Google promises autonomous cars for all within five years Sergey Brin is promising Google's self-driving cars will be available for everyone within five years, and says that his company's current fleet of vehicles has managed to drive 50,000 miles without humans having to take the wheel. Google has over 300,000 miles of automated-driving testing under its belt already, he said, and …
It's more a question of miles driven. The UK with gas prices at about a weeks wages per liter makes people a bit more thoughtful before they get in the car and drive 100 miles. In the USA with gas priced at McDonald's lunch per tankful in cost keeps people on the road.
Automatic weapons? Anybody that has them usually keeps their mouth shut about it or the FBI, SWAT and a dozen other "official" state security thugs will break in, confiscate the weapons for shipment to the cartel in Mexico, shoot the owner in the head and claim that he made a threatening move. I would make a threatening move if I heard shouting outside my house followed by people smashing in the door at 5am. Somehow, the cops wonder why people present them with so many problems on these raids.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/statistics/releases/reported-road-casualties-gb-main-results-2011/
http://www.nhtsa.gov/PR/NHTSA-05-11
US traffic deaths have dropped by 25% over 5 years - so they were well over 40,000 just a few years ago - there's been a few % reduction in miles driven due to the hike in gas prices. The US vehicle-miles figure is 10x higher than the UK's, but (of course) the huge difference in road types makes a straight comparison problematic.
* Yes, I know you're still using Gopher.
'The US vehicle-miles figure is 10x higher than the UK's, but (of course) the huge difference in road types makes a straight comparison problematic.'
You're right - Imagine what would happen if they had the corners we have in Blighty - It would be like a demolition derby!
I'd also be interested to know what percentage of UK road deaths are caused by American tourists encountering roundabouts..
Upvoted because the four times I've encountered f**ktards going the wrong way around a roundabout while on my motorbike, its been near a airport, and when I flagged the driver down, they were all americans in hire cars.
How the hell you manage to go the wrong way when the approach ducts you into the correct direction I do not know...
I get that sense of pucker now approaching roundabouts near airports...
Not long until there is a whole generation who has never driven a car.
If they work out well safety-wise, manual driving might be forbidden except in emergencies.
No one with driving skills is going to kill motor-racing stone dead rather abruptly!
Top Gear will be nothing like we know it... O.K that might be a good thing.
Where are my car keys? You don't need them Grandad!
As usually, what is dropped out is the paradigm shift. The expected result of this robotization is not lazy driver but a robot taxi. With cars tailored to your momentary needs (single seaters, familly sedans, city cars, roadsters, sermis) coming on demand, at a bargain price, why own a car at all? And then, for cars operating 24/7, the cost of electron-ware is not so important. It goes without saying that in this scheme of things EVs will be preffered.
Roughly my thoughts as well. For me, the interesting thing is that it will take a start-up or a company like Google (no interest in the automotive industry) to make the change.
Once driverless cars are common people in general won't own private cars (except maybe toys for wealthy people). People will instead use automated taxi like services. So we'll end up with lots of black cab like cars on the roads which will be commercial vehicles so will be designed for long lives and high reliability.
In this scenario there will be far fewer cars manufactured per annum to do the same work as the vast majority of a car's time is currently spent doing nothing so it will take far fewer automated cars to replace them. These new cars will be quite utilitarian so it's hard to see where the market for high end motors will be.
The long and the short of it is the current automotive industry is not going to embrace automated motoring.
Totally wrong!
There will be more cars owned cause nobody want to drive in a taxi where some drunk puked up and so on.
Self drive means suddenly people who can't drive will now be able to use a car. Dad's car, mum's car and the kids have one too.
The real improvement will be that they will be able to drive faster and closer together to handle more traffic on the same roads
Once driverless cars are common people in general won't own private cars (except maybe toys for wealthy people). People will instead use automated taxi like services.
That might be the case in urban areas, but it's unlikely in the suburbs - too much latency due to low population density - and a complete non-starter in rural areas.
Not long until there is a whole generation who has never driven a car. If they work out well safety-wise, manual driving might be forbidden except in emergencies. No one with driving skills is going to kill motor-racing stone dead rather abruptly! Top Gear will be nothing like we know it... O.K that might be a good thing.
Where are my car keys? You don't need them Grandad!
I am very concerned about the tens of thousands of unattended miles of driving these cars have done. I haven't heard about permits, notifications or any closed course testing. It's like the airport scanners.... they're perfectly safe... no, the FDA didn't test them, we did and they are perfectly safe. Prepare for the 2-headed mutants.
There has been work on autonomous cars for years and it is still a problem that vexes the experts. I highly doubt that Google has a car that will work well enough to be allowed in the wild. One or two spectacular smashes will spell the end for automated cars for a couple of decades at least. Roads and traffic control are created to be worked by protein not platinum.
Want to read or surf the net on the way to work? Check out the PRT pod cars at Heathrow's terminal 5. If there were routes all through London, you could take the train from Brighton, switch to a pod at Charing Cross and be at work before you know it. No congestion charges, no ulcers and if you are late, you can blame it on National Rail.
Is an automatic car going to avoid a bad pothole in the road? how will it deal with the Police and emergency services wanting to get past?
We don't have fully automatic trains and those things are on rails with a hugely limited number of destinations, no pedestrians to worry about. So why do we think cars will be much easier?
