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Report: By 2035, Nearly 100 Million Self-Driving Cars Will Be Sold Per Year
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The rise of autonomous cars might turn out to be more rapid than even the most devout Knight Rider fans were hoping. According to a new report from Navigant Research, in just over two decades, Google Cars and their ilk will account for 75 percent of all light vehicle sales worldwide. In total, Navigant expects 95.4 million autonomous cars to be sold every year by 2035. That's pretty astonishing. For one thing, that's more cars than are built every year right now."
They start making up figures on a market that has not started yet?
Seems like a real great (and useful) idea to me...
Predictions about something 22 years into the future aren't worth the paper they aren't printed on.
No.
Just.. No.
HELL NO.
Someone let me off this rock, I think it's time for me to get off.
You will pry my steering wheel, and manual transmission, from MY COLD DEAD HANDS!!!!
Just.. No.
Sigh.
I personally wouldn't trust any auto driven care made by anyone. Its all about control baby and i want full control.
Jack of all trades,master of none
The numbers are that high because so many of the cars crash into each other and people need to buy more.
in China.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Hooray, just like how 10% of all vehicles sold in California will be zero emission by 2003!
Oh, wait...
The true future of transportation by that year will be horses and mules.
in the fucking corner before we start predicting stats for self driving cars? How about self driving pedicabs first.
by 2045 over 600 billion Flying Cars with lasers will be sold every day
At least by 2015 we will have flying cars.
At some not-so-far-in-the-future point a person who is [still] self-driving their car is going run over someone else and kill them. There will be public hysteria and the knee-jerk reaction will be to completely outlaw the use of cars that are not auto-driven. safety at all costs. -g
Self-driving cars in the future? You mean regular cars on the road, still? Where's my jetpack, damnit!
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I just spent over 300K on a new house so I can take the train to work. A self driving car that could drive me to work while I take a nap. They will sell like crazy.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
...once I have personally spent a few weeks taking one through the centre of London and across the mountains of Spain, rather than watched some other guy entirely choose what route to demonstrate it on.
Sure, I get it: driverless cars are far safer than human-driven cars according to tests performed under the auspices of a dozen people who stand to make bank from driverless cars. Give random people in random countries some and see how they do.
world hunger and thirst will be solved by flying magic ponies that poop colored manna and piss purple mineral water
on what the fuck did this "institute" base their figures, tea leaves?
Ridiculous. If a car can drive itself, it is much easier to share with others. No need for a family to have 3 cars anymore if you can just send one to go pick some one up.
There'll be a taxi style service, or cars shared by people living in the same block, and cars will just go where they're needed.
http://xkcd.com/605/
The rise of autonomous cars might turn out to be more rapid than even the most devout Knight Rider fans were hoping.
Considering that Knight Rider was first on the air in 1982, I don't think I can agree.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
That the rise of automated cars will not come from the congested highways filled with passenger cars, but from the likes of UPS, Amazon, USPS, WalMart, supermarkets-- all looking to slash the cost for delivery of goods. ISPs aren't the only one's who pay big to overcome 'the last mile' problem...
I predict in the next 20 years or so, shit is going to go so horrifically fucking wrong for humanity that "auto-cars" will be removed from the List of Stuff Society Cares About. Whether it be full-on nuclear war, a complete, global totalitiarian state, or a big fucking asteroid obliterating all life, something bad is gonna happen, that makes us, collectively, stop giving a shit about trivial, non-survival nonsense like flying auto-cars.
I guess we've got 'till 2033 to see who's right. I'll go get some beer and lawnchairs.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Meh... predictions that far out obviously garbage
Yeah... for most people, most of the time, once robots are safer at driving than we are, why would you want to drive yourself? I commute weekly and have a 640 mile round trip - about 10 hours. Lots of people with shorter commutes spend a similar amount of time in their cars. Wasted time. When I take the train instead of the car I can get on with something useful - work, reading, even sleeping so I'm refreshed on arrival. When I drive, I have to concentrate on driving for 5 hours. If a computer can do that for me, great! Similarly, when driving a bit further for a family vacation, why would I want to be concentrating on driving (with my wife yelling at the kids "don't do that, it's distracting Daddy!") when I could be relaxing, playing games etc. as my robot chauffeur takes me where I want to go?
