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Slashdot Asks: How Long Before Self-Driving Cars Become Mainstream?
Here's the thing, regardless of one's stand on self-driving cars, they are no longer a futuristic idea. Major car companies such as Tesla, BMW, and Mercedes have already released an autonomous vehicle or plan to release one soon. Sergio Marchionne, an Italian-Canadian executive who is currently the CEO of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, recently said: It isn't pie in the sky. People are talking about 20 years. I think we will have it in five years. ZDNet has published its interview of Jim McBride, technical leader in Ford's autonomous vehicles team, who thinks self-driving cars are five years away from changing the world. At the same time, we must acknowledge the talks about these smart vehicles killing many jobs, and the security vulnerabilities we read every once in a while. What's your take on this?
Just all those other projects that were only 20 years away, since the 1960's.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but we're not quite at the stage where you can just take a car off the road, slap on some sensors and some jazz in the steering wheel/pedals, and the car is ready to self-drive. I would imagine each car model has to be optimized for this, and that will take awhile. So in 5 years, we might have self-driving cars coming off the assembly lines, but it's gonna take a lot more than 5 years before that's a sizable percentage of the cars on the road.
There are no self-driving cars today. A self driving car is a car that can follow any standard road, anywhere. They can't. They are plagued by weird things of all sorts. Maybe we're five years away from ones that can handle the city roads. And another five years from ones that can handle effectively all roads. Then adoption can begin.
Video phones have existed since the '70s. I wouldn't say that they became popular until last year. And they still aren't anywhere near the majority.
I don't want to sit in a car, bored to tears, when I could be spending my time driving; driving's fun, and it's certainly more fun than sitting and waiting.
Ditto. People come up with all of these oddball scenarios (A dozen kids suddenly appear in the middle of highway. Hit them or run into a wall?), but fail to recognize the fact that a typical human driver would have only have looked up from his phone after he felt his car bowling over kids like tenpins.
To be successful a self driving car doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to avoid killing 30,000 people a year as well as avoiding about 5.5 million auto accidents that in turn injured 2.5 million people.
Humans sort of suck at driving, actually, and I've got to think a vehicle with 360-degree sensors that can see and react to conditions in microseconds can do a lot better than us tired, distracted, drunk, road-raging meatbags.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
A few years ago, those questions would get a laugh. Over time they've been given much more consideration.
I've always figured that self-driving cars would cause driver-operated cars to go the way of the manual transmission in the USA - limited to the cheapest end of the market, the specialist, and the enthusiast.
Because, really, after the drunks are forced into them, I figure the next step is to get Johnny one because it's so much safer than him having to drive -and he likes it because he can do his cellphone stuff while going someplace.
Then, when it's time for him to buy his own vehicle, he'll pick another self-driver because he doesn't know how to manually operate one, and might not even have a license to operate.
Plus, with them out there, it becomes much easier to start raising the standards for a driver's license.
I don't read AC A human right
Why have the car park itself at the mall at all? Why not have it head home so someone else can use it while you shop?
Several reasons: 1) you're wasting a lot of gas having a car drive itself empty back home, 2) that's going to increase the traffic, and 3) how do you know exactly what time you'll be done shopping? Most likely the car won't be able to get back to pick you up when you're ready, so you have to sit around and wait. The whole point of having a car is to go when you want, and not have to wait for someone else's schedule.
For that matter, I think car ownership itself will become much rarer, and membership in car collectives will be a much more common.
Perhaps, but it seems like it'd be a lot cheaper and easier to just use RoboUber or RoboLyft. Big companies like that will be able to buy huge fleets of self-driving cars, and put together the infrastructure to dispatch them most efficiently. With so many of their cars on the road, your wait time will be tiny, whereas if you co-own a robocar (or even a few of them) with a handful of people, that one car won't be able to pick you up quickly since it likely won't be nearby when you summon it, or it'll be in use. I think you're right about car ownership becoming rarer, but not about the collectives. We'll just have a handful of big corporations owning most of the cars and we'll just pay for automated rides. Overall, though, it probably will be better and cheaper overall: far fewer vehicles will be needed (most cars just sit parked most of the time), and the total transportation cost for most people will probably be less, and we can also stop wasting so much land on parking lots, which will improve density.