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The dream of driverless cars is dying

spectator.co.uk

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Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#101

Post by King-Aaron »

marcosdumay wrote: post #70
ghaff wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why anyone would say the "dream" is dying. If anything is dying, it's unrealistic hopes that fully autonomous vehicles will be widespread and dirt cheap to be driven around in by the end of this decade. I suspect the hype's been fueled by--in addition to the usual suspects--the growth of young professionals in urban areas who have this vision of never having to own a car and being driven around everywher…

> For that to be a reality... Those on demand trip services (Uber, Lyft, etc) are already cheaper than owning a car. What you describe already exists.

I don't know if it's cheaper in urban USA than here in Western Australia... But I find taking Uber every morning and afternoon works out to be substantially (i.e. prohibitively) more expensive for me than driving the car in to the office.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#103

Post by XalvinX »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #86
marcosdumay wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For that to be a reality... Those on demand trip services (Uber, Lyft, etc) are already cheaper than owning a car. What you describe already exists.

> Those on demand trip services (Uber, Lyft, etc) are already cheaper than owning a car. Only until the VC dollars dry up.

or the drivers form unions, maybe?

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#105

Post by nojvek »

nradov wrote: post #88
marcosdumay wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For that to be a reality... Those on demand trip services (Uber, Lyft, etc) are already cheaper than owning a car. What you describe already exists.

Ride hailing services are only cheaper in a few dense urban areas where most trips are short and parking is very expensive. Everywhere else they're still an expensive luxury.

Yep. I pay an insane amount of money to Lyft for rides to home because I live away from city and we only have one car.

Could have gotten a second car but I hate driving in peak hour traffic so I take the bus. Lyft is definitely convenient after hours since my last bus is at 6pm. The convinience comes at a steep price though.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#106

Post by tonyedgecombe »

hodgesrm wrote: post #56

One thing I have never understood about the driverless vision is how it seems to ignore economically significant problems like (a) traffic congestion and (b) extremely inefficient energy use in transportation, especially personal vehicles. Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves. It seems more productive to solve congestion by gettin…

I wouldn't be surprised to see it make congestion worse, that one hour journey to work that was unacceptable before might become bearable if you can read a book or surf the web during your trip.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#107

Post by chopin »

glenra wrote: post #78
hodgesrm wrote: post #56

One thing I have never understood about the driverless vision is how it seems to ignore economically significant problems like (a) traffic congestion and (b) extremely inefficient energy use in transportation, especially personal vehicles. Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves. It seems more productive to solve congestion by gettin…

> Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves. Lanes are as wide as they are and following distances are as long as they are because people are terrible at driving. A mostly-driverless 4-lane highway could more than double capacity just by reducing following distances when computers rather than human beings are making the decision when t…

The basic problem is that generally more capacity invites more traffic. This isn't solved with autonomous vehicles. As well I expect more empty traffic.

Example: I currently drive to work 20km. As my wife needs occasionally as well, we have two. With an autonomous car we could forgo one and I send it back after I arrive at work. In the evening it'll pick me up again.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#108

Post by chopin »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #43
qrbLPHiKpiux wrote: post #24

What would a TOS look like for a self driving car? “Shall hold manufacturer, software developer, etc not liable for any injury or death from the result of using car...”

How does a pedestrian agree to that TOS?

By being outdoors. It's the same way as you currently "consent" to third-party cookies by visiting a site.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#109

Post by bachbach »

mpweiher wrote: post #65
grigjd3 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a disingenuous comment. Trains don't deliver to stores directly. In the US, there is a severe infrastructure imbalance. Trains don't make sense for smaller (less than train-sized) loads.

Thanks for the softball: the practice of heavy trucks delivering directly to stores is a scourge on our cities, a practice that needs to be banned as quickly as possible. Here in Berlin, two children were killed by these monsters on one day last month, with the children doing nothing wrong.

I've always wanted a world in which pneumatic tubes played a bigger role - as they used to with mail in London and Paris. It used to be possible to get a letter in 4 hours.

I was walking down a street the other day, early morning, and it stank with food scraps, garbage - it was one of those maintenance streets you find at the back or sometimes even the front of fast food outlets, delis and cafes. The backend of that industry looks unappealing and smells as bad even though the businesses and city are doing everything they can to keep it organized.

With pneumatic tube rubbish disposal - which already exists - it would improve the quality of a large portion of the city, not to mention those children wouldn't have had to suffer.

More generally as I see it we are in the Dark Ages of underground tunnel making but if it could be made 1000x affordable lots of problems start to go away for our infrastructure. I've seen The Boring Company's proposals of course but I suspect it's on the wrong track. What you want is a creation capable of creating a criss-cross of tunnels - a whole network (similar to dark fiber, just waiting for land development so it can be turned on) which is deep beneath any other infrastructure and is linked to the surface through vertical channels e.g. a connection to somebody's house goes up, not across as we assume pipes are supposed to. I think the cost of extra pump power would be as nothing to getting rid of every legal and utility availability headache!

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#110

Post by ghaff »

nradov wrote: post #90
netfire wrote: post #38

Personally, I’d be happy with just automated freeway driving. That seems like an easier problem to solve (no pedestrians, complex traffic controls, cars going the other way or turning across your path, and visibility is usually pretty good). Why not focus on and perfect that first?

While driving on California freeways I have seen: pedestrians, complex traffic controls (law enforcement rerouting traffic or running moving breaks due to incidents), cars going the other way (drunk or confused), and terrible visibility (fog, snow, dust, heavy rain). It's going to take decades before automated freeway driving is perfected. Those edge cases can't just be ignored.

You can to at least some degree though once you've imposed the constraint that there needs to be a competent licensed driver in the car because they need to handle the endpoints in any case.

Certainly, the car needs to be able to recognize conditions where it needs to turn over control with, say, one minute warning. And we're not at that point today. But one can imagine things like radio beacons for construction zones for example. It's not easy but it seems much easier than the more general case and it's also possible to get too hung up on truly weird corner cases like traffic going down the freeway in the wrong direction.

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