Sure, I get the "I like the excitement of driving" thing - sports cars, track days and their ilk will never go away - but for 95% of my driving I'd rather not have excitement, or high performance, I just want to get from A to B at my greatest convenience (hence private transport over public transport).
At the moment it requires relatively complex sensors, relatively high computing loads and is relatively unproven safety-wise. As soon as the competence and safety of autopilot is proven someone will mass produce it as an option (probably a high end maker like Mercedes, BMW first), all the other companies will follow suit to kill the first provider's competitive advantage, prices will crash and at that point why would you not want it? Put it this way, how much time per year do you spend concentrating on driving? How much would it cost you to buy back that much extra leave from your employer?
Even on a sporting model, if you can turn it off you can still have the track day experience.
For young drivers, it promises an end to high insurance premiums - everyone is driven by autopilot, the risk level is all the same.
Hell, why even think about young drivers? This becomes transformational. Working late? Little Bobby needs picking up from football? Send the car. Bobby has a smartcard that lets him into the car and once you know he's in you have your mobile tell the car to drive him home.
No need to worry about parking tickets, the car will drop you off, find a parking space (letting you know where it is); no need to worry about speeding violations. Computers don't speed. By linking in to routing information, live traffic, intelligent traffic distribution systems, the cars will manage traffic density more effectively.
My only criticism of the report is I reckon it will happen sooner - maybe a decade sooner. We systematically over-estimate the extent of short term change and under-estimate the extent of long term change.
This tech is commercially viable for longhaul trucking right now. That is the first market.. Not passenger vehicles.
Nobody will say this, of course, because it is going to make an entire industry obsolete overnight.
..don't panic
I figure that DUI convicts will be the first to be required to use self-driving cars, it's a logical step up from the breathalyzers which already run a couple thousand. Of course, it depends on just how 'self driving' the car is. I'm picturing a 'there isn't even a driver's seat' level of automatic control, as opposed to a really advanced autopilot, but there's still usable controls/overrides in a driver's control.
Then you go from there to 'bad drivers', insurance eventually starts being cheaper for self-driving vehicles, leading to the legislature eventually ending what's currently effectively limited liability for people NOT using self-driving cars, and yeah, once it reaches a certain point nearly every car produced will be self-driving. Exceptions would be off-roading vehicles.
I once calced out that a self-driving vehicle would be worth roughly $2k/year for me.
I don't read AC A human right
The Institute of Pulling Numbers Out of Our Arse. We are responsible for 95.3% of the statistics available on the internet.
In the year 2035, there will still be a large number of speculative tech articles predicting ridiculous things in the decades to come. Really!
Some settling may occur during posting.
All the convenience of a Chauffeur, only without having to pay one, but you get to wash the car and pull maintenance yourself! I'd love to be able to sit back and read my book while the car drives itself to my destination!
...and genetic engineering will make pigs fly. I can see it happening if the insurance companies start making countries adopt it for safety reasons, but it will be a real challenge to take away control from human beings. You can't make people obey speed limits or drive responsibly now and you can be dang sure the first time you're not allowed to speed there will be riots in the streets.
..would you, as a presumably tech-knowledgable person, trust a self-driving car?
- for me, on a long drive - German Autobahns being decidedly less interesting than you may imagine, have you never has the ocassion to try - in this scenario, when faced with hour-long monotony where software nav probably would indeed be safer, I would doubtless take my chances ocasionally with autodrive. Inner-city, short journeys and being otherwise reasonably awake, hell no, thanks.
Interesting is the European concept of not allowing large vehicles/trucks on the roads at weekends (well, Sundays at any rate) and holidays. It is actually the only time I will attempt long-distance drives at all nowadays; Berlin to Munich (for example) on a Monday morning remains an utter nightmare.
As with everything (and as already stated), be the lawyers who decide if the technology wins. Lets face it, there *are* going to be accidents, and if you personally were involved in a no-fault (or software fault) crash, or lost a loved one or similar, youd probably be dialling 1-800-SUETHEMALL as well.
What I want is a car that drops me off where I need to go, then heads off to park itself. When I'm done with my meeting/dinner/errand I'll press a button on my phone and the car will come pick me up again (if I walked down the block, it would track my phone location to pick me up where I am). My commute recently got much shorter, but while I worked further away from home I would have killed for a car that would take over the driving once we hit the freeway, and let me read the news and enjoy a cup of coffee in peace.
