Here is an exerpt of an article I was writing called the "Sustainable Status of America" on why the ecological foot print is inflated, and what it really shows.
The way the ecological foot print works is that it calculates how big of an area of the planet each of us needs - in "global hectacres per capita". Here is a graph of the ecological foot print from many nations vs the human development index.
At first blush, this report would seem to refute my point - the USA is one of the least sustainable nations on the planet. However, taking a more complexed and detailed understanding unvails many interesting counterpoints. The first counterpoint I would like to point you to is the graph of footprint over time. What you can see is that the footprint of most nations goes down, while the HDI goes up. What this means is that we are on the right track, which is better than nothing. If we project out the lines, what we see is that we should be for the most part sustainable by 2050.
After looking at the ecological footprint, I quite like the way it measures impact. However, it has one huge, IMHO, design flaw. It considers CO2 to have a physical footprint in global hectacres per capita. For example, in the graph of Switzerland, you can see that most of the footprint is energy, I.E., CO2. If you were to ignore the CO2 requirement, you would find that Swizterland was actually sustainable (but barely). Worldwide, the carbon component of our footprint is over 54% of the foot print. The way CO2's footprint is being calculated is by taking into account the amount of CO2 captured by acres of biomass, such as forests. What this means is that it essentially calculates how big of a fuel farm we would need for the world using first generation biofuels. The results are rediculus for energy instensive countries such as the USA. This is because first generation biofuels are incredibly ineffecient - often less than 0.1% efficient at converting solar energy into useful power. A solar panel is 20% efficient. A recent IEEE report concluded that to power the world with switch-grass ethanol would require essentially the whole planet be converted into one big fuel farm. Meanwhile, solar panels essentially on our roofs could charge up all our electric cars and power our houses. This CO2 calculation pollutes the ecological footprint data with tangential information that depends on technical change.
The ecological footprint makes a good point. Our current mode of operation is unsustainable, but what it also makes clear is what our number one sustainablity priority should be: reducing CO2 emissions. Fortunately, thousands if not millions of my fellow capitalist pigs have responeded to the call. The solution, and this will be clear, is not to reduce our energy use but instead to develop new technologies to solve the problem. We have been told by environmentalists "we must change our behavior instead of wait for technological fantasy", but history has had other ideas. The whales were not saved from the whalers because activists told everyone to turn of the lights. The whales were saved because technologists and capitalsts drilled for oil. JD Rockefeller saved the whales, not Patrick Moore. CO2 will be stopped because higher fossil fuel prices are already pushing renewables - the solution is already happening, but you don't often hear about it. For example, wind power is growing at around 30% annually - a phenominal growth rate in the business world. The consequences of this growth are the colapse of off-peak electricity prices - which I hope will result in the shifting of industrial production and transportation "fuel" production to windy nights. Wind currently makes up 1.8% of our electricity. What that means is that in 15-20 years at the current growth rate, wind will make up all of our electricity production.
You clearly understand the issues. Some people don't understand the ridership issue. I suggest you get a slashdot account so people can see your posts.
I'm in a town of 60,000 and we do not have traffic problems here. We have basically no public transportation, and our roads are poorly designed and confusing, and yet we rarely have traffic problems. You can get around any where you want with a car in about 20 minutes at maximum. Most driving trips are actually quite relaxing - I like it because it gives me an excuse to be uncontactable.
Not oil, that's for sure. Right now, most electricity comes from gas and coal, nuclear and hydro. Oil makes up less than %1 of electricity generation. Even on a coal grid, there are less CO2 emissions from electric cars than gas cars. By the time all cars are electric, all electricity will come from solar and wind and hydro.
You don't need to excite the general public. You need to excite some weirdo genius cult leader who realizes that his Utopian vision just isn't going to happen on Earth. Then space will happen.
Not to mention the more direct studies in which various distant objects were observed to detect occlusion events. Not enough events were detected to account for the idea of dark matter being composed of Brown Dwarfs and other small "normal" objects.
