There is a hint of what a full society of self-driven cars will be like in Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge: there are no traffic lights. The cars all weave through an intersection much like pedestrians do while walking.
The future, at least in terms of the dangers of driving, is bright.
I look forward to the day when every car is a taxi, and the only cars parked on the side of the road are the ones owned by the very few people who can still be bothered at all to own a car full-time, which will hopefully be very few people.
I happened to use an open source traffic simulator which is capable of simulating both purely autonomous and human/autonomous traffic scenarios. It is possible to still support traffic lights for the humans who, for whatever reason, still desire to drive (I bet there will be always be reasons for you to want to drive manually.)
The team at the University of Texas at Austin has done a great job developing this simulator, AIM4. You can check out the videos and the source code here:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~aim/
Once autonomous cars have saturated the marketplace, I can only think of two reasons to still drive manually:
1. As with people who row or sail, just for the enjoyment. Such usage could be restricted to specific places like racetracks.
2. Because I'm going somewhere I "shouldn't" and I don't want to tell my car (and have it record my journey for someone else to review, or refuse to take me). This may also be the case with emergency vehicles, an ambulance may need to drive along a pedestrian-only street, for example.
Now, there will be a need to mix human vs autonomous traffic on the run-up to that. Obviously, until sufficiently many cars are autonomous to warrant the removal of human-controlled cars, that will need to be the case. Furthermore, early production Autonomous cars may have routefinding flaws, or the computer may break down, meaning that someone may need to drive a normally autonomous car themselves.
Is the implication here that pedestrians will simply walk into the street at random and the AIs will handle that? I find myself a little uncomfortable at the thought, and I'm fairly enthusiastic about driverless cars for most of the reasons you stated.
Yes, that's precisely what happens. You'll be given a safe berth, with cars stopping or avoiding you by at least the distance you could conceivably fall over.
Personally that's already how I cross the street, and my confidence in human drivers isn't anywhere near so great.
Hm. There is a thing currently where it's socially unacceptable not to cross at a crosswalk, and also to stop in the middle of the road. Some people are still jerks, but they're rare.
I could easily see a bunch of kids deciding they'll go challenge the AI by dancing in the middle of a crowded street. Admittedly a millionth chance occurrence though. "Computer, take a picture, get me facial recognition, and report them to their parents."
With human drivers you're given a notion of whether or not they've seen you (they're looking in your direction, the vehicle is slowing, they're motioning at you to cross or get out of the way, or honking at you). The situation is somewhat deterministic.
Not perfect by a long shot, but unless automatic vehicles offer some similar pedestrian signaling capability, there will be issues.
There's also the question of what happens, say, when a vehicle is surrounded by a crowd of people with ill intent. This happens:
That's an interesting video. I'd quite like to know if it's being coordinated "from above", or whether the cars are making their own decisions - the latter would be rather more impressive, since I think a fully managed road system is much further off, if not an impossibility.
I think the market for trucks will be far more disrupted. The idea of having "drone" containers seems far more easily realized and higher value added than civilian passenger autos. The average A->B distances are longer (miles/trip), the routes simpler (turns/mile) and the roads are less complex (fewer on-grade intersections). It seems an automated "carpool lane" would be a huge benefit. As would the avoidance of speeding and drowsy driving by semi/lorry drivers. Furthermore, removing this rolling stock from passenger car rights of way would itself be an improvement in safety (if for no other reason than > visibility).
The US military is also pushing remotely driven supply vehicles.
Then the next market is trucks on highways.
It's a bit like rail. People are obsessed with passenger rail but tend to ignore freight rail. For instance, how many people know that the US freight rail system is excellent?
An interesting side issue you didn't consider is at least in the initial roll out phase you simply make an automated "train" with ten trucks, and the lead truck driven by human (or at least has a human on board).
I thought they have already been doing this in Australia[1] to some degree. I suppose they are not independent trucks but then I'm not sure what the new advantages are if a person is still involved. With the Powertrain, they can split the trailers apart at destination and use normal cabs for distribution I guess.
The term is "drafting" or "slipstreaming". The concept has been part of the allure of autonomous vehicle engineering for decades, and is already praticed by human truck drivers (though they cannot follow as closely as automated systems would be able to).
I've done it myself in a passenger car on long trips -- once covered most of a state at high speeds behind a truck who seemed bent on making his schedule. 75+ MPH and my fuel consumption was well below typical for that leg of the trip.
Yep, I always thought that driverless trucks will come before that kind of cars. Better safety, lower costs, faster shipping, because there are no driver breaks.
I always wonder what the world will be like with thousands of truck and taxi drivers out of work. I know the same could be said for banking clerks (ATM), checkout clerks (automated checkout counters) etc. But I suspect the demographic is quite different.
Maybe we went through something similar when digging machines replaced people with shovels.
My direct interaction with the profession would indicate you'll still need a dude sitting in the cab, because no one trusts anyone WRT inventory control and you still need human body to load/unload.
The main difference is instead of requiring the coveted commercial drivers license plus or minus hazmat certs, you'll have a grunt laborer who optimistically knows how to count in english and can handle a pallet jack and/or electric forklift.
Well looking on the bright side, there'll be a lot of new jobs created as gas station attendants for filling all the automated vehicles... until that gets automated.
