It's great to hear that companies like Tesla, Mercedes and Audi (and many others!) have been committed in to changing the future of driverless cars and the ever growing progress of technology in this field.
Do you think driverless cars will become the next common means of transport in the near future? Your views are much appreciated :)
Most of the things you have listed are just aids, whereas self driving cars will make many of those things irrelevant (for people) and completely free them from the chore of driving.
What if the cars suffer a DDoS attack??
I've had that happen to my car. Went out one morning and someone had immobilised it by draining the battery.
Blue screen of death on a sharp bend could be a problem too.
Ctrl+Alt+Eject.
"Windows has encountered a problem. Would you like me to upload a photo of your demise for troubleshooting purposes? [Yes/No]"
"Thank you. Unfortunately a solution was not able to be found. This session will now be terminated. Re-incarnation will automatically begin in 3 seconds … … …"
"Open the car door, Cortana"
"I'm afraid I can't do that, David"
"Why the hell not? Can't you see the car is crashed, upside down and we need to get out?"
"The system is currently installing Windows Car OS v25. Your computer will restart several times while Windows upgrade takes place. In the meantime, your friend Jack has invited you to a game of Halo 7 on Xbox Five. Join the game?"
After a few deaths and a few successful legal cases driverless cars will turn into carless car makers.
So we can go back to letting humans kill themselves at a higher rate? In good conditions driverless cars are already safer than humans. In a few more years they will be safer than humans all the time.
Shortly followed by…riderless motorbikes!
Google "DARPA riderless motorbike"
And while you're there, Boston Dynamics for their latest robot walking in the snow which humans also struggle with.
What will they think of next? Pilotless planes? Oh wait…
I assume you mean SAE Level 4 as there are 5 levels (you are currently driving Level 0 or 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car
This will happen, and by 2021. There are billions in R&D pouring into this new frontier and they are surprisingly close with very good level 2 and 3 offerings already on the market.
Level 4 autonomous will also impact the need for car ownership once cars can be summoned on demand (eg Uber trial in Pittsburgh) A big driving factor will be car insurance. Once autonomous is significantly better than human, premiums will skew to the point where people baulk at paying thousands to insure themselves to drive.
Driverless cars are only possible on purpose built driverless roads. Human judgement is needed.
Have you ever driven? Do you know how bad human judgement is? I'd rather be on a road full of robots than of humans. Humans are shit at driving.
I have car, full bike, and rigid truck licences, and a Computer Science Degree with distinction to answer your question.
A machine cannot be programmed with a animals instincts, rationality, logic etc.
Sorry if I am irritating.
A machine cannot be programmed with a animals instincts, rationality, logic etc
For someone with a CS degree this is extremely short-sighted. Reminds me of the infamous quote erroneously attributed to Bill Gates:
“640K of memory ought to be enough for anybody.”
Also - "a machine cannot be programmed with logic". Wha??? That is literally what a machine is programmed with.
And driving hardly requires "animal instincts".
@johnno07:
As a CS undergrad working in the field and a recently minted P plater. Can confirm humans are shit drivers. Can also confirm that AI logic and required associated hardware that can statically perform better than people terms of crash rates has been around for the better part of a decade. They do not need "instincts" when they can calculate in a few milliseconds the exact angle needed to turn to avoid the dumb kid that just ran out onto the road your car is barreling down at 80kph.
The most interesting part of this discussion is the shear numbers you can quote. America alone has nearly 30,000 fatalities on their roads every year of which at the bare minimum 60% are due to human error. Let's say autonomous cars wipe out 50% of that figure, that's 15 thousand people saved every year.
I wouldn't trust a driverless car as they all have Windows.
What if I placed a basket of apples on the center console?
I think we should have more carless drivers.
i think the only way they will become full driverless is if the RTA/Goverment invest in road sensors etc for cars to use to provide better lane navigation and turning. And also red light wireless import to tell the car the lights are changing red etc. it will be quit complex. i think at least another 25 yrs before the rich may have them and 50yrs for main stream.
Drive a Tesla Model S on autopilot and then come back and say that. The car for the most part will drive itself down the road. You are still responsible for the car, but it is remarkable what the car car do.
