Self Driving Car thread

[ChaoticUnreal]

Since we have taken over the last couple pages of the Tesla thread I figured we could use a thread about it.

I don't want to copy all the posts from the Tesla thread into here so summarize.

Self driving cars are going to come out but the first (few) generations will most likely require a person with a license behind the wheel.
Networked cars will allow AI cars to drive and handle situations that are far ahead of what a person could do.
Smart roads should help identify problems in the road that AI cars would then route around.

To continue I think a good first step that will now be even harder thanks to the recent NSA info would be to make all cars networked so they communicate between each other. This would allow car makers to figure out a standard now when it doesn't really matter. It would also give us the added bonus that if your car is telling all the cars around it what it is doing and where it is even if a human is driving it the AI would have an easier time reacting to it especially if there is a flag saying human/ai driver.

 

[BitPoet]

Assuming we can get "good enough" self driving cars...

Why bother to own one? Wouldn't calling up zipcar (or whatever the equivelant is) and telling it to pick you up at X place at Y time to go to Z, and have an available car nearby come pick you up, make much more sense?

It'd sure as hell cost less for a majority of commuters, I'm sure.

 

[ChaoticUnreal]

BitPoet[/url]":3q3g393l]Assuming we can get "good enough" self driving cars...

Why bother to own one? Wouldn't calling up zipcar (or whatever the equivelant is) and telling it to pick you up at X place at Y time to go to Z, and have an available car nearby come pick you up, make much more sense?

It'd sure as hell cost less for a majority of commuters, I'm sure.

If we get to that point I would love to not own a car. Hell you could even set up 2 tiers of service where the first tier will pick you up and take you right to your destination and the second tier will stop and get others along the way. The benefits would be the second option would cost less.

 

[BitPoet]

Deus Casus[/url]":2599qgft]

BitPoet[/url]":2599qgft]Assuming we can get "good enough" self driving cars...

Why bother to own one? Wouldn't calling up zipcar (or whatever the equivelant is) and telling it to pick you up at X place at Y time to go to Z, and have an available car nearby come pick you up, make much more sense?

It'd sure as hell cost less for a majority of commuters, I'm sure.

If we get to that point I would love to not own a car. Hell you could even set up 2 tiers of service where the first tier will pick you up and take you right to your destination and the second tier will stop and get others along the way. The benefits would be the second option would cost less.

The question becomes weather or not it then becomes a state-level public transit, or stays private.

 

[Nevarre]

Self-driving cars are already more "here" than you'd realize when looking at it form the autonomous side of the equation.

Mercedes has a stereo camera based adaptive cruise control system (vs. radar-based for other high-end cars with this feature) and since it can track cars in 3 dimensions (vs just distance to target) it can not only speed up and slow down, it can follow the target in front of it up to ~35 mph. In order to avoid the regulatory hassles, the driver has to keep his or her hands on or near the wheel, but you can game the system by sticking your hand through the spokes.

They're just not "here here."

A lot of the benefits you'd see have inherent risks, like high speed caravans ~1 meter apart.

Additionally, you will need an override mode for lots of reasons and I think people are going to validly push back on some of the aspects of automated driving. Once one and only one vehicle in the system fails to use automation (even a bicyclist screws this up) you can no longer do things like smart intersections at any reasonable speed. Automated systems have faster reaction times and can benefit from networked information, but getting them to respond effectively to the unexpected is a Really Hard Problem. Most of the Cool Things you could do compound risk if something goes wrong.

The point BitPoet makes about no longer needing to own a car if you can have one autonomously pick you up and take you where you want to go is valid to a point, for some users, but it presupposes high urban density where the cost of renting offsets the PITA of owning. There's very little PITA factor in lower density urban/suburban/small town/rural. That doesn't preclude you from using a private car in that way either-- have the car drop you off (or you drive it to) a location, and then it drives itself to a remote storage facility to return when you're ready to leave.

 

[HappyBunny]

Deus Casus[/url]":1zyv9ns1]

To continue I think a good first step that will now be even harder thanks to the recent NSA info would be to make all cars networked so they communicate between each other.

I think that's a bad first step, regardless of NSA stuff. Information from other cars has to be untrusted, which means the car really needs to be able to drive by its own sensors before it can start incorporating anything from other vehicles.

