Elon Musk Plans To Solve Traffic Congestion With Self-Driving Buses (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Elon Musk believes self-driving buses are the answer to solving traffic congestion and mass transit in densely populated cities. Musk has teased the idea while at a transportation conference in Norway, according to Bloomberg. "We have an idea for something which is not exactly a bus but would solve the density problem for inner city situations." he said. "Autonomous vehicles are key... I don't want to talk too much about it. I have to be careful what I say." Elon Musk released the Model X last year with semi-autonomous Autopilot mode, and most recently, announced the "budget-friendly" Model 3 with similar autonomous functionality. There's no question autonomous vehicles are the future. "I very much agree with solving the high-density transport problem," Musk said in Norway. "There's a new type of car or vehicle that would be great for that and that'll actually take people to their final destination and not just the bus stop." The Hyperloop is another example of Elon's vision to revolutionize transportation.

Comments

An uberesque vehicle

[BlueCoder]

I think he is brainstorming a driverless limo/bus. Without the driver station it could be square to shorten the vehicle. Then separate the vehicle into compartments with say 3 or 4 sections. You can book a whole section for yourself or share. Just imagine a squarish vehicle with 4 sets of gull wing doors.

They don't want to talk about it since it's likely they would be for uber, lift and conventional taxi businesses.

Don't forget once we have driverless the local taxi medallion companies can get in on the game quite easily too.

Time for an old Slashdot meme update

[Etcetera]

Back in the day, every once in a while someone would propose some "this will solve everything" solution to the problem of spam, and we'd reply with the list of many reasons why it wouldn't work. I feel like we need to update the meme below for all of the technocratic solutions coming out of Silicon Valley nowadays by people who don't particularly live in the real world, and/or are millennials.

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Re: Time for an old Slashdot meme update

[Etcetera]

What's funny is that the spam problem was solved years ago. Can't remember the last time a piece of spam hit my inbox. You need a new example.

Well, I'd put it more as:

(-) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email

For the most part, and for most consumers, there now IS a centrally-controlling authority for email: Google. And if they're not using Gmail, they're using Yahoo Mail or Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com. Combined, they can basically dictate filtration rules for non-business US spam filtering. And for B2B spam filtering, there's a whollle lot of outsourcing that gets done to one of very few vendors. The meme writers (and all of us back in the day), didn't foresee that distributed (ISP-level or lower) email that you use Eudora, Entourage, Thinderbird, etc. would go away for most users.

It's worth noting that outside the US, and especially in developing areas, spam is still a pretty big problem, even moreso if you consider security/attack vectors as "spam"

Implying people do or want to ride the bus

[kheldan]

If Elon Musk wants to invent something that will improve mass transit, how about a mind control device that will make people actually want to use public transit in the first place? All a 'self-driving bus' will do is make bus drivers less skilled -- because they'll still have to sit there, supervising some shitty pseudo-AI that is pseudo-driving a 9 ton chunk of metal and flesh on wheels that could kill dozens of people if it fucks up -- and make no mistake, it will be required to still have manual controls and a qualified human operator, alert and supervising it, at all times. Stupid idea.