Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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?
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.
They won't have to outlaw them. You don't need laws when you have insurance companies. Once self-driven cars are declared safer, insurance rates will skyrocket for manually driven cars, so only the rich will be able to have one.
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
Auto trans
self-locking doors
auto ride control
auto headlights/self-diming & on-off
automatic seat belts
airbags
proximity keyless entry
ABS
lane drift monitoring
auto brake on object detect
...what part of 'automatic' snuck up on you over the last 50 years?
It hasn't happened yet. Keep dreaming.
-- Cheers!
Are you so out of the loop you didn't notice Ford released a car with auto brake in traffic for under $20k? VW makes cars for similar money that park themselves. When I drove through Sydney last weekend, it would have been brilliant if I had not been the meat filling between a GPS navigation device and the steering wheel.
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").
I suspect if you look at modern automatic transmissions, you'd be surprised, especially with some models which may see a 1 mpg difference between automatic and manual versions (and this is for vehicles that get over 30 mpg).
Better tech, electronic shifting, and more gears does wonders.
Total nonsense and pessimistic based on zero evidence.
People are slowly starting to wake up -- they are getting tired of the constant fighting, and corporations profiting at the expense of people's lives. Not enough people care (yet) but things are changing. You'll have your proof in about 10 years ...
--
Money is just another form of Energy Exchange.
Automatically. Which is the point that was being made in the post that you originally replied to.
The question of active or passive is a separate issue and is complicated by the government's way of defining it. (Which seems backwards to me.) I would expect active/passive to refer to the device itself, rather than the user's interaction with it. The way the government defines it a self driving car is pretty much a passive device. A rock is an active device - it doesn't do anything unless you pick it up and throw it. Imagine a fully automatic predator drone that takes off, locates a target and attacks completely automatically. That would be labelled a passive device. I don't think those labellings match the usual interpretations of those words.
Self driving is the single feature that would ever get me to shell out for a new car. Nothing like having your own car drive you home after a couple of beers after work.
Ultimately, the huge capacity to save lives and the economic advantages of self-driving cars and trucks are going to drive this step very fast. Tens of thousands of lives every year, hundreds of thousands of injuries, tens to hundreds of billions in insurance costs, tens to hundreds of billions in savings on transportation, etc. In the face of the possible gains I think the regulatory aspects will get resolved faster than most people think.
I hope so. I am a pessimist about how quickly it will happen, however. I could see Google saying "Hey our car works. License our patents." and then all the car manufacturers dragging their heels about implementing the tech for 20 years.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
10) auto brake on object detect Don't exist except in a few ~$100k cars.
Is available in some mid-range Volvos:
The Volvo S60 and V60 come with Volvo's City Safety system as standard, which is the same system fitted to its sister the XC60. This system stops the car in the event of impending collision in 'City Traffic' below 19 mph (31 km/h). A new safety feature named "Pedestrian Detection", available on both the V60 and S60, detects people in front of the car and automatically applies the brakes if the driver does not react in time.
Gears are on the way out, soon hybrid or electric will be the norm and they generally don't bother with them.
Auto-headlights are common and the EU is/was considering making them mandatory so people can't forget to turn them on.
Auto-seatbelts are stupid but a warning buzzer when you don't put yours on is pretty common now, and again I think the EU was looking at making them mandatory.
Auto collision avoidance is also likely to become mandatory in the next few years. Parking sensors are already on the EU's list for the next round of minimum standards.
Not necessarily disagreeing with you, just sayin' things a bit different in the EU, apparently.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Because sometimes faster -is- better. A fairly significant fraction of travel is done to get from A to B. Sure if the time between is more comfortable, then it's less of a chore, but nevertheless, a shorter travel-trip is a plus.
Not a plus big enough to override ALL other concerns, the concorde for example is extinct because it was too expensive for the benefit it offered. But for most people at current energy-prices, paying the extra it costs to have your car go 70mph rather than 40mph is worth it. Yes it may spend atleast twice the fuel to do so, but spending $3 in fuel to have 1-5 people each save an hour, is worth it to many, much of the time.
It only seems backwards to you because you're not looking at it from the driver's point-of-view, and instead from the machine's point-of-view. Are you an engineer?