@thornton82: Agree, people are expecting too much from a car which is still in its early stages of development regarding designs and safety mechanisms. It's a privilege to have technology like this finally emerging from the blueprints and becoming more and more practical. We need to be patient and aware that technology like these can't be perfected overnight, it needs time, work and improvements for many years ahead :)
Tesla will realise full autonomy inside 5 years.
No, realise. As in they will create and implement full autonomy on a road going car, within 5 years. Perhaps sooner. It is possible, but not likely, that the Model 3 will launch with full autonomy. Certainly the Model 3 will have level 3 autonomy. The Model S right now has level 2 autonomy, and it is the best on the market by a mile. It's certainly not perfect, but as soon as you drive one, and let it do the actual driving, you will be amazed. At the moment you are only supposed to use it on Freeways, but it has the capability to work on most roads.
for many years ahead
imagine all the many years of head enjoyed behind the wheel of a self driving car.
Nah it doesn't work on most roads - I own one. Most roads that are narrow and NOT highways, it will fail.
Have you driven one? For a start it can change lanes. Regardless of what it actually does, it is game changing. It is a multitude better than any system from Mercedes (who are the next best).
@thorton82: It can't ONLY change lane if you use the indicator… it's not autopilot nor driverless. If the traffic in one lane stops… you are doing to be stuck there unless you tell it to move.
@fruit: Have you driven one? No.
Yes, no one said it was autonomous. In fact I specifically said it was level 2 and you are responsible for the car. That doesn't change the fact that it is game changing. And it literally is autopilot. That is what it is called. Pilots don't get into a plane, punch in Sydney and sit back. They take off and lock in a heading, with waypoints sometimes. In a Tesla, you get onto a freeway, pull the cruise control level towards you twice, and it locks onto a heading. And if you are in a lane and the traffic stops, the car takes off by itself when the traffic moves.
@thorton82: Pilots don't get into a plane, punch in Sydney and sit back. Yah.. except for landing and takeoff you can..
level 2
LOL
autonomous
autopilot
Keep drinking that coolaid
@fruit: Ok, keep arguing semantics with yourself. I'm stating facts, you are giving your opinion. The fact remains the system is amazing, and it exists right now.
And pilots can auto land on an ILS approach, they do it regularly. But that's not the point. Autopilot in a plane is a heading lock. The systems between the car and the plane are very similar in their functionality. If anything, a car autopilot system is more complex, there are a lot more obstacles and variables on the ground compared to 30,000ft.
https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/deep-learning-sel…
Dirt roads etc are no problem. What companies are saying publicly is years behind the latest developments.
If the traffic stops you won't be stuck there. When the car ahead starts moving again then it will move too.
Keeping the car in the lane and understanding traffic lights are the easy part of autonomous driving which have already been solved. As Thorton mentioned, Teslas already do this.
Teslas don't read traffic lights.
Will we even need cars in the future?
Telecommuting will become ever more common and physical labour ever more automated. The expanding class of unproductive citizens will present an increasing burden on the economy until the dysgenic social policies which sustain them become financially untenable. Democracy will collapse and the technocrats will discharge the remainder of humankind from the machine.
Eventually the genetically engineered posthumans will be plugged into command consoles and all humankind will live in slums outside the walls; if they're allowed to survive at all.
Looks like the illuminati are up and ready to go with the mass depopulation thing :-) Innovative.
Once the technology becomes mature it might not be mainstream but there's still a niche.
Below is a news article which has interesting comments:
http://www.smh.com.au/business/driverless-cars-to-cost-7000-…
Insurance companies would raise prices on manually driven cars. Great for party goers and drunk drivers.
Driverless zones. Driverless cities. Great on freeways.
Need to actually make a cheap electric car before they make driverless, who wants to pay 35k for a Nissan Volt? Cant be that hard
That is cheap. And there is no such car as a Nissan Volt. There are GM Bolts and Volts in the US, but the Volt is not an electric car, it is a hybrid. There is a Nissan Leaf electric car, which is the cheapest model on the market, but it is pretty rubbish, it only has a 160-200km real world range, even on the latest upgraded model.