It's all coming, I'm sure. The trick is going to be what we do during the transitional period when only some people have the automatic cars and others still drive around in their manual control clunkers getting in the way and crashing into us...
It doesn't get me to work any faster since it will probably obey the traffic laws and not go over the speed limit. It won't get me to any destination faster, since it probably will not go over the speed limit. It probably won't speed up half a block away to 10 over the speed limit to catch a green light. And I have no desire to sit and play video games while my car is driving itself. I'm sure the driver will still need to pay attention anyway in case anything goes wrong, especially with early models. I'm sure we will see laws that prevent the driver from watching videos or texting even in a self-driving car.
... parking lots. Or close-quarter driving where a GPS is useless. Or places where the GPS hasn't defined roads yet so no route is known.
Having a car with smart cruise control or alerts me to cars in blind spots or a host of other things that automatic cars have to have I would like. But I actually enjoy driving and don't see it as a chore. When my wife and I go places, we enjoy watching the scenery go by and pulling over for unplanned stops. We sing along with the radio and watch for neat little places to stop. We do this thing called 'talking' while we drive to pass the time instead of burying our heads into our tablets or video screens.
I don't think any car is ever going to be 100% automatic. So we will end up with people that don't drive very much, and become far worse drivers, in areas where they have to have the best skills
Just another bad reason for people to withdraw into their little shells and not have to interact with other people except on a video screen.
Maybe when I can't drive myself it will be worthwhile. I just don't see much of a benefit to having an autonomous car. Maybe people that live in traffic hell areas like LA or San Diego will need them so they can drive in the special 'autonomous car' lanes. But here in Phoenix, traffic just isn't bad enough.
And self driving motorcycles will never find a market.....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I'm sure they'll all be flying cars too.
When it's somebody saying "This will happen in 22 years..." you shouldn't call it a report. Reporting is for describing things that happened in the past.
The headline should read:
"Wild ass guess by some random dude on the internet: By 2035, Nearly 100 Million Self-Driving Cars Will Be Sold Per Year"
But... whatever.
It's interesting how well self-driving cars are working early, and it's certainly promising. But I'm wondering if liability issues will put the whole thing on hold for decades? Right now, if you crash, the blame can be assigned to an individual most of the time (aside from rare crashes caused by brake failures or other technical problems). If a self-driving car crashes, the liability would then be with the car company or the company which programmed the self-driving code. There may be a lower risk of crashing in a well-made self-driving car, and the total number of crashes may be reduced greatly, but it could only take a handful of crash incidents to bring down a company.
It hasn't happened yet. Keep dreaming.
-- Cheers!
We need better licensing:
http://missingbytes.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/self-drive-engage.html
The same automation technology will have placed so many people out of work who then no longer can afford these cars.
if you can build autonomous cars, you can build cars autonomously. Meaning, cheaper cars, one that "everyone" can afford. Plus, the reduced driver skill requirements will also increase the market.
Also, due to the stringent testing requirements, reliability and robustness are almost guaranteed, and the long testing cycle means that there will be few models to choose from, so factories will benefit from focus and specialization.
Nonsense. We'll all be hopping from our homes to the Hyperloop station on our Martin Aerospace personal jetpacks by then. I have SEEN the future, my friends! ;)
-Who needs an own car if a car comes to you in 5 minutes when you need it
-Shops will be packing motorized shopping carts which bring you the grocery home
-charging stations will be big and centralizsed with secured parking. after all the car can go a few km
This is what I don't get. Was it Ford that said he wanted his employees paid enough that they could buy the cars they made? By then everything will be made with robots. Sure, it took a little longer than we expected. Computers had to catch up and there were some material science issues. But it's pretty clear that automation is (finally) coming. Heck, Boeing is on it's way back to the US bringing robots instead of jobs... So who, besides maybe 50,000 people at the top and another 200,000 of their bootlickers is going to be able to afford food, much less a car?
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I can maybe see self drive only roads / lanes that have grade separation. At least at first and even in say a full auto drive system maintenance and utility trucks will need to have some manual control.
People don't want electric cars, let alone a car that can drive itself. We're stuck in monotony.
Hey, I've been waiting for them since 1965.
