Cars for those who hate to drive

[Jeff V]

Autonomous cars about 5 years out: Ford

If the car requires no input from a driver, does it even need to have a human occupant? There are times that it would be nice to summon a car to come get me, but my wife is not available to drive.

Driverless taxis, trucks, buses will make obsolete the profession of "driver." You could also eliminate drunk driving by using a breathalyzer to enable manual driving mode.

[hepcat]

NPR had a great piece on the ethics behind autonomous cars. I never even thought about it in the way they presented it. For example, a self driving car isn't capable of making the kind of calls a human could during an accident. If it has a choice between running into a child that jumps in front of it, or steering into oncoming traffic on a busy thoroughfare, what will the choice be?

I think we need to keep some human control in place.

[Daehawk]

You could also eliminate drunk driving by using a breathalyzer to enable manual driving mode.

They have that now. They get some fool to breath for them. But if they screw up that breather is just as liable.

Cars will be redesigned for sure. You wont need drivers seats...just passenger areas in them. One seat forward one back so passengers could talk to each other or sleep.

[Smoove_B]

Cannot wait to see how auto insurance companies handle this.

[noxiousdog]

Autonomous cars about 5 years out: Ford

If the car requires no input from a driver, does it even need to have a human occupant? There are times that it would be nice to summon a car to come get me, but my wife is not available to drive.

Driverless taxis, trucks, buses will make obsolete the profession of "driver." You could also eliminate drunk driving by using a breathalyzer to enable manual driving mode.

This is absolutely what is going to happen. Uber only has drivers now so they can analyze usage patterns. Their goal is to offer a subscription service. I'm sure they'll have several tiers with one being a commuter service and one being so many individual miles per month.

It's really making me rethink my next vehicle.

[LawBeefaroni]

Driverless taxis, trucks, buses will make obsolete the profession of "driver." You could also eliminate drunk driving by using a breathalyzer to enable manual driving mode.

Pretty sure it's been discussed on some of the economy threads. Trueb driverless cars will eliminate a ton of jobs and services. The ones you mentioned plus auto insurance, body shops, driver's ed, highway patrol, revenues from traffic violations...

[Jeff V]

This from an article linked from the one above:

Google has revealed that its driverless cars have been involved in accidents 11 times, but says all the collisions were caused by other drivers.

The accidents were all "minor", meaning light damage and no injuries, Chris Urmson, director of Google's self-driving car program, said on Monday.

"Not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident," Urmson wrote.

[Paingod]

While I don't hate to drive, I've been waiting for this to mature with some small amount of eagerness. I think that if we can make a big enough push and replace human drivers across the board with automated ones, traffic fatality stats will plummet. It's going to bother me when we save 40,000 lives per year, and the media focuses intently on the 2,000 that still die somehow on the road in an effort to provoke the mass hysteria that's good for their market shares.

Local stories about drunk drivers will be replaced by national news detailing how some automated car responded poorly to unexpected circumstance, resulting in 3 fatalities caused by the flaming robotic death racers themselves!!!

Until every car on the road is automated, I don't think I'll be comfortable relinquishing control to a computer. People tend to do remarkably stupid things when they're driving, and I doubt a machine can respond well enough to avoid accidents when it sometimes seems like they want to hit you.

I mean ... just look at that poor Google car. It just couldn't cope. It assumed the bus approaching at 15mph would yield as it turned in, and collided with the it at 2mph. The bus driver doesn't even appear to notice the car trying to merge and is shocked when he bounces it off his side.

[LordMortis]

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/ ... ublic-demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM

[em2nought]

[Jeff V]

Cannot wait to see how auto insurance companies handle this.

Probably it will start with a discount for a driverless car, eventually morphing into penalties for driven cars. It'll be interesting to see if they can coerce the car companies into building in a tattle feature that shows how many miles the car was autopiloted and how many miles it was driven.

