…we’ll still need the Miata.
Yes. Two counterpoints, though.
First, I don’t think I’d be able to read or write while being driven; in my experience that can make me car sick. I have to be in control.
Second, I very much fear that in a world of self-driving cars, it will be considered socially irresponsible and dangerous to drive yourself, and probably made illegal.
"so what did you do before self-driving cars?"
"we just drove 'em ourselves!"
"wow, no one died that way?"
"oh no, millions of people died"— Mel G. Castro (@MelGForever) May 29, 2016
My prognostications for self-driving cars is that fully autonomous cars will initially be limited to freeways that are self-driving cars only. The reason is that with all of the cars autonomous and cooperative (driven by local networking so that each car is talking to its neighbors and some what beyond), traffic densities can be more than quadrupled – cars literally bumper-to-bumper at 75 mph or more. This will be too much to resist for local and state governments, who will discover that the infrastructure costs of doing this will be far cheaper than building new highways. The roads may be autonomous-only from, say, 6am to 10am and 3pm to 7pm, and allow meat servos to drive during off-hours in some lanes, but eventually those freeways will be all autonomous, all the time. I think we’ll see the first cities start this in 15-20 years, and the end state in 35 years.
Fully autonomous on regular city streets though…40 to 50 years before it’s a majority of cars. I have extensive experience designing highly autonomous systems, and I personally don’t think that Google’s technology will scale. Onboard sensors and onboard sensor processing / recognition algorithms need to get a LOT better, and then there’s a lot of real-world experience that needs to be acquired. It’s gonna take a while.
Log before the savings in infrastructure costs, state and and local governments will have their budgets hammered by the giant drop in revenue from traffic violations.
“cars literally bumper-to-bumper at 75 mph or more.”
And what happens when the car at the front hits a deer? Or the car in the middle hasn’t had the brake pads changed in ten years, and can’t stop as fast as the cars in front?
Personally, I think VR is going to make cars obsolete well before we have a car which doesn’t require a driver ready to take over when it doesn’t know what to do.
The deer will be picked up on the lead vehicle’s radar; this is trivial – can already be done today. And the road infrastructure would pick it up earlier. If the car in the middle didn’t have adequate equipment, it would not be permitted on the road. These are very simple things to build in.
I don’t see VR doing much to reduce the demand for transportation. Maybe if they can get to projected holograms with no headgear.
When the brake pads wear out the fluid level in the master cylinder drops. The low fluid level trips a sensor that in turn causes the brake service light on the dash. When that brake service light comes on all of the cars anti-lock, traction control, and stability control gizmos are disabled. I would hazard a guess that the cars autonomous systems could/would be disabled as well.
My Jeep already tracks wear on the engine oil and predicts remaining lifetime. No reason to think that won’t be done with brake pads soon (with or without automous driving).
There are all kinds of things that could require an emergency stop, and you can’t defy the laws of physics – an object in motion tends to stay in motion. Uniform deceleration along an entire train of vehicles would be well nigh impossible.
It will be more like the ACC my current vehicle already has – a radar that keeps it at a minimum stopping distance from the vehicle in front when I engage the cruise control.
and if a tire blows? An axle? At 75 mph bumper to bumper … that would be an interesting thing to watch.
Bumper to bumper at 75 mph? We have that now on Central Expressway in Dallas. Even when traffic gets heavy, it just keeps moving. You can’t slow down enough to maintain a safe separation from the car in front of you. If you do, someone else will simply cut in. All you can do is keep a white-knuckles grip on the steering wheel and hope that no one stops suddenly. (I was in a seven- or eight-car pileup when someone did put his brakes on. No serious injuries, fortunately.)
It was even worse in the ’80s before they redid the road. Only two lanes in each direction, and the entrance and exit ramps barely existed. Nearly as bad as the 405 in LA.
Yes, actually, that accident was in the 80’s.
Central Expressway in Dallas
I always called it the trench run. You need to stay on target and use the force.
The Roads Must Roll.
Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need “roads”.
Driving on manual inside the city? They send you to the organbanks for that, don’t they?
You know how nazi children reported on their parents? Imagine cars, self driving or not, secretly reporting on their passengers. Only for their own good of course. /sarc
Mixing human and robot drivers will create some cool new ways to mess with each other on the road.
Don’t like tailgaters? Have a hacked vehicle activity coordinator tell the car behind you that you’re hitting the brakes hard. Or if your car can impersonate signals from another car, other “exciting” “pranks” can be pulled.
See someone sleeping in the car next to you? Ease over a little bit causing the other car’s swerve response to activate.
Want to slow someone down? Turn on your blinker so they slow down to let you in. When they speed back up again, turn your blinker back on.
“In the world of self-driving cars, the driving man is king.”
OK I couldn’t resist, even if not true.
