no worse

So if it's a tree, or a pedestrian or an old vehicle the situation is no worse than today.

Currently if any of those things are around a blind corner, you run into them. Assuming you can't stop in time or go around them.

With a smart car, you still run into them.

Of course the smart car might have radar and laser sensors, and hit the brakes a lot faster than you would have done. So maybe you run into them at a lower speed.

Overall though, you've gained the ability to not run into a smart enabled car around that blind corner, and maybe reduce the severity of running into other objects. You're definitely no worse off than before though.

Right. Why were they "merely speeding around the curve" to begin with?

"If you can't stop in time or go around them then you are driving *TOO FAST* for the circumstances (NB this is not the same as speeding because you could be below the limit but on a slippery road or in situations where visibility is reduced)"

Exactly. Why I slammed this example was because the way this was presented was such that it's likely that it'd give a false sense of security. Why drive slowly? I've got Fog Lights! Why be careful about turns with icy roads? I've got All Wheel Drive with Traction Control! Why take this freeway onramp slowly? I've got VW-Branded Computing! The article already demonstrated a scary amount of undeserved trust, with drivers reading newspapers.

I suppose it's all moot, and hopefully we'll get something that is actually beneficial, and therefore, won't be all attention-getting and thus never covered; to silently assist, not replace. No batmobile-esque autopilot, just sensors that might slow down the car in dangerous curves, prime the brakes and downshift to react quicker if something's ahead, or maybe assist the air bag AI to reduce false positives and false negatives.

Or, knowing car manufacturers, a hidden phone-home to alert the local dealer to pester you to come in for some expensive needed maintenance.

re: Huhnke envisioned a blind curve...

"Lastly how is a long stretch of open road supposed to be annoying? That's the perfect time to go really, really fast..."

Damn' right, man. Time to put the top down, crank up the stereo, and put the pedal to the metal.

Lowest common denominator

"Lastly how is a long stretch of open road supposed to be annoying? That's the perfect time to go really, really fast."

The thoughts of an individualist - they'll get you for that! One place where something like this could work well would be traffic jams; traffic might actually flow better with machines paying attention than it ever would with idiots checking on social networking sites rather than driving. Problem: somebody in government decides they haven't had a power fix in too long and changes the carbon allowance or whatever it is, and the next thing you know, the cars don't move as well as they once did.

The other problem: the "I'm scared" button on the dashboard that slows the car by 20% or whatever would be deemed safe. It would get added, perhaps for good reason. But the people who respond well to OnStar adds will never let go of the damn thing and completely louse up traffic.

It will be illegal to pass, of course, so you get to sit behind the guy who is either afraid to travel at reasonable speed OR thinks he's better than everyone else and knows that they should be spending more time in traffic in the name of safety and saving the planet. The fact that it wastes lots of fuel with all the cars idling for no reason is unimportant to him.

@Mike Flugennock

Herr Flugennock

Your individualist tendencies have been noted by the team and will be dealt with an an appropriate manner.

The VW Driver Profiling Safety Team.

"Knowing you better than you know yourself for your own safety."

/rimshot

"And by that stage, collision avoidance had better be advanced enough, because the super-fast cars will need some way to avoid the remainder of the population who's fallen back to using horses and fucking bulls to do their towing."

You're suggesting we'll be fucking bulls to do our towing?

EXTREME PORNTHOUGHT!

Lock that man up, then burn him!

@Nexox Enigma

Did you just say what I think you said? Essentially "peak oil is never going to happen?" That's the dumbest damned thing I have ever heard. Where exactly do you think it comes from? God makes it and puts it in the ground for good little Texans to find?

There may be debate on the WHEN peak oil will happen, (quite a few believe we have already hit it,) but it is 100% inevitable. Given that, it makes more sense to me to invest in methods of propelling our cars without requiring portable chemical fuels. “The Grid” isn’t a magical source of energy, but there is a damned sight more coal than there is Oil left, and if we really get desperate there is always solar, wind and even wood burning..

If, as a society, we are going to invest in essentially ripping up our transportation infrastructure to install a bunch of sensors, guides, beacons and other goodies to allow vehicles to drive autonomously, we should seriously consider installing some sort of track system similar to light rail transit by which vehicles can continuously draw energy from the grid while driving.

There has to be a way to accomplish this without requiring either rails or overhead power lines. Preferably one that isn’t as ridiculously inefficient as inductive charging. I can think of a few ideas right off the top of my head, though they would need refinement. IF we start installing that sort of infrastructure now, alongside the beacons and sensors and whatnot, then I think we will be far further along preparing for the future than simply believing God Provideth Our Oil (or other such abiogenic nonsense) and pretending the looming energy crisis doesn’t exist.

What matters is collectively coming to a few agreements.

First: there is a looming energy crisis; this involves telling the oil companies to shut the fuck up and stay out of the negotiations for once.

Second: Even if the energy crisis is a ways off, as a society we can’t afford to keep burning our precious fossil fuels for personal transport. We need those hydrocarbons for plastics and other petrochemical industries we don’t have the technology to replace with alternates yet.