I can imagine some day, especially in cities, car ownership becoming obsolete. Mileage subscriptions seem to be one way to do it, with different classes of car having different rates. Right-sizing the fleet so to keep up with demand will be key.

I hope I live long enough to see what effect a largely autonomous world looks like. I'm thinking "Mote in God's Eye" where the "Moties" would zoom around at high speed, acutely aware of what every vehicle is doing and there never being accidents. Just think of what removing accidents and ass-hat drivers might do to alleviate congestion even as volume continues to increase.

[Smoove_B]

I'm looking forward to a world where I have access to a driver-less car before a home internet connection speed faster than 5 Mbps. Because apparently that's happening.

[Jeff V]

The bus driver doesn't even appear to notice the car trying to merge and is shocked when he bounces it off his side.

That's the thing, it's people drivers that make the roads the hazards they are, and although you might be a minor deity, for purposes of this discussion you are still people. You would be more likely to anticipate incorrectly during an incident caused by another driver, and there's a greater than zero chance that you instigated the incident (the other day, I nearly got t-boned in a parking lot when exiting a drive-thru, whether something else got my attention I don't know, but I just didn't see the guy). It would still be logically safer in an autonomous car because you'd be taking your own fallibility out of the equation.

[Jeff V]

I'm looking forward to a world where I have access to a driver-less car before a home internet connection speed faster than 5 Mbps. Because apparently that's happening.

The car that I'm going to buy has a $450 option to make it a wifi hotspot (additional service subscription required). You might be able to do better by car right now!

[LordMortis]

Cannot wait to see how auto insurance companies handle this.

Probably it will start with a discount for a driverless car, eventually morphing into penalties for driven cars. It'll be interesting to see if they can coerce the car companies into building in a tattle feature that shows how many miles the car was autopiloted and how many miles it was driven.

I can imagine some day, especially in cities, car ownership becoming obsolete. Mileage subscriptions seem to be one way to do it, with different classes of car having different rates. Right-sizing the fleet so to keep up with demand will be key.

I hope I live long enough to see what effect a largely autonomous world looks like. I'm thinking "Mote in God's Eye" where the "Moties" would zoom around at high speed, acutely aware of what every vehicle is doing and there never being accidents. Just think of what removing accidents and ass-hat drivers might do to alleviate congestion even as volume continues to increase.

I was wondering who gets sued in accidents and what they can sue for. If Ford's driverless car kills my mom, I know Ford's got deep pockets.

[NickAragua]

Frankly, fuck driverless cars up their hairless asses. I can't stand it when my wife brings her god damned blathering GPS unit along, and I get pissed off every time I have to drive an automatic transmission car because it never shifts gears when I would have. On the plus side, I'll hopefully be dead before this crap becomes truly ubiquitous so I don't have to deal with cars driven by retarded AIs in addition to cars driven by regular retarded people. [/rant]

[LawBeefaroni]

Until every car on the road is automated, I don't think I'll be comfortable relinquishing control to a computer. People tend to do remarkably stupid things when they're driving, and I doubt a machine can respond well enough to avoid accidents when it sometimes seems like they want to hit you.

I mean ... just look at that poor Google car. It just couldn't cope. It assumed the bus approaching at 15mph would yield as it turned in, and collided with the it at 2mph. The bus driver doesn't even appear to notice the car trying to merge and is shocked when he bounces it off his side.

That's why Google is doing project Sidewalk. Their own city where they can ban evils like drivered cars. It's brilliant when you think about it. Proof of concept on a massive scale.

[Jeff V]

Funny, if I had to pick one city for a mass-rollout of driverless cars, a city that could most benefit from removal of all drivers, the majority whose head is so far up their ass they have no idea how bad they are driving; that city would be Boston.

Sorry to hear you're not going to make it 5 years.