Or do you think paying $500 for an electric car is a realistic proposition? If so try here
http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__910__908__Cars_Pa…
Actually driver-less decreases the need for them to be cheap, because they can have a much greater utilisation. Hooked up with a service like Uber they could cost a half dozen times what a standard car costs and still have a lower cost per trip. One of the problems with electric cars at the moment is that people who drive short enough distances to make them viable don't drive enough to make the fuel savings worthwhile, typically.
Driverless cars are still quite a few years away. Currently the most advanced cars, such as Google's effort, has problems with mundane traffic scenarios such as:
The other obvious area where driverless cars have a very long way to go is in heavy rain and snow, with the latter being a key feature for hundreds of millions of northern hemisphere drivers.
On ABC radio last week I heard a spokesman for a driverless car tech company saying his children are currently 10 and 12 years old, and he thinks they won't need a driver's license to operate a vehicle in just a few years time. Given the above problems, I think that's rather optimistic.
The technology has evolved rapidly and I think in a decade self driving cars for most scenarios, with manual override, will be affordable for many people in Australia. I just get annoyed when the media hyperventilates with click-bait articles declaring driving dead with tens of millions of jobs worldwide about to be lost.
Tesla, Mercedes and Audi
This will be the greatest change in lifestyle for generations in my view.It won't all happen at once but it will be revolutionary.
Imagine if all that time you spent driving was spent productively, either reading, catching up with friends, work, eating, sleeping etc.
It will change the way we live, in that we may not own cars, we may subscribe to a service. We can ask our car to go get pizza and beer, drop us off and pick us up (eliminating parking issues).
It will mean we can commute more and therefore live further away from work, as we can just jump int he car, eat breakfast, watch the news, do emails, make calls etc. That means we can live further from work.
Unitl recently I drove a manual 4wd and a motorcycle, but I am also ready to go the fully controlled vehicle. I have spent enough time in planes to feel comfortable having no idea what is going on with my vehicle.
Sign me up!
Automated car towing caravan. Ooooh yeah.
Recently there was an accident in the US where the car did not see the huge truck turning in front of it. The driver was decapitated.
The problem I see is that these driverless cars are designed to drive in a convoy. Just slipstreaming behind the car in front.
What happens if the lead car fails to see the truck…
Eventually, all cars on the road will detect each other, even the manually driven ones. They won't be relying on analogue sensors to know that another vehicle is in the way.
Driver speeding, the car was not fully autonomous, driver not paying attention, and no hands on the wheel, watching a dvd! No-one suggested that the tesla was a fully operational autonomous vehicle, in fact the opposite.
This driver has become a significant statistic and will, in his own way, drive forward the advancement of these cars.
I reckon if an individual is uncomfortable or unsure of the technology there will be "drivers" available who assist in driving the car by logging into the data and driving remotely, just like current drone pilots. The drivers may well be based overseas from your vehicle. Your next "Uber driver" may well do it from the comfort of his/her home for a nominal fee in your vehicle. If you want to see the technology in action look at fpv drone freestyle. The pilots are not in the vehicles yet manage to control them remotely in 3d through obstacles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRmlX6rrs2w
In Victoria we have a "toward zero" policy for road deaths. This years toll is well above last year even though the cars keep getting safer. The variable is the driver (and crap roads).
There is little impediment to this happening soon. Good luck getting insurance when insurers do the numbers and work out that the new tech is much safer.
Elon says we'll have it by Q4 2017. We'll double or triple that to take into account how Elon likes to schedule under the assumption nothing goes wrong and everyone works as hard as him, we'll have it in around 3-5 years. Which might be possible given the rate at which machine learning is being researched and utilised by companies everywhere.
When full autonomy becomes ubiquitous, the perks would be amazing. It would help eliminate the need for parking lots which have become massive craters in cities and given that everything is coming online nowadays, it's possible for traffic congestion to be reduced by a system managing the routes of every car in the network.
Deep respect to Tesla for starting as a joke mocked by the the incumbents of the automobile industry only to have them watch Tesla grow into a respectable company offering the best EV and autopilot currently commercially available and now they're forced to play catch up.
I have 2 children now with oldest turning 3. I'm fairly hopeful that they won't ever learn to drive. This has got to be the technology of the future I'm most excited about and truly feel it isn't that far off. I would hope to be one of the earlier adopters - not bleeding edge, but once there is one on every street, I'll be in.