 

[BeauMK]

Deus Casus[/url]":2hn0c3ue]

BitPoet[/url]":2hn0c3ue]Assuming we can get "good enough" self driving cars...

Why bother to own one? Wouldn't calling up zipcar (or whatever the equivelant is) and telling it to pick you up at X place at Y time to go to Z, and have an available car nearby come pick you up, make much more sense?

It'd sure as hell cost less for a majority of commuters, I'm sure.

If we get to that point I would love to not own a car. Hell you could even set up 2 tiers of service where the first tier will pick you up and take you right to your destination and the second tier will stop and get others along the way. The benefits would be the second option would cost less.

Taxis, but with no driver to make sure nobody pees on anything... I'm not sure I like this idea. I will continue to own my autobot, thanks.

Relying on data from other cars seems like a non-starter too, at least until we "solve" network security. I don't want 4chan helping with my morning commute. You could mitigate that if the entire automated fleet was one centrally controlled infrastructure. Then someone is in charge and you aren't relying on the idiot in the jacked up pickup to keep his vehicle patched.

Still, some parts of driving, like interstates, are actually pretty simple. I would love to be able to turn control over to the computer when I have to cover 200 miles of interstate. I'll bet that's what we see first, luxury cars that have an auto-highway mode. We will still have to drive around town for a while after that, but eventually more and more scenarios will be supported and we won't have to do much manually at all.

 

[Megalodon]

BeauMK[/url]"q1fe0xg]Still, some parts of driving, like interstates, are actually pretty simple. I would love to be able to turn control over to the computer when I have to cover 200 miles of interstate. I'll bet that's what we see first, luxury cars that have an auto-highway mode. We will still have to drive around town for a while after that, but eventually more and more scenarios will be supported and we won't have to do much manually at all.

A lot of commutes are stop and go freeway driving. Highly boring, plenty of time to catch an episode of something. Probably why Google is funding it so heavily.

 

[Boneman]

From the other thread:

Chuckstar[/url]"2u35qim]

Boneman[/url]"2u35qim]

Chuckstar[/url]"2u35qim]

Boneman[/url]"2u35qim]

Alamout[/url]"2u35qim]It doesn't sound like the goal is "self-driving" to the extent that you can take a nap. I suspect it'll be a long time before that's legal--even with self-driving cars, I expect a conscious operator will be required. Robots aren't good at exceptional situations.

They may not be good at exceptional situations, but neither are people. There aren't really exceptional situations that require you to do anything other than see-process-decide-react(turn/stop). There isn't a step along that way that robots aren't drastically better at. People basically sleep while actively driving, they sure as hell will pass the heck out when cars drive themselves.

Someone at the side of the road is gesticulating wildly because there's a pile-up around the next bend. Right at the bend is a bridge, and you know how bridges ice over first.

There is an accident ahead and the police are waving traffic around it onto the shoulder. Even if you could program an AI to respond to those types of gestures, the hard part is programming an AI to know when to and not to respond. You don't drive on the shoulder just because someone's waving their arms in a certain way. You do it only if the situation warrants it.

Something small, but sharp falls off the truck in front of you. You swerve to avoid shredding your tires. An AI never sees it.

There's plenty of situations an AI will simply fail to react to that humans wouldn't really think twice about.

EDIT: The one I really should have thought of: road flooding. It's really hard to tell the difference in some situations between a wide, but shallow, puddle in the road and a flooding. The way humans tell the difference is that we look at the entire landscape and try to figure out if it looks like the landscape shape would result in deep water there or not . And, btw, humans even get this wrong pretty frequently. AIs are not going to be good at this.

Most people aren't going to pay one bit of attention to the wacko on the side of the road waving their hands. The computer will notice the ice from the traction control, probably immediately, or maybe before you hit it through front-mounted sensors.

The car can see the police and say, hey, dude, in the driver's seat, wake the fuck up, I don't know what's up here. Your turn.

You're just stating "an AI never sees it." Based on what? Something that is below the resolution of the scanners is likely to be missed by a person anyway. Sure, maybe you see it, but Johnny-Im-texting-this-hot-gurl-while-driving-down-the-highway isn't going to. And oh no, a flat tire. Pull over and change it.

