13 ms·

Autonomous transportation launching to 125k residents in Florida

157 points by olivercameron 9y ago

Isamu 9y ago
With a human behind the wheel, with hands off? Or are they really launching with nobody in the vehicle?
- mxpxrocks10 9y ago
  the picture looked like no one in the vehicle, but then again there was this in the past: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--o8x0LC0x--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/vqbi9pdn0xnuehfennmg.jpg https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--o8x0LC0... :-)
- mkolodny 9y ago
  This picture from the article has a human behind the wheel: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Hz0b8qPI6Q4pwysytasFpA.jpeg https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Hz0b8qPI6Q4pwysyt...
- michaelrbock 9y ago
  With a test driver behind the wheel. Source: https://twitter.com/olivercameron/status/951200429001469953 https://twitter.com/olivercameron/status/951200429001469953
- olivercameron 9y ago
  Human behind the wheel today. A key reason we choose private communities is that we see it as a way to remove that Test Driver much faster, though.
kldavis4 9y ago
More details on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida#Autonomous_vehicles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida#Autonomo...
olivercameron 9y ago
Hello everyone! Oliver, the CEO of Voyage and YC alum (2011) here. I got started in the self-driving car world as a member of the team that built Udacity's self-driving car curriculum, and also an open source self-driving car. This industry is crazy fun and moving ridiculously fast. Let me know if I can answer any questions at all about absolutely anything. We're really excited about bringing Level-4 transportation to the world, but especially so at places like The Villages, Florida. Whether it’s helping those with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, vision impairment, or just those who want to get around with less friction, we’ve seen first-hand the positive impact autonomous transportation can have for seniors.
- marcell 9y ago
  Hi Oliver, a few questions: (1) Will these cars have a Voyage employee in them to supervise? (2) What are your driver intervention rates, eg. compared to Waymo? [1] (3) Is there anything unique about The Villages, FL that makes it easier (or harder) to deploy self driving cars? Congrats and interested to see the responses! [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/01/13/waymos-self-driving-cars-need-less-driver-intervention/96529888/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/01/13/waymos-...
  - coev 9y ago
    The Villages is basically a retirement community so there's a large audience of potential customers that may not be able to drive on their own.
    - gresrun 9y ago
      Also, the max speed limit on roads in the community is only 30mph and electric or gas golf carts are the ubiquitous transportation method today.
  - olivercameron 9y ago
    Hi marcell, great questions. 1) Yes, at least today. We call them Operations Specialists, and they're highly trained in operating autonomous vehicles and customer service. 2) This is a tough one, since it's not apples-to-apples. That said, Waymo is clearly the industry leader in this regard, and we're glad that at least some of their formula is observable from the outside. We've been at this a little less than a year, and today many of our passenger rides are 95+% autonomous. A long way to go, though! 3) We love these communities for a number of reasons: A) Speed limits in these communities tend to be a little more restricted than everyday public road. The faster you (and others) can go, the more complex it becomes. The roads are also spectacularly well-maintained. B) Customer acquisition is a non-trivial problem, and with these sorts of partnerships we gain (exclusive) access to 125,000 potential riders. It would be brutal for us to achieve the same in San Francisco, and not necessarily cost effective to retain them. C) If we wanted to try out concepts that may accelerate the timeframe to remove the Test Driver, a private community is easier to collaborate with. D) Above all else, there's just a lot of demand for what we offer in these sorts of communities. Self-driving cars will lower the cost of transportation, and for those with vision impairments (or Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s etc.), it enables such residents to get around with less friction.
lolc 9y ago
"Beginning in early 2018, we’ll start rolling out a door-to-door self-driving taxi service to residents." Now? Isn't that a bit optimistic? To me it looks like they have just one car for testing. At least they understand that they need the environment mapped to a very fine degree.
- olivercameron 9y ago
  We are an optimistic bunch, and it will be a slow rollout (constrained by vehicle build-outs), but we also have experience launching such self-driving taxi services. We have a service that's live today in San Jose that serves tons of (repeat) riders daily. We've learned a lot there that we're applying directly to Florida.
  - lolc 9y ago
    How autonomous is the service in San Jose then? Do you mean to say that you have cars without drivers that serve ride after ride and come home to charge? If so I'm far behind the curve.