The problem with this idea is that public transit consumes a lot more energy than people assume. For example, the cleanest electric light rail in the united states consumes approximately 3 times as much energy per passenger mile as driving a Tesla Roadster electric car. The best transit rail system I have reviewed is in Japan, where the system uses approximately as much energy as the average electric car would. High speed intercity trains can consume much less than cars but they are a drop in the bucket for overall consumption. Buses also use a lot of fuel, the average Bus gets around 36 MPG per person. The average car gets 23 MPG (and rising) but contains 1.54 people, so it gets around the same MPG as well. Here is a link to my source (further links in article).
1. It is just a battery. Many people read about hydrogen and snicker "EROI EROI it's just a battery not a source of energy it's worthless Nah Nah." But that isn't true. We need a battery system, and hydrogen and aluminum have a lot more energy density than most other batteries. There is no theoretical reason why making hydrogen or aluminum with electricity should be less efficient than charging and discharging batteries. There are practical reasons.
2. It is true that aluminum production uses huge amounts of electricity per volume/mass of aluminum. That is actually a good thing. Aluminum production is around 70% efficient (there is huge market pressure for improvement). It is mostly smelted using hydroelectric power. The insane energy consumption is good because aluminum has 2x the energy content by volume as gasoline.
3. This system is very inefficient, because the reaction of aluminum with water wastes energy as heat. This is because there is a lot more energy in oxidizing one Al atom than in one H2 molecule. This aluminum+water process comes up a lot, and while I agree that it is a nice process, it really does not have a niche it can fill. Only 50% of energy of the Al ends up in the H2. Then, only 40% of the energy of the hydrogen ends up being converted to electricity in the hydrogen fuel cell, so the net aluminum->electricity efficiency is only 20%. It gets worse, because hydrogen fuel cells are too expensive for cars. As a result, we have to use a combustion engine, and end up with only 10% aluminum->motion efficiency. A better way to do this is with a straight aluminum fuel cell. Aluminum fuel cells (which consume metallic aluminum without producing hydrogen) are about 40% efficient. They are also cheaper than hydrogen fuel cells.
4. Schemes like this may not seem like batteries, but they are. Infact, all such electricity->something->electricity schemes are batteries, and may be compared directly on efficiency, energy density and cost per unit energy. Here is rough comparison of efficiencies. For cars, you need to have an efficiency of above 25% to be as green as gasoline cars on average grids, and you need to have an efficiency of above 50% to be as green as gasoline cars on a coal grid.
Electricity->aluminum->hydrogen->engine = 10%
Electricity->aluminum->hydrogen->fuel cell = 20%
Electricity->hydrogen (compressed)->fuel cell = 25%
Electricity->aluminum->electricity = 28%
Electricity->Zinc->electricity = 50%
NiCad/NiMh/Lead Acid = 70%
Li-ion = 90%
If you have solar panels capture the energy, they simply suck the energy up, store it, and when it returns as heat in the friction of the objects it moves, the lights it powers, etc. Without the solar panels, the light would just be heat. So it is free.
The main issue with public transportation energy efficiency is occupancy. Trains and buses in a "walk-on" schedule are not guaranteed to be fully occupied. Airlines and highspeed rail operators manage demand so that trains and planes are often up to 70% occupied. However, walk-on buses and trains often have under 20% occupancy. What this means is that cars do a lot better except in rare, properly-managed, high-density scenarios. Here in the USA, outside of a few urban areas, such San Francisco and New York, there simply are not the densities needed for successful public transport operation. In these cases, the automobile (and motorcycle) are actually more efficient because of occupancy.
Case in point. A 55 passenger advanced hybrid passenger bus gets 5.5 MPG city. With all seats full, it gets 300 pMPG, which is really good. But, this almost never happens. Why? Because the average number of people on a bus in the USA is 9 (UK is 10). What that means is that the bus gets 55 MPG. A Prius with one driver gets 50 MPG, which is similar. A Prius with 5 people packed in gets 250 pMPG, similar to the bus (I'm sure the Prius would do better if it was a diesel hybrid).