And apologies for the use of gender-specific pronoun and noun, each with historical connections to oppression… 😉
cthulhu’s posited progression may well be how things go, but I think it will happen at least twice as fast. Places where humans can legally drive any three- or four-wheeler will get scarcer and eventually disappear. Many types of vintage “fun” cars will probably be retrofitted with electronics and servos to comply with the new normal.
The big question, to me, is what becomes of motorcycles? As they would be far more difficult than cars to automate/retrofit, I’m sure there will be some agitation to ban them past a certain point. On the other hand, once the motorcycle’s worst natural predator, inattentive human car drivers, is driven to effective extinction, the coming era of driverless cars could become a new golden age of motorcycling.
There will be places where people can drive, sort of like track days now. Motorcycles will be for that. But for a daily commute – not in the cards. Autonomous or nothing on many roads, as I said.
You really think there will be autonomous-only roads in ten years? The tech is NOT there; TRLs are at the 4-5 range, and given the extreme safety implications, we’re looking at 15+ years to get to TRL 9, which means fielded products.
As they develop the tech. head injuries will go up so everyone will be required to wear helmets along with seat belts. Having any child in your car will become an automatic felony, civil forfeiture will take your home away; You’ll go on the no fly list as a terrorist; have your sex changed and listen to new wave music 23 hours a day.
Right now we’re less than 10 years past the first DARPA Grand Challenge in the Nevada desert. That was pretty pathetic, but the intervening few years have seen huge strides in driverless car tech. I can easily imagine dedicated driverless roads in ten more years. Here in California it’d probably start by converting the carpool lanes to all-driverless vehicle lanes and working out from there.
Well I sure hope Google’s self driving car works better (fewer crashes) than Chrome running on my iPad mini. That crashes several times per use.
(I only bought the fruit product because it runs a couple of popular aviation mapping/chart/information apps in Australia. If not for them I’d throw the damn thing away. User hostile, expensive, slow PoS. I actually look forward to booting up my Windows 10 PC in the morning to browse the web with instead of using the iPad)
Use the Five Tibetan Exercises; the first one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Tibetan_Rites#First_Rite, do it twenty times around, switch directions on alternate days) cured my carsickness completely within a few weeks. Forever, as near as I can tell; it reset my baseline. I can now read in a car without feeling sick at all, for the first time in my life.
I tried to get my kids to do it, but they only got as far as the first day (when you feel kinda sick for fifteen minutes afterwards). They refused to believe me that the next day will only be for five minutes and within a few days you feel fine right away.
“First, I don’t think I’d be able to read or write while being driven; in my experience that can make me car sick. I have to be in control.”
While being flown too? I’m never completely comfortable flying specifically because I’m not in control, but reading and writing takes my mind off it.
In twenty year’s time our kids will be aghast that we spent so much blood and treasure owning, maintaining, and piloting automobiles.
No, flying is generally fine (though I’d prefer to be at the wheel there, too). I think it’s a cognitive dissonance between the landscape flying by on the ground and the motionlessness of whatever I’m reading that causes the problem. It’s not a problem in the air unless there’s a lot of turbulence. But I’ve never been airsick. I’ve actually never been carsick, either, but only because I stop doing whatever I’m doing (e.g., reading) that’s causing it to onset.
Opaque windows? Or some sort of blinders? (Might look goofy, but no goofier than all the VR devices people will be wearing by that time.)
I hate unexpected motions when I can’t see what’s causing them. Turbulence in the air at night or in the clouds is an issue.
I still predict that self-driving cars will crash and burn in the courtroom when it’s Dead Blonde Toddler v Corporate Giant.
Without a driver, there’s nobody else to sue but the manufacturer.
That is a function of the degree to which the car owners are allowed to program their preferences.
I predict the opposite: autonomous automobile accident deaths and injuries will drop to a tenth of self-driven, resulting in chapters of Mothers Against Self Driving™ forming to lobby local politicians to ban self-driving from urban areas. The self-driving lobby will eke out a humiliating compromise, being allowed to drive their old fashioned cars on Sundays from 6am to 4pm, when they’ll all meet up at at one of the few remaining Sonic drive-ins wearing leather jackets and complaining about the certain degeneration of the youngest generation who never learned how to drive.
The most common occupation in most states is the truck driver. This technology has some of the greatest potential for economic disruption in employment and vehicle ownership, just for starters. While there appear to be great potential as well in the areas of safety and productivity, it will be interesting to see during this implementation how existing professional drivers will move into other career areas.
I’d imagine it will look very similar to what was on display in the movie I, Robot, with Will Smith. Autonomous, high-speed, dense traffic, with manual override after many, many warnings from the system.
And motorcycles will be regarded as intensely dangerous, what with the tank of combustible fuel and ICE between one’s legs.
I mean, of all of the movie perceptions of the future and driving, that seems like a fairly plausible scenario.
What will happen is what always happens. New unrequired overlapping laws. More restrictions on what’s legal and new revenue for the government.
If a person is held responsible for damages, what other law is required?
Bob Hope said it best, I don’t mind people having choices… I just don’t want them to be mandatory.