    - olivercameron 9y ago
      We still have Test Drivers behind the wheel as a last resort, but we regularly give passenger rides with zero or low disengagements. As a real-world example: we have a couple who uses our self-driving taxi service multiple times a day every day (The Grims), and their rides are ~95+% autonomous.
      - lolc 9y ago
        You mean 95% of their rides are entirely autonomous or their typical ride is 95% autonomous? I remember how voice to text got to 95% in the nineties. It's used for a lot of things these days, still not for safety-critical tasks.
        olivercameron 9y ago
dhruvp 9y ago
Pretty cool idea to go to private, well constrained areas so that it scopes down the problem and allows for quick iteration. Good luck! Excited to see autonomous vehicles in these environments.
- olivercameron 9y ago
  Thank you Dhruv!
propman 9y ago
I think this business model has a far greater chance of succeeding than something like Tesla's. It's easier to just focus on a small averagely populated area than high density urban cities or in Tesla's case, the entire country. It's safer to deal with construction/road issues, unique quirks present of each city when you're only focusing on one community at a time. It's far less of a headache dealing with one set of regulations for a community that has few, impressionable decisionmakers than trying to scale while trying to meet ever-changing individual regulations from each state/city and an uncertain national landscape. Only Google and the big automakers have the available influence to push for federal regulation standards and even those can be scrapped if some major incident happens or morons refuse to follow proper safety protocols to chase profits (uber). If Tesla pushes level 4 or 5 autonomy, they need to consider every circumstance (rain, snow, dust storms, tornadoes, ice, and so many other random unique Mother Nature quirks), every road construction issue, hazards, fallen trees etc. all at once. It just isn't feasible. You need city employees to report fallen trees, garbage truck routes, area with frequent deer or animal crossings etc. They can't just say it's autonomous in one particular area where maybe only 100 Teslas are present, it's just not economical. I think this route of small community adaptation is the most likely and it's great to see most players shift to this model. This means that automakers aren't going to be the big players in this space for another decade or so. It's not economical for big beuracratic, slow moving businesses like Ford to enter into this landscape. Small companies and startups pushing into this has its advantages and disadvantages however.
- alehul 9y ago
  I'd just like to point out that Tesla as you're speaking of it is a car manufacturer, whereas Voyage is a car service. Tesla is apparently planning to launch their own car service, which from an economic standpoint may be poised to win. It will involve Tesla owners being able to add their car to a public fleet and essentially have their car make money for them. It's plausible the Tesla model will win out because, in the majority of hours, only about 20% of the fleet is used in a car service. RideAustin, as a nonprofit, has publicly available ride data to support this. So with a dedicated fleet, you'll often have a lot of unused cars that will be quite inefficient. With the Tesla model, however, the money-making portion is a secondary purpose for the car's ownership, with the primary one being the owner's own convenience when needed. Hope this is explained accurately!
alehul 9y ago
I haven't heard of Voyage before, but this is interesting. Would it be accurate to summarize that while most autonomous car companies are going for gradually higher levels of autonomy nationwide/worldwide, Voyage has the opposite strategy of starting at a higher level of autonomy in one controlled community and will aim to expand geographically from there?
- olivercameron 9y ago
  Correct! We think people would be surprised at how big some of these private communities are, and how many places look like them other than retirement communities.
- drcross 9y ago
  In robotic terms it's called a constrained environment.
nathan_f77 9y ago
I had no idea that retirement communities could grow to the size of cities. This place is amazing [1] [2]. Peter Thiel and Y Combinator talk about building cities or planned communities, but it looks like it's already been done. And now they're adding fully autonomous vehicles. I think this is also the perfect place to test fully automated grocery stores, restaurants, and home automation. You could set up automatic payments for everything via facial recognition / GPS / bluetooth. I never considered that the "city of the future" would be a retirement community with lots of elderly people. I wonder if they have security cameras covering every street, similar to the UK. You could set up some facial tracking across all the cameras, and a centralized security system in every house, and it might become the safest city in the world. It could also make a great episode of Black Mirror. I work remotely on my laptop, and my wife and I have a lot of hobbies, including yoga, ballet, archery, art, music [3]. We're