In a suburb, or in a rural area (like most of the US!), most of the trains would be empty. Rail also has very high costs (much higher than building a road and running the cars) associated with it if it cannot be fully utilized. Should people live in suburbs in rural areas or should they give them up and live in a city because of transportation efficiency? That's a different question. What we do know is that cars are the best way to deal with suburbs and rural areas, and buses are a necessity for those who cannot afford to own cars or cannot drive cars because of disability. In the future, if robotic cars become a reality, we can have robo-taxis instead of buses for the disabled.
Actually, the train is already maxed out in efficiency. People don't understand how efficient electric vehicles are. Well designed ones, such as that Japanese train and Tesla Roadster are 90% efficient or more. There's not much room for improvement in either case. Many people are building their homemade electric cars on A/C induction motors which are used for industrial equipment and trains - one electric motor that powers on axle of a train can easily power a car. It might actually be more efficient (but not by much) because oversized motors are used at lower current, which reduces cooling and gives the car more HP, which is always good.
This really demonstrates the fact that switching to alternative energy sources (switching from gasoline to electric) can have better effects than conserving energy by switching from one mode of transit to another.
BTW, in the USA, there is an average 1.54 passengers per car, so to make it fair to the car, the car uses 100-170 watt-hours/passenger-mile.
Yeah. I was trying to type 250 watt*hours/mile, not 25. Ironically, 25 is right for a moped. Leaf has a 24 kWh battery pack and goes 100 miles/charge, so I think were in the ballpark.
That figure is inflated by a factor of 5 - it's really 16 kWh/100 km or $1.6/km. In the USA, needs to tax gas at $0.60 a gallon to pay for roads (it currently taxes it at $0.40~ish).
That number is wrong, because it calculates the energy in the gas that goes into gasoline cars. 80 kWh/100 km is 1,287 watt*hours/mile, five times higher than the average EV highway energy rate of 250 watt*hours/mile - electric cars are 5 times more efficient at using energy than gas cars. At low speed (city driving), a EV consumes around 150-160 watt*hours/mile, similar to the Japanese rail system, which gets 150 watt*hours/passenger-mile.
I think the only way I've failed her thus far is her physical fitness
You don't need to. I'm gonna anger a lot of people by saying this, but physical fitness is not really important. In a world where one can buy a $600 dollar part that can convert bioenergy into mechanical power at a 10X the power to weight ratio of a human being, it's not really all that important.
Oh, and mindless junk is important. Video games are the reason my first job was coding, not washing dishes. I was allowed unlimited game time assuming I finished all my school work. Guess what? I got bored of the games. So I wanted to write my own. I did. Then I discovered my coding skills worked for robotics and web dev. Then I found out that I could write applications for doing "business" stuff. So, one of the reasons I am where I am today is because of mindless junk.
Really, I can't wait for the first DIY experimenters to hit the highways in their homemade robocars. Slogan: DIY Robocars - making safety dangerous - your car, your code, our road.
Not many people will be willing to trust a computer to drive them, even if it's safer.
Actually, users won't have to. People think that robocars = no human drivers, but I don't think this is really true. All they need to do is have the same algorithms, but give the human drivers say 1 foot of play back and forth in the lane and say 2 seconds ahead and behind. Then people will still feel like they're in control, driving will still be fun for those of us who enjoy it, and those of us who would get sick to our stomachs in a robocar would feel better.
Under normal driving conditions, a human is not really better than a robot. It's the extreme conditions, where the driver is not paying attention to the road, or a sudden even, or ice and snow or a mechanical problem that gets you. If you build a few avoidance systems, you could make driving a ton safer without going through all that work of building a full robocar where you get in, click on a map, and sit back. You don't need to go through and figure out how to drive every weird unmarked intersection in the country, "just" look at some laser scans and hit the brakes if something gets in the way. You also get superhuman vision, like infared cameras, laser arrays, sonar, DHS xrays, as well as road information such as traffic cameras and CCTV's.
