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How Tesla's Autopilot and Google's Car Are Entirely Different Animals (robohub.org)
Hallie Siegel writes: Developers and futurologists have long talked of two paths to autonomous cars: the incremental path (where autonomous features such as adaptive cruise control, autonomous parking etc are slowly added to make the car increasingly autonomous) and the revolutionary path that abandons the human driver altogether — the Google car approach. Robocar expert Brad Templeton compares Tesla's latest autopilot technology to the approach Google is taking, explaining why some people think autonomous cars are still decades away, while others believe they are just around the corner.
One looks like it was designed for adults, the other for toddlers. The google car couldn't look any more childish if had pedals inside and coloured wheels.
I love driving, I hate driving with all the drooling morons on the road that cant do safe lane changes or drive with any semblance of skill.
So I want everyone else to get self driving cars.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Driverless cars are going to be hugely disruptive to a large number of industry. The first Uber/Lyft like company to get them going will be able to undercut every taxi service in the entire developed world. We are talking a billion dollar industry there. They will likely be able to gain a significant share of the existing public transit spend in almost every city in the world - even those with good public transit infrastructure - another billion dollar industry. For many individuals it will be more attractive to spend the considerable amounts of money they currently spend owning a private car on an automated taxi service, which is another billion dollar industry.
The first trucking company to use driverless cars will be able to run trucks more often, for cheaper, undercutting everyone else. This is again a billion dollar industry. Eventually companies like Amazon and Walmart will have vending machine vans that circulate around an area and come to your door with milk and bread faster than you can walk down to your local store. This will change the nature of bricks and mortar retail again. That is another billion dollar industry.
A fleet of driverless taxi services would potentially make the economics of electric cars look unbeatable. The high load factor of taxis means that you can afford to pay a lot more in capital costs in exchange for massively reduced operating costs. Automated taxis could also manage their own charging, and with apps that pre-plan journeys the car sent to you would be able to ensure it had enough charge to get you to your destination, eliminating the main problem with electric cars right now. The system could probably be built with small (cheap) onboard batteries and a limited number of swapping stations throughout a city. This could massively undercut both gas cars and private vehicle ownership without any further reductions in battery prices. Now you are talking about a trillion dollar industry.
There is no doubt that driverless cars are a challenging technology to develop. It will be extremely difficult to make them as reliable and safe as we would all like them to be. But in the end, as long as they are, say, an order of magnitude safer than human drivers, the massive economic benefits (i.e. potential profits) will ensure that they are put on the roads. When there is this level of money to be made, capitalism will find a way.
Nice.
Google and Tesla are doing different things for good reasons. Tesla makes electric cars, and it needs to go carefully or it will lose its core business and customers. So they start from an electric performance car and gradually work up to an autonomous performance car. Google doesn't make cars, so it is not risking a core business; and their potential customers are mostly people who can't drive or don't trust their eyesight any longer, so anything that lets them potter to the shops is better than nothing. So they start from a new antonomous car, and work up to an autonomous performance car that can play chicken with the Audis on the autobahn.
Two different approaches. One of them is not necessarily wrong.
Not to mention, that self driving cars will very rarely commit traffic violations (speeding, etc). That will dry up a major revenue source for a lot of smaller towns, another billion dollar industry.
*Summon car from parking space*
*Drive like maniac to destination*
*Let car find it's own damned parking space*
*Summon car from parking space*
*Drive like maniac home*
*Let car find it's own damned parking space*
rinse and repeat
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.