living in Chiang Mai, and many of the archery club members are retirees from the UK. So we're already interacting out with some older people, and don't have any qualms about it. All residents of The Villages must be over the age of 19, but 20% of the houses can be owned by younger people who live by themselves. Not saying we would want to live there, but it's not too hard to imagine. This would also be a great place to build home automation startups (or even city automation), just like Voyage is doing. For example, many of the residents might be able to afford robotic chefs [4]. The system could automatically order your groceries, and they'd be delivered by a self-driving Voyage car. Then another robot in your house could receive the delivery and store the food in your smart refrigerator. It also makes me realize that a blockchain might be unnecessary. You trust your neighbors, you trust the people who manage the community, and you trust the legal system, lawyers, judges, and prisons. So there's probably no need for a trustless payment network in a community like this. The Octopus card works fine in Hong Kong, and it's just integers in a database. Lots of people are working from home these days, so I think this might lead to more planned communities. The digital nomad lifestyle is great for a while, but it gets exhausting after a few years. Hopefully there will some communities that are geared towards younger people and people with families. I've also been following the High Street Cohousing Project [5] in New Zealand. Would be very interested to hear about other cohousing projects and planned communities. [1] https://www.thevillages.com https://www.thevillages.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida [3] https://www.thevillages.com/calendar/ https://www.thevillages.com/calendar/ [4] http://www.moley.com/ http://www.moley.com/ [5] http://highstreetcohousing.nz/ http://highstreetcohousing.nz/
jknz 9y ago
Congratulations. Especially if there are serious competitors in this space, governments could enact laws that speed up safety requirements (and maybe speed up innovation too). One thought: Governments could force driverless companies to share their data, in some inter-operable format (think a 3D map, or 6D if you had speed information?) that could be read by other cars nearby. For instance if there is a stroller with a baby in front of the car in front of you, or if an accident happened in the street you are about to enter, you would be able to read it from the information emitted from cars that are closer to the danger/obstacle. Current technologies allow this. My guess is that sensors will gain substantially in terms of robustness. (Imagine what you can do with one set of lidar/thermocamera/visial cameras; now imagine what you can do with data from 10 of these sets from different locations!) Smaller players (such as Voyage, although it seems you got there far already!) would probably benefit from this and it would benefit competition/innovation. Governments would likely be happy to force this into law because if it makes sense for safety. Anyway, congrats for the real-life launch
lovemenot 9y ago
This sounds really a great project. Good luck. I wonder there was any consideration given to just adding automnomy as a module to the golf-carts that are currently widely used in these communities. It seems that could allow for faster deployment, lower legal barriers and lower capital investment. The autonomous vehicles in Black Mirror's recent Hang the DJ fits this concept.
Animats 9y ago
This was what Google was thinking for their little 25MPH bubble car. The one they discontinued in 2016.[1] The great thing about a 25MPH speed limit is that slamming on the brakes deals with most problems. You don't have a stopping distance long enough that you have to steer out of them. Good idea, still too expensive per unit. Votage has a huge upfront cost spread over very few cars. Plus human drivers, which means "it doesn't really work yet". This is a "can we get market share before the money runs out" play. It worked for Uber. Things like this will be in retirement communities everywhere around 2025, once the sensors are in volume manufacture and cheap. When I was working on self-driving (2005 Grand Challenge) I saw two initial use cases - this one, and airport rental car pick-up and return. Both require only slow-speed driving in reasonably controlled environments, something which can be made to work. Neither is yet economically feasible. [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603126/google-puts-the-brakes-on-its-autonomous-bubble-car/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603126/google-puts-the-br...
- akira2501 9y ago
  > The great thing about a 25MPH speed limit is that slamming on the brakes deals with most problems. Might still not be that great if your clients are elderly.
  - dx034 9y ago
    On suburban roads, nearly all obstacles will be seen early enough to allow for slow breaking. It's very different in cities where people can appear between parked cars.
    - akira2501 9y ago
      I meant as passengers. Restraint systems are designed with healthy bodies in mind, and they wreak havoc on the elderly. "Slamming the breaks" is not a valid strategy in this environment.

