261–270 of 349 posts
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Mapping the roads isn't challenging. How do you think humans perform at driving through brand new cities?
Humans don't need cm-scale precise maps in cities to avoid jumping curbs and running into streetlamps. But that's still a requirement for all autonomous cars that have been demonstrated.
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For refill time, note that most electric car owners do almost all of their charging in their own garages overnight... not something that's common for gas-powered cars. Long trips are worse for electric cars, sure. But day-to-day driving? Charging is not an issue if you can charge in your garage.
For passenger capacity, note that most car owners utilize 1/4 or 1/5 of their available seats. Yet while all 3 of my vehicles (2 cars and a motorcycle) are 2-seaters, virtually all of my driving is solo (and I'm not even talking about commuting -- I'm primarily a bicycle commuter. Okay, my other 3 vehicles have 1 seat and 2 pedals). The "average" or typical use case is not how people choose their vehicle. They choose…
Many people own 2 cars as well, and it just makes sense to at least make one of them an electric. That is in my opinion will be the tipping point where there is enough demand to heavily invest in proper charging network.
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For 10K (+3) if you live in USA, you can buy a Nissan Leaf that came out the 3 year lease, and it is a decent car that seats 5 people with a range of about 80+ miles. Batteries are expensive and will continue to be till the turn of this decade and not a whole lot can be done. The better analogy would be laptops vs desktops, laptops gave mobility but they were heavy did not have the power etc. but by 2004 - 2006 they…
The $8,000 price I quoted is after heavy subsidies. I imagine that used Nissan Leaf price is also after subsidies. If electric cars become mainstream I wonder what will happen with subsidies.
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Maximum torque will get you home faster by... 1%? You still can't fly in residential areas at 160MPH. Whereas big capacitive touchscreen allowed to read text at least twice as fast. And you can actually manipulate websites UI. That's entirely new enabler. Electric car does not enable you to sleep in it or grow potatoes. It's a great car, but still a car.
one-pedal responsive operation is a win in the same way multi-touch is a win. It doesn't sound like a big deal,but once you get used to it, everything else seems dated. Operating multiple pedals to operate a vehicle is a leftover from crude technology. Sure, some people like it that way (a set that includes me). But for most people, once they get used to push pedal a bit to go slow, a lot to go fast, let go to stop -…
That said, unless we see a significant leap in battery tech, I think we're stuck with ICE cars for the foreseeable future. But we might see hybrid systems from racing more, that enables the car to become far more efficient in the city.
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The number of miles driven autonomously doesn't really matter if drivers have to intervene even for a second to resolve an issue. If the car is driving by itself 99% of the time, that's not good enough for the "share an autonomous car" use case. It's no good at 99.9% either. Or 99.99%. It's a lot more interesting if google's cars actually had no steering wheel or way of intervening. Because that's what we're talking…
"It's no good at 99.9% either. Or 99.99%." That's not completely right. If that 99.9% covers 100% of certain use cases, they will be used for those cases. It's like much else in tech, it's not an instant change, it's going to be all about expanding the uses cases over time.
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What do you mean by self-driving cars? As in highly assistive driving on highways so that you can not really pay attention most of the time whether that's legal or not? That I could (maybe) buy though it's a stretch given replacement cycles. But something I can summon with an app and take a nap? 50 years may be too soon.
"Level 4: The vehicle performs all safety-critical functions for the entire trip, with the driver not expected to control the vehicle at any time. As this vehicle would control all functions from start to stop, including all parking functions, it could include unoccupied cars." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Definition
I wish people would be slightly more honest about technological change. Smartphones are very special. They are very cheap, easy to mass produce, and you can iterate on them very quickly. Cars on the other hand have a much longer life cycle, involve much more capital, and in general are going to follow an elongated investment / replacement cycle. Comparing these two systems, while enthusiastic and great for a college…
Some other manufacturers will contribute of course, but even if 60m electric cars rolled out annually starting now and started replacing ICE cars, that will take (1B/60M) * years, which is 16years and 8months.
The only way this could be sped up would be the rise of self-driving cars, an increase in public transport and the continuation of urbanization. If many manufacturers stopped making ICE cars and we used much less of them we could replace enough of the current fleet for it to be non-trivial in a few decades.
[0]http://www.worldometers.info/cars/ [1]http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/08/23/car-population_n_934...
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> The Google cars have been rear-ended seven times, often when stopped "but also on the freeway," wrote Urmson, director of Google's self-driving car program. In other collisions, the cars were side-swiped or "hit by a car rolling through a stop sign." Eight of the 11 collisions were on city streets. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/297ef1bfb75847de95d856fb08dc0...
Mentioning accidents makes them sound dangerous. Mentioning that they haven't been at fault in any of them changes that significantly. In their last monthly report they described the two incidents in detail and they were the fault of the human driver behind them and about as trivial as collisions get.
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I've always thought that the Google cars have driven 95%+ of their miles in Mountain View, CA where every single aspect of the roads have been digitized, tested and tweaked a million times over. If you stuck one of these cars in a brand new city, it wouldn't work nearly as well.
Mapping the roads isn't challenging. How do you think humans perform at driving through brand new cities?