31–40 of 201 posts
I tried to use Google's driverless car, but everytime I asked it to search for rival services, it kept driving me to their search and adsales offices. Was a bit weird. Like they told the car to prefer their services first! My eurotrash friends promised to investigate though, so that's nice.
A lot of people are bashing the car's appearance, but I think people forget that putting the first driverless cars on the road is as much a PR challenge as it is a technological challenge. Truly autonomous driverless cars is a huge shift in the way we have operated for almost 100 years. There will be a lot of caution and resistance from political groups, concerned citizens, entrenched interests, etc. The car that the…
A lot of people are bashing the car's appearance, but I think people forget that putting the first driverless cars on the road is as much a PR challenge as it is a technological challenge. Truly autonomous driverless cars is a huge shift in the way we have operated for almost 100 years. There will be a lot of caution and resistance from political groups, concerned citizens, entrenched interests, etc. The car that the…
My initial reaction was dismay that Google seemingly didn't consult any decent auto designers on this. But then I wonder if that's actually fine. My kids will likely be baffled by the idea that we attached so much of our own identity to our cars. The financial investment in cars to make a statement about ourselves (over and above getting us from A to B) is immensely irrational. With self driving cars ownership will l…
A lot of people are bashing the car's appearance, but I think people forget that putting the first driverless cars on the road is as much a PR challenge as it is a technological challenge. Truly autonomous driverless cars is a huge shift in the way we have operated for almost 100 years. There will be a lot of caution and resistance from political groups, concerned citizens, entrenched interests, etc. The car that the…
Uber have the right idea here; own the platform, not the infrastructure. Lets face it, a cars spends most of its life stationary, waiting for you to drive it. Not so the autonomous vehicle. Autonomous vehicles are freed from the shackles of parking so why not lease your car to Uber and have it earn money as a cab? The future will be a bad time to get into car parking.
Perhaps, this will be the case in the long term. However, until then perhaps we could implement some sort of price surging where rental costs of parking space skyrockets when demands get high. Uber is doing the hard work of making price surging palatable. Everyone else just needs to ride on their coat tails.
The way Google seems to be approaching self-driving cars is the right one in my opinion. Self-driving cars will be on-demand, booked through something like Uber and will not be owned by the end-user. I feel that the other car companies working on self-driving car technology for consumers are wasting their time. The main reason I enjoy owning a nice car is that I like driving it. If I wasn't in control of driving my c…
Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal got to have a ride in one and shared his thoughts here: http://theoatmeal.com/blog/google_self_driving_car
My initial reaction was dismay that Google seemingly didn't consult any decent auto designers on this. But then I wonder if that's actually fine. My kids will likely be baffled by the idea that we attached so much of our own identity to our cars. The financial investment in cars to make a statement about ourselves (over and above getting us from A to B) is immensely irrational. With self driving cars ownership will l…
| Google's new fleet was intentionally designed to look adorable... By turning self-driving cars into an adorable Skynet Marshmallow Bumper Bots, Google hopes to spiritually disarm other drivers. I also suspect the cuteness is used to quell some of the road rage that might emerge from being stuck behind one of these things. They're intended as moderate-distance couriers, not open-road warriors, so their max speed is 25 miles per hour.