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Nissan Plans To Sell Self-Driving Cars By 2020
Lucas123 writes "Nissan today said it will begin demonstrating autonomous vehicle technology on its all-electric Leaf this year, and plans to begin selling multiple models of self-driving cars by 2020. Nissan said it's already building an autonomous drive proving ground in Japan. Its goal is availability across the model range within two vehicle generations. The car company, which is among several others and Google in developing autonomous driving tech, is currently working with top universities, including MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Oxford and The University of Tokyo, to develop its self-drive technology."
No more tailgating, left lane hogging, pulling out without indicating, running red lights, drunk driving or any of that other stuff the meat-based drivers keep on doing.
Free up the roads for people who don't see driving as a chore and make an effort to drive properly.
No sig today...
All these cars will religiously follow the speed limit, boxing up roads and not permitting those of us who are in a rush to get around them. The road rage will cause accidents, I guarantee that.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Why wouldn't Uber buy their fleet of cars from Nissan, instead of from Google?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
What happens when every car uses lidar, or some other range finding technology? Won't they interfere with each other and cause problems?
Looks like taxi drivers and most truckers might be out of work in less than 10 years.
This is a better headline. To those of us over 35, we have been trained to think of 2020 as a long time from now.
None of you are making sense.
And don't explain it. Just stop. Stop whatever it is you're on about.
Thanks.
All these cars will religiously follow the speed limit, boxing up roads and not permitting those of us who are in a rush to get around them. The road rage will cause accidents, I guarantee that.
Learn to let go, then. The problem isn't the law-abiding the drivers. It's the high strung ones.
I've driven in states where the standard is to speed heavily, and I've driven in states where the standard is to go the speed limit. In my experience, there's a lot less road rage when people are going the speed limit. There's less variation in speed when everyone is following the same standard, which means less people tailgating, less lane changes to pass, and less people cutting each other off.
For me, eliminating the "must get there quicker" mentality sharply decreased my aggression when driving. I am a *much* better driver now than I was when I was younger and treating the highway like a personal race track and getting frustrated when someone got in the way of going the speed I wanted to go. Being forced to go the speed limit taught me to chill and let go of the little irritations that are the seeds of road rage.
So, I say bring on the fleet of law-abiding autonomous vehicles. Maybe it'll teach the rest of you to cool your frigging heads. (And to get off my lawn!)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The main obstacle to self-driving cars isn't technological, it's cultural. Even if they get a commercially viable product on the road in 2020, it'll be at least a generation of these things being on the roads before people become comfortable enough with the technology to trust their lives to it en mass. And that doesn't even speak to the costs involved. High end luxury cars get the tech first and it trickles down, eventually. Factor that in with the cultural issues and we're probably not going to see widespread adoption of self-driving cars until 2050 or beyond.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
...shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
I would recommend autonomous car makers stay out of the litigious US market initially, and focus their initial launch on some place like Singapore.
It has:
1) No Snow, which is still causes difficult problem for autonomous vehicles.
2) Highly structured environment. It is a nation that essentially consists of a single, highly-organized city.
3) That single city has a government that operates as a sovereign entity, and can adapt its legal framework to accommodate the cars.
4) That sovereign entity has demonstrated itself to be business friendly (sometimes at the expense of the individual).
5) Has car owners who are accustomed to accepting extensive government regulation and oversight.
Much as I would love the idea of having a self-driving car myself, I can't see how such a thing is compatible with American Society.
What if there's a squirrel, a cat, a dog or a frickin' deer on the road?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
because it will happen
Granted they require two people with six figure salaries sitting next to the system driving the plane. Despite this they still crash over a dozen times a year. I'm sure making the transition to an Altima that can whiz down the road while you jack off and drink a Starbucks is trivial.
Using human pilots we've hit the limit as to how many cars we can pack into a second in one lane at highway speeds. At 70 mph, the most you can do is two cars passing a given point in one second. We've plateaued.
If we drive slow enough to follow another car at a safe distance, throughput suffers. If we travel higher speeds, we have to reduce the distance between cars and throughput also suffers. You could add more lanes, but the costs would be enormous on average. You could try to force people to drive smaller cars when alone or car-pool by mandate, but good luck w/those.
Autonomous cars will allow tailgating and higher speeds, with much less risk, raising the effective traffic load to 3 cars per second, which is a 50% increase in throughput, without adding more lanes, going to double-decker limos for everyone, etc.
Phhh. Didn't Toyota already have a self-driving car?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
"By 2060 it will be illegal for a human to drive a vehicle in the USA".
My prediction made in 2012.
I am a nobody so no one will notice.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
...it does a better job than the current aiming system on the Micra.
Once people figure out that you can have sex in the car on the way to work only the lonely will still be driving.
