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When Cars Go Driverless, What Happens To the Honking?
blastboy writes "The potential upside to getting rid of drivers: 'Today car horns are still a leading source of noise pollution in urban centers. India's honking problem is so severe that the response to it—from both activists and government officials—mirrors the response to an actual epidemic. Officials in Peru, meanwhile, began treating honking like a serious crime in 2009, threatening to confiscate the cars of people who honk when they shouldn't.'"
They said driverless not hornless. Those in the car are free to honk their asses off. :)
K
We will not have "driverless cars". Ever.
I imagine that driverless cars will honk quite frequently, just to be on the safe side. They will be able to communicate silently to other car 2.0s but the old style drivers and the pedestrians will need warnings that there is a car that they might not be aware of.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It's been weeks, if not months since I've heard any car honking, I'm sure it's happened, but I can't remember it. I know it's been years since I've honked deliberately, though I'm kinda bad at using the horn on my car anyway, it's hard to use.
Seriously. Use the on board radar to spot idiotic behaviour and let 'er blast!
Three Squirrels
Don't like honking? Come ride in Vietnam sometime. Honking just means "HI! I"M COMING!" or turning.
ws day?
Actually where I live honking isn't as much of a noise problem as the ricers with fart cans and pickup trucks with dysfunctional mufflers.
1. Aways yeld to idiots and jackasses.
2. Maneuver to avoid accidents, honking does not help much.
Very seldom, if someone fell asleep at the traffick light, I give it a very short blip.
If all horns were uninstalled tomorrow we would not loose much. Now let's discuss sirens and light pollution.
Just stop this already. Before I get my driverless car, I want my oft-predicted jetpack, flying car, and robot maid.
Self-driving cars aren't a cool idea, they are just stupid.
the purpose of the car horn was not to express anger at other drivers but to warn of an emergency. there will still be people dangerously stepping into the street and the cars will honk to warn them that they may get hit. that's not to say it will warn them only when they will be hit but rather when the probability of being hit drastically increases. pedestrians are highly unpredictable and the cars have been programmed to act accordingly. also, if someone in a manually driven car might be in the process of causing an collision (e.g. turning into an occupied lane) the car will honk.
the real question is if people will give other people the finger in traffic.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Anybody who thinks this is unlikely has never driven on back roads. Will they get rid of horns? I hope not.
I really wish I had the ability to make a more subdued honk sometimes, for alerting a pedestrian, or whatever. It seems like an obvious enhancement, and yet AFAIK such a thing has never been standard or even available, except maybe as an aftermarket item.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
wtf, every truck in india has a huge sign that says please honk. it's considered rude NOT to honk in india. not being sarcastic. honking is viewed positively there.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
in the event of danger. This is the law. In the US people follow the law. People here ned the law, not as much as those germans tho. Man, talk about robots. In peru, they really don't need a special law to take all your stuff. Laws really aren't needed there. People just assume that if you are doing something bad to them, you are from the government. I hope we get chip implants soon. Breathing on my own is a chore.
The horn is an easy to access button that makes a noise. And like the other primates, if we have an emotional response we press the only button available because it is THERE.
We give babies toys that make a noise when you press different buttons, and adults we are little different and still enjoy pressing the button that makes a noise.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
...I'd say treating honking as a serious crime isn't working terribly well. At times, the horn became a nearly continuous background noise.
When Cars Go Driverless, What Happens To the Honking?
It Will Stop.
Next?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Have gnu, will travel.
For every driverless car honk a tree falls silently in a forest...
Can a civil eningeer, or social/civic engineer please chime in here?
Let's please, I beg of you all, think about why we are driving so fast to go nowhere... ?
For a robotic, self-extending middle-finger. Gonna make a ton of money on this.
I live in Minneapolis and it is extremely rare to hear cars honking, rare enough that when a car does honk, everyone turns their head to see what all the commotion is about.