Regarding road flooding, yeah, the computer isn't going to say, "well, fuck, it, lets give this a try." It's going to stop, and say hey you, driver, I didn't want to flood your car, so I figured I'd let you handle this.

To enable you to take a nap, it just needs to make some sort of sound when attention is required and pull over/stop until it is provided.

I don't understand why you're so dismissive of it with hand-wavy assertions. The Google car would appear to be able to handle all of the situations you proposed without issue. Actions requiring an instantaneous response, the currently implemented tech is probably already better at it than you by virtue of its infinite attention span, 360 view, and faster reaction times. For everything else? Pull over, stop, and wait for human control is generally an acceptable response. The tech to deal with those situations is already in existence, on the road, driving around in Google and (I think) Carnegie Mellon cars.

As of a year ago, the Google car still was not able to drive on snow nor was it capable of dealing with something as simple as construction detour.

Have you never had a long highway commute? Are you just not getting it? How can you not see the utility of it? IT DOESN'T HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF EVERYTHING FOR YOU 100%. It just has to safely hand off control. "Alerting human to the issue and ensuring control is safely handed to human" is handling it. And they said they required the person to take control in those situations, but I don't recall it saying its because the system can't handle it. I'm sure they've got a lot of testing they want to do before they let loose their cars in high-risk situations like residential areas and on snow. Doesn't mean the car can't do it, it's just policy not to let it.

The article posted in the other thread said the guy's hands were on the wheel for only 14 minutes of his one hour commute. If I only had to be actively engaged for 25% of my two hour commute it would be a fucking godsend. Ok, sure I couldn't got into deep REM sleep in the current Google car iteration, but so long as the car is programmed to safely hand over control when it encounters a situation it can't handle, a little nap wouldn't hurt. hell even just being able to fart around on my phone would be pretty awesome. Which most people do on the road already.

I'm sure we're a long way from a car with a "layout in backseat and start counting sheep" mode, but for many people with a lot of highway driving on their commutes, the current version of Google Chauffeur would be simply amazing.

 

[LordFrith]

Looking ahead 50 years...

Will self-driving cars cause more urban sprawl, or less?

- If living without a car but getting anywhere in a city or near-urban area is quick and simple because I have my schedule linked to the cloud and cars simply show up when I'm walking outside, I may have more incentive to be in a city-like area.

- If I can get into my car and watch TV or sleep for an hour or two while my car travels 150mph to work, I could live in Sioux Falls, SD, while working in Kansas city.

This would also make job location less problematic.


Other things -- would long-haul truckers still have jobs at all in 20 years? If I can put a fleet on the road to do major movement between areas that are only moving material, why would I bother putting trained humans in them?

 

[Schizoid]

How many jobs 50 years hence will require your physical presence? Otherwise I think you would see a string of bedroom communities alongside the 150 mph highways, much like towns used to spring up along railroads.

Long-haul trucking seems like a perfect fit for autonomous vehicles. There is a shortage of drivers, and the trucks move from warehouse to warehouse over interstate highways, following the same routes.

 

[MilleniX]

And when there's construction along one of the regularly used routes, there's commercial incentive to have the users fund mapping/telemetry of the detour routes, so that vehicles can still get through.

 

[Zich]

Another potential positive coming out of this is the obsolescence of parking lots. If your car can drop you off and then go somewhere out of the way (like a storage facility that is optimized for space since it doesn't need human access), we can reclaim the absurd amount of space wasted on parking lots.

 

[redleader]

Zich[/url]":325dzoxc]Another potential positive coming out of this is the obsolescence of parking lots. If your car can drop you off and then go somewhere out of the way (like a storage facility that is optimized for space since it doesn't need human access), we can reclaim the absurd amount of space wasted on parking lots.

Yeah, one often overlooked advantage of this is how you can replan cities. Without needing to actually park a car at a destination, you can make cities a LOT more dense for a given cost (in both money and area). Since people in cities are much more productive (and generally productivity rises with density), the economic implications are potentially huge both because more people can afford to live in highly productive cities and it becomes more efficient to commute into them.

 

[Alamout]

You can pretty much do that already, with mass transit instead of self-driving cars. In fact you can do it much better: no matter how good self-driving cars get, they won't be able to match the passenger density of a train.

