I am looking forward to self driving cars, and keep hoping they will get here before my parents lose their ability to safely drive themselves.
Back in the mid 70's there was a 'personal rapid transport' or PRT system proposed which was individual 'cars' on a rail system that were smart enough to stop at a station. The idea was that the rail line had switches where a PRT unit (4 or 8 passenger) could go into a station when called with an elevator like button. You would get in, and then it would head out on the track and not stop again until your destination station.
The idea was that it eliminated the two biggest issues with 'public transportation' which were pickup and drop off schedules that forced waits when you transferred from one line to another, and the fact that the train/bus would make all stops forcing it to be slower than a point to point bus/train.
I believe you could implement that system safely on a dedicated 'self driving car' road. And such roads would be less expensive to build than a rail infrastructure.
I graduated from wvu and apart from “#1 party school” tag, its claim to fame was/is the PRT. fun to ride, not fun when your cabin gets stuck in middle of the track with nobody to call.
I remember reading a sci fi novel with that idea too. The scene had a guy packing up his luggage in a self-driving car, watching the car get in line with a long-distance "train" of self-driving cars, and then falling asleep so he can make it to the next city.
My daughter is on the autism spectrum. I think she is capable of driving herself, but at least right now, she shows no interest in it. Instead, I'm teaching her how to get around herself on a bicycle. And while I am still intent on helping her develop self-reliance, the future she will be working as an adult will likely involve self-driving cars.
I think it is very likely that the cost of self-driving cars will be higher. Middle class is already getting squeezed, and if having on-demand transportation is more affordable, it is more accessible for people. When self-driving cars have lower insurance premiums, then manually-driven cars would be left in the domain of the hobbyists and the wealthy -- driving it for fun, rather than because you need to make a living.
At the same time, I can see bicycles and electric bicycles becoming even more popular.
There was a kickstarter campaign a couple years ago documenting how roads were originally made for bikes, with the first paved roads being lobbied by bicycle groups rather than auto groups. We also have some interesting things: (1) in the early days of the auto industry, the auto industry pushed forward legislation for traffic safety, shifting the idea is that if a pedestrian is on the road, it is the pedestrian's fault, and that "roads are made for cars" (2) buying out trolly companies so people would buy more cars and (3) this idea of "roads are made for cars" has become so ingrained in our mindset that it influenced city and urban design for almost a hundred years.
I'm glad to see this is starting to swing back the other way.
Arguably you can get most of those benefits now by chartering Uber, Lyft, Waymo, etc. to run private bus lines. They could run bigger and smaller vehicles as needed and let you schedule your pickups and dropoffs from their apps.
Plenty of countries around the world let people start up their own bus lines to meet demand.
Completely agree! That's what I think the future of self-driving cars will be -- not so much "automatic Uber" but instead little busses that can automatically optimize their routes to get people where they need to go. This would mitigate a key issue that is often raised in regard to ridesharing --
that it has the potential to clog streets.
Speaking of PRT in the 70s, for quite some time the Morgantown PRT in West Virginia was the only functioning example of one. (I believe nowadays there are a couple others):
What do you guys think of a solution where the driverless leg of the trip is also passengerless. In v1 of the system the passenger is required to have a license and will follow route guidance from the car to navigate to their destination. After arrival the car will return to autonomous mode and take much safer precautions to the next customer.
As they loaded Kayleigh Hutschins, age 36, onto the stretcher, it waited. Rick was a new EMT. He just got his certs about 3 weeks ago. He was told of the 'shadows' in classes. But seeing one was still a bit un-nerving. Daniel, the more veteran EMT was marking the time, but knew there was no rush to get to the hospital.
'Yeah, they freaked me out at first too' Daniel said into the ambulance's sterile white lights, he looked back at the freshie.
'They go all the way to the hospital, right behind us, yeah?' Rick wondered if the stories were true.
'Yeah, as long as her credit card still works, it'll be right on our ass'
'What happens then? When we get to the back door?'
'Follow us right in, thank God John Muir's not a blind road and has an exit. UCSF just has a loading dock, damn things block us in all the time and we have to call SFPD to get em moved out of the way.'
'How long do they stay for?'
'In the parking lot? They'll stay until her card is cancelled or the family does something. Homelanders like y'all can't pinch two nickels, so the family'll likely never contact the card company cus they'll hound them for years about her debts.' Rick looked at her glowing green fingernails, perfectly manicured.
