91–100 of 118 posts
If applied correctly this could solved a lot of traffic problem. I still don't understand why cars don't have a retractable bar under them. So you normally drive everywhere, but big roads like highways are in fact rails where your car gets on.
It hasn't caught on. And I don't see the advantages that might be there outweighing the disadvantages.
If applied correctly this could solved a lot of traffic problem. I still don't understand why cars don't have a retractable bar under them. So you normally drive everywhere, but big roads like highways are in fact rails where your car gets on.
If applied correctly this could solved a lot of traffic problem. I still don't understand why cars don't have a retractable bar under them. So you normally drive everywhere, but big roads like highways are in fact rails where your car gets on.
Do you mean something like this? http://www.ruf.dk/ It hasn't caught on. And I don't see the advantages that might be there outweighing the disadvantages.
Unless all cars are driven by machine, the driverless car won't make a huge difference in our lives. You can already experience the magic of not having to drive by paying someone else to do it for you. The real gains of automation occur when a machine doing the job can do it faster than a human. Computers calculate and communicate faster than people, and factories/robots build stuff faster. A machine driving a car ha…
This is wrong of course. Imagine you could hire a driver, now imagine he worked for free and was always at his best driving ability. The things that self driving cars will do first, really really well, are: 1) Drive people around who currently use chauffers because they can use the driving time productively. 2) Lower the barrier to attending events, restaurants, etc in urban areas where parking is an issue. (if you c…
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Almost like a taxi? I guess with driverless it's more like cloud carpooling.
It'd be cheaper than a taxi since there's no driver to pay.
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This view seems deeply flawed. One of the upsides of public transportation is that I can read / sleep / work / talk with people with 0 distractions. The downside is that the commute is 3-5 times longer. If I can get the shorter commute time of my car AND have the benefits of not having to pay attention, that's a huge gain even if my travel time isn't any faster. Additionally, there are plenty of use cases that don't…
The comparison to current public transportation is unfair. First, imagine what public transportation would be like today if as much money had been invested as has been invested in cars. There are more licensed vehicles in the U.S. than there are licensed drivers. Cars simply cannot beat public transportation in raw material use, operating cost or road space utilization. My car occupies 70 sq ft of road space. At most…
Honestly, I do this all too often. What if the American passenger railroad system had never been left to die? What if the Big Three hadn't bought up streetcar services all over the country and run them into the ground? What if we'd been investing money for the past half century in making advances in new rail technology instead of trying to make dangerous cars slightly less dangerous?
The intermittent dialog about high-speed rail here brings to mind an obese diabetic who has resolved that he definitely needs to start going to the gym one of these days.
Ok, I think I'm done ranting.
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It was sarcasm. The point was that the iOS vs. Android wars pale in comparison to potentially world-changing research like this.
The ubiquitous spread of smartphones throughout the world is not world changing? We're talking about platforms that struggle for mastery over an emerging market that will be bigger than the PC revolution.
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This view seems deeply flawed. One of the upsides of public transportation is that I can read / sleep / work / talk with people with 0 distractions. The downside is that the commute is 3-5 times longer. If I can get the shorter commute time of my car AND have the benefits of not having to pay attention, that's a huge gain even if my travel time isn't any faster. Additionally, there are plenty of use cases that don't…
Imagine cars on demand. You don't own a car, you text a car to get you to work at 8:30, the car picks you up at home, drops you off (no parking space required) and goes on to the next ride. I can't wait to see driverless cars.
Unless all cars are driven by machine, the driverless car won't make a huge difference in our lives. You can already experience the magic of not having to drive by paying someone else to do it for you. The real gains of automation occur when a machine doing the job can do it faster than a human. Computers calculate and communicate faster than people, and factories/robots build stuff faster. A machine driving a car ha…
It would be sweet to see a time where only a majority of the cars on the road are driven by machine. I imagine them driving in packs, and leaving lots of buffer space between them and the lone human driver.
Can you imagine reading a book, watching a movie, eating (or whatever) in your car and suddenly the situation gets so hairy that the car switches back into manual? I don't think that would work out, especially if the last time you had taken the wheel was 5 years ago.
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Interestingly enough, a car which simply refuses to drive in hurricanes, hailstorms, white-out snow, and so forth would be rather more than 20% superior to the average driver. So that's easily dealt with - if insufficient sensory data is available, either hand control over to the driver or, if possible, pull to the side of the road. The average driver likely does really horrible in large crashes and pileups, so merel…
One of the nice things about software drivers is that you can spend as much time as you want training a module for driving with, say, a given tire blown out and then swap that module in when actual conditions match the conditions that its trained for.