Can't forget insurance fraud. I foresee a future where insurance companies will impose additional fees to cars that are "assisted" rather than fully autonomous.
What is assisted? A car fitted with the self-driving computer, but rather than driving the car it instead compares your actions with one the computer would normally do. What is this comparison for? To determine whether you are a safe driver -- a Safe Driver Rating (SDR).
Self-driving cars will become the new gold standard for determining who is a safe driver -- and failing to meet that standard will result in higher insurance rates.
What does this have to do with malicious hackers? They can fudge the self-driving computer to silently and gradually increase your insurance rates by misreporting your SDR.
What about cars that are neither fully autonomous nor "assisted"? Simple: they don't get built/sold anymore due to being unsafe.
One interesting side effect of a safe driver rating is you need to balance the cost of having to pay higher insurance with having to find a new job.
Or another interesting problem is how do you push a self driving car beyond its performance boundaries to save your life? "I'm sorry dave, but I can't let you drive during a hurricane/tsunami warning" "hey car, shut up and drive, the storm surge is rising and unless you get moving you're about to transform into a submarine"
If you get fired from your job because your self driving car decided its not going out in 1 inch of snow, how much do you sue the manufacturer? Or the other way around, your self driving car permitted you to go out in a 24 inch blizzard and it got stuck and you died, how much does your estate and survivors get to sue the manufacturer?" Obviously the proud american tradition of screw the little guy means the mfgrs can do anything they want, but the PR implications mean all self driving cars will shut off whenever the chance of precip is above 0%, or the temp is below 32F, etc. And THATs why I don't want a self driving car, it'll be useless in order to be legally intrinsically safe (only valid operating conditions will be 70 degrees, sunny, daytime, etc, which is about 2 weeks per year where I live.)
What if your car, networked with all of the other cars in the immediate area, came to the conclusion that a fatal collision was unavoidable unless one car (your car) purposely veered over the side of a bridge... The good of the many outwieghs the good of the few, and you're the few?
That really is a terrifying thought if you follow it. It won't be so blatant. Probably more like "everyone knows that Volvo AI's get in way less fatal crashes than "cheaper" Chevy AI's".
Considering human nature, I don't think I can imagine a way where this won't happen on some level or another.
A child runs into the street. The only place to swerve is into a few senior citizens. The kid's dead, right? Obviously the seniors have seniority, you must Respect Your Elders, and their estates can pay for much better attorneys that a grieving young couple can. I just wonder if the software will be smart enough to know that.
Something I don't get: what is assisted driving for? I can see it being used in a transition period, where we want to assess the reliability of computers, get a corpus… But once the car can drive itself, why not let it? That way, no matter how unreliable you are, it won't influence the car.
Higher insurance rates will be only for people who insist on driving their cars. I believe this would be a very good thing.
A system in which no one ever has any control over where their vehicles choose to take them is not necessarily benign. Such a system can be tampered with, taken over or simply glitch because some idiot caused an overflow or the maps are inaccurate or all of a sudden $something_inefficient.
The purpose of 'assisted' driving lies in the premise that a 'perfectly' automated system doesn't exist, and will fail, and when it does, it should fail to wetware.
The notion of "control" is silly, you will still be the captain of the car, just not the driver. What if the wetware system kills 100 times as many people, should you still be able arbitrarily override the automated driver?
I already accept a lot of places that I should let machines handle a task for me. I drive an automatic transmission rather then shift myself. I have traction control that overrides my foot to give me better control of the car. I fly in planes that are mostly flown by autopilot.
Assisted driving will only be a short stopgap. It will be quickly gotten rid of because of cost to maintain two systems and because the ugliness of a "drivers seat". Interiors will look nothing like they do now. There will be no drive-shaft (fully electric) so no big bump or center console in middle of car. No steering column, no mirrors and a completely different arrangement of seats then now.
In other words a fully automated car looks nothing like an assisted driving car. I doubt people are going to want to pay more and sit in less comfortable cabin, just for the opportunity to override the computer driver.
>What if the wetware system kills 100 times as many people, should you still be able arbitrarily override the automated driver?
Yes.
Because human beings are the result of a million-odd years of evolution and perfectly capable of making their own decisions, negotiating obstacles, pattern recognition, adaptive reasoning and reflexive response. To decide that people are too stupid and clumsy to be allowed the luxury of driving so let's just have car companies, insurance companies and Google decide what's in their best interests, is essentially a well meaning but potentially pernicious form of autocracy.
Pun intended.
People die in housefires all the time too, maybe they shouldn't be allowed to cook their own food? People die from accidental gunshots and police misconduct, so clearly automated weapons systems should be the only ones allowed to enforce the law? Yes, sometimes there are auto accidents. But also, millions of drivers make it to and from their destination without incident every day. Proponents of self-driving cars make it seem as if it's bloodsport to let humans drive their own cars. Yet they seem to implicitly trust the result of those same humans building the network and infrastructure to do the driving for them.
How many people die because of a manual override that does worse than the computer? How many people die because the computer itself did a mistake that a human could reasonably have overridden safely?
