Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.
1–10 of 83 posts
Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.
#2Meanwhile...
California is trying to build a 100 billion dollar bullet-train boondogle that will be ready in 20 years.
By that point our efficient electric cars will be able to link together in high speed freeway 'trains'.
What if that money was invested in developing the autonomous cars?
The public thinks everyone else is going to ride the train and free the highway up for them... what a waste.
Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.
#3What is "within two vehicle generations"?
Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.
#4Meanwhile... California is trying to build a 100 billion dollar bullet-train boondogle that will be ready in 20 years. By that point our efficient electric cars will be able to link together in high speed freeway 'trains'. What if that money was invested in developing the autonomous cars? The public thinks everyone else is going to ride the train and free the highway up for them... what a waste.
Obviously the bullet train is going to be a disaster, but if there were a high speed train (as in Europe) from SF to LA, I would definitely leave my car home and use the train. I'm only to happy to free up I5 for you.
Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.
#5Meanwhile... California is trying to build a 100 billion dollar bullet-train boondogle that will be ready in 20 years. By that point our efficient electric cars will be able to link together in high speed freeway 'trains'. What if that money was invested in developing the autonomous cars? The public thinks everyone else is going to ride the train and free the highway up for them... what a waste.
While this is a good idea in theory, i'd say the autonomous highway isn't going to work well if you give grandma the option to tap on the brakes when she gets nervous.
Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.
#6What is "within two vehicle generations"?
The auto industry works in cycles on the scale of approximately 5-6 years. So technology that is not practical right now is 6+ years out.
They are basically promising to sell this as soon as possible. They have 1-3 years for the go or no go decision.
Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.
#7No thank you.
I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing possible at any given moment.
But even so, I am also an experienced software developer, and I know that software is only as good as the author(s). Bugs happen. It's inevitable. And I don't want to die or be injured because of software errors. I'd rather it be human error.
Now you might say to this, "Planes fly on auto pilot constantly. Every time you fly you're basically in the hands of software." And this would be true. But my response to that is:
1) The air is much less densely packed than the roads and highways.
2) In the air, even though you are traveling much, much faster than in a car, the pilots have more time to react to a problem than a driver in a car.
3) The pilots are highly trained, experienced and hopefully alert. Drivers in automated cars will be complacent and texting on their phones.
I think this is a terrible, terrible idea and misuse of technology, despite the fact that humans are shitty drivers. I think it's only going to exacerbate the problem, not improve it.
Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.
#8No thank you. I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing possible at any given moment. But even so, I am also an experienced software developer, and I know that software is only as good as the author(s). Bugs happen. It's inevitable. And I don't want to die or be injured because of software errors. I'd rather it be…
Have you seen car accident stats? I'll concede that bugs do occur, but it would take some serious failure to make it any worse than the average driver. Even decent or good drivers are not that great, especially when you factor in distraction, tiredness, poor judgement of road conditions, etc.
Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.
#9Meanwhile... California is trying to build a 100 billion dollar bullet-train boondogle that will be ready in 20 years. By that point our efficient electric cars will be able to link together in high speed freeway 'trains'. What if that money was invested in developing the autonomous cars? The public thinks everyone else is going to ride the train and free the highway up for them... what a waste.
Meanwhile, JR East announced it intends to raise speeds on the Touhoku Shinkansen from 320km/h to 360km/h by 2020.
Tell me the chance of single passenger road vehicles routinely travelling at speeds like that within the foreseeable future, because I'd say zero.
And furthermore, these slow motion freeway "trains" will rely on networked, not merely autonomous, car technology, not included in the 2020 timeframe.
Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.
#10No thank you. I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing possible at any given moment. But even so, I am also an experienced software developer, and I know that software is only as good as the author(s). Bugs happen. It's inevitable. And I don't want to die or be injured because of software errors. I'd rather it be…
"I'd rather it be human error."
Eventually - not this year, maybe not this decade, but eventually - technology will be better than human drivers. How many lives, then, would you be willing to sacrifice, on the grounds that human error is somehow better than (less frequent) machine error? Six? Sixty? Six hundred? Six thousand? Since 1985, nine hundred thousand people have died in car crashes in the US alone. That's more than the entire population of San Francisco. Think about that. Nine hundred thousand people. Nine hundred thousand corpses. If technology can prevent that, I'd say we have a moral duty to not only develop it, but to do so as fast as possible, before too many more people die early, violent deaths.