The re-planning question is much more a political problem than a technological one.

That said, self-driving cars might change the politics involved to some extent.

 

[MilleniX]

The urban replanning part will probably happen progressively and organically anyway. Once self-driving cars make any market penetration at all, parking providers will start offering discounts for self-parked vehicles with automatic payment, due to lower labor costs. The fraction of space those things occupy will increase as prevalence of users increases, until there's actually a substantial density advantage over existing staff-operated parking garages. Once we hit that point, more forward-looking cities will be able to ratchet down the demands for parking plans associated with new development, and garage operators will start converting some existing facilities entirely and shutting down others that are no longer useful. I do wonder what we'll do with all those purpose-built underground spaces as the business atmosphere shifts. Perhaps personal storage units, displacing some portion of that land-usage above ground?

 

[Alamout]

That process would take many decades to happen organically--longer than self-driving cars will exist, perhaps. Unless we develop revolutionary advances in both the cost and time of construction projects. Societies and governments need to cause this amount of change--markets aren't going to do it on their own, not at a useful timescale.

 

[BitPoet]

BeauMK[/url]":17cap6nz]

Deus Casus[/url]":17cap6nz]

BitPoet[/url]":17cap6nz]Assuming we can get "good enough" self driving cars...

Why bother to own one? Wouldn't calling up zipcar (or whatever the equivelant is) and telling it to pick you up at X place at Y time to go to Z, and have an available car nearby come pick you up, make much more sense?

It'd sure as hell cost less for a majority of commuters, I'm sure.

If we get to that point I would love to not own a car. Hell you could even set up 2 tiers of service where the first tier will pick you up and take you right to your destination and the second tier will stop and get others along the way. The benefits would be the second option would cost less.

Taxis, but with no driver to make sure nobody pees on anything... I'm not sure I like this idea. I will continue to own my autobot, thanks.

Interior video. Owning your own car is still fine, but it's expensive, and trends among the 20-something generation is distinctly away from owning cars (or even having drivers licenses)

 

[Versa]

Looking forward, self driving cars while having many benefits will also cause 1.8 million truckers to lose their job, another million or so taxi drivers, and an unknown number of other fields (fedex, ups, post office). This, combined with other areas of automation, will help cause wide spread unemployment and further funneling the money and power into the hands of the wealthy that can afford these technologies. Separating the haves and have nots. May you live in interesting times.

Of course, the standard, "well in the past people have just found different jobs to work", contingent will trot out that tired old line. Just like the stock market, past business trends do not indicate future business trends.

 

[ChaoticUnreal]

Versa[/url]":yv9pf84f]Looking forward, self driving cars while having many benefits will also cause 1.8 million truckers to lose their job, another million or so taxi drivers, and an unknown number of other fields (fedex, ups, post office). This, combined with other areas of automation, will help cause wide spread unemployment and further funneling the money and power into the hands of the wealthy that can afford these technologies. Separating the haves and have nots. May you live in interesting times.

Of course, the standard, "well in the past people have just found different jobs to work", contingent will trot out that tired old line. Just like the stock market, past business trends do not indicate future business trends.

I don't think ups/fedex will be able to get rid of all drivers since just getting to the house is only half of the problem. While it would suck for the truckers/taxi drivers I'm willing to accept that as a cost of progress. And in theory removing the drivers should allow prices to come down since they don't have to pay for the driver over and over, but instead have a 1 time upfront cost. But there is almost always job loss with automation. That doesn't mean that automation is bad.

Not to take this too far out of self driving cars but I remember a few years ago at MIT they had a demo of a car that folded up and could stack with similar cars. So the premise being that you got out and "parked" the car and it would go to the end of a line of cars and then when you went to leave the car at the front would just pull forward and unfold and you would just take that one. I think that along with self driving could really replace the need for a car and greatly reduce the parking requirements in bigger cities.

 

[tie]

How are self-driving cars going to affect deliveries? Is the idea that it will come by, text you to come out and pick up your package, wait double-parked to see if you actually come, and then maybe have a conveyor belt inside that moves the package to a pick-up area? This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Has anyone thought it through?

