A lot of people are bashing the car's appearance, but I think people forget that putting the first driverless cars on the road is as much a PR challenge as it is a technological challenge. Truly autonomous driverless cars is a huge shift in the way we have operated for almost 100 years. There will be a lot of caution and resistance from political groups, concerned citizens, entrenched interests, etc. The car that they put forward first needs to be non-threatening, safe, and easy to adopt.
Given Google's stake in Uber the car will be part of a fleet that can be summoned by a mobile app, not some product you go out and buy. Because there will be no dealerships and individual owners, they don't care about attracting buyers for the vehicle - it doesn't need a cool factor. What it needs is to be non-threatening and safe so you will feel comfortable getting in one and going for a ride.
Additionally, the first car on the roads will just be making in town trips and will be limited to 25mph - no highways or major arterials. This means it makes more sense for the car to be compact, light, and similar to a Smart Car, than a Camry or SUB.
> The car that they put forward first needs to be non-threatening, safe, and easy to adopt.
Moreover, I think Google wants their car to be recognizable as a driverless car. They don't want it to blend in, because people would (at least for now) think that was "spooky"—that any car anywhere around them could be being secretly driven by a robot.
Instead, the visual distinctness means that it's instantly clear that these are their own thing, in much the same way that golf carts, scooters, and backhoes are—despite all being wheeled vehicles that can be driven in car lanes—their own thing. Because they're recognizable, it makes it possible for you to build a separate autonomous response into your subliminal "driving event loop" for the class of "driverless car", the same way that you will react separately to seeing any of the above in your lane. Which is exactly what people want, in order to feel in control: the ability to notice and compensate for the driverless cars around them if they all encounter some pathological edge-case.
(Just as an example of what I'm talking about—and this is a completely untested hypothesis on my part—I bet that driverless cars come to a complete stop a lot more frequently, in surprising places, because their sensors tell them something is standing in front of the car—e.g. a pigeon. A regular driver knows a pigeon will just sit there minding its own business as the car approaches it, but fly away right before the impact would happen; a driverless car might not know that. Because of this, your driving algorithm for being behind a driverless car will likely have a component similar to driving behind a school bus: "this vehicle makes frequent sudden stops, and I need to be ready to stop too. I should be more car-lengths away from it than are strictly necessary.")
The appearance of the car is really important. If it looked too fun, like a Ferrari, some may think it's not safe. It reminds me of "helper" robots in movies about the future. They always have such unintimidating appearances. This car appears to be attempting the same thing and I'm ok with it.
This is also a prime opportunity to question the idea of traveling at 85 mph in 4,000 lb. metal boxes that get 13 mpg.
In my town, many parents put their newly-licensed teenage children behind the wheels of enormous SUVs in the name of safety, simultaneously reducing the safety of everyone around them. If tanks were street legal, we'd probably have 16 year old kids barreling down the road in them.
> the first car on the roads will just be making in town trips and will be limited to 25mph
I think the rest of us are going to start loathing these timidly-driving things: "Oh f%#k! I'm stuck behind a self-driving car again, now I'll be late for my meeting."
Uber have the right idea here; own the platform, not the infrastructure. Lets face it, a cars spends most of its life stationary, waiting for you to drive it. Not so the autonomous vehicle. Autonomous vehicles are freed from the shackles of parking so why not lease your car to Uber and have it earn money as a cab? The future will be a bad time to get into car parking.
Do they really have driverless cars or
just cars that run on essentially
electronic tracks very carefully
determined?
If someone moves the location of a traffic
light, can a Google car still find the
traffic light? Wbat if a bulb in the
traffic light is burned out; is the
car smart enough to negotiate the intersection
with the failed light? What if a bucket
of white paint fell on the road yesterday;
is the Google car's image processing good
enough to recognize this or to tell the
difference between wet paint and dry?
Heck, when I drive, there is a lot for me
to watch and analyze. A Google car
can do that?
