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Everyone will have 5 years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap

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Re: Everyone will have 5 years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap

#32

what about the countryside?

Yeah, reading this article I get the feeling the author was raised in, and has only resided in, a major metropolitan era.

Sounds like they're just starting to work on inclement weather on pavement while I'm wondering how they're going to handle the farmer who wants to drive through that ditch with tall grass that will obscure the camera and 3d point mapping. Not to mention straddling that rock they know is there so it doesn't hit the pumpkin under the truck. Then backing up to the trailer of firewood which needs to be maneuvered slowly with one wheel going over a rock to narrowly avoid that tree on the other side.

Anyone who thinks manual driving is completely going away in the next 15 to 20 years either has poor grasp on the technical issues or is just failing to think of all the edge cases.

Re: Everyone will have 5 years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap

#33
post #11

Self-driving cars are inevitable, but I still feel like everybody is focusing too much on the vision of them being the primary mode of transportation well into our future. Cars as transportation should be dead in the next 50 years, outside of fairly niche (relatively speaking) use cases like construction/maintenance/etc. workers who need to carry large loads or people who live or need to travel well outside of city l…

Why? Mass transit is an industrial age solution to the congestion problem, when we couldn't plan for demand in real-time. Mass transit means that there need to be a lot of people who want to go from the same place, to the same place, at the same time. This is never true, so you have to relax the assumptions: they aren't coming from the same place, so force them all to walk to a stop. They aren't going to the same pla…

> The cost will be the same, and the travel time will be half or less.

Is this a guess or is there data/papers on this somewhere? Genuinely curios if there are any sources.

Re: Everyone will have 5 years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap

#34

> The end state will be the fully autonomous module with no capability for the driver to exercise command. You will call for it, it will arrive at your location, you'll get in, input your destination and go to the freeway. Except it won't. You'll go to three Sponsored Locations that offer similar, but not quite the same, services as the destination you selected, while the windows are used as projection screens for ad…

And Americans will absolutely hate Europeans for their walkable cities.

Re: Everyone will have 5 years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose people that were into horses felt the same way when automobiles were first introduced. They knew the bloodlines and "genetics" of a good horse. The emergence of autos made that knowledge less valuable and/or relevant. I do want to live in that world and I live in the suburbs of vanilla tract homes, charter schools, and club soccer. Vehicles are expensive in either time, money or both... I recently did the b…

I suppose people that were into horses felt the same way when automobiles were first introduced. But nobody was told "you have five years to trade your horse in on a car, or send it to the glue factory". Horse are still legal and used to this day, they just mostly lost out to market forces... that is, cars are simply a better mode of transportation for most people most of the time. But you can still ride a horse if y…

[deleted]

Re: Everyone will have 5 years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap

#36
post #31

I will love to see how these "smart" vehicles handle kids on top of overpasses dropping rocks and nails on them (which already happens way too frequently around here)

What's to "handle" about these? These vehicles should absolutely be able to detect and gracefully handle the failure of critical systems (sensors, drivetrain etc.) regardless of the existence of malicious children. And besides that, there will be an Emergency button (like in elevators) with which passengers can report things like rock-shaped dents in the car's body.

Re: Everyone will have 5 years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap

#37
post #11

Self-driving cars are inevitable, but I still feel like everybody is focusing too much on the vision of them being the primary mode of transportation well into our future. Cars as transportation should be dead in the next 50 years, outside of fairly niche (relatively speaking) use cases like construction/maintenance/etc. workers who need to carry large loads or people who live or need to travel well outside of city l…

Why? Mass transit is an industrial age solution to the congestion problem, when we couldn't plan for demand in real-time. Mass transit means that there need to be a lot of people who want to go from the same place, to the same place, at the same time. This is never true, so you have to relax the assumptions: they aren't coming from the same place, so force them all to walk to a stop. They aren't going to the same pla…

Mass transit in the modern age fails because we started planning cities around everyone owning cars, not because it's an inefficient solution.

Re: Everyone will have 5 years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose people that were into horses felt the same way when automobiles were first introduced. They knew the bloodlines and "genetics" of a good horse. The emergence of autos made that knowledge less valuable and/or relevant. I do want to live in that world and I live in the suburbs of vanilla tract homes, charter schools, and club soccer. Vehicles are expensive in either time, money or both... I recently did the b…

I suppose people that were into horses felt the same way when automobiles were first introduced. But nobody was told "you have five years to trade your horse in on a car, or send it to the glue factory". Horse are still legal and used to this day, they just mostly lost out to market forces... that is, cars are simply a better mode of transportation for most people most of the time. But you can still ride a horse if y…

You didn’t need to buy “horse insurance.”

The real change happens when it doesn’t make buisness sense to insure you.

Re: Everyone will have 5 years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can always go to the track.

And you can go hunting in Europe... if you happen to be friends with the land owning gentry.

Isn't that an overly broad statement? I believe hunting in Norway, Finland and Sweden is often if not mostly done on land not owned by gentry.

Probably other countries as well. (I found that hunting is popular in France, Germany, and Austria, but I wasn't able to figure out if the landowners were mostly gentry or not. I got the strong sense that they were not.)

Re: Everyone will have 5 years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"kill me now" That's exactly what's happening now. 37,000 deaths per year just in the US. But it won't be the deaths that will cause the change to happen: if the US actually cared more about preventing fatalities than "freedom" it'd regulate guns. The trigger for outlawing manual driving in cities and on freeways will be the convenience factor: 150mph travel without slowdowns for congestion will cut travel time to le…

>> 150mph travel without slowdowns for congestion will cut travel time to less than half. Yes, just as the shift to supersonic air travel radically reduced flying times. >>If you want to drive manually, go to the track "Take it to the track" has been chanted for decades. It has long been possible to build cars physically or electronically unable to break speed limits. No such product has ever been brought to market.…

> Driving is not hard. It isn't even remotely dangerous compared to many jobs

Hate to point out the obvious, but 35,000 people die every year in US because of driving. That's a lot of deaths. I would vote for avoiding those deaths - even though I enjoy a recreational drive once a year or so (all other times for me driving is a blood-boiling waste of life called commute).

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