 

[Megalodon]

NHTSA automation levels:

http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+ ... evelopment

Function-specific Automation (Level 1): Automation at this level involves one or more specific control functions. Examples include electronic stability control or pre-charged brakes, where the vehicle automatically assists with braking to enable the driver to regain control of the vehicle or stop faster than possible by acting alone.

Combined Function Automation (Level 2): This level involves automation of at least two primary control functions designed to work in unison to relieve the driver of control of those functions. An example of combined functions enabling a Level 2 system is adaptive cruise control in combination with lane centering.

Limited Self-Driving Automation (Level 3): Vehicles at this level of automation enable the driver to cede full control of all safety-critical functions under certain traffic or environmental conditions and in those conditions to rely heavily on the vehicle to monitor for changes in those conditions requiring transition back to driver control. The driver is expected to be available for occasional control, but with sufficiently comfortable transition time. The Google car is an example of limited self-driving automation.

Full Self-Driving Automation (Level 4): The vehicle is designed to perform all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip. Such a design anticipates that the driver will provide destination or navigation input, but is not expected to be available for control at any time during the trip. This includes both occupied and unoccupied vehicles.

I think there's been confusion over what's being proposed, and shooting down of short term deployment of level 4 when every step is valuable in itself.

 

[LordFrith]

tie[/url]":1ojfmag1]How are self-driving cars going to affect deliveries? Is the idea that it will come by, text you to come out and pick up your package, wait double-parked to see if you actually come, and then maybe have a conveyor belt inside that moves the package to a pick-up area? This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Has anyone thought it through?

End-of-street delivery pods.

 

[NetMasterOC3]

LordFrith[/url]":1y4t7m1s]

tie[/url]":1y4t7m1s]How are self-driving cars going to affect deliveries? Is the idea that it will come by, text you to come out and pick up your package, wait double-parked to see if you actually come, and then maybe have a conveyor belt inside that moves the package to a pick-up area? This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Has anyone thought it through?

End-of-street delivery pods.

Trebuche/catapult in the side of the truck.

The quality of service won't be appreciably different for most people than the current level of service where the FedUPS guy tosses the box with your new computer over the fence/wall/at your door anyway.

 

[nummycakes]

It strikes me that one big impact of the advent of self-driving cars will be fewer lane additions to highways.

Lane capacity at highway speeds is about 2,200 cars/hr, or about 1.6 seconds between fronts of cars, or about 1.5 seconds between bumpers.

That's almost exactly average driver reaction time, which could essentially be eliminated by an automated system. Lane carrying capacity could rise upwards of 5x if traffic consisted only of self-driving cars without changing safety margins.

With very few exceptions, their arrival in numbers will eliminate demand for adding lanes to highways. The entire rationale for highway widening projects should disappear soon after the problem of automated driving across all weather and lighting conditions is solved.

 

[Megalodon]

I'm really, really skeptical that we'd get factors of several improvements in lane throughput.

 

[nummycakes]

65 miles/hr / (5x 2,200/hr) = 9.5m

Your average car is about 4m long, give or take, so that's a bit over a car length between cars, essentially zero reaction time, I don't see why not even if a self-driving car couldn't see more than the back of the car in front of it (or the front of the car behind it - don't want to brake faster than they can). More distant hazards would be detectable as at great distances as humans can if not more so and reacted to (there's no reason to keep cameras at where the eyes of a human driver would be, or just in one spot).

 

[redleader]

Alamout[/url]":1rfm8iz1]You can pretty much do that already, with mass transit instead of self-driving cars.

Yeah but to a much lesser extent given the extreme cost of adding new subways to existing cities and the relatively slow speed of subways given that they have to pause at each station and cannot dynamically reroute but instead follow fixed tracks.

Alamout[/url]":1rfm8iz1]
In fact you can do it much better: no matter how good self-driving cars get, they won't be able to match the passenger density of a train.

In terms of density per sq km, this is probably not true. You cannot fit all that many subway trains into a square km because you can't realistically build all that many subway tubes. Individual trains can hold enormous numbers of people, but the supporting infrastructure needed to operate them probably more than balances out this advantage.

Alamout[/url]":1rfm8iz1]
The re-planning question is much more a political problem than a technological one.

That said, self-driving cars might change the politics involved to some extent.

They massively bend the cost curve, which will inevitably upend the politics.

