161–170 of 204 posts
Fasten Your Seatbelts: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions Amazing! He studied and compared all other driver-less cars to Google's and came to this conclusion. I know a writer getting paid for clicks wouldn't forget that virtually every major car company is working on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car#History
Or that google isn't an auto manufacturer...
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Take the next leap and see that you don't need to actually own the car at all. No need to send a car back home. No need to negotiate with your neighbor. We all share a fleet of cars like a taxi service. Need a car? Pull out your smartphone app and push the "call" button that sends a nearby car to your location. You could also schedule a pickup for the exact time you get off work. No need to send an empty car back hom…
...except if said family has kids of the age that they need car seats, which are a pain in the ass to install correctly; ripping them out and putting them back in twice a day is both ridiculous and unsafe. And you can't realistically even have shared cars with pre-installed car seats, because they need to be adjusted all the frigging time as the kid grows. FWIW, neither my wife or I had ever owned a car, we managed j…
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Every manufacturer is not going to have their own solution. The top few, sure. But it's a different story for the long tail. It can't possibly make sense for all the companies with 1% market share and no notable software knowledge to write their own systems, especially with all the likely regulatory hurdles. It wouldn't be good, and it wouldn't be cheap. There's clearly going to be a huge market for commodity solutio…
> Every manufacturer is not going to have their own solution. The top few, sure. Wrong answer. The car companies that currently have their own projects: Audi / BMW / Ford / GM / Honda / Hyundai / Lexus / Mercedes-Benz / Nissan / Porsche / Tesla / Toyota / Volkswagen / Volvo And remind me again who would want to license technology from a company who has zero experience in delivering mission critical solutions.
Plus cars are 10-20 year commitments, is Google going to be there and still interested in this? I am not even mentioning the strings Google might attach, like using Google Tires to be "compliant and be able to use the {brand}" (see Android)
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90 percent of those in the transportation sector will lose their jobs. Car companies will go broke when demand plummets. Pizza delivery will not be an entrylevel job. I think the net effect will be hugely positive, but like all paradigm shifts this is going to cause immense social upheaval and initially look like it only makes things worse.
Taxi driving, RIP.
I've been saying this to anyone who will listen for years. I really believe this technology will touch everything . Real estate markets will shift dramatically as the average commute time halves or quarters. Transport costs will plummet, making every single physical object cheaper. Public transit will be dirt cheap, always punctual, and take you absolutely anywhere. Tens of thousands of people each year will escape d…
What we didn't anticipate was truly personal, individual vehicles that could drive themselves even within within twenty years of 2001. I thought that the world would move toward more fixed-path public transportation solutions, like the monorails that always featured in 1960s visions of the future.
The comments below your comment on use cases are very interesting. This whole subthread is food for thought. My thought, as a married man with three children still at home, and one grown child in another state who might still join us on family trips from time to time, is that we will probably buy ONE more car that isn't self-driving, to replace the older of our two cars in the next few years, and then ONE self-driving car to be my wife's main commuting car, with her stuff stashed inside. For all other trips, we will subscribe to an on-call car service, which will surely be cheaper per use than full ownership of a second car. The car service cars can be parked all over town for instant availability. They will be intelligently dispatched by algorithms that balance speed of arrival with passenger preferences such as whether or not the car has child safety seats, whether or not the passenger prefers to work or to relax with a great sound system during the drive, and so on. I greatly look forward to this lifestyle. I substitute a lot of walking and bicycling for car driving already, and just knowing that eventually (not REAL soon) all the cars sharing the road and street with me will have competent robot drivers is a huge improvement.
The Wall Street Journal article "Why Driverless Cars Are Inevitable--and That's a Good Thing"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044352490457765...
from a few months ago has more about the economy-changing dynamics of driverless cars. I can't wait--but I'll observe the speed limit while I'm driving as I attempt to wait.
AFTER EDIT: Responding to comments elsewhere in this interesting thread, why I think Google Maps will probably be licensed into most self-driving car packages, even if the hardware is built mostly by other companies, is that Google Maps is relentless in adding data to its geographic database.
