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Self-Driving Cars Will Be In 30 US Cities By the End of Next Year
schwit1 sends this report from the New York Observer:
Automated vehicle pilot projects will roll out in the U.K. and in six to 10 U.S. cities this year, with the first unveiling projected to be in Tampa Bay, Florida as soon as late spring. The following year, trial programs will launch in 12 to 20 more U.S. locations, which means driverless cars will be on roads in up to 30 U.S. cities by the end of 2016. The trials will be run by Comet LLC, a consulting firm focused on automated vehicle commercialization. ... they’re focusing on semi-controlled areas and that the driverless vehicles will serve a number of different purposes—both public and private. The vehicles themselves—which are all developed by Veeo Systems—will even vary from two-seaters to full-size buses that can transport 70 people. At some locations, the vehicles will drive on their own paths, occasionally crossing vehicle and pedestrian traffic, while at others, the vehicles will be completely integrated with existing cars.
The vehicles travel slower, set routes. The cost to add the self-driving capability is a lower percentage of the total cost of the vehicle. Finally, over the long term they save money by removing the necessity of paying a driver.
Still not as perfect as using the tech on garbage trucks. They move even slower, have less union opposition (because you are only getting rid of the driver, not the attendants that load the vehicle. But no one's perfect.
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Do the cars have an alarm or something that alerts the occupant (back-up driver) in the event it gets confused?
To go back to the mechanical failure: a driver might be too distracted to notice early since of imminent failure and it might be too late to react. A car's computer will always be controlling tire pressure.
My wife has driven her can for 3 months with a near-constant "intermittent error" (I've seen it on about 90% of the time, she claims it's on about 10% of the time, given the amount of time I'm in her car, that's statistically possible, but highly unlikely). The self-driving car can drop her off, then drive to the dealer. The self-driving car will be safer because those little things can't be ignored, so mechanical failures should be lower.
Also, self-drivers will have near-constant communications with "home" (near-constant being either real-time, or batch when stopped, or batch when stopped plus real-time for "incidents"), so they can report things with vibration sensors and such.
I had a friend pick me up to go somewhere. As we were driving, I put my hand on the dashboard, paused, and said "I didn't think you had a full-spare in this car." He was confused. I said "You recently changed the right-front tire. But I didn't see a steel-rim on it, so I presume you have the flat in the trunk." His only response was "bullshit." He thought I talked to his parents or something. He didn't think it possible to tell from the passenger seat that something was wrong, then put a hand on the dash and tell which of 4 tires was recently changed. He later told me I was 100% right on all counts. I was seriously interested only why Chevy had their Impala SS spares on full-alloy rims. I'd have guessed that they'd use a steel rim, even if full-sized. I have no idea if it was an extra-cost option to get the allow-rim spare. It's not like they needed a donut to save space in the Impala SS trunk.
The spares are usually balanced poorly (they aren't used that often), or are properly balanced, and fall out of balance over the years in the trunk. So a vibration from the right-front was detectable by a human, even if most wouldn't notice or know what it was if they noticed.
A few vibration sensors in a car, correlated with mechanical failure reports would probably diagnose a large number of problems, long before they happen. And cut repair cost, as problems could be identified early, when small repairs would save a larger bill later.
As for failure modes, I've heard you are more likely to die by trying to avoid a deer than hitting it without slowing. Doing nothing is better than trying to not hit it. A human would never take that action unless they were too drunk/tired to have a slow response time. The best action is drive straight and brake. But humans don't like that either. Human's responses are slow, and usually wrong. A computer-car would be better in almost ever case, but people will focus on that 0.01%, rather than save 30,000 lives a year by moving to self-driving cars. The other thing is that the more self-drivers are out there, the safer it is for everyone.
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As to reporting potholes, every major city responds to reports of potholes needing patched, but the sheer amount of requests, traffic, time of year, etc, prevent them from quickly filling them. When you include limited monetary resources, things get much worse.
Boston claims 2 days. Anchorage claims 1 day. I remember the last time there was an "incident" with potholes in Anchorage (worse weather than Boston, but Boston complains more). It turned out that people had documented the pothole's growth and size for weeks, but nobody reported it. It's a form of "my hardship is worse than your hardship" one-upmanship.
If you have never driven in colder climates where potholes are ubiquitous this time of the year, you don't have a frame of reference to understand how bad these things are.
The AK in AK Marc stands for Alaska. Care to talk about my experience in colder climes some more?
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