 

[redleader]

nummycakes[/url]":3aj77yuq]It strikes me that one big impact of the advent of self-driving cars will be fewer lane additions to highways.

Lane capacity at highway speeds is about 2,200 cars/hr, or about 1.6 seconds between fronts of cars, or about 1.5 seconds between bumpers.

That's almost exactly average driver reaction time, which could essentially be eliminated by an automated system. Lane carrying capacity could rise upwards of 5x if traffic consisted only of self-driving cars without changing safety margins.

Indeed:

A 2012 IEEE study estimates that widespread adoption of autonomous-driving technology could increase highway capacity fivefold, simply by packing traffic closer together. Peter Stone, an artificial-intelligence expert at the University of Texas at Austin, thinks that intersecting streams of automated traffic will essentially flow through one another, controlled by a new piece of road infrastructure—the computerized intersection manager. Average trip times across a typical city would be dramatically reduced.

http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2013 ... riving-car

 

[Peldor]

I think a 5x increase would be a scary ride for highway travel unless all the cars are automated, but it's fairly obvious that even a 1.5-2x increase in capacity is a massive change for long-term infrastructure planning. The more interesting question to me is how does capacity rise as the percentage of self-driving cars rises?

 

[ChaoticUnreal]

Peldor[/url]":3lup5xvv]I think a 5x increase would be a scary ride for highway travel unless all the cars are automated, but it's fairly obvious that even a 1.5-2x increase in capacity is a massive change for long-term infrastructure planning. The more interesting question to me is how does capacity rise as the percentage of self-driving cars rises?

I think self driving cars would also cause more use of the highways since if I can read a book while my car drives me to work I'd be less annoyed that it is taking me over an hour to get to work. So I think any gain in efficiency would be countered by more people commuting.

 

[Stainless]

nummycakes[/url]":3f0xw5m0]

65 miles/hr / (5x 2,200/hr) = 9.5m

Your average car is about 4m long, give or take, so that's a bit over a car length between cars, essentially zero reaction time, I don't see why not even if a self-driving car couldn't see more than the back of the car in front of it (or the front of the car behind it - don't want to brake faster than they can). More distant hazards would be detectable as at great distances as humans can if not more so and reacted to (there's no reason to keep cameras at where the eyes of a human driver would be, or just in one spot).

This came up in the previous thread - in short while you could pack cars close(r) together the practical limit might turn out to higher than you'd expect.

A partial list of issues with stacking truly close from memory - Differing software, differing hardware, varying levels of maintenance, networking failures (if cars are networked) and all the random events that go with driving.

Even so I can see good implementations having a big impact on congestion.

What would be interesting is how would automakers deal with fully self driving cars. For example if I'm not behind the wheel, the carefully stratified differences in the current line up for some companies (say BMW) stops making much if any difference. The difference between a 3 & 5 Series BMW I can see - but between a 320, 328 & 335?

 

[Alamout]

redleader[/url]":2nrldj6k]

Alamout[/url]":2nrldj6k]In fact you can do it much better: no matter how good self-driving cars get, they won't be able to match the passenger density of a train.

In terms of density per sq km, this is probably not true. You cannot fit all that many subway trains into a square km because you can't realistically build all that many subway tubes. Individual trains can hold enormous numbers of people, but the supporting infrastructure needed to operate them probably more than balances out this advantage.

I don't follow this at all. You can't fit all that many cars into a square km either, self-driving or not. Even without parking you need to build all of those roads, and even with the projected benefits of automation letting cars move closer together, they aren't going to match the capacity of a modern train or subway (and hey, we and automate those too). Subways routinely handle tens of thousands of passengers per hour.

Let's not forget that self-driving cars require lots of their own supporting infrastructure--much of which has yet to even be developed. Certainly increasing road capacities by 5x is going to have a corresponding effect on road maintenance requirements.

I'm all in favor of self-driving cars and I think they'll be great. But they're not a replacement for a real rapid transit system, and they're certainly not an excuse to ignore rapid transit until some future technology is around.

 

[bflat]

Stainless[/url]":3u2c8ke4]

What would be interesting is how would automakers deal with fully self driving cars. For example if I'm not behind the wheel, the carefully stratified differences in the current line up for some companies (say BMW) stops making much if any difference. The difference between a 3 & 5 Series BMW I can see - but between a 320, 328 & 335?

