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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?
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.
They need to define what 'self driving' means to get an answer. Self driving features such as parking assist or other very specific functions are already here, but I don't consider it self driving if I can't get from one location to another without driving. Maybe if I could travel an interstate with no interaction, that might qualify.
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.
Maybe if I could travel an interstate with no interaction, that might qualify.
You can. Tesla autopilot doesn't do intersections, or on-ramps, but once you are on the freeway, you can engage it, and it will self-drive until you reach your exit.
In Teslas with Autopilot, all the hardware is already present for full self-driving, and new features will be added as the software matures.
Or until you run into snow, poor lane markings, etc.... But hey, in ideal conditions it kinda works... It's a step forward, but there are still miles to go...
Yes, it is a step forward. And it is an important step forward. In terms of bootstrapping technology and making iterative improvements based on real world requirements, you now have a consumer car that can autonomously drive from point A to point B on the highway and then have a person take over. Combine that with already available features like self parking, and autonomous braking and you have most of the autonomous abilities you are talking about for fully autonomous. If all that is left is cars that have difficulty driving in poor weather and bad roads, then you are at least on-par with human drivers.
And better than human drivers if the car tells you to not drive in bad weather. The best way to drive in bad weather is not to.