Can't wait for when I can call my driverless car to come and pick me up.
Driverless cars are the future, but I'm surprised by the number of responses predicting mass adoption in 5-10 years. Bill Gates said earlier this year in an interview that it is 'certainly more than 15 years off' before a meaningful percentage of cars will be driverless cars. He suggests the question of legal liability will be a hurdle, which seems to make sense to me. Driverless AI may hit and kill a person, but you can't exactly haul them before the courts and jail them.
We'll may see driverless cars pretty soon, but the tricky issues of legal liability, political issues, etc indicates to me that it will be at least a few decades before driverless cars will be mainstream.
It's not actually all that different from the manufacturer of any other product or industrial machinery having liability. All things that actually exist. A lot of people will take a good deal of time to be comfortable, but given the amount they've progressed in the last 5 years, I'd say in 15 years they will be quite common. In 5-10 years they will still be rare, but not hard to find. Given some people seem to be comfortable treating Tesla's as if they were automated (and they clearly are not), something actually automated stands a good chance of taking off quickly, especially with the 'Uber' generation.
Honestly I have been surprised at how easily Tesla / Google etc have managed to get governments to fall over themselves to allow their semi-autonomous cars rather than block them.
Companies can and are hauled before courts when their systems kill people. You can't jail them, but that isn't really the point. The question really comes down to, with the accidents, are they still safer than human drivers, and the answer will be easily yes. Not everyone is going to be willing to give up control though, not for a long time.
What does Bill Gates know? He has no involvement in autonomous cars whatsoever. The only people worth listening to on the subject are Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Ziv Aviram. These are the people in the know. Tesla looks like it is planning to Launch the model 3 with at least level 3 autonomy. That is 400,000 orders without anyone driving the car, so I guess you could call that mass adoption. Tesla thinks they will be making 500k cars a year in the next few years.
Driverless car is good. One more spare seat.
a 5 seat car is still going to be a 5 seat car
*taxi
Given the need for travel (for work) is drastically reducing, hopefully too is the need for commuting. I wonder how this will effect the autonomous vehicle industry over the next 10 years. 10 years ago we didn't have iPhones or Netflix streaming. Think of what we'll have in another 10.
who will the police issue the speeding ticket to, for 1 kph over the limit
Is it possible to hack the driving software so that it drives the people onboard off a cliff?
I wouldn't be surprised if the roads become DRM'ed and only cars with unhacked firmware will be able to go on it.
What is more worrying, hacked software or an iced up psychotic no-hoper in control of a vehicle? We currently have lots of the latter, but very little of the former. It has been possible to hack Chryslers for some time. Why would you do it?
Driverless vehicle are bound to happen. Uber already started rolling out driverless Volvo SUVs. While making commercial vehicles driverless will take jobs away from humans, it will at least reduce the number of accidents in the future. I think we still have a long way to reach that point where we have actual driverless vehicles roaming around city streets but hopefully it happens soon. PS: I've designed a few autonomous vehicles at uni and plan to get a job in the related field when graduate this year.
I'm sure they will come in eventually but 5-10 years seems unrealistic. There would need to be a high level of regulation and whilst companies like Tesla and Google have been making great strides but large scale adoption is untested. Pricing will be an issue, IT security and not to mention how software updates/obsolescence is handled. I'm curious to see how this plays out but would rather wait until sufficient testing and precautions are in place. I'm much more keen to see if electric cars can be sustainable in Australia.
I live in Victoria. Our electricity is largely generated by brown coal. An electric vehicle merely has its carbon emitted further away than a tailpipe. Electric vehicles will make more sense when we generate more renewables.
An electric motor can have 80-90% efficiency. Petrol engine I think is around 30%.
Did you factor in efficiency of the coal generation plant and the transmission, conversion and storage efficiency?
Love to see those numbers and how they stack up. I have no links but my understanding is that there is little if any difference once you work out efficiency of burning a lump of brown coal, transmitting it 100km's, transferring it to batteries, storing it and releasing it back to the motors.
There is a reason why this stuff is not a "no brainer, why haven't we done it earlier".
It needs to start somewhere and the source of our electricity is the government's problem. Unfortunately the govt is not exactly pro environmentally friendly.
