- The death count from cars exceeds that from guns. So if you are outraged by guns and want things to change, you should feel the same about car crashes.
Technology creates an opportunity to save lives. Computers don’t get drowsy, drunk or distracted by text messages, and they don’t have blind spots. Just look at commercial airlines: Automation has helped all but eliminate fatal crashes among American air carriers. The last one happened in 2009.
'Grappling' A generous word. Joe Schmo isn't included in the decision making for things like this. The insurance companies will DEMAND automated vehicles, Joe Schmo, Jane Q. Public be damned. Once trucking becomes automated the consumer market will follow quickly, again, because money.
Six of one, half dozen of the other. The actual mechanism by which it happens isn't all that important to me. The pressure comes from the insurance companies and winds up at the manufacturers by roundabout path of consumer behavior. I'm thinking in the scale of centuries today anyway, 'A ways off' is basically tomorrow given how I'm currently relating to the clock.I think they'll offer rebates for autonomous vehicles as soon as their calcs demonstrate that it saves them money.
I can't wait. I know I'm not a great driver, I'm not terrible but I take no joy in driving. A car is like a toaster to me, appreciate that it does it's job well but as long as the job gets done I don't care what form it takes. I'd love an appliance that gets me where I want to go cheaper and more safely.
I can't wait until I can just tap my Ub-yft app, and an autonomous vehicle is waiting for me outside my house at 6:30 in the morning, every morning. I get in, and it takes me to work, and while I am on my way I don't have to worry about assholes not paying attention to the road, etc, because I am in the Auto-Vehicle lane, reserved for autonomous vehicles only. I can sit back, read, and drink my coffee. Then I get out of the car at work, and it gets dispatched to its next commuter, so I don't have to park it, either. I'd pay HUNDREDS of dollars a month for that. (No car payments. No maintenance. No insurance. God, life would be so much better!)
I will bet you a dollar - right f'n now - that you could advertise that gig on Craigslist and have takers. Was talking to my wife's ex-boss yesterday (we've stayed friends - they're great) and she relayed that she took an Uber black one time, got to chatting with the driver, and he handed her his card and said "next time, just give me a call." So now she's got a standing car service to the airport every Thursday and back every Friday. She likes it because it's cheaper, it's dependable, and she knows the guy now and trusts him. He likes it because he makes more money and has steady income. I'm sure Uber would fire him if they knew but since they don't, it's disintermediation all the way down.
Has anyone driven a Tesla autopilot? My Subaru has Subaru's adaptive cruise control. It also yells at me if I stray out of my lane. I ask about Tesla because every article up to this one had led me to believe the technology was pretty much ready for prime time. A road near home had a small median and turn lane added. The old white line was mostly ground off, but it's partially visible. My Subaru sometimes dings at me because it sees me straying over that old line as I drive around the median. My Subaru will also stop itself in traffic but locks the brakes until I brake and take over. Is Tesla further along? When people say self driving cars are on the way, do they mean rolling bedrooms where I can take a nap, or do they mean a car that will override driver commands that would otherwise result in a collision? Articles seem to imply the former, but increasingly I suspect the latter.The technology for semi-driverless cars still isn’t good enough or cheap enough. The $50,000 Volvo I was driving — like a Tesla I’ve tried — got confused by unpainted lane lines, for instance, and I had to take over. But the technology is improving rapidly. Within a few years, many cars will have sophisticated crash-avoidance systems.
I think it's something closer to the latter than to the former. Google - excuse me, Waymo has shown little to no progress and is supposedly suffering from an outpour of talent. Which gives HERE (formerly Nokia, kleinbl00) and TomTom a chance to catch up on their mapping capabilities. Full automation is a really tough nut to crack. It's an easier problem when you have low-speed suburbs (like Waymo tests in) or fenced-off highways (like Tesla, Volvo & Daimler), which is why those places see automation happen. Tesla is out there beta testing automatic steering on highways on its willing serv-...I mean users. Volvo and Daimler will probably have something similar ready in a few years as an expensive addon to their luxury cars, with it slowly trickling down to regular cars. But full automation, in complex urban environments and non-Californian weather? The experts I've talked to about this subject are almost all very conservative in their estimations. "Forty or fifty years from now, maybe."When people say self driving cars are on the way, do they mean rolling bedrooms where I can take a nap, or do they mean a car that will override driver commands that would otherwise result in a collision? Articles seem to imply the former, but increasingly I suspect the latter.
There are two schools of thought out there as regards autonomous vehicles: 1) Make the car smart enough that it can handle any situation 2) Make the map good enough that it can handle any car Google is going with (2). Tesla is going with (1). Google obviously wants to sell maps. Tesla obviously wants to sell cars. Personally, I think (1) is going to be hella harder to implement in an "every day" sort of way because there's no good verification. There's no audit trail. There's no real way to say "no, this won't run over a pedestrian." I mean, the first autonomous vehicle fatality was a Tesla that didn't "see" a semi crossing the freeway. This article is about Volvo, which is kinda-sorta doing (1) but not in a serious way; they're probably looking for a viable way to nickel'n'dime Google (or the other big European mapping concern which veen can elucidate at the drop of a hat) into getting a better rate. I, personally think we'll see a lot of (1) on proscribed routes that eventually spread out from population centers, but that's an educated guess.