That's before you even consider all the impatient/malicious people who will do things like not allow a vehicle to merge. You have to be pretty aggressive in a lot of areas to merge onto a highway, I can picture it now, this poor self driving car inching timidly forward waiting for a gap in traffic until it runs out of lane and helplessly stops.
QuoteAnyone talking next year is kidding themselves.Weed smoking Musk has promised exactly that, putting them on the streets next year. Yeah, another visionary thing. With cannabis the term "visionary" takes a new meaning.
I would argue that real autonomous driving (in a real world traffic situation you could encounter today in a car) could only work reliably with real artificial intelligence (and not some brainless neuronal network giving somewhat nondeterministic results) so it could react to unexpected situations at least as good as a human driver.
So even ten years from now sounds pretty much optimistic unless there is some unexpected breakthrough in AI.
Waymo One riders are currently able to take rides within parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area, including Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert. Our service operates around the clock, seven days a week. Riders can travel anywhere in our territory day and night. Our goal is to give our riders everyday access to our cars, and we encourage them to take rides as frequently as possible.
Driverless cars are the future - just around the corner. That is what the tech giants, the auto industry and even the government want us to think. But closer inspection reveals that we are much further from that driverless utopia than we are led to believe by newspaper headlines and by press releases from firms with vested interests. Christian Wolmar argues that autonomous cars are the wrong solution to the wrong problem. Even if the many technical difficulties that stand in the way of achieving a driverless future can be surmounted, autonomous cars are not the best way to address the problems of congestion and pollution caused by our long obsession with the private car. This entertaining polemic sets out the many technical, legal and moral problems that obstruct the path to a driverless future, and debunks many of the myths around that future's purported benefits.
Double hell - I'm still waiting for a house robot that will fetch me a beer and find the TV remote after 50+ years of promises from 'Tomorrows World' etc. How hard can that be?
For as long as I can remember there has been no shortage of headlines trumpeting major scientific breakthroughs every few months. But almost invariably, after the initial excitement, it turns out that they've only developed the first 90% and all it requires for the last 10% are a few minor wrinkles to be ironed out, somebody to decide the best shade of blue to paint it, a solution to the Goldbach conjecture and the discovery of some new materials which can withstand 5000C whilst being a bit stronger than graphene at half the weight.
You might not care but almost everybody else will. People tend to get very excited about deaths caused by things out of people's control and very quickly start baying for blood/something to be done/heads to roll. Rational consideration of cost - benefit tradeoffs won't be at the fore-front of most observer's minds (unless they happen to be engineers). When a human f**ks up and kills someone it's an accident. When something manufactured f**ks up and kills someone because of a design defect it's a company/corporation head that has to roll. Laws will have to change radically to allow autonomous vehicles to operate without the threat of company destroying liability costs arising from every incident involving human injury or death.
There are plenty of youtube videos showing the difficulties and problems that self driving cars get into for those interested.
I also think fully autonomous vehicles are a long way off. Modern computers still have a difficult time of identifying an email as spam, something that a human of average intelligence can determine at a glance with nearly 100% certainty.
They work on carefully mapped urban courses but the real world is full of edge cases.
Every day I see debris in the road, spilled paint, sand, worn off markings and all manner of other things that will confuse the heck out of an autonomous system.
That's before you even consider all the impatient/malicious people who will do things like not allow a vehicle to merge.
You have to be pretty aggressive in a lot of areas to merge onto a highway, I can picture it now, this poor self driving car inching timidly forward waiting for a gap in traffic until it runs out of lane and helplessly stops.
I would argue that real autonomous driving (in a real world traffic situation you could encounter today in a car) could only work reliably with real artificial intelligence (and not some brainless neuronal network giving somewhat nondeterministic results) so it could react to unexpected situations at least as good as a human driver.
So even ten years from now sounds pretty much optimistic unless there is some unexpected breakthrough in AI.Yep, in all the hype this gets forgotten, they aren't even close to what a human driver can do in terms of the unexpected. Won't even happen in 10 years, I'm calling that one too.
I don't think the EV market will go away like that. Certainly, it will lose a high profile player, but there are other manufacturers who are in the game to some degree - and with some bold legislative targets in place in some areas and the general tendency away from the love affair with petroleum fuels, it will continue. There will be an impact, but it won't be terminal.
'Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere (Perspectives) Christian Wolmar'QuoteDriverless cars are the future - just around the corner. That is what the tech giants, the auto industry and even the government want us to think. But closer inspection reveals that we are much further from that driverless utopia than we are led to believe by newspaper headlines and by press releases from firms with vested interests. Christian Wolmar argues that autonomous cars are the wrong solution to the wrong problem. Even if the many technical difficulties that stand in the way of achieving a driverless future can be surmounted, autonomous cars are not the best way to address the problems of congestion and pollution caused by our long obsession with the private car. This entertaining polemic sets out the many technical, legal and moral problems that obstruct the path to a driverless future, and debunks many of the myths around that future's purported benefits.
Preview: https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Driverless_Cars_On_a_Road_to_Nowhere.html?id=aZCCDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
People will use them for sex, drinking, and leave all sort of garbage behind.
Yeah hopefully. I really want to see EVs become the future. I don't think it will do much to solve climate change on it's own, but it will at least help.
Tesla isn't the biggest player in the EV market today. Not by a long shot. And I'm pretty sure EVs will go away in a few years. They only sell in artificially created markets. In the Netherlands the politicians are slowly waking up to recognise the fact that EVs simply aren't affordable to most of the people and the CO2 reductions are minimal at best.
Tesla isn't the biggest player in the EV market today. Not by a long shot. And I'm pretty sure EVs will go away in a few years. They only sell in artificially created markets. In the Netherlands the politicians are slowly waking up to recognise the fact that EVs simply aren't affordable to most of the people and the CO2 reductions are minimal at best.All the well-to-wheels analyses I've seen shows that the CO2 reductions are substantial except if they are purely charged by coal power plants, but most countries have a lot of nuclear and renewables in their energy mix.
There are actually many benefits with EV's for a robo-cab service. If they mainly operate in a metropolitan area the shorter range isn't a problem, and it's also not a problem to take cars out of service for charging regularly. They will get lower fuel costs, and be environmentally friendly which is good pr (besides the obvious advantages for the environment and smog levels). You also utilise the cars better, they won't just collect dust in a garage but will be used until they wear out, so fewer cars can service more people.
The Waymo routes in Phoenix are carefully curated routes that are mapped to incredible levels of detail and Phoenix is flat with a dry climate.
It's nothing like being able to drive to arbitrary locations throughout the nation.
The area where I live for example is mountanous with lots of twisty crowded roads and complex confusing intersections that don't meet at right angles. There is a lot of inclement weather, rain, hail, the occasional dusting of snow. The roads are very crowded and getting worse all the time, I think there's a good reason none of the self driving testing is going on here despite the tech industry being second only to Silicon Valley.
The difference is that this technology have been demonstrated for many years now, there are several different companies developing such self driving systems and companies with very deep pockets are pouring a lot of money into it. I find it a bit weird so many are in denial about it.