I fully expect the second number to be much lower than the first —eventually. And when it does, I'll be glad when manual driving is considered a lesser crime. Because make no mistake: risking your own life is your choice. Drive on tracks, smoke, drink, have unprotected sex (with an informed and willing partner), whatever. On the other hand, driving on public roads put everyone else at risk. A small risk, but still. I say that having such control over their lives is simply unethical.
> Yet they seem to implicitly trust the result of those same humans building the network and infrastructure to do the driving for them.
Of course, never trust them farther tan you can throw them. But you can throw them pretty far: just sue their ass off whenever they're responsible for an otherwise avoidable accident (like a bug in the software caused by sloppy practices). Also, they can test the cars, and you can expect more consistency, compared to human drivers.
Those are good arguments for the automation existing to begin with, but don't address why manual controls shouldn't be available.
Which to me is the crux of the issue - in the scenario without an available override, when something goes wrong, there isn't anything you can do about it except hope that it doesn't kill you, because at that point it's no longer about the AI and all about collision physics.
I bet cities with congested infrastructure (read: not in the US) will be the first to go 100% autonomous just to optimize infrastructure utilization. Other cities (read: in the US) will then be forced to follow to remain economically competitive (b/c cheaper/better utilized infrastructure = lower taxes + higher economic output).
You'll probably still be able to drive in the country side though.
This is perhaps unintentionally describing the entire population. I believe this will be a huge barrier to adoption overall.
Americans, in particular, don't drive cars for transportation. They drive cars because they wish to maintain the idea of having complete control over their lives.
Also likely (based on actual trends), critical systems will be directly connected to the internet, and protected by a single company wide default password.
It's not as if it's particularly difficult to tamper with traffic flow now, as it stands. Take down a stop sign, mess with traffic light signalling (popular in movies about terrorist madmen), just plain go up to a car and hijack it.
The crackdown on people doing this, however, is enormous. It makes it very unprofitable to do any of these things.
The potential for centralized surveillance and control which exists in all digital systems will become a more and more important issue as these devices progressively become ubiquitous.
The same applies to driverless cars as to smartphones, electronic medical records, reading of news articles, social media, etc, etc.
I don't think it's lost on people discussing the subject, but it won't be able to stop this technological trend for several reasons.
Autonomous cars will be safer than human operated ones so they will at some point be cheaper to insure. This will continue until it is either unaffordable for the average person to operate their own car or outright prohibited because of safety concerns.
Driving will become a hobby which people will be able to pursue on dedicated (race)tracks.
Once Congress is shown that at least 20,000 of the 30,000 deaths per year could be eliminated by forcing autonomous vehicles on everyone, it will be illegal to operate a vehicle manually on first the Interstates, then eventually on every public road.
I was just going to post this but forgot to login and here was your post. The hard part is the initial adoption when most cars are still manually driven and the good stuff comes when none of it is manually driven. How we get there will be and adventure.
The way we get there is through car sharing schemes like Zipcar and Getaround.
v1 Zipcars automatically move themselves around between designated spots to rebalance supply and demand
v2 Zipcar can come pick you up much like Uber << taxi industy is screwed at this point
v3 Zipcar can pick you up and then drives you to your destination << Zipcar becomes much more desirable than owning a car at this point
This will happen at first in big cities like NY or Sydney here in Australia where parking, registration and other costs make car sharing already popular.
That's the point. Like riding, directly operating a motor vehicle can be an enjoyable an rewarding experience without being a good way to get around town. Someday, I hope, driving will be reserved for purpose specific tracks, cars that are actually enjoyable to drive, and drivers who can afford to pay the unsubsidized cost of such a leisure activity. I like a good drive myself, but I'd rather let a computer handle drudgery like stop-and-go on a large freeway through LA twice a day.
Yup. I have a friend who trains horses for a living and another that really wants to get into that business. But her customers aren't average workaday people: they're people who are willing and capable of and interested in investing time and effort and money and space into cultivating their relationships with horses, who want to learn more about them and use them for very specific ends.
Already today a lot of people have no idea how the internals of cars really work, do not properly care for their vehicles, and ultimately couldn't care less if someone set up a teleporter instead. The vehicle isn't the point for most people. For the people for which it is the point, they're the ones who obsessively follow Top Gear, wish they could buy Ferraris even if they have to rebuild the engine constantly, happily tinker away under the hood on the weekend: they already do that to the extent that their finances allow.
Driverless cars take nothing away from them except traffic jams during commute.
This is different. This is a horse you ask nicely to take you there but once you're locked inside it can take you anywhere. The issue is not safety, it's control.
Horses have control issues as well. And a properly designed autonomous car is likely to have a manual override or emergency stop, things for which there are no good equivalents on a horse.
People genuinely enjoy doing lots of things, and perhaps there will be tracks and courses where they may continue to do so, but allowing members of the public to operate massive vehicles on public streets leads to thousands of deaths and injuries and millions of dollars in property damage. Driving will become like smoking: you're still allowed to do it, but only in isolated places where you can't harm nonconsenting people.
People who enjoy that are also a kind of nerds; I was one and the feeling was about the same as I get now when I switch on one of my 70s/80s computers. I changed nerd-ness as an awful lot of people died around me on motorcycles and in cars.
It's not important though; you are a menace to society if you drive yourself once robot cars are commonplace and thus you need to take your driving pleasures/status symbol to the track.