I don't care how it looks, it if still cannot drive in bad weather, snow, and worse needs detailed up to date maps, its not truly autonomous driving, its like programmed driving with a few extras.
When the cars can come to you where ever you may be, broke down on the side of the road for example, and take you anywhere regardless of conditions then it can be heralded.
As it stands now its nothing more than the automated cars shown as high tech in Jurassic Park.
Everyone seems to be overlooking the fact that using an autonomous car as a cab would be illegal. Current permits are rather specific about having an manufacturer's employee behind the wheel at all times. I'm not an expert, but I wouldn't expect any state to lighten up the requirement of at least having someone behind a wheel for the foreseeable future. I think most patrons of Uber don't really want to be sitting behind the wheel.
My initial reaction was dismay that Google seemingly didn't consult any decent auto designers on this. But then I wonder if that's actually fine.
My kids will likely be baffled by the idea that we attached so much of our own identity to our cars. The financial investment in cars to make a statement about ourselves (over and above getting us from A to B) is immensely irrational.
With self driving cars ownership will likely disappear, and be replaced with time sharing. At that point the connection between our view of ourselves, and the car we ride in disappears.
I'm not sure that completely excuses the lack of modern car aesthetic here, but it could go some way to explaining it.
Forget your kids... I'm baffled. I'm baffled that people are willing to squander so much money on cars, especially people who have relatively little of it. If you think about it I'm sure you pay tens of thousands of dollars on a thing that moves you around but ultimately, sits around way more than not.
I am somewhat anxious to see how this plays out financially and economically otherwise. Will these cars cost the same as a car that every person now buys for themselves with maybe a little higher cost of maintenance and operation (M&O)? Will there essentially be one manufacturer because one vehicle can support 10 people and we don't need millions of these things pumped out? And will the collapse of competition mean that there will be a monopoly (dare I say it, Über) that over-charges all of humanity after they have essentially captured the market in the exact way that an evil empire like Über would?
An even bigger question I have, will this kind of development essentially mean the doom for anonymous movements? We can all imagine that there will essentially be no way that you will be able to ride in one of these without identifying yourself and at some point manual vehicles will be banned; very likely in most of our lifetimes. At which point you, the guy who rides his bike or walks will be highly suspect if you are even able to at all, since you must be hiding something since you don't want to use the government tracker transporter.
| Google's new fleet was intentionally designed to look adorable... By turning self-driving cars into an adorable Skynet Marshmallow Bumper Bots, Google hopes to spiritually disarm other drivers. I also suspect the cuteness is used to quell some of the road rage that might emerge from being stuck behind one of these things. They're intended as moderate-distance couriers, not open-road warriors, so their max speed is 25 miles per hour.
> With self driving cars ownership will likely disappear
That's a bold statement. It might become more of a luxury, i.e. something you buy when you reach a certain income, rather than something you need to live. But disappear, no, it won't.
As anecdote, I can bring the experience of European life. In a lot of European towns and cities, you can live quite comfortably without a car, today -- after all, they were built for people and horses. Rich people (or people who want to be seen as wealthy) still buy huge SUVs -- and then struggle to park them, because they're not as thin as a horse.
In London, a lot of people simply use cabs to move around most of the time; but sure enough, if they have a decent income, they'll buy a car and park it somewhere, ready to be driven during their countryside weekends.
Already today, car ownership has very little to do with convenience; it's mostly about ownership and individualism, something that is completely opposite to the concept of sharing. My wife is absolutely horrified at the thought of sharing anything ("germs! ruined things!" etc etc), and that will not change because of Google or Uber.
I often wonder how much of it is a human trait. Transportation has many sides, it's a psycho-physiological wonder (push a pedal while sitting, and move faster than running), it's a moving private space, a technical and aesthetic source of pleasure, obviously a social status sign also. Were people as attached to their horses, boats ? was it a rite of passage or just a mundane thing ?
I don't want to own a self-driving car. I want the self-driving equivalent of a taxi or Uber. Press a button on my phone, the closest one shows up, drives me where I want to go, and then hangs out nearby for the next person or goes back to the closest designated parking location.
