The Autonomous Cars News, Development, and Discussion Thread
It's high time we had a thread dedicated to autonomous cars on this page.
If this works out, autonomous cars will be the biggest transportation innovation to occur in our lifetimes. No one knows what kind of change self-driving and self-parking cars will have on current transportation trends - but most analysts agree the disruption will be huge. Will people need to own cars anymore, or will large public fleets of autonomous taxis be enough? What will the role of buses and public transportation be? When cars can park themselves, will there be a need for parking requirements anymore? As for news items: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...n_5401375.html "Google's New Driverless Car Has No Brake Pedal Or Steering Wheel" https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...al-gallery.jpg |
Finding a Better Word for 'Autonomous Car'
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I found this article to be interesting, but I disagree with GM's estimated time line. I think change will come much quicker than these people think. There can and will be a sudden acceptance of autonomy in society, and it will catch many of the 'established' players off-guard (IMO).
GM Executive Says Google Could Be ‘Competitive Threat’ http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...etitive-threat Quote:
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What I would like to know is how insurance would work.
Seriously, if you're vehicle all of a sudden goes berserk and you ending hitting another vehicle or even person, who is the guilty party? if the responsibility was the autonomous vehicle then does that mean the Google has to pay as technically it was Google computers completely running the car. How could you sue or make someone criminally liable for something they didn't do. they may have been in the vehicle but were not in control of it. |
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http://www.allgov.com/usa/ca/news/un...28?news=853257 |
An interesting thought exercise:
What Will Happen to Public Transit in a World Full of Autonomous Cars? http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/...ous-cars/8131/ Quote:
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It would be nice if there are security personnel in driverless buses in 2075. Just so the riders could feel safe
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One point he doesn't touch one is the greatly reduced need for car parking will lead to denser cities (no parking requirement when building will change things quite a bit in most places). |
This video made the rounds a few years back:
Short Version: Full Version: It was a good start at visualizing how a fully autonomous intersection might work, but there are several criticisms: 1) What road is 12 lanes wide? - Autonomous roadways can be much narrower than current roads due to the decreased following distances of autonomous cars. 2) Autonomous roadways won't need lanes - Autonomous cars also won't need to keep to the right (or left) if traffic conditions require it. (Such as, if there are lots of left turning vehicles, traffic might reconfigure to left-hand running so that the left turns are handled more efficiently) 3) Autonomous cars will not operate as spread out as in this visualization - Autonomous cars will operate in tightly-packed platoons in order to reduce drag. But even with these considerations, it was a start. Yesterday I found this simulation of a hybrid intersection system, which can handle both human-driven and computer-driven vehicles. (Red = "legacy" vehicles and White = autonomous vehicles) I like how the traffic light is smart enough to detect when a human-driven car shows up so that the rest of the time the intersection can operate with full autonomy. It also shows just how many cars that can be handled autonomously vs. manually, as when there is a huge backup of autonomous cars after a 'legacy' car waiting for a red light. Most of all, this simulation shows what benefits can come during the transition years, even before roadways go fully autonomous. |
Mercedes-Benz Completes First Fully Autonomous 100 km Drive
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_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Also, from another article, comes an estimated cost savings compared to human-driven taxis: Quote:
From $4 to $0.50 per mile will make a huge impact on mode split (people choosing between taxi or transit etc). For comparison, according to AAA, the cost of owning an average sedan costs 59.2 cents per mile: http://newsroom.aaa.com/tag/driving-cost-per-mile/ This is further proof in my theory that simple economics (insurance rates, cost of ownership, fuel costs etc) will move people towards autonomy much faster than laws and regulations and incentives ever will. |
Elon Musk reaffirms his goal of having Tesla Motors be the first to offer an 'autopilot' feature:
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Why trucks will drive themselves before cars do
http://www.vox.com/2014/6/3/5775482/...before-cars-do Quote:
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The Environmental Implications of Driverless Cars
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A City Built to Test Self-Driving Cars Will Open Up Its Streets This Fall
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What happens when people intentionally, maliciously blocks the path of a self driving car designed to never, ever, hit a pedestrian? I can see a car driving down the street in south Chicago and some kids run out into the road on purpose to make it stop and then harass the driver. For better or worse, I guess cameras and facial recognition technology would fix this. A car detects someone doing this, films it, sends it to police. Cops would ride around in cars and then bust people.