[rshetts2]

If an auto drive system were implemented fully, we could save 30-40 thousand lives a year. We would also substantially reduce the burden to our health care system and almost completely eliminate auto insurance premiums. People with long work commutes could either catch up on sleep or get some work done on the way in. Parents wouldnt have to worry about an accident when ever they needed to reach into the back seat and smack a kid for saying "are we there yet?" for the 132nd time. Drunk driving and the loss of life resulting form it would be eliminated. Auto accidents would be reduced to an almost non existent number which would in turn extend the working life of vehicles substantially. But by all means lets keep driving in the hands of people, whats a few tens of thousands of deaths when compared to our right to drive free.

[NickAragua]

Funny, if I had to pick one city for a mass-rollout of driverless cars, a city that could most benefit from removal of all drivers, the majority whose head is so far up their ass they have no idea how bad they are driving; that city would be Boston.

Sorry to hear you're not going to make it 5 years.

Well, there's always a reasonably good chance that nuclear war will break out within the next five years, so at least I won't have to put up with driverless cars.

[Jeff V]

Well, there's always a reasonably good chance that nuclear war will break out within the next five years, so at least I won't have to put up with driverless cars.

So you're counting on Trump getting elected! Good luck with that!

[NickAragua]

Well, there's always a reasonably good chance that nuclear war will break out within the next five years, so at least I won't have to put up with driverless cars.

So you're counting on Trump getting elected! Good luck with that!

Hey, I'm just trying to look on the bright side.

[Jeff V]

If an auto drive system were implemented fully, we could save 30-40 thousand lives a year. We would also substantially reduce the burden to our health care system and almost completely eliminate auto insurance premiums. People with long work commutes could either catch up on sleep or get some work done on the way in. Parents wouldnt have to worry about an accident when ever they needed to reach into the back seat and smack a kid for saying "are we there yet?" for the 132nd time. Drunk driving and the loss of life resulting form it would be eliminated. Auto accidents would be reduced to an almost non existent number which would in turn extend the working life of vehicles substantially. But by all means lets keep driving in the hands of people, whats a few tens of thousands of deaths when compared to our right to drive free.

I can see some other benefits as well, and Elon Musk is on it with his hyperloop demo that was in the news. If personal vehicle ownership becomes a thing of the past; people will not have such strong attachments to personal vehicles and will be more inclined to use mass transit. New train technologies need a receptive customer base to gain traction. As it is, it would be a win for me if a car could drop me off at the train station then another car fetch me at the destination. The train would take care of the longest segment of the commute faster than a car can.

[EvilHomer3k]

Cars are fun to drive. I don't think you'll ever fully get rid of them because there is a large amount of the population that does love their car (as well as those that love their classic 1966 Ford Mustang). That said, driverless cars, even if they aren't the only ones on the road, are still going to make driving safer overall. Imagine a world where there aren't any teenage girls/boys doing 45 in a 25 while texting or posting selfies.

Has anyone seen tests of driverless cars in winter blizzard conditions? How do they fare against deep snow, gravel ruts, things like that? The ones I see are all in sunny california which has different issues than Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and the entirety of Canada.

[Sepiche]

I think *completely* autonomous cars in 5 years is a pipe dream for a few reasons.

Yes, Google's cars are running well, but they operate in a relatively small geographic area that has to be carefully mapped before hand with extremely detailed information. It does use cameras and radar for detecting other cars and unexpected objects, but in terms of navigation, it's not scanning the road in real time like a human driver would... it's following a path for which it has a lot of pre-processed data.

Here's a visualization of the data for one intersection:


Now multiply that by every intersection in the country, and then think about how often some of those variables would change and need to be updated, not to mention having to build that database in the first place.

Tesla is taking the opposite approach of having the car do the navigating itself, but that's a complicated undertaking and most likely farther out than using pre-processed navigation.

At any rate here's an excellent Vox article that discusses a lot of the current pitfalls (and from which I stole that visualization):
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11447838/s ... -obstacles

There will likely be areas of major cities that will support driverless cars in the short term, but for a car that can go anywhere in the country at will, it's going to be a much, much longer wait IMHO.