While the model differences might no longer be engine size, they would still differentiate on minor features. Seat type, heating/cooling, in car AV systems, compters, climate control, look and feel of the interior, etc. The base model could have traditional car seats and a basic stereo. The mid level model would allow the seat to lean back like a recliner and have a drop down entertainment screen. The top end model would have the seat rotate completely around, setting up an in car office or living room type feel.

 

[ChaoticUnreal]

Alamout[/url]":iawo8xtd]

redleader[/url]":iawo8xtd]

Alamout[/url]":iawo8xtd]In fact you can do it much better: no matter how good self-driving cars get, they won't be able to match the passenger density of a train.

In terms of density per sq km, this is probably not true. You cannot fit all that many subway trains into a square km because you can't realistically build all that many subway tubes. Individual trains can hold enormous numbers of people, but the supporting infrastructure needed to operate them probably more than balances out this advantage.

I don't follow this at all. You can't fit all that many cars into a square km either, self-driving or not. Even without parking you need to build all of those roads, and even with the projected benefits of automation letting cars move closer together, they aren't going to match the capacity of a modern train or subway (and hey, we and automate those too). Subways routinely handle tens of thousands of passengers per hour.

Let's not forget that self-driving cars require lots of their own supporting infrastructure--much of which has yet to even be developed. Certainly increasing road capacities by 5x is going to have a corresponding effect on road maintenance requirements.

I'm all in favor of self-driving cars and I think they'll be great. But they're not a replacement for a real rapid transit system, and they're certainly not an excuse to ignore rapid transit until some future technology is around.

The problem is the majority of the people (at least in the US) don't want mass transit they want to own a car so they can just get in and go wherever they want. I would love to have a good mass transit system that I could take to work but right now that isn't possible. I shouldn't say that I can get close to my work if I'm willing to double my commute and I live in one of the more dense areas of the US that has a commuter rail.

 

[Alamout]

The problem is the majority of the people (at least in the US) don't want mass transit they want to own a car so they can just get in and go wherever they want.

Yes, I understand that,

The re-planning question is much more a political problem than a technological one.

We don't need new technological solutions. We need politicians and voters that care about the problem.

 

[nummycakes]

Stainless[/url]":26yusfve]What would be interesting is how would automakers deal with fully self driving cars. For example if I'm not behind the wheel, the carefully stratified differences in the current line up for some companies (say BMW) stops making much if any difference. The difference between a 3 & 5 Series BMW I can see - but between a 320, 328 & 335?

If a car is fully self-driving then a couple of the tropes of current design are no longer necessary: steering wheel, mirrors, forward-facing seats, an engine compartment you can see over (if still ICE), windows. It'll certainly be interesting to see what designers come up with.

 

[Megalodon]

One of the problems with this discussion is people talking about wildly different levels of automation, both from a for and against perspective.

The only option plausibly on the horizon is level 3: optional autopilot on mixed traffic roads. Even mandatory autopilot freeways with computer guided intersections, which is an awesome idea, won't remove the need for manual driving anytime soon. So you need to be able to see over the engine compartment because you need to be able to drive, that's not avoidable. Conversely not being able to handle a dirt road in a blizzard also doesn't matter because that's not the only place it would be valuable.

 

[Frennzy]

One of the problems with this discussion is people talking about wildly different levels of automation, both from a for and against perspective.

Exactly.

"Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

 

[BeauMK]

Megalodon[/url]":4gmvcmgl]One of the problems with this discussion is people talking about wildly different levels of automation, both from a for and against perspective.

The only option plausibly on the horizon is level 3: optional autopilot on mixed traffic roads. Even mandatory autopilot freeways with computer guided intersections, which is an awesome idea, won't remove the need for manual driving anytime soon. So you need to be able to see over the engine compartment because you need to be able to drive, that's not avoidable. Conversely not being able to handle a dirt road in a blizzard also doesn't matter because that's not the only place it would be valuable.

That's why I think for the foreseeable future self-driving cars aren't going to cause any fundamental changes. We will have the same thing we have now, only a little bit more comfortable, more fuel efficient, and much safer. Driving while drunk, while texting, while old, all will become much less of an issue over time as automation improves. That's enough for me.