Others like myself will charge their car via solar power at home, and as the govt brings in more cleaner energy then things will change. We can only do our part and things will fall in place.
@skyva: Even allowing for transmission loss and battery efficiency, electric cars still come out ahead on emissions. Not to mention the fact that it's emissions further away from where people are breathing, which is arguably much more important than carbon emissions.
And then we go to 'largely' generated by brown coal… so 90%? Well that's another 10% better for the electric car. 80%? You see where this is going. Also a car makes a decent battery to help home solar make more financial sense.
The reason why we haven't done it earlier is that electric cars still cost alot, and people don't drive enough for it to make financial sense. It's not an emissions reason, it's an economic one, which trumps all other reason. It's why you see many more Prius's as taxis than in private hands, they just don't make financial sense unless you travel enough for the fuel savings to add up.
Electric cars also are much simpler and have fewer moving parts than their counterparts, so I'd expect eventually to find them being cheaper, in maybe 10 - 20 years.
@Bargs:
"Even allowing for transmission loss and battery efficiency, electric cars still come out ahead on emissions."
Nope:
http://theconversation.com/teslas-in-victoria-arent-greener-…
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/electric-cars-make-more-em…
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/teslas-cars-are-only-as-green-…
"Not to mention the fact that it's emissions further away from where people are breathing, which is arguably much more important than carbon emissions." Yes, lets push the environmental issue onto others. I would argue the opposite. It is better for the polluter to experience the pollution as it might just make them stop and think about what they are doing. Would you reduce your household waste if the government stopped collecting garbage every week? Hell yes.
"Electric cars also are much simpler and have fewer moving parts than their counterparts, so I'd expect eventually to find them being cheaper, in maybe 10 - 20 years." Hmmm, not sure about that, got a link or reference? On a parts count maybe, but each driven wheel on an electric vehicle has a motor, and a tank of fuel is pretty simple compared to a charging port, massive array of individually controlled and wired batteries, etc, and the battery pack may well be junked in 5-10 years.
The issue is that these matters are not as simple as people think and when they do the numbers they find it doesn't always work out how they want it. Saying that we need to install solar to charge our cars is not the complete answer as we already use all our solar so putting our solar into cars merely means the home uses more grid electricity.
If the economics were in favour of electric cars in Victoria, people would be rushing en masse, to save money. If electric cars were cheaper to make and run they would be cheaper to buy, but they are not and mainstream makers cannot make them for the price people will pay given the benefit to the end user.
I am all for electric vehicles but we need to invest wisely, and make the correct decisions based on fact.
@skyva:
Sorry, you seem to have missed my point, which was that it doesn't make financial sense. Because you're saying the same thing.
"It is better for the polluter to experience the pollution as it might just make them stop and think about what they are doing."
The polluter isn't the one experiencing the pollution though, it's the pedestrians in the cities that are experiencing it, not the person behind the wheel. The 'problem' with carcinogens is that the effect isn't instant. If people were dropping dead in minutes you'd see a change of behavior pretty quickly, but because the effect is delayed it doesn't have a behaviour changing effect.
But still, I think there's too heavy of a focus on 'carbon' emissions, and not enough focus on air quality. Reducing tailpipe pollutant emissions has human health benefits and should lower the cost of the health system in years to come.
Also. Jesus is Victoria a world leader in being terrible with emissions. Luckily Victoria isn't the world or the planet would be in real trouble. A side effect of politics being played with lives it seems.
"Electric cars also are much simpler and have fewer moving parts than their counterparts, so I'd expect eventually to find them being cheaper, in maybe 10 - 20 years." Hmmm, not sure about that, got a link or reference? On a parts count maybe, but each driven wheel on an electric vehicle has a motor, and a tank of fuel is pretty simple compared to a charging port, massive array of individually controlled and wired batteries, etc, and the battery pack may well be junked in 5-10 years."
You misunderstand how electric cars work. While each wheel 'could' have a motor in theory, in a Tesla for instance there's only 1-2 motors depending on the model. They're that much simpler they actually predate internal combustion engine powered cars. There's just far fewer moving parts. The reason for their failure to now is that batteries just don't have the same energy density as gasoline and recharging obviously takes a lot longer than filling at tank. The cost is a matter of scale, hundreds of millions compared with tens of thousands is just no contest. There's an enormous amount of 'infrastructure' within a car supporting the engine + tank of gas, you don't just put those two together and get a working vehicle. But you could theoretically put a battery and an electric motor together and get a working vehicle.