Yes, and I'm one of those people. However, I basically don't drink because I drive. I have a 6 month old, if he's home I don't drink because I can't have more than a beer and run out if I need to. When he's at grandma's I'll drink, however I'm still conservative because I know I'm getting up early in the morning and can't drive hungover.
I know in my cousins area they have a keys-to-us service. You drive to the party or wherever and they drop off a driver to drive your vehicle with you in home. Why? Because it's cheaper than a cab because you only pay one way, and you can get where you're going on time because you don't have to wait for a cab, which on say New Years Eve won't be on time or even in the ball park.
It's foolish to believe that leisure will beat practicality. People will get automated cars because it means they can work on their commute. Forget the dash it's a desk. Or you could watch a movie. Heck, not only could you predrink for the party, you could drink whilst on your way there.
Or the kids out at the movies and you decided to have a few drinks. They call wanting to be picked up? No problem, just send the car.
You'd no longer have to pay for expensive downtown parking, you could either pay for it to park in a cheaper less convenient lot or you could have it drive home if it's a short distance.
Yes I like to drive, but I also like starting fires with a bow and stick... but I normally just use a lighter.
One point missed in all the comments about enjoyment, is disruption doesn't care about enjoyment, just dollars and cents.
No one in a position of authority cares if you liked your bank teller or not; you're simply told you're going to be using an ATM now for financial reasons. Ditto office automation vs clerks and secretaries. Did you enjoy getting magazines and newspapers before the web wiped them out, well, no one in a position of authority cares what you enjoyed.
I like the idea that in the future the only people manually operating cars and motorcycles will be doing it for fun rather than for the drudgery of daily life. That sounds like a better place to live. If the net benefit of driverless cars is reducing vehicles on the road and reducing traffic congestion think about how much more fun it will be to drive?
The driverless cars will automatically take the safest action and let you through when doing something reckless like cutting them off on the freeway etc. It kind of sounds amazing, you could be a total asshole on the road and no one would care... Imagine cruising down the freeway at 90MPH in rush hour swerving between drone vehicles and watching as they politely get out of your way. Its a driver's utopia
Right now the scariest part about self-driving cars is the corporations making them or governments having access to remotely-controlled "kill-switches" for these cars. In such a future you wouldn't need to "cut the breaks" to "make it look like an accident" anymore, and doing it like this would be far easier, if strong security measures aren't considered from the start.
No, the scariest part is the likelihood that they will be hackable, resulting in cars that essentially steal themselves or kidnap people or 'inconvenience' them while someone breaks into their house. Then there's the degree to which state actors can use them for ubiquitous surveillance and suppression of freedom of movement. The kill switches wouldn't be used to kill people, just round them up or lock them remotely inside their vehicles.
Yours is a paranoid theory. This future you're worried about is just as possible with elevators and yet we don't see it happening. It'll be just as difficult to get away with because of how unusual accidents will be with self driving cars.
Elevator accidents are rare (hence: suspicious), people transit them for brief periods of time, usually in the company of others, and it's difficult to known when your intended target is in the elevator to attack them. If you're going to target someone via an elevator attack, you've likely got far more effective and specific vectors which would work.
Cars tend to be assigned to specific individuals (permanently, on an ongoing occasional basis for car-share programs, or for a trip duration in the case of dispatched livery) and, well, accidents happen, even with automation (other vehicles, mechanical failures, road or environmental conditions). Moreover, if your intent is to convey someone somewhere, it's a lot easier to do this via an automobile (which can travel anywhere on a paved road and non inconsiderable options on unpaved roads) than in an elevator, which, with the exception of Mr. Wonka's design, tend to follow a rather predictable and limited course.
If I were in charge of threat assessment for a VIP/HNWI, I'd very much take this threat into consideration.
The difference, I think, is that the majority of elevators today rely on mechanical systems for control. Sabotaging a mechanical system in secret is a lot harder than sabotaging a computer-controlled system that is networked to the rest of the world.
> In such a future you wouldn't need to "cut the breaks" to "make it look like an accident" anymore, and doing it like this would be far easier, if strong security measures aren't considered from the start.
This future is already here to some extent. All they need to do now is to clean up the evidence (remove a plug, or have it self-destruct) after the event.
The OBD2 bus has been around in most vehicles since the late 80's and you can assume that those who need such functionality, have had it for a long time.
Depending on how the kill-switch is implemented, it might not be that big of a deal, e.g. when the kill-switch is triggered, the vehicle occupants are given a 1-minute warning before the car goes from self-driving to manual driving mode.
So there's a political incentive to not make cars entirely safe, even if they're self driving: maintaining plausible deniability for high level criminal activity.
It seems like these cars will have to be operable in both the manual and self driving modes. Otherwise the car will become much less flexible.
Examples:
1) immediate unplanned stop at a yard sale
2) drive "off road" to get around an obstruction
3) dealing with unstructured parking situations
4) avoiding emergency stops in unsafe locations
5) driving through puddles (is it 2 inches or 2 feet deep?)
6) etc.
And for some significant transition period the road will be populated by both manual and computer driven cars.
How does the hybrid system work? Won't many people take advantage of "dumb" cars. How would you drive if you knew many cars were computer controlled. Would people figure out how to "game" the known computer driving rules? I don't pull out in front of cars that are too close because the human might not stop and hit me. Maybe I don't worry about it if I know the computer is in control of the other car.