[DocDarm]

Cannot wait to see how auto insurance companies handle this.

Volvo CEO: We will accept all liability when our cars are in autonomous mode

http://fortune.com/2015/10/07/volvo-lia ... ving-cars/

[Kraken]

Cars are fun to drive. I don't think you'll ever fully get rid of them because there is a large amount of the population that does love their car (as well as those that love their classic 1966 Ford Mustang). That said, driverless cars, even if they aren't the only ones on the road, are still going to make driving safer overall. Imagine a world where there aren't any teenage girls/boys doing 45 in a 25 while texting or posting selfies.

Yup. Rationally, the arguments for removing control from humans are compelling. Emotionally, I'm glad that I lived when I did, because the future mostly sucks.

[rshetts2]

Oh and most important of all..... The virtual elimination of all traffic jams.

[gbasden]

Oh and most important of all..... The virtual elimination of all traffic jams.

Everyone says this, but I can't quite wrap my head around it. I know traffic flow will be optimized, but if you end up with more cars trying to go someplace than the road has capacity, you still would end up with slow or stopped traffic I would think?

[DocDarm]

Oh and most important of all..... The virtual elimination of all traffic jams.

Everyone says this, but I can't quite wrap my head around it. I know traffic flow will be optimized, but if you end up with more cars trying to go someplace than the road has capacity, you still would end up with slow or stopped traffic I would think?

Here's a great video about how human behavior can cause a "shockwave" traffic jam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suugn-p5C1M

[Malificent]

Cars are fun to drive. I don't think you'll ever fully get rid of them because there is a large amount of the population that does love their car (as well as those that love their classic 1966 Ford Mustang). That said, driverless cars, even if they aren't the only ones on the road, are still going to make driving safer overall. Imagine a world where there aren't any teenage girls/boys doing 45 in a 25 while texting or posting selfies.

Yup. Rationally, the arguments for removing control from humans are compelling. Emotionally, I'm glad that I lived when I did, because the future mostly sucks.

On the other hand, I'm the perfect market for this. I don't hate to drive, but I consider it a necessity rather than something I love. I'd much rather let the car handle the driving and I get that time back to do any number of other things. I'm super excited.

[LordMortis]

Oh and most important of all..... The virtual elimination of all traffic jams.

Everyone says this, but I can't quite wrap my head around it. I know traffic flow will be optimized, but if you end up with more cars trying to go someplace than the road has capacity, you still would end up with slow or stopped traffic I would think?

You would but [John Lennon]imagine no self important or unobservant drivers creating chains of caterpillar affects by cutting in and out of traffic with no regard to the world around them.[/John Lennon]

But yeah, what we get better optimized traffic and sometimes that will still make you crazy (or all the time in Chicago) but I'd still take it. If I didn't get car sick from reading, I'd totally be cooking with gas.

[Jeff V]

Oh and most important of all..... The virtual elimination of all traffic jams.

Everyone says this, but I can't quite wrap my head around it. I know traffic flow will be optimized, but if you end up with more cars trying to go someplace than the road has capacity, you still would end up with slow or stopped traffic I would think?

The thing is it would be a lot more efficient. Cars that know exactly what other cars are doing can drive at speed in dense formation. You eliminate asshats waiting until the last possible second before cutting into lanes they want to be in, which causes everyone to stop and let them in. You can also make better use of ancillary roads and distribute traffic load better. Pedestrian overpasses (which are common in Manila BTW) can eliminate traffic lights and stop signs, making city roads a viable alternative to expressways. As traffic flow improves, there is less negative effect from stop-and-go truck traffic which is slow to accelerate. There are probably infrastructure improvements that could better compliment autonomous vehicles that would result in further improvements.

[Lordnine]

I’m looking forward to driverless cars. I don’t own a vehicle or have a driver’s license.