SEP 6 2012, Alexis Madrigal's column in The Atlantic, shared previously to HN, "How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything"
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go...
September 27, 2012, David Pogue's column in the New York Times: "What Makes Google’s Maps So Good"
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/what-makes-googles...
The Google Street View photography of my former neighborhood in Panchiao, Taiwan is PHENOMENAL, and data like that are being gathered all over the world. If I like, I can take a photo in 3-D view with my Nexus 4 phone, GPS geolocation turned on, and add data to the database any time. Generally, any time anyone is on a drive with a Google device turned on, Google gets some of the data that helps it predict current driving times for differing routes to the destination--an enormously helpful feature of Google Maps for drives during rush hour in the Twin Cities.
I've been saying this to anyone who will listen for years. I really believe this technology will touch everything . Real estate markets will shift dramatically as the average commute time halves or quarters. Transport costs will plummet, making every single physical object cheaper. Public transit will be dirt cheap, always punctual, and take you absolutely anywhere. Tens of thousands of people each year will escape d…
You're missing one important factor - many people, me included, just like to drive cars and they don't treat them as "transport vehicle only". I would refuse to use a driverless car even if it would be more economic, more safe and would transport me faster.
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> Car companies will go broke when demand plummets. Just because it doesn't have a driver doesn't mean it doesn't need to be manufactured. Car companies will do fine. > Pizza delivery will not be an entrylevel job. Nope. But pizza making still will be. Sebastian, are you listening? > I think the net effect will be hugely positive You got that right. > but like all paradigm shifts this is going to cause immense social…
> Just because it doesn't have a driver doesn't mean it doesn't need to be manufactured. Car companies will do fine. From TFA: "We can reduce the number of cars by 90%." So, you read that and disagree with it?
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Not only car companies either. Lots of state DoTs like CalTrans (in conjunction with UCBerkeley) have been working on self driving cars. The Caltrans-UCB PATH prgram was begun way back in '86 and demoed self driving cars back in '97! http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/the-future-is-in-the-past/...
The PATH stuff isn't even in the same ballpark. It only worked for specially-outfitted express lanes that had magnets embedded in the road.
That's why the CA legislature pssed legislation to allow self-driving cars on public roads with such unusual alacrity - this is a technology we want to ensure gets a foothold in California, both for direct revenue flowing to the state and for the second order economic gains that would result from wide deployment - environmental improvements, lower accident rates, and new service markets. EDIT: as well as the ongoing…
I had heard that funding levels in California, as ranked against other states, had fallen in recent years, and that is surely embarrassing to Californians, who historically have taken pride in generous state funding for schools up to and including universities. But of course even more embarrassing to California in the years that I have been an adult have been the poor results in California schools, even compared to funding levels there that were higher than in some other states. I wish the school administrators in California well in learning how to spend their resources better. I note that the Gates Foundation studies of effective schooling practices often include schools in California in the study samples, and I hope actionable data lead to better results.
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You don't quite understand the scale at which Google operates. What they're essentially doing is building a 3D model of the entire world , using their own data (did you think those Street View cars were just taking pretty pictures?). By comparing the real world against the model, they'll be instantly able to distinguish between the fire hydrant (which was there yesterday) and the pedestrian (who wasn't). No algorithm…
I don't think you understand the scale of the world. Street View is YEARS out of date in most major international cities and doesn't exist in the majority of smaller cities. It would be dangerous borderline criminal for a self-driving car to be relying on it for anything important.
Google's cars start with an extremely detailed map of the road, including where the lanes are and where everything should be. And, every time a Google car drives the road, that map can be updated.
This obviously isn't ready to deploy nation-wide right now, but there's a pretty obvious growth path here. If you were to buy a Google car for your commute, you might have to manually drive it for several days in order for it to learn everything it needs to know. Eventually, the other self-driving cars on the road will also be helping build a map for you, and you for them.