As we all know from Back to the Future, 2015 is the era of flying cars. However it seems there is an alternate timeline in which people are too much of a risk to guide flying cars with the skill of Doc Brown. So we have to first develop autonomous cars and then transfer over to autonomous flying cars. Which pushes our timeline 2020.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_hwerqogzQ
It seems to me that self-driving cars would be a big deal for elderly people who are don't want to give up driving despite really being incapable of driving safely.
Having grown up in NYC and spent much of my life riding a bicycle on the streets of Manhattan, I came to the conclusion a long time ago that my first priority when riding my bicycle or driving a car is, wait for it, to not die.
Having lived and driven in many parts of the U.S. I've often been appalled at the cavalier way in which people drive. You're in a 1+ ton box of metal usually traveling at least 100km/h. Lots of ways to die in that scenario.
Perhaps others might decide that they too do not want to die, but I won't hold my breath. As such, I think autonomous vehicles will be a huge win for everyone except those with a death wish.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Will autonomous vehicles have to have a driver on board? If not then delivery companies would love the idea of sacking all theirs. The public might not like having to fetch their parcels from a truck pulled up on the street outside their house, rather than have them delivered to the door, but meh.
Another thought, how long after the technology becomes commonplace before the first non-suicide truck bomb? If I can think it up, then presumably the security apparatus can also, and is right now considering this possibility; it'll be interesting to see what rules and restrictions come into force to try and prevent it.
a Black 1982 Pontiac Trans Am Ill be good to go.
Meanwhile, I'm glad I drive a pickup. My next one, bought in three or four years, will probably last me until I don't need to worry about driving any more.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
I love to drive. I like to push the clutch, get into gear rev the accelerator and let out the clutch. I love to drive. I don't answer my cell when I'm driving, even though my wrangler has u-connect. I rather listen to my rock/blues collection and drive What I like about driving a Wrangler it's one of the only vehicles out that does not feel like you are driving by wire.
The geek/nerd/awe-seeker inside me loves the idea, but I don't know if we are (from a socio-economic pov) ready for mass-scale implementation of this kind of tech. (with this I mean technologies that automate some form of work)
Don't get me wrong, I really want us to be there, but we aren't.
Our current socioec. model doesn't cope well with abrupt changes in employment, we live in a survival race, a mostly well-mannered jungle law. There are lots of measures we could take to alleviate this but I don't see our beloved representatives caring much unless shtf, and we already know "s" never really "htf".
As per usual, science and technology don't give a flying fuck about all this nonsense and changes will come.
Oh well, you never know.
-- Counting backwards since 1984!
Nissan will be ready with revolutionary commercially-viable Autonomous Drive in multiple vehicles by the year 2020
Why would anyone buy a new Nissan, now that Nissan has told us that if we wait for six years (at the longest!) we could get one with Autonomous Drive?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Effect
...the assumption that a self-driving car entails sitting in the back sleeping, or otherwise goofing around while the car does all the work. I have a feeling that the driver will be required to be present and alert in the driver's seat as if, well, he were driving, for many, many years after launch. And also: how can self-driving cars be that close when self-driving trains aren't really there, yet?
But when will I be able to not drive one ?
I don't drive due to my poor vision.
If we had truly autonomous cars, we wouldn't need a car per person. One car can take you to your park-and-ride, your wife to work, your son to middle school, and your daughter to elementary school an hour later. Then, it can pick each person up and take them home. And just in case scheduling conflicts, you can team up with your brother and sister to form a 3-car system. Team up with more people, and you can start carpooling and sending the nearest available car to whoever needs it like a taxi service. Get a city involved, and you'll have the more adaptive and cheap bus system in the world, that picks you up on your doorstep and transfers you from car to bus with perfect timing. Routes and transfer points will change dynamically to route traffic most efficiently. Bus-only lanes and traffic light control will ensure calculations are accurate for the majority of the route. Even if you drove like a maniac, you'd have trouble beating an autonomous system that synchs all the traffic lights to its benefit, drove speed limit on the bus-only lane, and does a perfect transfer to car to take you from doorstep to doorstep. Or maybe it wouldn't be that hard because there will be so few cars on the road that owning a car would be like having your own private Jet.
nt
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
It is alarming how eager people are to turn over so much control to computers
If everybody is driving at speed limit how is it a traffic jam then?
Just look at how they treat the rightful owner of www.nissan.com.
That's how they'll treat you after their self driving car becomes self aware and kills your family.
I look forward to an era of actual autonomous vehicles, but I think it may never happen at least on roads as they are now. Won't the driver have to constantly attentive in case he or she has to suddenly take over manual control? If not why not and if so then what's really the point?
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
How about they fix the miserable range the LEaf has first?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Nissan should rather just plan to sell "cars" by 2020 as I haven't seen a Nissan I have ever wanted to buy.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Or they'll remain on my list of companies I won't do business with.
http://www.digest.com/
I wouldn't have to own a car. That would put me on a cloud a little closer to heaven.
Is all fun and games until a B.S.O.D. or kernel panic kills 50 people on a freeway. I'll pass.