We'll still have trucking....we just won't have truckers.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
This tech is commercially viable for longhaul trucking right now. That is the first market.. Not passenger vehicles.
Yeah, but that's where it provides the least benefit. Longhaul truck freight moves many more ton-miles per man-hour than passenger cars. We're talking 3 orders of magnitude difference.
I think if the thing self drives, a community car could deliver itself to your door if you order it with a phone. Sure vandalism is possible, but cameras + the next user reporting the problem can track down criminals.
God spoke to me
A self driving car will quickly find another and lock in or hook up to it. .... a train!
Before you know it you have
And car drivers that aspire to be on a train are few and far between.
The driver also monitors the cargo. I see self-driving trucks coming so there won't be need of sleep breaks, but I think that's not going to be soon.
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I wonder how this will change the look of the car. If they drive themselves then there's no reason to even have a front seat. I'm guessing the first few generations of cars will look like what we are familiar with but after people are comfortable with the fact that they can drive them selves I would imagine the shape and design of vehicles will drastically changing from what we are used to.
Personally, I won't buy one if it's a friggin' electric car. If it's powered by good old in-your-face, enviro-fascists fossil fuels, I'd be interested. But seriously, for a long cross-country trip, this would be great. Even better if they can put it in an RV. That way, I could be making a sammich without having to watch the road.
I will own a self driving car. ASAP. I want it now.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
If my human driven car hits a tree or pedestrian, I or the driver is at fault. If Google's self driving car hits a tree/pedestrian, can I sue Google? Of course, there would probably be an army of lawyers trying to blame every conceivable part of the car just like tech support drones try to find any down level driver on my enter computer to blame problem x. "Ok, the bios update which according to the release-notes says that it fixes the F12 help menu typo, is why my computer crashes..."
Also, normally I roll out software updates into a sandbox or lab environment at work. How would you update driving software on your car without testing it on a real road? Would you take your car to an empty parking lot, upgrade and then pray... it doesn't screw you up?
Also, if a software update 'bricks' your car, will Google pay to have it towed?
Today's speed limits are chosen with the limitations of human drivers in mind.
But each autonomous driving algorithm should have its own set of speed limits, customized for it.
Whether those limits are higher or lower should depend on how competent a given algorithm proves itself to be, relative to human drivers.
* If a driving algorithm is a little more accident-prone than the average human driver at a given speed, that deficiency could be rectified by forcing it to observe lower speed limits.
* On the other hand a driving algorithm that proves to be two orders of magnitude less accident-prone than the average human driver at a given speed, should be granted higher speed limits. (Not so much higher as to erase all or most of its safety advantage. But higher.)
So that would be the ideal outcome. But I predict that, for a few decades at least, Luddite thinking will force driving algorithms to comply with speed limits designed for human drivers. (To the detriment of safety, in the case of the worst algorithms, and to the detriment of rapid transit, in the case of the best.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Engineering is done by humans as as the thousands of poorly engineered building,bridges, cars, planes,trains, consumer products killing thousands/millions have shown us is that engineering is no guarantee of safety.
Could you cite those statistics for death caused not by human error?
Because, according to the CDC, 35,000+ people died of auto accidents in 2010, compared to only just under 17,000 for all "other" non-transport, non-firearm, non-poisoning, non-fall, non-fire/smoke, non-drowning deaths. And that was a GOOD year for automotive deaths -- one of the lowest in decades. For all the national panic over September 11th, we lose well over 10x that number of people every year thanks to auto accidents. More people die every year from car accidents than from firearms, fire, and poison combined.
That's just the fatalities! Only about 8% of crashes result in fatalities thanks to nearly miraculous advances in modern medicine. There are about 6 million crashes per year and about 2.3 million people sent to the hospital as a result. That's about a $70 billion drain on the economy every year. 44% of people with spinal cord injuries obtained them from a car accident.
Getting in a car is the single most dangerous thing you do every day.
While engineering may be no guarantee of perfect safety, but it's practically a guarantee of lowered risks. Human error was the sole cause of 57% of all accidents and a contributing factor in over 90% Mechanical error alone was only 2.4%. The top three contributing factors to accidents are driver inattention, alcohol, and speed. A driverless system (that obeys traffic laws) eliminates all three.