You have the following:
1. Fully human-controlled (1980's and before)
2. Computer controlled emissions equipment (1990's)
3. Computer controlled stability and traction (2000's)
4. Computer assisted accident avoidance (2010's)
5. Optional full computer control? (2020's)
Notice that there is no mandatory full computer control. That's because I don't think you really need it. Sure, some economy cars will come without steering wheels or stuff, but many luxury and performance vehicles will. I think what will happen is that you average sports vehicle, be it and offroader or a sports car or a road-going rally car will have three settings: no assistance, computer assistance, and completely autonomous. Eventually, "no assistance" will not be a good idea on public roads. Not like it is going to negatively impact the driving experience anyway.
Now, many people discuss scenarios where "road trains" and other modes of driving that would not be possible with human drivers with no spacing between the cars. I don't see that as a viable scenario. While many accidents are caused by people's mistakes, some are caused, or at least helped along by mechanical failure, such as tire blow out or brake problems. These automated cars may be better at reacting to the problems, but I don't want to be in a road train inches in front of a semi when its tire calls it quits.
If robocar technology can save 40,000 lives a year, why should we care about letting people drive them? Because it will allow the systems to make a significant impact much earlier, and it will cause a who group of people (people who like driving) who would be otherwise opposed to robocars to be supporters of robocars. They're actually a surprisingly useful group of people, being car mechanics (who will fix the things and install assistance systems on pre-built cars), race car drivers (who will promote the things to the general public), and not to mention people who work for automakers who build the cars in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
SOx is not a greenhouse gas. It is, however, air pollution and acid rain.
Here is an exerpt of an article I was writing called the "Sustainable Status of America" on why the ecological foot print is inflated, and what it really shows.
The way the ecological foot print works is that it calculates how big of an area of the planet each of us needs - in "global hectacres per capita". Here is a graph of the ecological foot print from many nations vs the human development index.
At first blush, this report would seem to refute my point - the USA is one of the least sustainable nations on the planet. However, taking a more complexed and detailed understanding unvails many interesting counterpoints. The first counterpoint I would like to point you to is the graph of footprint over time. What you can see is that the footprint of most nations goes down, while the HDI goes up. What this means is that we are on the right track, which is better than nothing. If we project out the lines, what we see is that we should be for the most part sustainable by 2050.
After looking at the ecological footprint, I quite like the way it measures impact. However, it has one huge, IMHO, design flaw. It considers CO2 to have a physical footprint in global hectacres per capita. For example, in the graph of Switzerland, you can see that most of the footprint is energy, I.E., CO2. If you were to ignore the CO2 requirement, you would find that Swizterland was actually sustainable (but barely). Worldwide, the carbon component of our footprint is over 54% of the foot print. The way CO2's footprint is being calculated is by taking into account the amount of CO2 captured by acres of biomass, such as forests. What this means is that it essentially calculates how big of a fuel farm we would need for the world using first generation biofuels. The results are rediculus for energy instensive countries such as the USA. This is because first generation biofuels are incredibly ineffecient - often less than 0.1% efficient at converting solar energy into useful power. A solar panel is 20% efficient. A recent IEEE report concluded that to power the world with switch-grass ethanol would require essentially the whole planet be converted into one big fuel farm. Meanwhile, solar panels essentially on our roofs could charge up all our electric cars and power our houses. This CO2 calculation pollutes the ecological footprint data with tangential information that depends on technical change.