[Zaxxon]

Oh and most important of all..... The virtual elimination of all traffic jams.

Everyone says this, but I can't quite wrap my head around it. I know traffic flow will be optimized, but if you end up with more cars trying to go someplace than the road has capacity, you still would end up with slow or stopped traffic I would think?

The thing is it would be a lot more efficient. Cars that know exactly what other cars are doing can drive at speed in dense formation. You eliminate asshats waiting until the last possible second before cutting into lanes they want to be in, which causes everyone to stop and let them in. You can also make better use of ancillary roads and distribute traffic load better. Pedestrian overpasses (which are common in Manila BTW) can eliminate traffic lights and stop signs, making city roads a viable alternative to expressways. As traffic flow improves, there is less negative effect from stop-and-go truck traffic which is slow to accelerate. There are probably infrastructure improvements that could better compliment autonomous vehicles that would result in further improvements.

Yep, this. Most (nearly all, AFAIK) traffic jams are not related to a road having more vehicles than its capacity. They happen because you have more vehicles than the road can handle when those vehicles are driven by humans; can't communicate with each other on the millisecond level; and include a significant percentage of 1) terrible drivers and 2) terrible drivers who are also assholes.

[Jeff V]

BMW to release self-driving car in 2021.

[Combustible Lemur]

BMW to release self-driving car in 2021.

The ultimate riding machine?

[Lassr]

wonder how long before a group of hackers are sitting at home playing a racing game on their computer using real cars they have hacked.

[Kraken]

Oh and most important of all..... The virtual elimination of all traffic jams.

Everyone says this, but I can't quite wrap my head around it. I know traffic flow will be optimized, but if you end up with more cars trying to go someplace than the road has capacity, you still would end up with slow or stopped traffic I would think?

The thing is it would be a lot more efficient. Cars that know exactly what other cars are doing can drive at speed in dense formation. You eliminate asshats waiting until the last possible second before cutting into lanes they want to be in, which causes everyone to stop and let them in. You can also make better use of ancillary roads and distribute traffic load better. Pedestrian overpasses (which are common in Manila BTW) can eliminate traffic lights and stop signs, making city roads a viable alternative to expressways. As traffic flow improves, there is less negative effect from stop-and-go truck traffic which is slow to accelerate. There are probably infrastructure improvements that could better compliment autonomous vehicles that would result in further improvements.

Yep, this. Most (nearly all, AFAIK) traffic jams are not related to a road having more vehicles than its capacity. They happen because you have more vehicles than the road can handle when those vehicles are driven by humans; can't communicate with each other on the millisecond level; and include a significant percentage of 1) terrible drivers and 2) terrible drivers who are also assholes.

A contrarian viewpoint: Will robot cars drive traffic congestion off a cliff?

Based on focus groups in Atlanta, Denver, and Chicago, KPMG predicts autonomous ‘‘mobility-on-demand’’ services — think Uber and Lyft without a driver — will result in double-digit increases in travel by people in two age groups: those over 65, and those 16 to 24.

Vehicles traveled a record 3.1 trillion miles in the United States last year. Increased trips in autonomous cars by those two age groups would boost miles traveled by an additional 2 trillion miles annually by 2050, KPMG calculated. If self-driving cars without passengers start running errands, the increase could be double that.

And if people in their middle years, when driving is at its peak, also increase their travel, that yearly total could reach 8 trillion miles. ‘‘This could be massive,’’ Silberg said.

Increased efficiency in road use might not cancel out the increased volume, especially during the (probably) decades while robot cars share the road with human drivers.

[Jeff V]

Increased efficiency in road use might not cancel out the increased volume, especially during the (probably) decades while robot cars share the road with human drivers.

Key is getting human drivers off the road. In the process, there will be advancements and development of high speed mass transit infrastructure. People will take a self-driving car to the train station where they will be delivered downtown in 5-10 minutes as opposed to sitting in a car for an hour.