I would hate for this to be a motivation to ration and restrict streets to only cars. That's one of my biggest fears actually; all roadways can instantly be turned into gated streets or toll roads because unlike human driven cars, automated ones can be denied access to space without physical barriers and will possess more mature tracking technology. Also just in general these things will lead to the development of road optimization, really they will have to because otherwise people will circulate cars on surface streets instead of parking them in city centers until it becomes a major problem. This will in turn lead to privatization of some roads and by extension the elimination of free public uses. Imagine if a privately built subdivision forbade children from playing outdoors because they got in the way of moving vehicles? If you want to ride a bike you will have to register so they can charge you the market price of a moving road space envelope of 4 square meters at a certain time based on certain demand. I guess anyone who is poor would be effectively under house arrest. What if a run-down municipality decided it would lease all of it's unused street parking to a logistics company; and cross-country trucks that are not in service decide to camp out in front of your house because hey technically that's a public parking spot and it's free, right? Really robot cars have the most massively long and insane list of indirect implications ever. |
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Some very interesting thoughts. I like your solution to malicious traffic-blockers. I've heard many people worry about autonomous cars circling endlessly while they wait to pick up their owners. I've also heard many people worry about what will happen to all the public parking, especially street parking. If I were in charge, I would do several things when autonomous cars go public: 1) Change all street-parking to Pick-up/Drop-off zones, at least in commercial zones. In medium traffic areas, set a time limit that a car can be stationary in the P/d zone. In heavy traffic zones (downtown) put a price on how long a car is stationary in the P/d zone after, say, 30 seconds. Your car has been stationary for a minute? Pay the city a dollar (two cents a second). Or whatever other price gets people in and out of cars quickly. In residential zones, there would need to be local ordinances about street parking - such as having the residents come up with a list of cars approved to park in their neighborhood. Each person would submit the licence numbers of their friends and relatives and etc, and they would be allowed to park within X distance of that person's home. Anyone not on the list would not be able to park there - only P/d. In a fully autonomous world, I see parking as a separate business, not as an amenity offered by private businesses or by cities. A large parking garage built somewhere out of the way will charge per use, or by monthly memberships. There will be no such thing as 'free parking' anymore. 2) Implement charge-per-distance road pricing. Keep the gas tax because gas produces air pollution, but don't use it to pay for roads. Instead, let roads be paid for entirely by the cars that actually use them. Autonomous cars will have to record exactly where they went, when they went there, and how heavy they were. This will all be added into a pricing matrix and then the bill will be sent to the owner. Hopefully, this should solve the circling problem. Obviously some roads, such as residential roads in small neighborhoods and the like will not ever be self-sufficient, so they will always need some sort of subsidy. Hopefully that will come from the local area. Remember, roads designed for autonomous cars will be narrower and calibrated specifically for certain weight groups. Neighborhood roads won't need to be thick enough to carry a semi truck because a truck will be programmed never to go there. 3) Because autonomous roads are narrower, use the left-over space for bike lanes and wider sidewalks. Just some thoughts. I'm very optimistic that a future of autonomous cars will be much better than the status quo. Imagine a world without surface parking lots, and with a bike lane running down the side of every street! That's the kind of city I want, and if enough people want that, and are willing to stand up for it, autonomous cars cannot possibly destroy the world. |
What is limiting the roll-out of Autonomous cars? Why not see them on sale tomorrow?
Two recent blurbs about how the obstacles are more legislative than technological or economic: Government looks to reform UK Highway Code for autonomous vehicles http://news.techworld.com/personal-t...mous-vehicles/ Nissan may introduce self-driving car by 2018 http://www.steelguru.com/internation...sn/341175.html I hope that Mr. Willets from the first blurb is correct in that California's laws will now require someone to be in the driver's seat. Or anyone in it at all, for that matter - that is a key point of an autonomous utopia. However, to my knowledge, no such law is even being contemplated at present. |
One of the primary reasons why transit will remain competitive with rented autonomous vehicles for some time is rush-hour demand. It will never be profitable for companies like Uber to provide enough cars for rush-hour commuters, because a large portion of said cars would then sit idle for the remainder of the day. Auto-car rental companies will have the highest profit margins if they can keep their car continually generating revenue. Obviously in most cities there will be very few people driving in the early morning hours, and some parking on the street will need to happen, but the less hours per day a car is parked somewhere the better. Indeed, I would expect the companies eventually engage in "market pricing" - downgrading their cost during times when there is low usage, and marking it up during high demand, in an effort to get maximum dollar value out.
Self-driving cars could actually help transit along main corridors to some degree, because they solve the "last mile" issue with suburban transit stations. Concerns about self-driving cars choking up residential parking spaces are unfounded, IMHO, because as I said, a well-run logistics or auto-cab company should virtually never have its cars parked, and within ten years we'll start having a surfeit of parking in most locations regardless. |
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I like your thoughts. I am a big believer that autonomous cars will be hugely beneficial to mass transit. Reasoning: 1) As you mentioned, the first/last mile conundrum will be completely solved. My question is who will own the autonomous cars in this scenario? Will transit agencies be allowed to own fleets of personal autonomous cars to accommodate its passengers, or will that duty be assigned to private taxi firms, requiring passengers to pay transit fares and taxi fares as well? What will be the dividing line between a taxi and mass transit? 2) Supposing people continue to own their own cars... which I think is likely, as people will still consider the car their 'personal space,' and want it to be always ready in their garage, rather than ready to pick them up via app... So, supposing people own these cars, they will only need to own one car. Autonomous cars will be more expensive to purchase than non-autonomous ones (not counting insurance), but one autonomous car will be cheaper than two non-autonomous. So, instead of the family provider driving to work and letting the car sit in a parking lot all day, instead he goes to work and then sends the car back home for the rest of the family to use. But what if his/her work is really far away? Then the car takes him to the transit stop, drops him/her off, then goes back for the family (taking kids to school and running errands and the like). 3) - and this one is the biggest of all: No more Parking lots in dense urban areas! None! We won't need them, as cars will drop off their passengers and then go find parking away from the urban core, or go back home altogether (with distance-based pricing, I wouldn't bet so much on returning home). This means urban cores can get very dense, which translates almost directly to very walkable, which is exactly the conditions in which transit operates the best. Autonomous cars are still cars, after all, and all cars, no matter what they are, come with capacity issues. Make them smaller, make them able to travel in platoons, make them able to operate without lanes, ect - they are still cars. They will increase the capacity of freeways and roads dramatically, but in urban areas they will still eventually reach their limit and have traffic jams. Transit isn't going anywhere - in fact, I believe it's about to get a huge boost in ridership and utility. As far as news goes... More squabbling over legal regulation of autonomous cars in California: http://www.latimes.com/business/auto...610-story.html This is actually extremely important; the rules that California adopts will likely be the basis for regulation in all other states - and potentially the basis for other countries to adopt as well. Delays and fighting here mean delays for the whole future of autonomous cars. |
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