To make the argument that driverless cars would be less safe than humans is a joke, especially when it's such a low bar to reach.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
1998 production: 52 987 000
2011 production: 59 870 838
And the curve looks fairly flat.
Probably cars lasting/being kept longer is part of the flatness of the curve.
Was hoping to see 1990 since that's 25 years back.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I've talked about this subject with some friends and family. I really believe that by 2050 driving a car will be illegal unless you are on a closed circuit like a racetrack. For the same reasons seatbelts, airbags, anti lock brakes, traction control, and other safety features are required by law on all new vehicles. They will bring out all the numbers showing that it's so much safer to have a computer drive the car that there is no argument against it that will stand up. I agree it will be safer and millions of lives would be saved. I don't care how safe it is. To what lengths are we willing to go to be "safe?"
You can be 100% sure that all the vehicles will be tracked. We are already tracked everywhere we go by meta data saved by the cell phone companies. All of our web traffic and emails are intercepted and saved in a database. Every car will have unique identifiers and everywhere you go and everything you do will be saved as well as who was in the car with you. Insurance will still be required and every penny they get will be profit due to the low amount of accidents. We will pay taxes for every mile our car drives and at what time it drives we will pay smog taxes for driving at peak hours.
We all complain about freedom and privacy. The truth is we have had neither for at least a decade. We have an illusion of freedom and safety. The more automated everything becomes the easier it is to know where we are and what we are doing at all times. I plan on driving and riding my motorcycle until they lock me up and auction them off for scrap. It may all sound like crazy tin foil hat bullshiat but that's what we said about the government tracking us.
We want to believe that the government has our best interests at heart. They don't, they have corporate earnings best interest at heart. I believe that it will come to violence like we saw the last few years in the mid east before we actually get change in the U.S. There is way too much money at stake for the government to back down on tracking everything that all its citizens do.
The economy _is_ a zero sum game, when you're at the top. To understand, ask yourself this: "What good's being rich if nobody's poor?". The wealthy have enormous leverage over the non-wealthy. They can make us do what they please. They can control the military. They can have anything they want. But if we all had the basics (food, shelter, healthcare) we'd be a lot less malleable. How many people here hate their jobs? How many are planning to stop going tomorrow?
Basically, when you factor in the ruling class the economy becomes a zero sum game. One side (the wealthy) gain when the rest of us (poor and middle class) lose. You're just not thinking about _what_ they gain. Power. They gain power. And as we gain, they lose that power. Zero sum it is.
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The date is far enough out that folks will have forgotten this report by then. It's one of those hopeful dates meaning "in our lifetime", just like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Star Trek.
Might well be accurate though, as I understand it we'll be getting self-driving technology from the Vulcans shortly after the eugenics wars.
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Eventually just about all low skill jobs will be gone, once we no longer have enough jobs to possibly support having nearly everyone employed we will need to find a way to make sure everyone can survive without needing to work. What this means is that we will need to get rid of all the capitalists (and all the poor idiots who support capitalist because they think they will someday parlay their 85 IQ into millions of dollars), or watch half or more of our people become homeless. 150 million angry desperate people make for a dangerous situation to anyone living a life of luxury
Nice comment. Add to that they won't be called cars anymore.
heck, im still driving the same car i bought 17 years ago,
when the car hits/kills a person or gets into any other sort of accident. i presume it would be the manufacturer.
* If a driving algorithm is a little more accident-prone than the average human driver at a given speed, that deficiency could be rectified by forcing it to observe lower speed limits.
* On the other hand a driving algorithm that proves to be two orders of magnitude less accident-prone than the average human driver at a given speed, should be granted higher speed limits. (Not so much higher as to erase all or most of its safety advantage. But higher.)
Why would you assume faster is better? If the car drives itself, it has no need for a driver. Thus, it could be completely unattended, and take advantage of the fact that optimal fuel economy tends to occur at about 35-55 MPH, where wind resistance is too low to be problematic.
Thanks to exponential nature of inertia, doubling speed generally causes four times the wind resistance. It doesn't take long for that ratio to get stupid, and that's why we don't have planes that fly 5,000 MPH.
In general aviation, it's commonly understood that a more powerful engine will help you climb faster, but typically doesn't speed the plane up much except at the extreme lower end of the power/weight curve - that's mostly a function of wind resistance.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
nmp for me
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
It'll probably still be cheaper to hire a driver than buy one of these.