There's very brief assessment from a government site:
https://avt.inl.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/fsev/compare.pdf
Also with regards to power generation for an electric car, one of the reasons the Chevy Volt uses the type of hybrid it does (basically a generator + electric motor) is because it's much simpler. Unlike the Prius (which is enormously complex), it's much simpler to have an generator + electric motor than it is to have either a ICE or ICE + electric motor combo.
Running a generator at fixed RPM means many fewer and simpler parts, as well as greater efficiency since you can tune to run at a consistent RPM, something you can't do in a standard car where the engine has to drive the wheels. So even just powering an hybrid car from the same means as you power any other car, you still gain efficiency.
End of racial/sexist stereo types for bad drivers. People will judge you based on the firmware version.
haha brilliant. Catapult the android/iphone wars onto the next platform!
I am surprised people here would trust their childrens lives to a computer program, to judge an almost infinite number of complex scenarios that we have to judge ourselves on the roads.
Darwin Award candidates.
You might be surprised at the number of times commercial jets land without pilot intervention, called autoland. Of course pilots like to land their own plane but if the conditions are such that the pilot cannot do it, they switch it to autoland. That is, when a pilot cannot do the job well they give the task to a computer.
SO,ummm, better stay off planes as well.
As opposed to trusting Hoons or trusting drunken idiots on the road who care little for others? If the tech is there and everyone crosses over, there WILL be a lot less road deaths.
They're already statistically much safer than the average driver, and they're not even fully automated yet.
Tesla's aren't all that great in the automation stakes, but if you have a look at the research Google has been doing, their cars are picking up more complexity than most humans are capable of already.
Yes this will be here soon atleast in US
beware all UBERrrr drivers you are helping UBERrr build their database and when this technology comes über will use this car for their business
Has been one proven death of a guy driving a Tesla car on auto mode only cos he had it all on video. Supposedly other incidents are being investigated. Car companies think that Tesla has released the tech too early, but Tesla doesnt think so. Should we be the guinea pigs for this tech umm NO. Needs to be developed more to iron out the kinks and improve on the programming. Like the guy that died they realised he died cos he hit a truck that had some bit jutting out of it and the program wasnt designed to pick up on that sort of vehicle and supposedly the sun was shining off of it and that was a factor as well etc etc. The situation was outside of the programming parameters, but it shouldn't be they should have accounted for all situations before releasing technology like that that could cause the death of somebody and possibly others. Its too early for this technology to be released imo
Tesla doesn't have an auto mode. It's just a fancy cruise control. The same thing happened when cruise control came out, dealers oversold it and accidents were had. Tesla's technology requires you to keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention. The idiot that died (he wasn't filming it by the way, he was WATCHING a movie!). The reason this has come out is because Tesla release the information to the market that the 'autopilot' feature was on, and why it didn't detect the tractor-trailer (that was totally at fault by the way - the issue with the Tesla wasn't that the autopilot was at fault, it was that it didn't take any collision avoidance action such as braking). People of course, can and do frequently avoid accidents where had they had the accident, they would not have been at fault. In this case, the driver wasn't paying attention, they should have been. Tesla's automation is 2 on a scale to 4 where 4 is fully automated. They don't have enough hardware to do it properly without short-cutting it with software, something which they have been remarkably good at mind.
There's a dozen other videos of the autopilot feature avoiding accidents, including one by the guy that ended up dying when it didn't avoid that one.
Tesla's real problem is they named the feature 'autopilot'. It is not. It's only half way there.
Yeah I know it's not a fully automated vehicle, it's an automatic driver assist feature. Also regarding the guy watching a film when he died there were conflicting reports on that, some people said there was definitely no movie playing at all and others said there was. People were questioning the claim that the driver was actually watching a movie when he died. Sounds a bit suss to me. Anyway personally I wouldn't want to be the guinea pig for perfecting the tech for auto driver assist/driver less cars, let somebody else do it.
