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Self-Driving Car Will Make Trip From San Francisco To New York City
An anonymous reader writes with news that Delphi Automotive is undertaking the longest test of a driverless car yet, from the Golden Gate Bridge to midtown Manhattan. "Lots of people decide, at one point or another, to drive across the US. College kids. Beat poets. Truckers. In American folklore, it doesn't get much more romantic than cruising down the highway, learning about life (or, you know, hauling shipping pallets). Now that trip is being taken on by a new kind of driver, one that won't appreciate natural beauty or the (temporary) joy that comes from a gas station chili dog: a robot. On March 22, an autonomous car will set out from the Golden Gate Bridge toward New York for a 3,500-mile drive that, if all goes according to plan, will push robo-cars much closer to reality. Audi's taken its self-driving car from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas, Google's racked up more than 700,000 autonomous miles, and Volvo's preparing to put regular people in its robot-controlled vehicles. But this will be one of the most ambitious tests yet for a technology that promises to change just about everything, and it's being done not by Google or Audi or Nissan, but by a company many people have never heard of: Delphi."
I was wondering how they planned to handle refueling (and maybe in the future, recharging). When they figure that one out, imagine what this kind of system will do to the trucking industry.
They don't even have to figure that one out. All they have to do is institute full service fueling to replace cardlock fuel stops. The trucks pull in, someone wanders over and fuels them, the trucks pull out again when they detect that the tank has been closed and the attendant has moved away. Extensive monitoring and high-resolution cameras will eliminate the need to have a human on board entirely.
Presumably, a car with a telepresence robot in it (just enough to communicate with attendants, not to drive the car) could conceivably already cross the country simply by stopping at full-service stations, if not for the legal impediments.
Besides commuting, OTR trucking really is the "killer app" for self-driving automobiles, and it's coming sooner than people think.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
More impressive would be for the car to drive from one end of New York to the other. During the day, avoiding highways, dealing with really chaotic traffic on narrow, poorly marked roads full of distractions and ambiguities.
Highways are simple. Traffic flows in one direction only, clearly marked and wide roads, no intersections, all roughly the same speed. No surprises. It's where by far the fewest accidents happen for human driven cars, even though it's boring and probably the part where human drivers pay least attention. Doing an hour of highways, ten hours of highways, 100 hours of highways - it's just more of the same. Now it's cross country, tomorrow it'll be cross country and back. And back again. As long as the fuel will last.