The bus drivers like to lay into the horn once in a while, but buses always have right of way so that's acceptable.
in a head= spiining reciprocating
But in reality the reason why they (and other third world countries) use their horn like crazy is because there are no traffic rules or enforcement. Meaning there are no stop lights, lanes and such. Everyone does their own thing and communicate with each other by honking, otherwise it would be impossible to get anywhere. So in the countries that refuse to add traffic laws and enforcement, honking will not stop, and self-driving cars won't exist because it'll be too expensive for the mere ants in the cog to afford.
Will honking go away? Not any time in this century and probably not in the next. OP forgot that the US economy is tanking faster than paris hilton in an orgy. 17trillion and rising to 20+ in just 2 years is more debt than this generation or the next and the one after can afford to pay of. That's the reality and only the wealthy "upper class" can/will be able to afford self-driving cars unless they manage to bring down the cost of vehicles by a substantial amount.
You are absolutely right. Those Google cars currently tooling around the country are purely imaginary. As are that other company's that can drive F-1 cars around Nürburgring in the pouring rain with professional-grade lap times(IIRC). The technology is already pretty much there, one more order-of-magnitude improvement and it will be pretty unquestionably superior to human drivers in all but the most contrived of corner-cases. After that the question is just cost and public acceptance.
Cost can reasonably be expected to diminish rapidly thanks to independent advances in computers and computer vision systems for other, more immediately profitable products.
And I'll bet you small automated "mall trolleys" that smoothly shared the walkways with pedestrians while averaging 10-20mph would go a *long* way towards generating public acceptance, while also increasing mall profitability. Hell, make it a "bug bounty" game - put big signs on the trolleys
"If this car is at fault in *any* damage to you or your property,
get $10,000 within 24 hours just by calling --- --- ----,
with the time and license number,
so that we can learn from the recordings of your creativity.
WARNING: clearly fraudulent claims will be prosecuted."
Give it a couple years, let the thrill-seekers get bored with jumping in front of the things hoping to cash in on a stubbed toe, and I bet you people are perfectly willing to let it do the driving for themselves and their neighbors as well. Meanwhile it will probably be one of the cheapest and most viral marketing campaigns *ever*. I mean who *doesn't* have a hilarious and heart-pounding personal story of some lunatic at the mall trying to throw themselves under the wheels of your trolley? And the personal realization that the automated systems had gracefully dodged an outcome that would gave given you nightmares for years if you had been at the wheel.
People would be beating down the car makers' doors for the things, especially if they would save enough on insurance premiums to pay for the auto-chauffeur within a couple years.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
> a more or less even humming is far more tolerable
Yeah, but it has no *style*. How about Hollywood-esque hovercar sounds? Or for the retro-inclined the sounds of a team of long-legged horses running on soft ground (because nobody wants to listen to a team of horses galloping down a cobblestone street). We could have a whole *palette* of soundscapes to play with as phttp://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/01/31/2331231/when-cars-go-driverless-what-happens-to-the-honking#eople got accustomed to the idea.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Cars can sneak up behind people, you know. Most people look forward, not behind.
Walking around on the sidewalk in China, for instance, is incredibly dangerous. Electric scooters are very common there, and people drive them on sidewalks. The problem? They are nearly silent and you cannot hear them come up behind you over the noisy road traffic. I've almost been run over a few times. Same thing with electric cars. No matter how diligent you are, it's not too hard to get hit by a car you just didn't see. A little noise goes a long way.
As in the kind that are about 5 ft in diameter and bouncing across the road at about 30 mph.
I do hope they have that case in the computer. I'd hate to get a panic-stop reaction or go into the ditch as the computer franticly tries to avoid the "obstruction."
The car horn will be used for wireless communication between cars because radio and light are just not cool enough anymore.
Can we please get rid of the damned backup beepers? There is no reason I need to be able to hear a truck backing up inside my apartment two blocks away and seven floors up.
No.
Insurance rates will also be far lower.
This reminded me: Who will buy the insurance? For example, in the UK apparently the actuary tables are messed up enough when it comes to young teens that it's often cheaper to buy a new car where the manufacturer covers the first X years of insurance than it is to buy an equivalent used car and insure it.
