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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."
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"
What most people commenting on this don't realize is that roads will be less congested. A lot of time savings will be squeezed out of slowing and accellerating in heavier traffic as computers will avoid this dynamic process caused by lack of info in human drivers and slowness of response in human drivers.
When a big group of cars all know they are computer-controlled they can move as a unit with less worry some idiot 3 cars ahead will slam on he brakes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
At highway speeds, human driven cars should be over 150 feet apart to be safe. Autonomous cars can be separated by just a few feet. The capacity of our existing roads would increase immensely.
No, they're really not. In most states that's actually explicit - you can get a ticket for "impeding the flow of traffic" or somesuch if you drive at the speed limit in the left lane when the natural flow of traffic is faster. Yes, that does mean the police can give you a ticket either way, which shouldn't surprise you at this point.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You don't have to waste any time in court... you have their driver's information, you go to your insurance company, and if necessary, they'll sue the the other driver for you to recover the costs to repair your car.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'