The ecological footprint makes a good point. Our current mode of operation is unsustainable, but what it also makes clear is what our number one sustainablity priority should be: reducing CO2 emissions. Fortunately, thousands if not millions of my fellow capitalist pigs have responeded to the call. The solution, and this will be clear, is not to reduce our energy use but instead to develop new technologies to solve the problem. We have been told by environmentalists "we must change our behavior instead of wait for technological fantasy", but history has had other ideas. The whales were not saved from the whalers because activists told everyone to turn of the lights. The whales were saved because technologists and capitalsts drilled for oil. JD Rockefeller saved the whales, not Patrick Moore. CO2 will be stopped because higher fossil fuel prices are already pushing renewables - the solution is already happening, but you don't often hear about it. For example, wind power is growing at around 30% annually - a phenominal growth rate in the business world. The consequences of this growth are the colapse of off-peak electricity prices - which I hope will result in the shifting of industrial production and transportation "fuel" production to windy nights. Wind currently makes up 1.8% of our electricity. What that means is that in 15-20 years at the current growth rate, wind will make up all of our electricity production.
You clearly understand the issues. Some people don't understand the ridership issue. I suggest you get a slashdot account so people can see your posts.
I'm in a town of 60,000 and we do not have traffic problems here. We have basically no public transportation, and our roads are poorly designed and confusing, and yet we rarely have traffic problems. You can get around any where you want with a car in about 20 minutes at maximum. Most driving trips are actually quite relaxing - I like it because it gives me an excuse to be uncontactable.
Not oil, that's for sure. Right now, most electricity comes from gas and coal, nuclear and hydro. Oil makes up less than %1 of electricity generation. Even on a coal grid, there are less CO2 emissions from electric cars than gas cars. By the time all cars are electric, all electricity will come from solar and wind and hydro.
You don't need to excite the general public. You need to excite some weirdo genius cult leader who realizes that his Utopian vision just isn't going to happen on Earth. Then space will happen.
Not to mention the more direct studies in which various distant objects were observed to detect occlusion events. Not enough events were detected to account for the idea of dark matter being composed of Brown Dwarfs and other small "normal" objects.
The problem with this idea is that public transit consumes a lot more energy than people assume. For example, the cleanest electric light rail in the united states consumes approximately 3 times as much energy per passenger mile as driving a Tesla Roadster electric car. The best transit rail system I have reviewed is in Japan, where the system uses approximately as much energy as the average electric car would. High speed intercity trains can consume much less than cars but they are a drop in the bucket for overall consumption. Buses also use a lot of fuel, the average Bus gets around 36 MPG per person. The average car gets 23 MPG (and rising) but contains 1.54 people, so it gets around the same MPG as well. Here is a link to my source (further links in article).
Several important points about this technology.
1. It is just a battery. Many people read about hydrogen and snicker "EROI EROI it's just a battery not a source of energy it's worthless Nah Nah." But that isn't true. We need a battery system, and hydrogen and aluminum have a lot more energy density than most other batteries. There is no theoretical reason why making hydrogen or aluminum with electricity should be less efficient than charging and discharging batteries. There are practical reasons.
2. It is true that aluminum production uses huge amounts of electricity per volume/mass of aluminum. That is actually a good thing. Aluminum production is around 70% efficient (there is huge market pressure for improvement). It is mostly smelted using hydroelectric power. The insane energy consumption is good because aluminum has 2x the energy content by volume as gasoline.
3. This system is very inefficient, because the reaction of aluminum with water wastes energy as heat. This is because there is a lot more energy in oxidizing one Al atom than in one H2 molecule. This aluminum+water process comes up a lot, and while I agree that it is a nice process, it really does not have a niche it can fill. Only 50% of energy of the Al ends up in the H2. Then, only 40% of the energy of the hydrogen ends up being converted to electricity in the hydrogen fuel cell, so the net aluminum->electricity efficiency is only 20%. It gets worse, because hydrogen fuel cells are too expensive for cars. As a result, we have to use a combustion engine, and end up with only 10% aluminum->motion efficiency. A better way to do this is with a straight aluminum fuel cell. Aluminum fuel cells (which consume metallic aluminum without producing hydrogen) are about 40% efficient. They are also cheaper than hydrogen fuel cells.