Probably better than people, it knows exactly where it's wheels are, the oncoming traffic, it will be calculating the depth of the pothole, and doing all these things simultaneously. As for emergency services, I'm sure a simple enough signal (or even siren recognition) would sort it out fairly easily.
People don't seem to understand the advances these things have made in the last 5 years.
"We don't have fully automatic trains and those things are on rails with a hugely limited number of destinations, no pedestrians to worry about."
Erm, yes we do. A significant number of partially and fully automatic train systems have operated since as early as 1963. The most obvious example is the Docklands Light Railway, but there are 20+ examples globally. They are mostly metro/light rail systems, but in principle there is no technical obstacle to mainline railways being automated.
The major barriers to automation are the capital cost of retro-fitting existing lines (which is why you tend to see semi or full automation on brand new lines), public perception of safety (vs. actual safety) and of course good-old self interest (in the form of the RMT and their brethren worldwide).
I work in the aviation industry and the second biggest reduction in crashes, after the invention of the gas turbine, was taking control away from the pilots.
A modern passenger aircraft will fly and land itself with no input from the two meat bags positioned in the room with the best view. There is a TV show "air crash investigation" where you get ample opportunity to see the chain of events leading to some of our worst incidents, and it will shock you the number of events that are directly caused by the crew or at least compounded by their actions.
A flight crew is rigorously trained with hours of simulated failure scenarios and still they make mistakes. Now compare that to some of the the fuckwits on the road.
Bring on automation, it will lower deaths and serious injury's, reduce insurance costs and taxi you home when you have had 6 pints of old peculiar in the lazy cock on a Friday night
Boatman,
"I work in the aviation industry and the second biggest reduction in crashes, after the invention of the gas turbine, was taking control away from the pilots."
After asking for the source of your statement, may I point out that automation does not take control away from the pilot: what it does is reduce our workload so we have more spare capacity to concentrate on strategic decision making. That and increased spatial awareness (e.g., in the form of TCAS and TAWS) has greatly reduced our accident rates--we still remain in control, however (well, management does... but that's another discussion).
I welcome the increased automation and driver assistance systems found in today's cars for the same reasons.
Few points....
Not sure if you have been reading many articles on the reg, but there has been talk of car to car communication for a while now. So I can imagine emergency vehicles will have transponders built into them that command vehicles to move out of their way, in a much safer way then humans panicking when a blue light appears in the mirror.
Police have also been longing for an automatic stop function in cars for a long time to end high speed pursuits and stop car thieves etc.
I know a certain mapping organisation that is doing high resolution mapping of roads which I suspect others are also doing, so its not a stretch to think it will become a mandatory data layer for the navigation system.
Finally I can imagine these cars will also have black boxes in them recording all the environment data, so when that twat cuts you up, because you are driving an automatic car. The data will automatically upload via 4G to the police and 3 points on the license with a ticket in the post, like Fifth element :)
"Is an automatic car going to avoid a bad pothole in the road? how will it deal with the Police and emergency services wanting to get past?"
Yes the automatic car will avoid the pothole. The first car hits the pothole and records it's location. It then transmit the location of the hole to passing vehicle heading back that way which in turn transmit it to to other passing vehicles so all passing vehicles know. The first vehicle then also submits the location of the pothole to the road authority while passing a radio receiver.
As for police and ambulances, they will get fitted with a radio version of the siren. I'm a police car, I'm at this location, I'm going this way. Self drive vehicles will pull over long before any human knows their coming. Traffice light will change so there will be absolutely no blockages to emergency vehicles.
"We don't have fully automatic trains and those things are on rails with a hugely limited number of destinations, no pedestrians to worry about. So why do we think cars will be much easier?"
Cars will be harder than trains. The only reason why train drivers still exist is because of unions protecting the drivers.
http://www.abd.org.uk/safest_roads.htm
You can make your own conclusions but Sweden ( zero tolerance and heavy penalties) for drink driving, UK (heavy penalties and little tolerance) for drink driving....
In the US, can you shut one eye sir and walk in a straight line and count backwards from a hundred, kind of gives you a clue.
In Austria, drink driving is almost a national pastime.
Methinks the yanks are trying to fix a symptom.
Risky - the level of arrogant luddism on this thread is phenomenal. Arrogant, specifically in terms of presumptive insolence, rather than any lack of knowledge, but maybe that's worthy of mention too.
The presumption that the two minutes of thought you have put into an opportunity such as this, will come up with something unique, that thousands of previous man-hours of effort from everyone involved (so within Google, the out of the box thinkers who came up with the concepts, the techs, the engineers, and not to mention Google's lawyers, and then State or National law-makers, and probably most importantly insurance companies and lawyers who would be for and against Google, and those who look at it not including Google etc) haven't been able to uncover or comprehend, something as simple as who would be to blame when the car is involved with an accident, is staggering.
Download the logs from the Google Car and it will tell you exactly what happened when, thus clearing Google from the opportunity of being sued for defective software or algorithms. You can be 100% certain that before the slightest bit of code was touched with the mindset of self-driving cars a risk assessment was carried out and this grew and grew, and Google would not release these into the wild until their lawyers have practically signed in blood to say that everything is covered for Google as far as can be expected in terms of economically viability.
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