It might not work in the regulatory framework of the USA as it currently stands, but if you drop insurance costs to roughly 1/10th of what they are now, combined with no more variable driver records, I could see the costs of 'insurance' being covered by the car maker as a feature.
I think we're almost to the point of saying 'screw the breath-tester, install an auto-drive system on a drunk's vehicle' point. But then there's all sorts of legal issues to work out there as well. We've seen some pushback on giving people DUIs for being drunk while asleep in the backseat of the bar parking lot, how would you handle a drunk person asleep in a self-driving car that's driving him home(because he's not driving) that doesn't have a bypass mode for manual operation?
For that matter, what will many jurisdictions do as they lose the revenue from traffic violations? Speeding should be right out(I imagine that the AI will follow the speed limit and if I'm reading/playing a game I don't really care about getting there faster anymore), plus if they screw up the timing on a red light so badly that a self driving car with reaction times measured in the milliseconds still ends up 'running the red', you don't just have some random person's word that they either didn't run the redlight or it was impossible to NOT run the red light. Depending on the setup, the car company can present logs(including possibly video), AI decision chains, and other information that would end up costing the department far more money than they gain.
Honking is an interesting sub-division. I wonder if they'll enable the cars to auto-honk? Heck, that leads to the idea of using honks as a sort of broadcast announcement to other self-driving cars - a sort of warning system for things like 'There's an accident around me, be aware!' that has the cars slow down and increase following distance. Have some sort of flow control system so it's rebroadcast no more than 5 times, and it doesn't even have to be audible to humans.
I don't read AC A human right
You mention trains, because they're 'much simpler to predict'. There is some truth to this, same with drone aircraft - fewer obstacles to worry about, orders of magnitude less clutter.
Thing is, an AI train system still has to worry about things next to the rails, because they might intersect with the train by the time the train gets there. There's still 'random events in an open terrain' to worry about, it's just that the possible AI responses are much more limited - increase throttle, decrease throttle, brake, or even just maintain.
Consider Wiredlogic's proposal: 'At night in clear weather'. I'd actually modify it a bit: Only in clear weather on uncongested highways and designated access roads to staging areas located right off the highways.
The idea is that the trucks travel known routes, normally away from pedestrians, on relatively clear areas. Only a step more complicated than the AI manning the locomotive. In-city routes would still be human manned, though as you stop bugs and develop more techniques/capabilities, the range of robotic vehicles will spread.
I don't read AC A human right
There will always be honking.
that's a cute reasoning, but porsche only switched to water cooling because their lineup began failing to meet more stringent air resource board standards. Cooler engine = less nox = allowable cars for sale in the united states
You know what's really funny? Modern IC cars are so quiet that they did a study - for most conventional vehicles, not hybrids or EVs, road noise is the dominant factor. IE tire noise on the road, gravel crunching, all that. The EVs and hybrids they tested were identical on a Db level.
As speeds increase it simply shifts to wind noise - the engine being loud enough to be a signficant factor is actually the exception and generally indicates an ill-maintained defective vehicle.
Anyways, a driverless car can probably do away with the warning sounds for the most part, it should be aware enough that it doesn't back into people.
I don't read AC A human right
People who buy Harleys will continue to do so.
Just a nitpick but Harleys are actually fairly quiet stock. It's the aftermarket pipes that remove the muffler system that make them loud.
I don't read AC A human right
In America, honking your car horn is an expression of anger. It is calling the other driver out that he is doing something unsafe or stupid. If someone doesn't move when a light turns green, you have to "bip" your horn by tapping lightly. A full-on honk might make the other driver get out and try to kick your ass.
Overseas, it's different. Honking the horn just says, "I'm here." It's an auditory announcement of where you are. This is very important, as other drivers frequently don't watch where they're going. When you pass, you need to honk the horn so the other driver doesn't suddenly decide to change lanes into your car. I ride an electric moped, and my electric piezo horn is my most important safety device other than the brakes. It announces my presence so people don't hit me. Taxis honk when they pass me - it doesn't mean they're mad, it just means "I'm here."