4. Schemes like this may not seem like batteries, but they are. Infact, all such electricity->something->electricity schemes are batteries, and may be compared directly on efficiency, energy density and cost per unit energy. Here is rough comparison of efficiencies. For cars, you need to have an efficiency of above 25% to be as green as gasoline cars on average grids, and you need to have an efficiency of above 50% to be as green as gasoline cars on a coal grid.
Electricity->aluminum->hydrogen->engine = 10%
Electricity->aluminum->hydrogen->fuel cell = 20%
Electricity->hydrogen (compressed)->fuel cell = 25%
Electricity->aluminum->electricity = 28%
Electricity->Zinc->electricity = 50%
NiCad/NiMh/Lead Acid = 70%
Li-ion = 90%
You can get something better: neato. It uses LIDAR.
If you have solar panels capture the energy, they simply suck the energy up, store it, and when it returns as heat in the friction of the objects it moves, the lights it powers, etc. Without the solar panels, the light would just be heat. So it is free.
Which university?
The main issue with public transportation energy efficiency is occupancy. Trains and buses in a "walk-on" schedule are not guaranteed to be fully occupied. Airlines and highspeed rail operators manage demand so that trains and planes are often up to 70% occupied. However, walk-on buses and trains often have under 20% occupancy. What this means is that cars do a lot better except in rare, properly-managed, high-density scenarios. Here in the USA, outside of a few urban areas, such San Francisco and New York, there simply are not the densities needed for successful public transport operation. In these cases, the automobile (and motorcycle) are actually more efficient because of occupancy.
Case in point. A 55 passenger advanced hybrid passenger bus gets 5.5 MPG city. With all seats full, it gets 300 pMPG, which is really good. But, this almost never happens. Why? Because the average number of people on a bus in the USA is 9 (UK is 10). What that means is that the bus gets 55 MPG. A Prius with one driver gets 50 MPG, which is similar. A Prius with 5 people packed in gets 250 pMPG, similar to the bus (I'm sure the Prius would do better if it was a diesel hybrid).
In a suburb, or in a rural area (like most of the US!), most of the trains would be empty. Rail also has very high costs (much higher than building a road and running the cars) associated with it if it cannot be fully utilized. Should people live in suburbs in rural areas or should they give them up and live in a city because of transportation efficiency? That's a different question. What we do know is that cars are the best way to deal with suburbs and rural areas, and buses are a necessity for those who cannot afford to own cars or cannot drive cars because of disability. In the future, if robotic cars become a reality, we can have robo-taxis instead of buses for the disabled.
Actually, the train is already maxed out in efficiency. People don't understand how efficient electric vehicles are. Well designed ones, such as that Japanese train and Tesla Roadster are 90% efficient or more. There's not much room for improvement in either case. Many people are building their homemade electric cars on A/C induction motors which are used for industrial equipment and trains - one electric motor that powers on axle of a train can easily power a car. It might actually be more efficient (but not by much) because oversized motors are used at lower current, which reduces cooling and gives the car more HP, which is always good.
This really demonstrates the fact that switching to alternative energy sources (switching from gasoline to electric) can have better effects than conserving energy by switching from one mode of transit to another.
BTW, in the USA, there is an average 1.54 passengers per car, so to make it fair to the car, the car uses 100-170 watt-hours/passenger-mile.
Yeah. I was trying to type 250 watt*hours/mile, not 25. Ironically, 25 is right for a moped. Leaf has a 24 kWh battery pack and goes 100 miles/charge, so I think were in the ballpark.
Aluminium also contains 2x as much energy as gasoline by volume.
That number, posted above, is inflated. It is really 25 watt*hours/mile.
That figure is inflated by a factor of 5 - it's really 16 kWh/100 km or $1.6/km. In the USA, needs to tax gas at $0.60 a gallon to pay for roads (it currently taxes it at $0.40~ish).