These self-driving cars will be cheaper than even UberX/Lyft/whatever, as there is no driver to have to pay. They can be smaller than a cab, taking up much less parking room (they can park too close for their doors to open, and they don't need to including seating for a driver), which can actually be a fairly significant cost in the city, where convenient parking spaces can sell for as much as a house does elsewhere.
Lots of people are point at this being Uber's future "auto-car". Here's an alternative idea:
- You can buy this car. It costs $100,000. But that's okay.
- When you aren't actively using it, you tell it to go "Uber mode" and pick up and drive people around as part of the "Uber Network of Cars"
- You split the fee with Uber/Lyft/whoever. They get 30%, you get 70%.
If the average ride pays you $7, over 5 years that's like 8 rides your car has to "sell" per day to be effectively "free" to you (except for financing, insurance, etc.).
- At the end of the workday, Google Now summons your car to pick you up in front of your office and whisk you home.
- After dropping you off at home, your car goes back onto Uber mode and does night-time service (if you opt-in).
You could probably pay your car off much earlier than 5 years with more rides/higher average ride fare, after which your car is making you money. Clever people will use this extra to finance more cars to run small fleets and effectively live without working.
Google Now summons your car to pick you up in front of your office...
...and, upon entering, you're met with a horrific scene of blood, urine, and feces left behind by the previous person the car picked up.
You sigh as you clean up the mess, "At least it feels like I'm living in the future now..."
But, most likely, the cars will keep track of who is riding in them and you could hunt down whoever made the mess and make them clean it up. Or maybe it has cameras installed? Talk about an invasion of privacy! Plus it's not like they ever signed a waiver saying they WOULDN'T shit in the car.
> You could probably pay your car off much earlier than 5 years with more rides/higher average ride fare, after which your car is making you money. Clever people will use this extra to finance more cars to run small fleets and effectively live without working.
If it's such a great money spinner, why won't companies do that? Why do you _want_ people to own cars?
The way Google seems to be approaching self-driving cars is the right one in my opinion. Self-driving cars will be on-demand, booked through something like Uber and will not be owned by the end-user.
I feel that the other car companies working on self-driving car technology for consumers are wasting their time. The main reason I enjoy owning a nice car is that I like driving it. If I wasn't in control of driving my car, what would be the point? Vanity of course has to be considered but in the future, I see self-driving cars which we don't own will the the status quo in cities, and owning a manual operating a car will be either a novelty or something for people outside of major city hubs.
My family doesn't own our cars because we like driving them. We own them for convenience! The prospect of ordering a car, waiting for it to arrive, futzing with car seats, transferring car toys, dealing with scarcity and surge pricing, etc. for every trip is very unappealing. And renting is usually more expensive than owning anyways!
In the near term, I'm looking forwards to hybrid assistive technologies. We took a vacation that required seven hours of highway driving. Toyota's freeway mode ("Automated Highway Driving Assist"), which controls speed and steering, would have made a big difference.
I want a self-driving car to free me up to do other things on my hour commute twice a day. Even if it were more cost-effective to rent (which I suspect it would not be given how much I would need to rent), I can think of 2 reasons I'd rather own:
- Don't have to worry about availability. Turns out there are a lot of people in my region who go to work in the morning and go home in the evening.
- When you spend that much time in your vehicle, it becomes and extension of your personal/living space. I don't want to spend 10 hours a week in a public box that may have a mess or an odor from the person before me.
Nonsense. That's just like saying taxis/cabs will negate the need for your own car.
Sometimes you need a car now to goto the shops, drop your kids at doctor etc. without having to wait 10-30 minutes for a car to arrive from the other side of town.
There could be a market for owning self-driving cars outside of major cities. Not everyone has access to a cab-like service now so unless that changes adding some sort of autopilot to regular cars would be useful.