'After 30 days John Muir or the other hospitals just calls the car company and gets them to move. All at once. It's a laugh riot.'
As they loaded her into the bay, the shadow inched forward the exact same amount.
Is the cautious mode going to obstruct traffic or something? Or are you saying that exposing other people to risk is okay and exposing users of the service is not?
If the autonomous system can't operate in a way that passengers would be comfortable with I don't see why it should be allowed on the roads at all.
I don't think that would work. First, nobody wants to drive a taxi. Unless it was really cheap most people would just get a lyft and not worry about following guidance from their taxi. Second, most of the people at risk of dying from a malfunctioning self driving car will be people outside the car. Third, how are you going to convince regulators your car is safe if you're making concessions like that? The government is a slow beuracracy and won't take kindly to halfway solutions that will force them to do things over once things are actually ready.
And as pessimistic as I'm being, I don't think its that bad of an idea. I just wouldn't put my money on it.
I am picturing your conversation with the insurance company:
“So in autonomous mode, the car takes many precautions, so it is really safe”
“Sounds good. So why do you want to let the customer drive?”
“Because they will be less cautious”
“I am raising your premiums”
Do you think self-driving cars will have different shapes in future, or is the existing typical look of cars the optimum shape?
TBH, I can see lots of problems even in existing cars for people - too many blind spots, too uncomfortable to get in and get out, more dangerous for those sitting on the driving side.
I wonder if all these problems will go away with self-driving cars, or are they necessary consequences of an optimum design to meet safety regulations.
I think the "uncomfortable to get in and out" needs to be addressed. Without the steering wheel, perhaps the seat can swivel, or perhaps passengers can exit from the front or back.
I doubt, at typical car speeds, aerodynamics is a big factor. It's not like a jet.
Get rid of the need for windows and steering wheel you have a lot of options. In a self-driving taxi you could even have multiple self contained 'cubicles' so you could share rides and not have to interact with anybody else.
I wonder if the FCA plan to be the platform for Google's self driving AI, instead of trying to develop their own AI like other car vendors are doing, make sense. In some way it seems very hard and costly to build your own AI, even Tesla appears to be lagging behind Waymo. On the other hand I'm not sure how much replaceable the position of FCA is. Currently trivially replaceable, but maybe in the future as they develop more and more skills about building the platform for autonomous driving vehicles (minus software), it could be a good position to be in.
Waymo is also working on courting other manufacturers, but nothing else has been announced outside of Honda[0] (which hasn't gone anywhere).
Car manufacturers today can be seen as integrators of various technologies. Most all of the driver assist tech out there today comes from companies like MobileEye and Bosch. It tends to make sense from an expense perspective to let that type of tech be developed outside of car manufacturers so the development costs can be more easily be recouped.
This article is actually just about them buying the cars. But currently their service operates in a small area in Arizona... A state chosen because they decided not to require Waymo to disclose safety statistics that other states like California require of self-driving cars.
> The details are a bit sketchy. Ask "how many thousands," and you're told, ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Off-topic: I was surprised to see that journalists are doing Unicode art in articles now, and I don’t think that’s wise. Wouldn’t this confuse a blind reader who is listening to a transcribed version?
I was impressed to discover that on macOS, asking it to speak '¯\_(ツ)_/¯' results in it saying "shrug". The exact form from the article without the backslash for the left arm, though, results in it saying "comma" for some (very) strange reason. For example:
It's fun to try stuff like this. In iOS for example you can go to Settings - General - Accessibility - VoiceOver to try the screen reader experience.
For the shruggie I get "macron backslash underscore japanese in a different voice slash macron," which sucks. Too bad - I was hoping it would be recognized as a word.
Wouldn't the same thing happen with ":-)", which is likely to appear (and be relevant) in quotations if nothing else?
I'd expect a screen reader to handle ":-)", and given that Slack has had /shrug for years, I am curious if screen readers also know how to pronounce the shrug yet.
"Waymo" was invented so that the press would stop calling them Google cars, because in case things go awry, Google as a whole would be under fire. This way "Waymo" (effectively a department of Google) can be thrown under the bus effortlessly with no PR damage to Google.
They don't want people thinking of Google when their cars are holding up traffic, turn out to be assholes when merging or changing lanes, or cause a fatal accident. Thus, Waymo.
