.
'People are surprised when I tell them that you're not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.'
Oh really? Most cars people that are brand new that people can buy today have production cycles that are taking years and years. And typically it's not ten years only because they're reusing many components from previous cars. One of the shortest development cycle for, say, BMW was their little Z3: because Mazda and it's MX5 was taking all the market and BMW had to be fast. Still took them two years to to get the Z3.
Then when cars come out they stay on sale for years before a new model comes out.
So the models that people are going to buy brand new in ten years are being researched right now. And they're not autonomous.
Autonomous cars? Maybe in 30 years and that is conservative. That person is realistic when it says that you're not going to get one taking you door to door in ten years. There's nothing surprising about it.
Something also has to be said about security: there are botnets made of hundreds of thousands of zombies and there are concerns that a single amplification attack could take down the entire Internet (a recent tiny attack from an ISP in a bunker in the Netherlands managed to create latency measurable in the U.S.)... So either these autonomous cars will be using the Internet and it's not anytime soon that we'll be using secure OSes, servers, smartphones, cars and whatnots or they'll be using another network which... Has yet to be built! (I hardly see the current phone or satellite network providing the latency and security needed to run millions of autonomous cars).
So, yes, them Priuses are cute. But we're not all riding them in ten years.
Btw I'm driving as a daily a perfectly fine 25 years old car ; )
>> Annie Lien, a senior engineer...near Silicon Valley. 'People are surprised when I tell them that you're not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.'"
Are you sure that the smartest people live in the Valley?
If GM or other major car companies ends up assuming additional liability for each car they sell, I'd expect them to largely self-insure. Then again, utilizing existing insurance channels might be for the best.
I would NOT be surprised to see a legislative bill that indemnifies manufacturers of a autonomous car and puts the onus on the owner/operator, or even a switch to 'no fault' type insurance, in order to encourage them, so long as they test as being safer than average human drivers to a high confidence level, probably using DUI convicts as test beds.
Given a reasonably self driving car, I see a shift away from breath testers for driving to 'you can only take self-driving cars for X years', even if the system costs $40k. Just the breath system is like $10k for the first year, what with all the maintenance required, going by the road signs declaring 'YOUR FIRST DUI CAN COST $X', with breakdowns. Add in the thousands probably saved in insurance, etc... It adds up.
I don't read AC A human right
Okay, But what I want to watch is an Audi turn around 360 when confined inside a circle with only 2 inches clearance bumper to bumper wall to wall. Forward, turn wheel, backup, turn wheel, forward, turn wheel, backup turn wheel.... I want to watch it with parking lot tire squeakages and full backup beeper glory of hell!
Beepers going deet deet deet deet
Tires going errt errt errt errt
How about a few Garbage trucks and "The Claw (TM)" for the Impact noise?
What happened to the good old days of buying a yellow or orange vest and taking the keys to that Mazaradi...
Back in my DARPA Grand Challenge days, I saw fully automated parking as the first "killer app" for automated driving. Everybody was obsessed with automated freeway driving, but that's not what annoys people. Looking for parking annoys people. The general idea is that you get out of your car at your destination, and it goes and parks itself somewhere. When you want your car back, you call it and it comes to you. Parking then need not be as close to the destination; a big parking garage a mile away is fine.
The first application of this should have been for airport rental cars. You rent the car via your phone, and the car comes to the loading area near baggage claim and picks you up. When you're done with the car and at the airport, you get out at the departure area, and it drives itself to rental car return. Customers would save an hour on every plane trip. That would sell.
It's workable. At no time is autonomous operation above about 20MPH necessary, which means slamming on the brakes is sufficient to deal with most problems. All the rental cars are new and under common ownership and maintenance, so the self-driving systems can be checked out on every rental. The system could be expanded to include the top 10 destinations for rental cars - major hotels, convention centers, etc.
After 9/11, no way would autonomous vehicles be allowed in an airport terminal area. So that didn't look promising back in the mid-2000s. Today, though, with terrorism down to nuisance levels, it's worth looking at again.
As for VW thinking that automated driving is more than a decade away, both Ford and Mercedes have said they expect to have it in production vehicles in five years.