High-end sports cars are fun to drive, but wouldn't it be nice to turn on autopilot from time to time? Like if you're stuck in traffic, or you need to do a bit of work, or you get tired during a long trip.
Some might also prefer ownership so that their car is always available with no delay, or so that they know their car will be perfectly clean and odorless.
I think you're right that on-demand will eventually make sense for a majority of people, though.
But the truth is that assisted driving is already a much larger market that self-driving cars. Many manufacturers already have lane assist, braking assist, self parking and other features. This type of creeping automation is much more likely to take over than coming at it from the other end. I would say both markets will get going and converge over a decade or more.
I like being a passenger in a nice car more than in a crap car, so owning a nice self driving car would be a bit like having your own chauffeur and time to do other things while enjoying your car.
The vision should be to replace as many drivered cars as possible with driverless and network the vehicles. I see a future without a need for stop lights.
Given that as far as I know, roads must be extensively mapped in advance of a self-driving car going on them, there is a nice bonus of doing self-driving cars exclusively through Uber at first. Uber can know the exact route the passenger wants to take in advance, and only send cars to passengers whose routes are already mapped. Furthermore, they can choose to only send them out when the conditions are good (no snow, etc. assuming conditions are still a problem when these go into fuller production). A nice way to roll the cars out incrementally without some of the problems they might otherwise have...
One of the aspects of this that I've been getting concerned about is the invasion of privacy that they will pose, especially if it's one or a handful of companies owning an operating the autonomous vehicles.
It's true that if you carry a cell phone you already carry a personal tracking device and offer this information up freely to your cellular provider, but I'm interested in reducing instead of increasing the amount of information I'm leaking in that way.
What kind of information will these cars track? They'll have to track who rides in them for accountability purposes, which I already find troubling. Your average cabby isn't going to be compiling a profile about you based on where you catch rides to.
Who has access to the information such as who rides in which cars? Is this available via an open API? I'm already peeved at companies like FitBit which hold my data ransom, is this going to be another of those situations?
There's a lot of privacy questions that I feel aren't being adequately addressed, but I still look forward to the possibilities this will bring. The privacy questions are answerable and any problems should be correctable.
To those that get hung up on the design: remember that this car is limited to 25 mph for regulatory reasons. Having a design that is closer to a bumper car than a model S seems fitting with that in mind.
A lot of people are bashing its appearance. I think it looks cute. So, to each his own on the regard. But seriously guys, this is happening a lot sooner than I thought and I really could not be any more excited to have these on the road.
Reminds me of the Cozy Coupe [1] I had as a child. Perhaps that's not by accident. The fear is that these machines will be unsafe, either to their passengers or to other cards on the road. Making it cute my reduce the perceived threat level.
They've got to make more progress on the sensors. They still have that overpriced Velodyne HDL-64E scanner (about $100K) on top of the prototype. The new vehicle has a slightly smaller device on top, probably the HDL-32E. Google doesn't seem to be making progress on flash LIDAR or millimeter microwave radar, which are going to be needed for reasonable-cost production vehicles.
CMU/Cadillac have a self-driving car. They have a number of long videos taken with a back-seat camera.
It's good enough that it's been driven around downtown Washington. It doesn't seem to sense turn signals or infer much intent from other-driver behavior. The driver has his hand on the auto/manual switch at all times; clearly there's not much confidence in this thing yet.
Google has had much more PR about it's revolutionary tech and that has a LOT going for it. When tesla comes out with their self driving car, if it looks 100x better than this prototype, I still might pick Google. Better aesthetics with comparable functionality will win the majority of time in my book (think Android devices vs Apple devices), however when it comes times to putting my life on the line, I will go with something I feel is safer 100% of the time regardless of how it looks. And like always, Google will dominate with it's superior functionality (backed by their PR over the last couple of years) over any tesla any day.
I wonder if these things could be used in potentially 'easier' niches like long-haul trucking: you'd create a loading/unloading port near the freeway, and send the truck to another port across the country.