Long haul freeway driving does not seem too complicated. But what about high density suburban and city driving?
1 is just a matter of allowing the user to issue real-time commands ("Car, stop here", "Car, go park"). 3 is less of an issue when you can get off and let the car park itself wherever it wants.
2, 4 and 5 are a matter of smarter algorithms, but I doubt they won't be able to do all that way before they become commonplace. Particularly 4, since you can't reasonably expect people to have to take control to avoid an accident. Even professional pilots can struggle with that, let alone regular drivers.
There is currently a lot of talk in the professional pilot community that automation has reached the point where pilots are increasingly unable to fly manually. So when the automation fails, they can't handle it.
fta : "The avoidance of accidents will cut insurance costs".
Ha ha. No. Any freed-up cash will result in an increase in gas-prices, taxes or whatever. The cost living will continue to be just a bit more than you can afford no matter what. Any "avoidance of accidents" will just translate into profits for somebody, not you. The cost-environment is entirely artificial and is designed to exploit you right down to the bones and gristle. You don't get to enjoy the fruits of progress except in ways that make you a more efficient worker. Sorry.
No, but the comment above made it sound like the situation he described applies to everyone. I am not crazy wealthy, but by being smart with my money and forgoing some things I can live within my means comfortably. I am sure there are many people in my situation, contrary to the statement I was responding to.
aaaand you've lost me. Apologies for the snide remark, but there's no way we'll be there by that time. The industry won't let us.
Apologies for not having much reason in this post, and only stating a personal opinion without much detail to back it up, but I'm just curious to see if there's anyone that feels the same.
"Ubiquitous" is quite a strong word. Maybe "available" would be a better word for 2025.
There are just too many technical, cultural, and political unknowns to think that you'll see more than prototypes and a few early adopters within 10 years.
The optimal (most efficient, safest) way to get computer-controlled cars to work;
- All drivable areas mapped (Not just the roads - EVERYTHING, since you might want to go off-road. What if; landslide, earthquake, someone digs a hole somewhere, leaves a brick on the street, etc.)
- Knows where everyone is (going) at all times (privacy issue)
- Has everyone on the same system (not happening within 12 years)
Since I don't see these three happen, they have to be dealt with somehow. The bracketed issues are fully remedied only by the solutions written before them. Anything less will be fighting the symptoms, not the disease, and be a never-ending battle.
There are so many obstacles to be overcome, so much politics to be done, so many technical challenges, so much bureaucracy ... 12 years really isn't that long.
The actual bar for deploying self driving cars is that they are safer than some (large?) portion of humans that we already allow to drive. We don't have to do it the safest way or the most efficient way.
I agree that ubiquity is unlikely, but because of cost.
(A high end Mercedes can already keep itself in a lane, slow down the cruise for a slower vehicle and will override the driver trying to crash into things. These systems are environmental, they don't depend on detailed maps. http://www.mbusa.com/mercedes/benz/safety
And they are one of several, not way out in front.)
Remember that the iPhone was released in 2007.. how much has the smartphone market changed since then. Billion dollar companies like Instagram and Snapchat have sprung up utilising that platform in only 6 years.
I see what you're saying but a lot can happen in 12 years.
To think about it another way, the time between the first dotcom crash and now is only 13-14 years.
How? Because the way I see it, they will have to form a cartel to prevent one of their own from selling self-driving cars and make a huge profit at the expense of everyone else.
I know, and it's also what they said about holograms, personal flying machines etc. Teleporting. And yes, some of those have happened or will happen sooner or later.
I'm not saying it's not going to happen, I'm just saying that this particular thing, I don't believe in.
But fair enough, I didn't provide any decent information to back up my statement, so I won't ask you to either.
Holograms and personal flying machines required huge technological breakthroughs to make them possible. Those breakthroughs still haven't occurred. Teleporting - questionable it's even possible.
Self-driving cars are already on the streets in certain cities. Did you see the recent S-class test in Germany?[1] They're here right now, maybe not quite production-ready, but certainly in beta. There's no comparison at all.
So you think, by 2025, we'll be -as the article says- "rid[ing] in the back seat reading a book, sipping a cocktail, or sleeping as your car drives itself to your destination"?
Count me skeptical. As I said, I don't think little over a decade is enough for that to happen.
Since the iPhone, we've added some pixels to its screen and a fingerprint scanner to the button.
Sure, in some circumstances we'll turn on this advanced version of cruise-control. But we won't be lounging while we get from A to B.
> Since the iPhone, we've added some pixels to its screen and a fingerprint scanner to the button
Did you forget about the 40x speed increase? Sheesh. I bet you're not still using an iPhone 1.
And no, I don't believe everyone will be being chauffeured around in their self-driving cars by 2025, but it will be an option at some price point. In fact, I expect that by 2020, if not earlier.
> Railroads, bus companies and short-haul airlines will suffer. If you can move from your home to your destination, door-to-door in the comfort of your car, who’s going to take the train, bus or plane?
Would that be significant? Costs, travel times, risk of accidents/theft, failures, would still be much higher. Not to mention it is absurdly less efficient to travel alone in a car.