In general I think separating brands is a good idea. And I think, at least from technical perspective (not legal perspective) you shouldn't blame Google in case something goes bad, and rather Waymo. After all, the set of people running Google search or Android are very different from those managing the self-driving car project.
In some sense, a single entity Google is an illusion so best to avoid it.
I'm not sure the motivation was as ill-intentioned as you indicate. Yes they spun it off the but I don't think Google was re-structured into Alphabet (and subsidiaries) for this reason. Waymo is a self driving car business, Google is a search engine that provides online services. I don't think the two overlap in a way that makes sense to club their businesses together into one quarterly report.
And it worked. I must have missed the news when Waymo was spun off, because I didn't realize they were former Google folks until like... last week. I kept wondering where the hell these guys came from and how they suddenly had the money to come up with this super-advanced tech by themselves.
I think Google implemented one of the recommendations from Innovator’s dilemma. Where you want new ventures to be as independent from the parent company as possible. E.g. earnings of 1mm for parent company might be insignificant, but very desirable for a new product.
Google had to split into Alphabet divisions. Executive focus doesn't scale. Arguably, they did it too late, which is why they shit the bed so bad with Google Cloud, a technically superior offering that for years had poor support, no focus, and further fell behind AWS.
The printing press that is advertising there steals all the focus.
I'm convinced that if Waymo was a division of Google, they wouldn't be close to monetizing.
I think they just wanted something for investors to know by name outside of "other bets". Easier to say you're losing money investing in Waymo than their other more conventional money losing ideas.
It's probably for the best, same with the decision to change Google the megacorporation into Alphabet, with the Google brand focusing on search and internet.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|8 years ago|reply
Back in the mid 70's there was a 'personal rapid transport' or PRT system proposed which was individual 'cars' on a rail system that were smart enough to stop at a station. The idea was that the rail line had switches where a PRT unit (4 or 8 passenger) could go into a station when called with an elevator like button. You would get in, and then it would head out on the track and not stop again until your destination station.
The idea was that it eliminated the two biggest issues with 'public transportation' which were pickup and drop off schedules that forced waits when you transferred from one line to another, and the fact that the train/bus would make all stops forcing it to be slower than a point to point bus/train.
I believe you could implement that system safely on a dedicated 'self driving car' road. And such roads would be less expensive to build than a rail infrastructure.
[+] [-] dxbydt|8 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Tr...
[+] [-] hosh|8 years ago|reply
My daughter is on the autism spectrum. I think she is capable of driving herself, but at least right now, she shows no interest in it. Instead, I'm teaching her how to get around herself on a bicycle. And while I am still intent on helping her develop self-reliance, the future she will be working as an adult will likely involve self-driving cars.
I think it is very likely that the cost of self-driving cars will be higher. Middle class is already getting squeezed, and if having on-demand transportation is more affordable, it is more accessible for people. When self-driving cars have lower insurance premiums, then manually-driven cars would be left in the domain of the hobbyists and the wealthy -- driving it for fun, rather than because you need to make a living.
At the same time, I can see bicycles and electric bicycles becoming even more popular.
There was a kickstarter campaign a couple years ago documenting how roads were originally made for bikes, with the first paved roads being lobbied by bicycle groups rather than auto groups. We also have some interesting things: (1) in the early days of the auto industry, the auto industry pushed forward legislation for traffic safety, shifting the idea is that if a pedestrian is on the road, it is the pedestrian's fault, and that "roads are made for cars" (2) buying out trolly companies so people would buy more cars and (3) this idea of "roads are made for cars" has become so ingrained in our mindset that it influenced city and urban design for almost a hundred years.
I'm glad to see this is starting to swing back the other way.
[+] [-] humanrebar|8 years ago|reply
Plenty of countries around the world let people start up their own bus lines to meet demand.
[+] [-] FreakyT|8 years ago|reply
Speaking of PRT in the 70s, for quite some time the Morgantown PRT in West Virginia was the only functioning example of one. (I believe nowadays there are a couple others):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Tran...
[+] [-] scottfr|8 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/Aramis-Love-Technology-Bruno-Latour/d...
[+] [-] mentos|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balgair|8 years ago|reply
'Yeah, they freaked me out at first too' Daniel said into the ambulance's sterile white lights, he looked back at the freshie.
'They go all the way to the hospital, right behind us, yeah?' Rick wondered if the stories were true.
'Yeah, as long as her credit card still works, it'll be right on our ass'
'What happens then? When we get to the back door?'