Naturally, I don't know anything about trucking, and you'd want to be really sure something so big and bulky is safe, but the idea would be, rather than "do everything a car does all at once" to do something relatively simple.
From an economic standpoint, I would be interested to see how many OTC parts this system. That is, does it need a $1000 lidar or would it get a similar performance with a cheap $100 sensor?
From a technical point of view, 25mph is very limiting IMO. You probably do not need a very sophisticated controller to navigate at 25. If you reach speeds of 60-70MPH with varying road curvatures, the controller design gets trickier.
I don't have a firm enough understanding of how the LIDAR and laser's work in these vehicles, but it occurs to me that it might be possible for a malicious actor to confuse the cars and cause accidents. That's concerning.
[+] [-] amckenna|11 years ago|reply
Given Google's stake in Uber the car will be part of a fleet that can be summoned by a mobile app, not some product you go out and buy. Because there will be no dealerships and individual owners, they don't care about attracting buyers for the vehicle - it doesn't need a cool factor. What it needs is to be non-threatening and safe so you will feel comfortable getting in one and going for a ride.
Additionally, the first car on the roads will just be making in town trips and will be limited to 25mph - no highways or major arterials. This means it makes more sense for the car to be compact, light, and similar to a Smart Car, than a Camry or SUB.
[+] [-] derefr|11 years ago|reply
Moreover, I think Google wants their car to be recognizable as a driverless car. They don't want it to blend in, because people would (at least for now) think that was "spooky"—that any car anywhere around them could be being secretly driven by a robot.
Instead, the visual distinctness means that it's instantly clear that these are their own thing, in much the same way that golf carts, scooters, and backhoes are—despite all being wheeled vehicles that can be driven in car lanes—their own thing. Because they're recognizable, it makes it possible for you to build a separate autonomous response into your subliminal "driving event loop" for the class of "driverless car", the same way that you will react separately to seeing any of the above in your lane. Which is exactly what people want, in order to feel in control: the ability to notice and compensate for the driverless cars around them if they all encounter some pathological edge-case.
(Just as an example of what I'm talking about—and this is a completely untested hypothesis on my part—I bet that driverless cars come to a complete stop a lot more frequently, in surprising places, because their sensors tell them something is standing in front of the car—e.g. a pigeon. A regular driver knows a pigeon will just sit there minding its own business as the car approaches it, but fly away right before the impact would happen; a driverless car might not know that. Because of this, your driving algorithm for being behind a driverless car will likely have a component similar to driving behind a school bus: "this vehicle makes frequent sudden stops, and I need to be ready to stop too. I should be more car-lengths away from it than are strictly necessary.")
[+] [-] dopamean|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billsossoon|11 years ago|reply
In my town, many parents put their newly-licensed teenage children behind the wheels of enormous SUVs in the name of safety, simultaneously reducing the safety of everyone around them. If tanks were street legal, we'd probably have 16 year old kids barreling down the road in them.
[+] [-] drcode|11 years ago|reply
I think the rest of us are going to start loathing these timidly-driving things: "Oh f%#k! I'm stuck behind a self-driving car again, now I'll be late for my meeting."
[+] [-] Toenex|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graycat|11 years ago|reply
If someone moves the location of a traffic light, can a Google car still find the traffic light? Wbat if a bulb in the traffic light is burned out; is the car smart enough to negotiate the intersection with the failed light? What if a bucket of white paint fell on the road yesterday; is the Google car's image processing good enough to recognize this or to tell the difference between wet paint and dry?
Heck, when I drive, there is a lot for me to watch and analyze. A Google car can do that?
[+] [-] Shivetya|11 years ago|reply
When the cars can come to you where ever you may be, broke down on the side of the road for example, and take you anywhere regardless of conditions then it can be heralded.
As it stands now its nothing more than the automated cars shown as high tech in Jurassic Park.
[+] [-] jnosCo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krschultz|11 years ago|reply
That was the death knell of Google Glass (at least in its current incarnation). Seems that Google hasn't learned much.