I think it's safe to say with grammar and expression like that, there isn't a high likelihood that you can afford a Tesla, so you can rest easy.
Tesla pointed out it's impossible to watch a movie on their system while in motion (for obvious safety reasons). The guy that hit him said it was on a portable player.
When neither the automated system nor the driver attempts to apply the brake, it's safe to say the driver was distracted.
@thorton82: Its called conversational informal English that I adopt sometimes on casual forums such as these. I thought I was conversing in a friendly environment and I generally enjoy using this amazing website, although occasionally you are presented with disappointing individuals such as yourself. Sux but it happens I guess. Dont speak to me again
I fully support driverless cars ASAP, although if someone could invent a cure for motion sickness at the same time that'd be great. If I'm not the one driving I always feel sick because the road isn't interesting enough to keep on looking at which is the only thing that stops me from being sick.
No more $50 CBD parking for the day. Your car will drive itself home or earn you money 'UBERING' and then come pick you up :) Time to divest from park houses :)
Can't wait till this comes out so I can catch Pokemon while it drives around for me.
This is a really interesting area and one with a long transition period. I think the real revolution will come when our autonomous vehicles can communicate with each other and with infrastructure. This is when you will see synergy across road networks, reduction in road toll etc. This is not an easy task - how do you make motorbikes, bicycles, pedestrians, owners of classic cars, part of a connected road network that can operate together seamlessly? While we still have humans making crazy decisions on the roads, we will still have chaos and accidents.
I think there will be changes around how we pay to use the road network. I predict we will still own our cars (unless company's become very flexible with start and end times, otherwise there would need to be a large fleet of autonomous vehicles to move commuters during peak hours, and then a large number of these vehicles would be under-utilised for the remaining time). I think autonomous vehicles will increase demand on the road network (why pay parking in the CBD when I can send my car home, then it can pick my kids up from school etc - multiplying the number of trips I would ordinarily make by constantly returning home to park). Peak hour traffic will flow both directions as cars drop off and return home, and vice-versa. I wouldn't be surprised if the government looks at a per/km charge to discourage this type of behaviour.
Another interesting point is the amount of data and information autonomous and connected vehicles will need to communicate. Presumably governments will take ownership of this data (although they have been a bit slow on the uptake so far). If there is a per/km charge, cars will need to be tracked. Even if there isn't such a charge, cars will still be easily tracked through the network via a number of data sources. Presumably an autonomous vehicle will have some type of identifier?? Imagine the reaction when commuters find out they could potentially be tracked through the network - it will be Census 2.0.
Governments really need to get in front of these changes to work out what outcomes they want for road users. If they leave it to car manufacturers with vested interests to pioneer, the outcomes might not be great for everyone. Exciting times.
I'm interested to see how Geohotz will be able to push out a product for $1000 that will drive any car (any car that meets the requirement). If he rolls them out and it meets all standards then I will buy getting one for my in laws
Price won't matter since a lot of ozbargain members seem to drive Audis, Mercs and BMWs.
No. Some of my reasons:
Historically you can see a lot of good inventions that are not in affordable cars. Eg. hybrid electric cars, regenerative braking, solar panel roofs, Auto Emergency Braking, tyre pressure monitors, Electonic Stability Control, LED headlights, Laser headlights, Infra Red/night vision, driver blind spot warning, lane keeping assist, dash cam, daytime running lights, self dimming high beams, rain sensing wipers, reversing camera, driver fatigue warning, mobile phone prevention, Heads Up Display, Satellite Navigation combined with RDS (or internet) traffic updates, etc.
Some examples of competing and more cost effect transport that will be first: Subways, above road trains/buses, rideshare, Uber, the future cheapo Taxi's, Telecommuting, redesign of town planning, driverless Taxi's, driverless car share, driverless rental cars, driverless Uber, bicycles, electric bicycles, driverless electric bicycles, driverless recument trikes, driverless motorcycles, driverless Segways.
The big reason it won't be common is that many people have a fearful psychology which makes it difficult to feel safe. Think of people with phobias such as fear of flying aeroplanes, hot air balloons, elevators, heights. Much of it is a fear of death and it will be challenging to educate a large segment of society to trust in a computer programmer.