I imagine hopping onto a car to the train station, and having another one waiting for you right at the arrivals gate will be the preferred mode of travel.
I have. The NE is the worst because they have the ancient small passenger cars. Out west they have the cool double decker passenger cars.
As far as slow, I slept most of the way from CHC to NYC for a recent HOPE conference (which was across the street from the station, no $45 cab ride (or whatever it is) from the airport for me).
I find taking the train to be very pleasant, although I prefer the rolling stock west of the Mississippi.
Can you quantify why rail is inefficient for moving people? It seems to work well in Europe, for instance. The criticism of high-speed rail in China didn't last long.
Even in Europe the cost is ludicrous relative to the gain.
Additionally, any convenience gained by the user - relative to flight - is almost entirely due to security differentials. Harmonize security and those travel times fall in line right quick.
Apply a tiny fraction of HSR costs to speed up air travel security instead, and you'll see far greater rider convenience increases and save incredible amounts of money.
> Harmonize security and those travel times fall in line right quick.
The security differential in the US is based in large part on the fact that airplanes can (a) be diverted by hijackers to alternate destinations, and (b) be used as weapons against arbitrary targets.
Since the risks aren't the same, why would you aim to harmonize security, except as a pure subsidy to the airline industry?
Can you provide the numbers to back up your statement? I realize on most other sites it's ok to so the cost is ludicrous, but here it's better to provide the numbers so other people can evaluate.
Thanks. Now we can address what you've said because clearly you are wrong, even from your own articles. This doesn't make it sound like train transportation is ludicrous.
"The busiest high-speed lines in the world are capable of making money, Bel said, including those between Paris and Lyon, where about 25 million people ride the French TGV trains each year, and the Japanese Shinkansen trains between Tokyo and Osaka, which draw about 130 million riders a year."
As for Spain, they've spent $60 billion dollars since 1980. That's less than one high-speed rail train in California and they've got almost 2000 miles of track.
We should dig up some other sources. They site that you provided doesn't seem like it's a great source. It doesn't say how much money is actually lost. Simply that it's not profitable.
Here in Europe rail is mostly used for commuting and shorter distances in general. Especially in smaller countries. That part of rail is not competing with flying in any way.
I would think that is only true for 'rail designed for cargo' or 'rail in not too densely populated areas'. Isn't rail designed for humans as used in subways efficient almost everywhere? I would think it definitely beats private cars.
I think that one reason for that is that, for reliable connections, one needs a multiple-connected graph. Users must be able to 'go around' any disturbance that arises.
Cities with high auto use tend to have lower commutes, cities with high metro use tend to have longer commutes. Of course in this case more than any other causation =/= correlation, but just anecdotally you'll find loads of people in Manhattan and Queens with 45+min subway+foot commutes to go a few miles.
NY, the most subway-centric city, has the longest commutes in the US. LA, "the most car centric city" (probably not literally true) tends to have amongst the shortest.
Decommission those NYC subways and replace with private shuttles and busses. Bet you'll see dramatic drops in commute times for NYC. And it'll save incredible, incredible amounts of money.
Los Angeles does not have below-average commute times; it has above-average commute times (the mean is just a hair under 30 minutes).
The NYC subway system is also a red herring. The subway primarily serves Manhattan, The Bronx, and Brooklyn. Of those people who commute into Manhattan from another borough, a plurality come from Queens, half of which has no subway coverage at all; that's for people inside NYC proper and obviously excludes NJ, Westchester, and Long Island commuters.
> NY, the most subway-centric city, has the longest commutes in the US. LA, "the most car centric city" (probably not literally true) tends to have amongst the shortest.
NY has much, much higher population density than LA, which probably both explains why it was more subway-centric and why commutes are longer.
There's a reason LA has shorter commutes: because highways and car traffic don't scale, and subways do, so it's impossible to get as far as you could with a subway. Los Angelenos still have 45 minute commutes, they just don't get as far and burn a lot of petroleum getting there.
The average commute in NYC is 45mins, which is almost 50% higher than the national average. LA always has a below average commute time.
The fact that LA metro has such short commutes - despite being one of the largest and most car dependent big cities in the world - suggests that highways and private cars do, in fact, scale very well.
While I've never been there, my impression of LA is that it's very sprawling. Maybe not everyone has to go to one central area to work. Unlike Chicago's Loop or lower Manhattan where a lot of the commutes tend to converge in one general area. If few people have the same commute destination, individual cars would be more effective than mass transit.
That problem is already solved, and it doesn't require light rail: Privately run shuttles and busses.
It'll never happen, as it's opposed by (1) Taxi operators, (2) Mass transit operators & unions, AND (3) Do-gooders who don't want private business to succeed where public service has failed.
I imagine that this would make the modularization of cars more feasible, or even necessary. E.g. a long-distance travel power train module could provide enough juice for driving cross-country (e.g. on holidays), while the commuter power train module would be lighter and less costly to rent. The car could drive itself to a hotspot where such modules are interchanged on demand. This would of course only make sense if there still is something like car ownership - if cars are only rented from central entities, then this entity would just send out specialized vehicles instead.