Third: We need to agree on standards. Standards for energy transfer to vehicles, standards for the beacons and sensors required to have pilotless aircraft, driverless cars and all other such things. There are some problems that transcend national borders, and the petty bickering is delaying the research and implementation which will do nothing but drive up the TCO.

Lastly: We need to come up with a way to address privacy concerns inherent in a society where all movement by all citizens is tracked. If your driverless car is responding to beacons on the road and has an array of sensors of it’s on, it is only a matter of time before someone starts recording the information collected and transmitting it centrally. We need to look at these issues BEFORE they become a problem, and legislate accordingly. (Otherwise you get some uppity island government telling everyone their privacy laws are invalid and spying on all of its citizens even whilst it is being sued and sanctioned for its misdeeds. Ooops…)

I am sorry, but when it comes to something as important to the lives of so many as personal transportation, the issues aren’t simple. They are complex and integrated into issues from the personal to the international. As a global society we need to grow the fuck up, stop it will the selfish reactionary bullshit and start actually PLANNING for the future.

Be PROactive rather than REactive; if you head of as many problems as you can before they arrive, that leaves you more time and resources to deal with the ones you didn’t expect and couldn’t have anticipated.

It’s a bloody shame that personal greed is always standing in the way. Someone stop the world: I want off.

FAIL

You'd rather trust the car to some software program developed by the lowest bidding software body shop in whatever is the cheapest labour cost country at the time? Because that's who will be designing, writing and testing the software when it gets to the commercialisation stage.

I've spent many years in the software industry and even if they chose the highest bidder in the most expensive country, I still wouldn't trust it, because I know that testing is the area that corners are cut. Why do you think every software EULA explicitly denies all liability for injury or loss (life, money etc).

@AC

Um...have you MET any actual homo sapiens sapiens? By and large, not the most alert, proactive or cautious bunch. Pretty much regulated by instinct, immediate desires/greed and distracted by shiny things.

Sure, a computer might screw up every now and again, and someone will die. Maybe even a few someones. A patch will be issued, we’ll learn a few things and our technology will advance. The point is that when you compare the operational record of software to that of wetware, I would be willing to bet my life and that of my loved ones on the fact that overall the number of collisions will decrease. Not only that, but the collisions that do occur will be far less deadly.

Just because a software based transportation system won’t be perfect doesn’t mean it won’t be a significant improvement over a wetware based one. If we can get the accident rate of automotive transportation down to even that of the airline industry, it would be a spectacular improvement.

What is it with commenters on this site? “If the solution proposed isn’t absolutely perfect, then bin it because WE’RE TERRIFIED OF ANY CHANGE.” You know what, I’m a bloody luddite. I abhor change in most forms unless there is a damned good reason for it. I don’t believe in the concept that “because it’s new” is a valid reason for ANYTHING.

Taking that into consideration, I STILL think that software is superior to wetware for most tasks. It’s far more predictable and it doesn’t get distracted. I mean, $deity man! They’ve got airplanes now that can do mid-air refuelling entirely autonomously. Do you have ANY COMPREHENSION of how unbelievably difficult that is? Automated carrier landings in rough seas. All this and more is possible, and you are worried that the computer is going to screw up something as simple as collision avoidance on a hiway? Please.

The failure rates of even the beta level equipment would probably be superior to the most of the arrogant drunken jackasses that crowd the hiways around here. Computers don’t get drunk, tired, impatient, distracted or sleepy. And their reaction time is at least an order of magnitude greater than even the best trained wetware available. You know what else? Computers keep getting faster and more capable all the time. Homo sapiens sapiens, well..

…have you seen Idiocracy?

Tombstone, because software isn't likely to get you there.

Re: FAIL

> "I've spent many years in the software industry and even if they chose the highest bidder in the most expensive country, I still wouldn't trust it, because I know that testing is the area that corners are cut. Why do you think every software EULA explicitly denies all liability for injury or loss (life, money etc)."

You don't generally get to do that in safety critical systems. If you're making fire alarms, life support systems, avionics or (eventually) car autopilots, if you aren't prepared to stand by the quality of your product, you will either a) be ignored by companies who aren't willing to take the blame for your shitty components killing hundreds of people or b) be unable to sell it in the first place without breaking a whole bunch of laws.

A partially automated car network whereby major roads were embedded with guidance and traffic management systems is a much more likely occurrence than VWs pie-in-the-sky dream. Common places to find long, boring journeys and long traffic jams, the benefits of autopiloted cars could be most easily seen with the least investment of effort and in a much more controlled environment with no blind corners or sudden turnings.

Road users could be encouraged to fit autopilots in return for reduced tolls or taxes, or other benefits like dedicated autopilot lanes, etc.

Making a totally general purpose car navigation system is probably an AI-hard problem in any 'legacy' road network that has built on a couple of thousand years worth of farm tracks to produce massively suboptimal routes. I'd be far happier trusting a robot to drive on a multilane trunk road than a twisty back lane, for example.

And this doesn't even begin to consider how loath many people would be to give up car ownership. Still, it got plenty of press attention so I guess it did its job.