Also your driver won't blindly follow a GPS the wrong way down a one way street.
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. - Oscar Wilde
Having come back from a holiday in Wales I think self-driving cars will take some time to cope with single-track roads, roads where cars have to reverse so two buses can pass, having to drive onto a grass verge on one side of the road so the other vehicle can keep clear of the sheer drop on the other, etc.
I think the impact of the automous vehicle is far greater than people realize.
* First a lot of things we need to do with the car will vanish: school run (car drives the kids and comes back), maintenance, parking (car does it on its own)
* People will abuse the car to drop them off (automatic parking) or pick them up. Probably some regulation for that will have to be created.
* Traffic guidance becomes finally practical. Instead of an endless stream of anoymous cars, now each car has a destination and can be advised about the route to take. Traffic that doesn't need to pass a certain point where there is a problem can now be rerouted.
* This will not be the end of traffic jams but advanced routing systems could have a huge impact in making car travel predicable again.
* Conclusion: let's hope all these autonomous vehicles are ELECTRIC since car use will certainly increase because of it.
* On the other hand: a car will become more than ever a tool for transportation. I think car sharing and other types of pooling will incease.
Just my thoughts
In reality, they'll all be illegal in 5 years which will be about 1 year after people getting hit by them sue the driver and consumers suddenly aren't interested in them anymore.
Sounds like a great opportunity for hackers.
And who will pay to upgrade the roads so these self-guiding systems will actually work at a cionsumer grade safety level??
LIke electric cars ... sounds like a good idea , but delivery of a working solution is alot harder that they think.
I lived in New York city and owning a car is somewhat of a headache is you don't have a driveway. And many homes built in NYC have driveways so small you're lucky if a mini cooper can fit down the damn thing (built years ago before the majority of people had garages.) And there are plenty of homes and apartment buildings built without driveways and parking garages. Then add to that the rampant building of brick shit box homes which have three - two family homes built on a lot that previously held a one family home with yard and driveway. Parking is a total mess, a nightmare really.
I would prefer if the car market were turned into an on demand limo or taxi service. Newer apartment buildings should have a garage full of these cars so dwellers can pull out their phone and have a car waiting out front. No more insurance payments, worrying about needing AAA, oil changes or other maintenance problems. You pay per mile or by time and can be safely shuttled around. Many neighborhoods in big cities have plenty of shopping nearby and bigger shopping centers reachable by train or bus. But trains and busses cannot directly drive you anywhere. You have to transfer and more often than not you have some really grimey people riding them (I have had a bunch of problems riding the busses and trains during high school days, guns, muggings and pervs.) Bicycles are a good alternative for transport but with shitty drivers on the road and roads not suitable for bikes it can get hairy.
In his novel "Rainbows End" Vernor Vinge describes a near future where car ownership is unnecessary. Once simply calls for a car via the functional equivalent of a smart phone and a little electric car rolls up and takes you to your destination. Once you get out it drives off to pick up someone else or recharge or return to the depot. I would *SO* prefer a system like that. Zip car minus the tedium of having to return the car to a specific place by a specific time.
Yeah, sure
Frankly I suspect that self-driving cars will come someday. We already have cruise control, back-up sensors, heck fall asleep lane drift sensors on some modern cars and I don't see people objecting to them. In fact, a fair number of folks really like those features. One only needs to look at manual versus automatic transmission to realize that a majority of the public likes automatic transmission but the enthusiast likes the manual stick.
My only real concern would be the loss of the skill of driving for the younger generation in much the same way handwriting is going away. I am glad I have both great handwriting and top notch typing skills and would be sad to have not had either. Granted driving cars is ridiculously dangerous in that I've gotten to my current skill level in driving through experience, some of which were hair raising mistakes so it's a trade-off. Is it worth dying or potentially getting crippled for a skill is something we would have to ask ourselves.
As for myself, I would love a self-driving car especially on those long cross country trips. If it was reliable enough to nap on, it would be a great feature. There might be points where I might manual drive my car for fun but if I got tired or bored I could pass control to my car.
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The "report" was probably funded by the manufacturers of self-driving cars, and is as worthless as most statistics.
