261–270 of 322 posts
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Sure, Steer by wire is new. DBW generally refers to the connection between the accelerator pedal and the throttle. There, DBW has been the norm for many years.
Surely not the brake, though. Right? Right? Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-by-wire
IMHO, big part of the first wave of customers to buy self-driving cars will be older drivers who are not allowed (or choose to) drive on their own. My parents are able to drive on their around now but are already getting worried about the day when they can't drive around on their own. They would appreciate a self-driving car.
Only issue for google would be that they won't be providing any useful data to google with their destinations and they are not really online but oh well...
The comments here are rather disappointing. It doesn't have manual controls? Well thats the point! I want to leave my crap in it and paint it some ugly color? Get with the times, young people already opt to not own cars. I can't double park in the city? Why are you imposing your steel box on people living in cities, many of which do not own cars and want walkable streets? I mean, this is the news website for a startu…
Something people forget waay too often..
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It is (indirectly) to me. I often visit the US, and I'm always amazed that I can't seem to go anywhere walking. The distances to go anywhere are huge. It seems to be that way because cities in the US where designed / build with cars in mind. In Europe cities were obviously not build with cars in mind, and as a result I enjoy here a much higher density of amenities (and suffer much worse driving conditions / parking t…
> It is (indirectly) to me. I often visit the US, and I'm always amazed that I can't seem to go anywhere walking. The distances to go anywhere are huge. It seems to be that way because cities in the US where designed / build with cars in mind. Huh, why would you think that? I'm not sure there's a major city in the U.S. that wasn't already a major city pre-car. And cities weren't redesigned post-car, that's why a lot…
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> The comments here are rather disappointing. Most of them remind me of Clifford Stoll's famous rant: http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva... "This new thing isn't like the old thing, so it could never work."
Stoll was one of the first to hop on the Internet bandwagon, and he thought he could get lucky twice by hopping off the fad before it became passe. As for the crazy from the other side, read anything by Nicholas Negroponte at the same time. A lot of young people, especially young hackers, think like authors of science fiction novels, where there is some grand society that they have designed, and how everything is hap…
I like the self-driving prototype. But this comment brings to my mind a situation where police operators or organized crime override the car's controls and reroute it to an alternative destination. A manual override, perhaps no more than an emergency brake, would be really nice if you thought something weird was going on.
Tesla (or insert company willing to go big on electric cars) and Google really need to team up on this. Self driving cars have the potential to completely do away with owning personal cars. Imagine a new public/private service that allows people to travel where & when they want without having to deal with the hassles or cost of owning a car. With the added centralization, the headaches that electric cars cause can be…
The video suggests these cars are probably being built in Tesla's factory - the white-painted walls and red-painted machinery are pretty unique to Tesla. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqSDWoAhvLU#t=58 (Also note that "Rotary Lift", the brand seen at that point in the video, is the exclusive supplier of vehicle lifts to Tesla - http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tesla-motors-chooses... )
"Google is having 100 cars built by a manufacturer in the Detroit area, which it declined to name. Nor would it say how much the prototype vehicles cost. They will have a range of about 100 miles, powered by an electric motor that is roughly equivalent to the one used by Fiat's 500e, Dr. Urmson said. They should be road-ready by early next year, Google said."
They could have used Tesla's facilities for the first prototypes though. My money for the first production run is on a niche house like Roush, or potentially Chrysler since these little cars share components with the Fiat 500e.
They won’t have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal… because they don’t need them. I like the self-driving prototype. But this comment brings to my mind a situation where police operators or organized crime override the car's controls and reroute it to an alternative destination. A manual override, perhaps no more than an emergency brake, would be really nice if you thought something weird was going o…
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I think the eventual goal will be that most cars will be self-driving and that will negate most of those problems. I imagine that the vision of the future is a giant car-sharing program made up of self-driving cars all coordinated by Google. Think about it - you fire up an app to request a car, one appears at your door within a couple of minutes, takes you to work, then disappears. After work, a different car picks y…
I can't see that working. You'll require a ton of cars taking individuals or small groups to and from work in a big city. That's not very efficient, and the reason we have a metro system in the first place. 1. That's a lot of pollution. 2. You have twice as much traffic, since these cars need to come to your house every morning, and drive back to their charging station in the evening. They can take those trips off-pe…
There's no reason for the cars to drive back into the city every evening. They could charge themselves while you're at work if they had to charge daily.