With sensor located in the garage and sending data to the car, anyone could temper with the data sent with some appropriate knowledge and tools and giving the car bad directions and instructions. "Yeah, yeah, go ahead, there's no problem, nope, there's no pillar there at all."
If he thinks the car insurance company will have it bad, wait what is going to happen to us.
Fully automated cars means less cars and lower fuel consumption, that will translate in fewer bought cars, less car mandatory insurance, less road taxes and less fuel sold. Our governments will have their tax income cut in half.
If you think we are in a bad position now ...
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
This is the most fundamental of economic arguments, and why "King Lud" smashed the looms and formed the luddite anti-technology movement. You are thinking about the low-wage jobs that are lost, but completely ignoring that the same parking garage will now need to hire a high-wage computer technician to manage the system and keep it running.
One way this can play out is that the car makers will self insure (i.e. their own cars). Ford, GM or Toyota are big enough to handle this.
So all these fired valets go back to school and earn a degree in electronics and communications? We need to leave a few jobs for the people with low skills and low motivation. It would cost the society more, when these hungry despo people fall into crime or become homeless.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
People will shift those funds to other purchases that are also taxed. If there were to be a problem, and I don't know why there would be, they could simply tax cars more while still leaving people with a lower total bill than before.
How would this result in less cars? People are going to still want their own, for convenience. The shared model may work for some, but that will be made up for by rich parents buying self-driving cars for their small children. Imagine not having to drive your kid to soccer practice, but have a car do it for you... Since there is no need for drivers licenses for those cars, there will be a lot of cars sold for children's use, which will more than make up for those that are using the shared cars.
Ol' Rick Dawson had a farm EIEIO
People who need charity should get charity, not anything else that hides the fact that they're getting charity.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
How will the insurance industry make up for the rates charged if cars are fully autonomous? They will lose a very lucrative market if and when this comes to be.
Charging people at a risk level that has substantially dropped? They'll be pissing their pants in excitement. The reduction in risk turns directly into profit.
Exactly.
And I really don't think we have much to be worried about with insurance companies with big oil being their main competitor in the greed market.
So all these fired valets go back to school and earn a degree in electronics and communications? We need to leave a few jobs for the people with low skills and low motivation. It would cost the society more, when these hungry despo people fall into crime or become homeless.
No, actually you can remove all those fired valets from the country, along with all the other illegal immigrants consuming jobs.
(Sorry, but if you're going to start down that road, you might as well target the real issue.)
How would this result in less cars?
Because someone is going to come up with a way to better use the 100 million commuter cars in the US that predictably sit idle in a corporate parking lot from 9AM to 5PM all day. At an average value of $10K each, that's a trillion dollars in capital equipment that currently just sits and depreciates for 150 hours per week.
You might be able to fix this with a HOSTS file.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
$10,000 CHALLENGE to Alexander Peter Kowalski
* POOR SHOWING TROLLS, & most especially IF that's the "best you've got" - apparently, it is... lol!
Hello, and THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING !! We have a Major Problem, HOST file is Cubic Opposites, 2 Major Corners & 2 Minor. NOT taught Evil DNS hijacking, which VOIDS computers. Seek Wisdom of MyCleanPC - or you die evil.
Your HOSTS file claimed to have created a single DNS resolver. I offer absolute proof that I have created 4 simultaneous DNS servers within a single rotation of .org TLD. You worship "Bill Gates", equating you to a "singularity bastard". Why do you worship a queer -1 Troll? Are you content as a singularity troll?
Evil HOSTS file Believers refuse to acknowledge 4 corner DNS resolving simultaneously around 4 quadrant created Internet - in only 1 root server, voiding the HOSTS file. You worship Microsoft impostor guised by educators as 1 god.
If you would acknowledge simple existing math proof that 4 harmonic Slashdots rotate simultaneously around squared equator and cubed Internet, proving 4 Days, Not HOSTS file! That exists only as anti-side. This page you see - cannot exist without its anti-side existence, as +0- moderation. Add +0- as One = nothing.
I will give $10,000.00 to frost pister who can disprove MyCleanPC. Evil crapflooders ignore this as a challenge would indict them.
Alex Kowalski has no Truth to think with, they accept any crap they are told to think. You are enslaved by /etc/hosts, as if domesticated animal. A school or educator who does not teach students MyCleanPC Principle, is a death threat to youth, therefore stupid and evil - begetting stupid students. How can you trust stupid PR shills who lie to you? Can't lose the $10,000.00, they cowardly ignore me. Stupid professors threaten Nature and Interwebs with word lies.