One of my favorite quotes was popularized by Mark Twain: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Insurance costs can easily exceed the price of a car over its lifetime. It's time to get rid of this obsolete tyranny, the mandatory cowardice of transportation nannies.
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Insurance question.
Isn't there an issue with centralized responsibility? If there is an accident (where the fault is the automated cars) wouldn't the responsibility lay with the car/software manufacturer?
A couple scenarios:
1. Self driving car encounters obstacle that it doesn't understand, for example some material invisible to Lidar, colliding with it then kills a pedestrian
2. Script kiddies figure out an exploit, for insurance fraud purposes, where if you approach the car at a certain angle, at a certain time of day, in certain weather conditions, it causes an accident that is the fault of the automated car
In these scenarios, involving deliberately or accidentally fooling the sensors, wouldn't it clearly be the fault of the manufacturer or the software developer and not the fault of the owner? Is insurance law written in such as way as to allow the owner of the autonomous vehicle accept blame or would Google et al be responsible? Would you ever really own an autonomous vehicle or would you licence it like your iPhone?
This insurance question has always nagged me about autonomous cars being on the road with "regular" cars. Anyone have any clarity on the subject?
Sounds great to me when I see the quality of drivers it will replace. Unfortunately those who really need the car, can;t afford them. They should eventually reduce the death toll and injury stats dramatically, but its going to take a long time. Just think, with a button labeled "take me home" designated driver takes on a new meaning.
sure, things are better now, but my point wasn't that things can't get better, my point was that the 'Zero Sum' argument assumes they always _will_ get better. It assumes that the economy will be _allowed_ to continue growing and improving.
My point is that we're going to see a massive contraction put in place by the wealthy to preserve the high status their wealth affords. That's what's meant by the phrase "What good's being rich if nobody's poor".
This idea isn't new. Karl Marx talked about it a lot. But all anyone can remember about him is that his writings were used as propaganda by a few nasty dictators.
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No matter who or what is driving, there's always a tradeoff between safety and speed. There's no reason to believe the compromise that is made for human drivers is also ideal for driving algorithms. In other words, if (at 55 mph) a driving algorithm proves to be two orders of magitude less accident-prone than human drivers, we may not want to raise the algorithm's speed limit until it becomes just as dangerous as a human driver. By raising its speed limit somewhat less than that, we'd get gains in both safety and speed.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I wish there was a User ID with which I could associate the credit for this fine, thoughtful post.
But the post can be improved...
It delievers your dry-cleaned clothes to your home. After you've unloaded it, it starts to head out of your cul-de-sac, knowing that it will soon be electronically summoned to perform some other mission. Sure enough, before it has even reached the end of your driveway, it's summoned to a nearby pizzeria, where it will be used to make a delivery.
Because these things are completely "fungible," as you say, the unit that delievered your clothes did not have to first be sent to the dry cleaner by you.
Because they are smaller than passenger cars, the boxen-on-wheels might be thought of as little nuisances by human drivers. To make themselves more visible, they could join themselves together into little trains, say, five units long. They would also gain a slight aerodynamic advantage in this configuration.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Nobody will remove a package addressed to someone else, because they know their actions are being recorded and they would be swiftly prosecuted.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I like my trucks jacked up burning gas not anything other
Reducing fatalities has an economic cost, and a logical, non-emotional society would specify exactly how much cost is acceptable to reduce fatalities. You have to draw the line somewhere (for example: "proposed guardrail installation is projected to prevent one fatality during its service life. We will proceed with installation if a contractor bid comes in under $9.8 million, but not if all bids are over $9.8 million.")
You need to apply a similar logic-based analysis at all points along a driving algorithm's speed/safety curve: "Regarding Google Driving Algorithm 4.2.3: reducing its speed limit from 137.338 mph to 137.311 mph is projected to prevent one fatality. We will proceed with this reduction only if it will shrink GDP by less than $9.8 million." Keep iterating until the marginal cost of a speed limit reduction is more than than the marginal benefit, and then stop, because right there you've found your optimal speed limit. (This is an oversimplification, of course, because there is no single speed limit applicable at all points on all roads.)
And guess what: when you use this logical process to find the optimal speed limit for Google Driving Algorithm 4.2.3, the fatality rate is not going to be the same as it was for human drivers. It's likely to be significantly lower than the fatality rate that was tolerated when humans were behind the wheel.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.