However, I'm not quite sold that people will give up on car ownership. Yes, there's public utilities and public transport, which is not up for individual ownership. But a car in the sense that we have it now is something more personal than a train cabin - a car's body is very close to us and we touch it all the time; we leave personal belongings there; and there is something to the fact that this car is always in front of my house/appartment, especially in emergency situations. This last point could be amended with emergency cars which are available to each apartment block, with which driving is just more expensive. Imagine crying "Help! I need a car!" and an emergency unit comes right around the corner and takes you wherever you want.
I don't think we'll willingly give up on owning cars. Rather, it'll become way too expensive for the average person to own one.
Once self-driving cars show a marked decrease in road accidents, insurance prices will rise.
Car-as-a-Service companies will be created, making the cost of riding in a private car much cheaper than outright owning one. I'm already intending to start a car service as soon as the first cars are available.
>Once self-driving cars show a marked decrease in road accidents, insurance prices will rise.
Huh?
Edit: Just to be clear: The world you describe should see incuranse rates for self-driving cars markedly lower, with rates for driver-driven cars probably a bit lower (than current).
He means insurance prices will rise for those who choose to remain self-drivers. However, you bring up a good point, incidentally, that even if the insurance costs more for a self-driver versus auto-pilot, rates will go down for _both_ either way due to much safer roads.
I don't think that is necessarily true.. The cost of insurance is based on the average expected payout per customer... I don't think the average payout will increase, as being a human driver won't suddenly become MORE dangerous, at worst it will stay the same.
But what happens when the average expected payout is expected to go down? Insurance companies will expect lower loss ratios from self-driven cars, so doing something as dangerous as driving your own vehicle will carry a premium. Its very similar to how your health insurance premiums are much higher if you're a smoker. You can smoke, but you're going to be charged for this unnecessary, harmful action.
Oh, I have no doubt that driving your own car will be more expensive than taking a self-driving car. My point was that it wouldn't be more expensive than it currently is to have insurance (when everyone is driving their own car)
I am sure lots of people said. I'll never give up rising my horse for this weirs automobile. While I agree with you a lot and I love driving. You have to think that while we will continue to enjoy driving. Think of the next generation of children who grow up in a world where they never have to start learning to drive in first place. Where they don't appreciate it the same way. And instead they go to some random driving course for a fun day of driving. Like some people go to a stables or ranch to ride horses occasionally
You think those companies won't try and close down on that market once the technology is available? I don't think breaking the Montana market is the key to success, either.
I wonder how the economics of owning cars will change when everything is computerized. In logistics (specifically trucks), it would incredibly reduce the total cost of shipping if you eliminate Less-than Truck Loads (LTLs) and empty back hauls. I imagine it is similar with transporting people, if there was a "taxi" like company that could maximize the use of an automated car, the total amount of cars necessary in the world would go dramatically down. Right now most cars spend most of their lives idle. Great side effects include no auto insurance and much less emitted greenhouse gasses.
The number of millennials buying cars is already extremely low, computerized cars would most likely continue to reduce the number of new car owners.
Unless these car systems are programmed at the level of rigor of the Space Shuttle or other "screw up and they all die" environments, the only group that's going to "convulse" from computer-driven cars will be lawyers. And they'll convulse laughing. Is this how it should be, no. But it's how it is in the US at the moment, possibly in other countries as well.
As people mention, if they don't behave as the rider wants or if they can't deal with unexpected situations (or mechanical failures) or if they're required to be always-connected and the net goes down… And I'm sure all sorts of privacy types would love being carted about with no control on their environment. Unless the net connection's also amazingly robust, the computer-driven kidnapping possibilities are endless.
Oh, I didn't think computer vision's a solved problem… It's easy to lose the GPS signal in cities, and you can probably jam or spoof it without too much difficulty. Doubt cities are going to spend lots of $$ installing all sorts of "helpers" to deal with all that rebar.
Imagine having your car drive off and park itself somewhere. You don't even need to know where.
And there are wider and more fundamental social benefits. City centres will become pleasant places to walk in. Cleaner air, less noise and less chance of being run over. Another example, children will play outside more, rather than being confined indoors as they increasingly have been.
Why park it. You'd surely want it to earn it's keep ferrying your "friends" to work [depending how restrictive laws are on temporary rental of autonomous vehicles], dropping-off the kids, popping to the drive-thru to get your lunch, picking up your washing, getting your supermarket shopping and such.
An aspect of this that I have yet to see examined is the rapid decrease in paint and body repair, as well as replacement parts needed on both a mechanical and cosmetic front. Many mechanical failures are due to driver error. Once again shrinking the pool of skilled manual labor with no new industry for the workers to transition into.
The thing that the article didn't touch on was the fact that many municipalities derive significant income from fines related to parking and traffic violations. It will be a big transition for them also.
There seems to be a lot of excitement about self-driven cars, but somehow, except for a handful of local lines, there has been no real automation on the operation of trains, even if they are much easier to make completely autonomous. How are self-driven cars not going to face the same fate as self-driven trains?
There are fairly automated trains but only in very controlled and low-speed environments. (e.g. "people movers" at airports).
But, to the broader point, I can't help but feel that a lot of people are conflating "able to tool down 280 with a human on board who is fully capable of taking over control--albeit not instantaneously" (or a next gen cruise control, if you would) with "a robot chauffeur who can drop the kids off at soccer practice." The second problem--which includes dealing with all the unpredictable things that happen on secondary roads--would seem to be enormously more difficult than the first.
