Will driverless cars ever actually be a thing?
tomcat said:
FilmCarp said:
Cars have gotten so much safer, but the great weakness is the driver. That's the problem that they are trying to fix.
You mean like the drivers who text, program their GPS, look up phone numbers, eat, put on make-up, etc. etc.?
My all time favorite, was the commercial truck driver who reported an SVU driven by a man with a cell phone in his ear, and a laptop balanced on the steering wheel, while driving on I80.
I was driving on the GSP many years ago and I swear to God -- I passed a car being driven by a guy who was playing a guitar while driving.
bub said:
You've pointed out bad human choices over the decades favoring cars over pedestrians but I don't see that weighing against driverless cars. Look at how many drivers ignore pedestrians and fail to stop at intersections to allow them to cross. That would have to be worked out for driverless cars and once in place, would be safer presumably.
It's not that it weighs against driverless cars, it's that driverless cars, in isolation, are only an incremental solution when we have the potential for true disruption and a better way forward. The Elon Musk vision, where driverless cars are a way to make private vehicles safer and more convenient, is a bit boring and underwhelming. I don't want to just rethink driving, I want to rethink cars, transportation, and our built environment more generally. If at the end of this all we've done is doubled down on making private vehicles the focal point of our built environment, it'll be as disappointing as having watched the internet go from promising a revolutionary new era in transparency, connection, and democracy to becoming increasingly a driver of misinformation, polarization, and surveillance. Similarly, I can easily imagine a future where roads are increasingly off-limits to pedestrians and bicyclists to optimize them for driverless cars. We'll have fewer pedestrian injuries and deaths, fewer injuries and death for car occupants, but our built environment will be more sterile and atomized than it is now.
My point here is that it doesn't have to go that way. Disruption present opportunity -- driverless technology is a disruptive technology, but we should think about what we hope to come out of this disruption -- just what we had before, but more of it, or something genuinely new?
one very obvious and beneficial aspect of driverless cars will be that they won't need to be parked by a human driver. For local trips like going to a restaurant in the village, your car can drop you off and go back to your own driveway. And even for longer trips your car can drop you off at the door of your destination and then go straight to an open space in a lot. And if these cars are electric, no carbon emissions. How much carbon is wasted by people circling or idling looking for parking spaces?
PVW said:
bub said:
You've pointed out bad human choices over the decades favoring cars over pedestrians but I don't see that weighing against driverless cars. Look at how many drivers ignore pedestrians and fail to stop at intersections to allow them to cross. That would have to be worked out for driverless cars and once in place, would be safer presumably.
It's not that it weighs against driverless cars, it's that driverless cars, in isolation, are only an incremental solution when we have the potential for true disruption and a better way forward. The Elon Musk vision, where driverless cars are a way to make private vehicles safer and more convenient, is a bit boring and underwhelming. I don't want to just rethink driving, I want to rethink cars, transportation, and our built environment more generally. If at the end of this all we've done is doubled down on making private vehicles the focal point of our built environment, it'll be as disappointing as having watched the internet go from promising a revolutionary new era in transparency, connection, and democracy to becoming increasingly a driver of misinformation, polarization, and surveillance. Similarly, I can easily imagine a future where roads are increasingly off-limits to pedestrians and bicyclists to optimize them for driverless cars. We'll have fewer pedestrian injuries and deaths, fewer injuries and death for car occupants, but our built environment will be more sterile and atomized than it is now.
My point here is that it doesn't have to go that way. Disruption present opportunity -- driverless technology is a disruptive technology, but we should think about what we hope to come out of this disruption -- just what we had before, but more of it, or something genuinely new?
one aspect of autonomous vehicles that I wrote about after attending CES last year is that there does seem to be an acknowledgement that private vehicles are not likely to be as ubiquitous as they are today. Ride sharing and/or mass transit is the focus of many of the manufacturers working on driverless vehicles.
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You've pointed out bad human choices over the decades favoring cars over pedestrians but I don't see that weighing against driverless cars. Look at how many drivers ignore pedestrians and fail to stop at intersections to allow them to cross. That would have to be worked out for driverless cars and once in place, would be safer presumably.