That number is wrong, because it calculates the energy in the gas that goes into gasoline cars. 80 kWh/100 km is 1,287 watt*hours/mile, five times higher than the average EV highway energy rate of 250 watt*hours/mile - electric cars are 5 times more efficient at using energy than gas cars. At low speed (city driving), a EV consumes around 150-160 watt*hours/mile, similar to the Japanese rail system, which gets 150 watt*hours/passenger-mile.
You get all that (except maybe tech support) for $0 with Ubuntu.
Why would it be about 30%, most web apps are free and 30% of zero is zero. Apple allow free apps in their store.
It also cost $100 or so a year to be in the app store.
I think the only way I've failed her thus far is her physical fitness
You don't need to. I'm gonna anger a lot of people by saying this, but physical fitness is not really important. In a world where one can buy a $600 dollar part that can convert bioenergy into mechanical power at a 10X the power to weight ratio of a human being, it's not really all that important.
Oh, and mindless junk is important. Video games are the reason my first job was coding, not washing dishes. I was allowed unlimited game time assuming I finished all my school work. Guess what? I got bored of the games. So I wanted to write my own. I did. Then I discovered my coding skills worked for robotics and web dev. Then I found out that I could write applications for doing "business" stuff. So, one of the reasons I am where I am today is because of mindless junk.
Really, I can't wait for the first DIY experimenters to hit the highways in their homemade robocars. Slogan: DIY Robocars - making safety dangerous - your car, your code, our road.
Not many people will be willing to trust a computer to drive them, even if it's safer.
Actually, users won't have to. People think that robocars = no human drivers, but I don't think this is really true. All they need to do is have the same algorithms, but give the human drivers say 1 foot of play back and forth in the lane and say 2 seconds ahead and behind. Then people will still feel like they're in control, driving will still be fun for those of us who enjoy it, and those of us who would get sick to our stomachs in a robocar would feel better.
Under normal driving conditions, a human is not really better than a robot. It's the extreme conditions, where the driver is not paying attention to the road, or a sudden even, or ice and snow or a mechanical problem that gets you. If you build a few avoidance systems, you could make driving a ton safer without going through all that work of building a full robocar where you get in, click on a map, and sit back. You don't need to go through and figure out how to drive every weird unmarked intersection in the country, "just" look at some laser scans and hit the brakes if something gets in the way. You also get superhuman vision, like infared cameras, laser arrays, sonar, DHS xrays, as well as road information such as traffic cameras and CCTV's.
You have the following:
1. Fully human-controlled (1980's and before)
2. Computer controlled emissions equipment (1990's)
3. Computer controlled stability and traction (2000's)
4. Computer assisted accident avoidance (2010's)
5. Optional full computer control? (2020's)
Notice that there is no mandatory full computer control. That's because I don't think you really need it. Sure, some economy cars will come without steering wheels or stuff, but many luxury and performance vehicles will. I think what will happen is that you average sports vehicle, be it and offroader or a sports car or a road-going rally car will have three settings: no assistance, computer assistance, and completely autonomous. Eventually, "no assistance" will not be a good idea on public roads. Not like it is going to negatively impact the driving experience anyway.
Now, many people discuss scenarios where "road trains" and other modes of driving that would not be possible with human drivers with no spacing between the cars. I don't see that as a viable scenario. While many accidents are caused by people's mistakes, some are caused, or at least helped along by mechanical failure, such as tire blow out or brake problems. These automated cars may be better at reacting to the problems, but I don't want to be in a road train inches in front of a semi when its tire calls it quits.
If robocar technology can save 40,000 lives a year, why should we care about letting people drive them? Because it will allow the systems to make a significant impact much earlier, and it will cause a who group of people (people who like driving) who would be otherwise opposed to robocars to be supporters of robocars. They're actually a surprisingly useful group of people, being car mechanics (who will fix the things and install assistance systems on pre-built cars), race car drivers (who will promote the things to the general public), and not to mention people who work for automakers who build the cars in the first place.
I got an idea to prevent crime. Let's make it illegal to do something illegal. That would prevent most if not all types of crime!