[+] [-] nichodges|11 years ago|reply
My kids will likely be baffled by the idea that we attached so much of our own identity to our cars. The financial investment in cars to make a statement about ourselves (over and above getting us from A to B) is immensely irrational.
With self driving cars ownership will likely disappear, and be replaced with time sharing. At that point the connection between our view of ourselves, and the car we ride in disappears.
I'm not sure that completely excuses the lack of modern car aesthetic here, but it could go some way to explaining it.
[+] [-] wahsd|11 years ago|reply
I am somewhat anxious to see how this plays out financially and economically otherwise. Will these cars cost the same as a car that every person now buys for themselves with maybe a little higher cost of maintenance and operation (M&O)? Will there essentially be one manufacturer because one vehicle can support 10 people and we don't need millions of these things pumped out? And will the collapse of competition mean that there will be a monopoly (dare I say it, Über) that over-charges all of humanity after they have essentially captured the market in the exact way that an evil empire like Über would?
An even bigger question I have, will this kind of development essentially mean the doom for anonymous movements? We can all imagine that there will essentially be no way that you will be able to ride in one of these without identifying yourself and at some point manual vehicles will be banned; very likely in most of our lifetimes. At which point you, the guy who rides his bike or walks will be highly suspect if you are even able to at all, since you must be hiding something since you don't want to use the government tracker transporter.
[+] [-] kansface|11 years ago|reply
| Google's new fleet was intentionally designed to look adorable... By turning self-driving cars into an adorable Skynet Marshmallow Bumper Bots, Google hopes to spiritually disarm other drivers. I also suspect the cuteness is used to quell some of the road rage that might emerge from being stuck behind one of these things. They're intended as moderate-distance couriers, not open-road warriors, so their max speed is 25 miles per hour.
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/google_self_driving_car
[+] [-] toyg|11 years ago|reply
That's a bold statement. It might become more of a luxury, i.e. something you buy when you reach a certain income, rather than something you need to live. But disappear, no, it won't.
As anecdote, I can bring the experience of European life. In a lot of European towns and cities, you can live quite comfortably without a car, today -- after all, they were built for people and horses. Rich people (or people who want to be seen as wealthy) still buy huge SUVs -- and then struggle to park them, because they're not as thin as a horse.
In London, a lot of people simply use cabs to move around most of the time; but sure enough, if they have a decent income, they'll buy a car and park it somewhere, ready to be driven during their countryside weekends.
Already today, car ownership has very little to do with convenience; it's mostly about ownership and individualism, something that is completely opposite to the concept of sharing. My wife is absolutely horrified at the thought of sharing anything ("germs! ruined things!" etc etc), and that will not change because of Google or Uber.
[+] [-] agumonkey|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lambda|11 years ago|reply
These self-driving cars will be cheaper than even UberX/Lyft/whatever, as there is no driver to have to pay. They can be smaller than a cab, taking up much less parking room (they can park too close for their doors to open, and they don't need to including seating for a driver), which can actually be a fairly significant cost in the city, where convenient parking spaces can sell for as much as a house does elsewhere.
[+] [-] LukeB_UK|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianstorms|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|11 years ago|reply
- You can buy this car. It costs $100,000. But that's okay.
- When you aren't actively using it, you tell it to go "Uber mode" and pick up and drive people around as part of the "Uber Network of Cars"
- You split the fee with Uber/Lyft/whoever. They get 30%, you get 70%.
If the average ride pays you $7, over 5 years that's like 8 rides your car has to "sell" per day to be effectively "free" to you (except for financing, insurance, etc.).
- At the end of the workday, Google Now summons your car to pick you up in front of your office and whisk you home.
- After dropping you off at home, your car goes back onto Uber mode and does night-time service (if you opt-in).
You could probably pay your car off much earlier than 5 years with more rides/higher average ride fare, after which your car is making you money. Clever people will use this extra to finance more cars to run small fleets and effectively live without working.
[+] [-] TranquilMarmot|11 years ago|reply
You sigh as you clean up the mess, "At least it feels like I'm living in the future now..."