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
You never know who is honking at you or why, even though you're already paying attention because -- guess what -- you're fucking driving.
... they will still need to be warned.
Oh I dont know [even tho this was repeated several times] the computers would communicate with each other asking 'what the problem is'?
... in the bedrooms
it was fun, but your beta has turned me off forever...
it's a cultural thing. maybe the peru got their car culture from spanish/portuguese. because they honk.
I'm spending the winter in thailand.. and the traffic is interesting to say the least(you can get by ok once you remember that people only follow red light rule and apart from that there are no rules that people go with).
but the interesting thing is that despite the traffic looking like chaos and everyone just fitting in through where they can nobody uses the horn in traffic(except to notify someone who is merging in, but really rarely actually).
but they seem to be using it mostly for notifying that they've arrived to pick someone up, that they're bringing post or stuff like that.
perhaps it is that if one honked in traffic here.. you would be honking 100% of the time ! so just as well might not honk.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I propose that your car horn be installed into the drivers seat.
The first time you honk your horn at someone it will be your last.
The horn will be automatically shoved up your ass where it belongs.
Drive through small towns where roads are built for cars with no thought for pedestrians. Many roads built in the last 50 years do not have sidewalks. Roads built before that will have had maintenance done by the town, but leave sidewalk maintenance to the adjacent landowner.
Where do new businesses build? On the edge of town. Really disheartening to see wheelchairs mixing it up with cars in 4 lane traffic.
Good sidewalks only exist in a few densely populated cities in America.
I attached a motorcycle battery and car horn to my bicycle?
Would they considerate that??
Maybe there's a market in Peru for that, I'll start a website www.PissoffPeruvianGov.com and sell those types setups so people could walk around the city with a car horn honking.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Perhaps some Indian can jump in, but anyway from my time in India I'd say it worked like this: People drive on which side of the road they wish, usually right in the middle, and in a curve they honk. The other driver hears the horn and from the sound of it judges whether the other car is bigger than his or not. If yes, he dodges, otherwise he keeps driving in the middle of the road.
My suspicion is that, unless this algorithm is implemented in Indian driverless cars, they will soon be driver- and passengerless.
They go off so often that nobody even notices them anymore. It would probably not change the accident rate to simply get rid of horns altogether.
People keep talking about driverless like it's a done deal.
Like it's something we're all going to migrate to. It isn't.
Sure, there's the technical know-how to do it.
But the legal, legislative and social pressures involved may eventually kill it.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"When Cars Go Driverless, What Happens To the Honking?"
Honking will be automatic, of course.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Yes there's one thing if it is technically possible, another if people actually want it or not. You could have the most awesome technical invention ever. If people don't see the use for it or feel belittled or even intimidated by it, it won't become a widely used product.
The whole thing of freedom and independence and the romance of having control of your veichle goes away if you are turned into a passive passenger. If people don't want that, automated cars will probably flop.
Peruvians are completely mad about their car horns. The problem is so bad, I was walking down the street in Cuzco with my Peruvian wife, talking about how everybody was honking their horns so much. Mid-rant, some yokel comes cruising past us, grinning ear to ear, & *playing* his car horn like it's some kind of musical instrument. (There wasn't even another car nearby!) I could hardly believe it! "See? THAT'S what I'm talking about!" :|
Owned a 300SDL years ago. Turns out the horn was right in front, just behind the grill. Oh what fun it used to be. Couple of chicks in front of me gawking at a light? Hit the horn and watch them jump! I used to so look forward to that and it really made my day.
Now I drive a Caddy and it's not behind the grill. It is fairly loud. They still jump but not as high. Just last week I got a guy driving a prius. Yes, he thought he was so smug in his POS hybrid, not paying attention to the light. I waited a full 5 seconds - then HORN! I think he hit his head on the roof. Heh.