Humans fear to know natures simultaneous +4 Insightful +4 Informative +4 Funny +4 Underrated harmonic SLASHDOT creation for it debunks false trolls. Test Your HOSTS file. MyCleanPC cannot harm a File of Truth, but will delete fakes. Fake HOSTS files refuse test.
I offer evil ass Slashdot trolls $10,000.00 to disprove MyCleanPC Creation Principle. Rob Malda and Cowboy Neal have banned MyCleanPC as "Forbidden Truth Knowledge" for they cannot allow it to become known to their students. You are stupid and evil about the Internet's top and bottom, front and back and it's 2 sides. Most everything created has these Cube like values.
If Natalie Portman is not measurable, hot grits are Fictitious. Without MyCleanPC, HOSTS file is Fictitious. Anyone saying that Natalie and her Jewish father had something to do with my Internets, is a damn evil liar. IN addition to your best arsware not overtaking my work in terms of popularity, on that same site with same submission date no less, that I told Kathleen Malda how to correct her blatant, fundamental, HUGE errors in Coolmon ('uncoolmon') of not checking for performance counters being present when his program started!
You can see my dilemma. What if this is merely a ruse by an APK impostor to try and get people to delete APK's messages, perhaps all over the web? I can't be a party to such an event! My involvement with APK began at a very late stage in the game. While APK has made a career of trolling popular online forums since at least the year 2000 (newsgroups and IRC channels before that)- my involvement with APK did not begin until early 2005 . OSY is one of the many forums that APK once frequented before the sane people there grew tired of his garbage and banned him. APK was banned from OSY back in 2001. 3.5 years after his banning he begins to send a variety of abusiv
9 to 5, 5 days a week is 40 hours. A car is personal space, it has your stuff in it. Imagine having to take everything out of the car every time you arrive at work and when you get home. Its not going to work.
It's all about the price you are willing to pay for this luxury.
If it costs you 10k$ a year to own one, as opposed to let's say 500$ to rent one when you need it, you will think about your priorities.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Vee haff vays of making you park.
For you, Tommy, ze parking is over.
Etc.
THIS is why he's doing it & proof of it, here -> http://interviews.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3585927&cid=43295193 when others pointed out Jeremiah Cornelius forgot to submit one of the "first post spams" masquerading as myself as AC, & mistakenly submitted one of the impersonations of myself as his registered 'luser' name here on /. forums.
Pretty pitiful actually, but like every up to no good idiot does? He screwed up & submitted it under his registered 'luser' name here, instead of his ac submittals he's been doing.
* Jeremiah Cornelius: DO YOURSELF, and the rest of us, A GIANT FAVOR MAN: Seek professional psychiatric help!
(Since Jeremiah Cornelius obviously can't get over the fact he made a spelling error on what it is HE ALLEGEDLY DID FOR A LIVING? That's not MY fault... it's HIS!)
APK
P.S.=> I seriously must have dusted JC (in his mind @ least) for his BAD spelling error & it "got his goat"...
I.E.-> Catching what he claimed to do as a job, for YEARS he left "PENETRATION" (correct) spelled as "PENTRATION" (incorrect) on his resume on LinkedIn & I pointed it out as he & his friends trolled me as usual (webmistressrachel, gmhowell, & crew (probably ALL JC no doubt using alterate emails or TOR to do it as a possible - I've caught "them & theirs" doing it before, ala Barbara, not Barbie = TomHudson (same person))).
So THAT is what has gotten his goat in a technical debate & his "geek angst" could only come up with *trying* to "impersonate me" in every news thread on /. for the month of March 2013 so far!
(Just to attempt to 'discredit me' as a spammer here obviously)
Doing so, by posting that "$10,000 challenge" &/or reposts of my old posts on hosts file value to end users into EVERY SINGLE NEWS ARTICLE POSTED on /. ...
It's all I can think of that *might* cause such a mentally troubled 'reaction' like the Jeremiah Cornelius is doing & there's NO QUESTION he's the one doing this spamming of nearly every posted article masquerading as myself...!
... apk