But, most likely, the cars will keep track of who is riding in them and you could hunt down whoever made the mess and make them clean it up. Or maybe it has cameras installed? Talk about an invasion of privacy! Plus it's not like they ever signed a waiver saying they WOULDN'T shit in the car.
[+] [-] eru|11 years ago|reply
If it's such a great money spinner, why won't companies do that? Why do you _want_ people to own cars?
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] andrewljohnson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonwilk|11 years ago|reply
I feel that the other car companies working on self-driving car technology for consumers are wasting their time. The main reason I enjoy owning a nice car is that I like driving it. If I wasn't in control of driving my car, what would be the point? Vanity of course has to be considered but in the future, I see self-driving cars which we don't own will the the status quo in cities, and owning a manual operating a car will be either a novelty or something for people outside of major city hubs.
[+] [-] millstone|11 years ago|reply
In the near term, I'm looking forwards to hybrid assistive technologies. We took a vacation that required seven hours of highway driving. Toyota's freeway mode ("Automated Highway Driving Assist"), which controls speed and steering, would have made a big difference.
[+] [-] bostonpete|11 years ago|reply
- Don't have to worry about availability. Turns out there are a lot of people in my region who go to work in the morning and go home in the evening.
- When you spend that much time in your vehicle, it becomes and extension of your personal/living space. I don't want to spend 10 hours a week in a public box that may have a mess or an odor from the person before me.
[+] [-] threeseed|11 years ago|reply
Nonsense. That's just like saying taxis/cabs will negate the need for your own car.
Sometimes you need a car now to goto the shops, drop your kids at doctor etc. without having to wait 10-30 minutes for a car to arrive from the other side of town.
[+] [-] cmdli|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlubarov|11 years ago|reply
Some might also prefer ownership so that their car is always available with no delay, or so that they know their car will be perfectly clean and odorless.
I think you're right that on-demand will eventually make sense for a majority of people, though.
[+] [-] brc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kayoone|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hotgoldminer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kandalf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eru|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] click170|11 years ago|reply
It's true that if you carry a cell phone you already carry a personal tracking device and offer this information up freely to your cellular provider, but I'm interested in reducing instead of increasing the amount of information I'm leaking in that way.
What kind of information will these cars track? They'll have to track who rides in them for accountability purposes, which I already find troubling. Your average cabby isn't going to be compiling a profile about you based on where you catch rides to. Who has access to the information such as who rides in which cars? Is this available via an open API? I'm already peeved at companies like FitBit which hold my data ransom, is this going to be another of those situations?
There's a lot of privacy questions that I feel aren't being adequately addressed, but I still look forward to the possibilities this will bring. The privacy questions are answerable and any problems should be correctable.
[+] [-] vinkelhake|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|11 years ago|reply
Which might explain exactly why it looks very similar to many NEVs [0] or Motorized Quadricycles [1], which tend to have similar constraints.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhood_Electric_Vehicle
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorised_quadricycle
[+] [-] kin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billsossoon|11 years ago|reply
[1]: http://www.littletikes.com/content/ebiz/shop/invt/612060/612...
[+] [-] Animats|11 years ago|reply
CMU/Cadillac have a self-driving car. They have a number of long videos taken with a back-seat camera.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXhvQeArwWM
It's good enough that it's been driven around downtown Washington. It doesn't seem to sense turn signals or infer much intent from other-driver behavior. The driver has his hand on the auto/manual switch at all times; clearly there's not much confidence in this thing yet.
[+] [-] jastanton|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soyiuz|11 years ago|reply
Where can I take you sir?
[+] [-] yRetsyM|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|11 years ago|reply
Naturally, I don't know anything about trucking, and you'd want to be really sure something so big and bulky is safe, but the idea would be, rather than "do everything a car does all at once" to do something relatively simple.
[+] [-] 3apo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvagner|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedunnigan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dogeye|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbayer|11 years ago|reply