Miles

I cover well over 30k miles a year for work and personal, I can tell you now there is no way I could do that with 60HP and stay sane!

Also less BHP does not always mean better efficiency, to cruise at 70MPH in a 60BHP car it will be screaming at 5KRPM, this will actually burn more fuel then a 160BHP car sitting at 1.5KRPM.

60 bhp per tonne would be sufficient?

Whaaaaaaaaaaat? Where did you get that silly idea? Maybe it's a typo and you actually mean 600bhp/tonne? YeeHaa! It's possible to accelerate out of trouble you know - a low power car can be bloody dangerous sometimes.

I can't see why you got downvoted for that post

it seemed sensible.

Except.... What happens when you've got all 850Million cars worldwide automated to the hilt? These autonomous computers use laser scanners, radar, sonar, that sort of thing. There's another order of magnitude increase in complexity required before they'll be able to determine which ranging beams are their own and which are from another car.

Also, for this car-network thing you're talking about all the car manufacturers- and kit car builders and classic car owners- adopting one single common system. This is nigh-on impossible. Even if everything's roughly compatible the manufacturers will be creating their own extensions to the service, which will suck.

Plus I'm not giving anyone the chance to build a remote killswitch into my car. If it's there for the government/police, it's down to the level of any 14 year old script kiddie 10 years later.

I give it 6 months before the first demonstrators on the road start being attacked by GPS jammers/spoofers, laser pens to screw up the rangefinding and so on. 3 years later (if these menaces are ignored by the government), we'll have carbon-composite cars designed to not show up to automated vehicles (say, a matt-black radar absorbant system for the now much easier technology of smuggling- no-one will even know what passed them) and the use of the traffic jam warning system to direct traffic away from politically sensitive (and criminally sensitive) areas.

So C.P. Cosgrove seriously underestimated the level of modern technology. But you underestimated the huge challenges that this technology still has to face before it's anywhere near ready for the mass market.

re: @C.P.Cosgrove

How right you are. I was driving at a moderate speed recently and approaching traffic lights at a pedestrian crossing. The traffic in the oncoming lane was stationary and the lights green for me. Then a couple of people walked straight out between the other cars and into my path.Whilst I'm pretty sure I had time to stop in this case, I'm also sure that the fact that the radar system on the car alarmed when it 'saw' them and the car's brakes were fully on instead perhaps of my taking a split second to realise I needed full braking meant I stopped sooner than otherwise. I have no doubt that if they had stepped out a fraction later or if I had been going faster, the tech might have made the difference between them looking incredibly embarrassed and being hurt. This, I am sure is only the start of the sort of tech assistance that is bound to prove valuable not just to the idiot who wants to drink his Starbucks and read the paper whilst driving but also to the rest of us who do concentrate on the task in hand!

API

It just requires a standard communications API defining and a common communication medium.

How the process and produce the communication contents would be down to each manunfacturer.

The idea that this would be difficult to do seems ludicrous when you're posting on the internet. We managed a worldwide network of disparate machines and different standards, yet you've managed to post, I've managed to read it and now I'm posting in reply. I doubt that we're using the same machine to do that, or even something made by the same manufacturer. In fact we may well be using a completely different communication technology, 3G, wifi, ethernet, etc...

Identifying your own laser would be trivially simple if you encode a small amount of information in it. Ie, tag it using pulse or frequency modulation.

Nor was there any suggestion that every car would have to use this technology. It's a primary requirement that the cars would work in an environment with other vehicles that aren't using this technology.

Of course, cars are perfect...

@AC - if the planners in your location are that incompetent you should replace them.

@Charles 9 - so you drive around in a 4-wheel drive goods vehicle every day, because you need to move a sofa/freezer etc. up a trackless mountain once a year? I hire the capability (with driver, in most cases) when I need it, and take the bus/train the rest of the time. Hardware stores here provide reasonably-priced delivery.

The point about less-urban settings doesn't work... if the area is really that sparsely populated, it's going to take ages for the magic car to reach you from its last drop-off.

The odd thing is, with a bit of reasonable infrastructure planning and public transport, you can achieve now almost exactly the same as VW's future vision, with the exception of paying VW $$$, and with the benefit of onboard P2P social networking. A triumph of marketing.

ha ha

Yeah ok. I'd like to see how that would be implemented/enforced.

Standard whine from blackworx.

Look - cars are, quite simply, the greatest thing that happened to humanity. Cheap, individualised travel, giving freedom to more people than anything else in history. People are no longer limited to small-radius travel, and can choose how far they want to go. A car at the lowest speed-limits generally set (30mph/50kph) can travel more distance in an hour than most people on foot have ever been able to in a day.* That is freedom. And don't forget the death and serious injury toll for those people that did have to walk those distances. People living in mountainous places still die every winter walking from house to house in the same village. Those that don't die are usually saved by being transported to hospital by - you guessed it - a person with a car (since the ambulance can't get up the hill).

* I wonder if there are estimates for the deaths/serious injuries if we were all (as in the current population) on foot/bicycles/horses - a quick Google didn't find anything.