Except trains are largely autonomous, it's about wanting a human element in the operation, not requiring them.
I see the same applying to a self-driven car, the human element is always present there in the form of passengers, who undoubtedly will be able to assume control if need be, that is how the Google cars are designed.
I have discussed with guys doing train software for a living: http://prover.com/ From their experience, automating trains in an otherwise human environment is very hard. Probably as hard as automating cars.
I expect the ubiquitous automation of trains at around the same time at the ubiquitous automation of cars.
The control of the train itself is easy. Simulations abound for this purpose. The GE's and Siemons of this world wouldn't hesitate to implement them if there weren't other significant rail context specific issues, such as the human environment comment above. The difference is that it's not a human vs human driver problem but a schedule design and human making bad scheduling decisions now that the trains are running late, implementation problem.
Furthermore, train drivers are cheap (compared with other infrastructure investments) and relatively efficient as they can be skilfully taught to drive according to a plan (compared with your fellow road commuters). Without other investments to tell the driver or the computer that they can drive faster/closer to the train in front at most railways are only likely to see efficiency gains (lower power/diesel usage) but struggle to drive those trains to denser schedules. It will happen for non-capacity reasons such as inter network usage, and safety to prevent trains from speeding around curves and falling off.
>Congestion avoidance will speed traffic and save fuel too.
Perhaps we live in different worlds, in my world self-driving cars will create more traffic jam, lead to higher road-use taxes and to harsher economic times due to people in trucking/delivery/cab driving losing jobs.
Traffic jam: the infrastructure may eventually change. Have a first car drive to to a nearby train or subway station, and a second car to your destination from the train. In the meantime, you may have more traffic jam.
Energy: when you don't need to own your car, you can use the best car for the job. A commuting car doesn't need to be able to carry 5 people around. It can be much smaller. Again, the transition period likely won't look good.
Harsher economic times: this is good old technological employment, where productivity rises faster than demand. My 2 cents: self-driving cars will significantly contribute to technological unemployment, and that's good, provided we manage it well. An obvious measure would be to generalize a 32 hours work-week, over 4 days. It would mean less unemployment and less overwork. Workload will reduce anyway. We might as well share this reduction, instead of giving it all to the unemployed.
Yeah, but they are still just cars. They will still need valuable real-estate for roads and parking and storage. What these are starting to sound like are trains and buses, which have existed for hundreds of years.
No. A self driving car can move itself somewhere where real estate and parking are freely available and cheap. Also, if people can utilize them like taxis then the total number of cars registered at any one time can drop dramatically.
The difference between a self-driving car and a bus/train is that the car goes wherever you want, just like a manual car.
If the most significant difference between a bus/train and a self driving car is the ability to deliver you to your doorstep, I will take the bus/train. Think of the benefits - you don't need to buy and maintain the self-driving car, and hence all the other things like insurance, parking etc. The city doesn't have to build more and more roads. Get a bit of exercise walking to your door. Really, I think these self-driving cars are just the auto manufacturers trying to extend the lifetime of their products.
The cost for parking will of course be limited as otherwise you could simply send the car out to drive around the block until you're ready to leave. That may not provide a restrictive limitation but it will be a limit in some way.
I'm now imagining huge traffic jams caused on purpose to enable electric vehicles to crawl around the city for several hours to avoid paying massive parking costs.
I can easily imagine cities mandating autonomous vehicles having to pay (automatically I guess) some kind of 'congestion' fee after driving a certain number of miles without a passenger or without covering any real distance.
As pointed out elsewhere in the thread, if computer driven cars become ubiquitous, insurance rates on person driven cars will become prohibitively high or the act of driving a car on public roads will be banned outright.
As someone who enjoys nothing more than riding my motorcycle on mountain road trips, I can't help but dread that. The privacy and liberty implications make me uneasy as well, in much the same way as the NSA's overreach.
Why would insurance become prohibitively high? Insurance is priced at the mean probability of getting into an accident * mean cost of restitution from an accident + insurance risk premium. I can't see self driving cars measurably affecting any of these numbers upwards significantly. Especially not by the factor of 10 it would require to make insurance prohibitively expensive.
Low-n probabilities become harder to assess, so if human-controlled vehicles are really rare, risks might be hard to assess.
How human drivers interact with otherwise automated traffic flows might similarly increase risks. Much as largely horse-drawn or bicycle traffic is generally pretty safe, but mixed-mode traffic with cars, trucks, busses, etc., tends to produce (often fatal) accidents.
Someone recently mentioned horses as a good analogy. Cars replaced horses; now horses are mostly not allowed on roads, and most people do not own horses. However, horse enthusiasts are still able to own horses and ride them, albeit in certain areas. As someone who enjoys driving, I can definitely see this same sort of thing happening with cars. Fortunately, it gives me hope that manually-driven cars won't become completely extinct.
I don't think liability insurance on motorcycles goes up very much. You still can't cause too much damage to a car, even if a human driver is much more likely to crash than computer.
The future, at least in terms of the dangers of driving, is bright.
I look forward to the day when every car is a taxi, and the only cars parked on the side of the road are the ones owned by the very few people who can still be bothered at all to own a car full-time, which will hopefully be very few people.