'Follow us right in, thank God John Muir's not a blind road and has an exit. UCSF just has a loading dock, damn things block us in all the time and we have to call SFPD to get em moved out of the way.'
'How long do they stay for?'
'In the parking lot? They'll stay until her card is cancelled or the family does something. Homelanders like y'all can't pinch two nickels, so the family'll likely never contact the card company cus they'll hound them for years about her debts.' Rick looked at her glowing green fingernails, perfectly manicured.
'After 30 days John Muir or the other hospitals just calls the car company and gets them to move. All at once. It's a laugh riot.'
As they loaded her into the bay, the shadow inched forward the exact same amount.
[+] [-] maxerickson|8 years ago|reply
If the autonomous system can't operate in a way that passengers would be comfortable with I don't see why it should be allowed on the roads at all.
[+] [-] tinalumfoil|8 years ago|reply
And as pessimistic as I'm being, I don't think its that bad of an idea. I just wouldn't put my money on it.
[+] [-] jameshart|8 years ago|reply
“So in autonomous mode, the car takes many precautions, so it is really safe” “Sounds good. So why do you want to let the customer drive?” “Because they will be less cautious” “I am raising your premiums”
[+] [-] kuschku|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andygates|8 years ago|reply
Empty driving seems inevitable in any use-case except "my precious". Fleets, yes. Deliveries, yes. Go pick up the kids, yes.
[+] [-] dabeeeenster|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zerostar07|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lovelearning|8 years ago|reply
TBH, I can see lots of problems even in existing cars for people - too many blind spots, too uncomfortable to get in and get out, more dangerous for those sitting on the driving side.
I wonder if all these problems will go away with self-driving cars, or are they necessary consequences of an optimum design to meet safety regulations.
[+] [-] skrause|8 years ago|reply
There's really no need that every car is a >1.5 ton vehicle that can fit 5 people or more when 90% of the trips are with just one person inside.
[+] [-] wjnc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unreal37|8 years ago|reply
I doubt, at typical car speeds, aerodynamics is a big factor. It's not like a jet.
[+] [-] empath75|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdb7893|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] princess-aslaug|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyrra|8 years ago|reply
Car manufacturers today can be seen as integrators of various technologies. Most all of the driver assist tech out there today comes from companies like MobileEye and Bosch. It tends to make sense from an expense perspective to let that type of tech be developed outside of car manufacturers so the development costs can be more easily be recouped.
[0] https://www.recode.net/2016/12/21/14046496/waymo-alphabet-ho...
[+] [-] icebraining|8 years ago|reply
That's not surprising. Waymo's team goes all the way back from the 2005 DARPA challenge[1] - they've been working on it for a long time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_(vehicle)
[+] [-] savrajsingh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danmaz74|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] provost|8 years ago|reply
Off-topic: I was surprised to see that journalists are doing Unicode art in articles now, and I don’t think that’s wise. Wouldn’t this confuse a blind reader who is listening to a transcribed version?
[+] [-] garblegarble|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JackC|8 years ago|reply
For the shruggie I get "macron backslash underscore japanese in a different voice slash macron," which sucks. Too bad - I was hoping it would be recognized as a word.
[+] [-] detaro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geofft|8 years ago|reply
I'd expect a screen reader to handle ":-)", and given that Slack has had /shrug for years, I am curious if screen readers also know how to pronounce the shrug yet.
(Is Slack screen-reader-accessible?)
[+] [-] criddell|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pault|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|8 years ago|reply
Emojis have been around long enough that they ought to be handling them by now anyway.
[+] [-] fiatjaf|8 years ago|reply
Nevertheless, I'm very satisfied that they're using emoticons and not emoji.
[+] [-] thebiglebrewski|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skarap|8 years ago|reply
Tough luck, 5 million dollars to the family?
[+] [-] Zigurd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kome|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nukeop|8 years ago|reply
They don't want people thinking of Google when their cars are holding up traffic, turn out to be assholes when merging or changing lanes, or cause a fatal accident. Thus, Waymo.
[+] [-] nora4|8 years ago|reply
In some sense, a single entity Google is an illusion so best to avoid it.
[+] [-] notyourwork|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notimetorelax|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JPKab|8 years ago|reply
The printing press that is advertising there steals all the focus.
I'm convinced that if Waymo was a division of Google, they wouldn't be close to monetizing.
[+] [-] jonknee|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kowdermeister|8 years ago|reply