157 points by olivercameron 9y ago

Isamu 9y ago

With a human behind the wheel, with hands off? Or are they really launching with nobody in the vehicle?

mxpxrocks10 9y ago
the picture looked like no one in the vehicle, but then again there was this in the past: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--o8x0LC0x--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/vqbi9pdn0xnuehfennmg.jpg https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--o8x0LC0... :-)
mkolodny 9y ago
This picture from the article has a human behind the wheel: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Hz0b8qPI6Q4pwysytasFpA.jpeg https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Hz0b8qPI6Q4pwysyt...
michaelrbock 9y ago
With a test driver behind the wheel. Source: https://twitter.com/olivercameron/status/951200429001469953 https://twitter.com/olivercameron/status/951200429001469953
olivercameron 9y ago
Human behind the wheel today. A key reason we choose private communities is that we see it as a way to remove that Test Driver much faster, though.

kldavis4 9y ago

More details on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida#Autonomous_vehicles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida#Autonomo...

olivercameron 9y ago

Hello everyone! Oliver, the CEO of Voyage and YC alum (2011) here. I got started in the self-driving car world as a member of the team that built Udacity's self-driving car curriculum, and also an open source self-driving car. This industry is crazy fun and moving ridiculously fast. Let me know if I can answer any questions at all about absolutely anything. We're really excited about bringing Level-4 transportation to the world, but especially so at places like The Villages, Florida. Whether it’s helping those with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, vision impairment, or just those who want to get around with less friction, we’ve seen first-hand the positive impact autonomous transportation can have for seniors.

marcell 9y ago
Hi Oliver, a few questions: (1) Will these cars have a Voyage employee in them to supervise? (2) What are your driver intervention rates, eg. compared to Waymo? [1] (3) Is there anything unique about The Villages, FL that makes it easier (or harder) to deploy self driving cars? Congrats and interested to see the responses! [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/01/13/waymos-self-driving-cars-need-less-driver-intervention/96529888/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/01/13/waymos-...
- coev 9y ago
  The Villages is basically a retirement community so there's a large audience of potential customers that may not be able to drive on their own.
  - gresrun 9y ago
    Also, the max speed limit on roads in the community is only 30mph and electric or gas golf carts are the ubiquitous transportation method today.
- olivercameron 9y ago
  Hi marcell, great questions. 1) Yes, at least today. We call them Operations Specialists, and they're highly trained in operating autonomous vehicles and customer service. 2) This is a tough one, since it's not apples-to-apples. That said, Waymo is clearly the industry leader in this regard, and we're glad that at least some of their formula is observable from the outside. We've been at this a little less than a year, and today many of our passenger rides are 95+% autonomous. A long way to go, though! 3) We love these communities for a number of reasons: A) Speed limits in these communities tend to be a little more restricted than everyday public road. The faster you (and others) can go, the more complex it becomes. The roads are also spectacularly well-maintained. B) Customer acquisition is a non-trivial problem, and with these sorts of partnerships we gain (exclusive) access to 125,000 potential riders. It would be brutal for us to achieve the same in San Francisco, and not necessarily cost effective to retain them. C) If we wanted to try out concepts that may accelerate the timeframe to remove the Test Driver, a private community is easier to collaborate with. D) Above all else, there's just a lot of demand for what we offer in these sorts of communities. Self-driving cars will lower the cost of transportation, and for those with vision impairments (or Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s etc.), it enables such residents to get around with less friction.

lolc 9y ago

"Beginning in early 2018, we’ll start rolling out a door-to-door self-driving taxi service to residents." Now? Isn't that a bit optimistic? To me it looks like they have just one car for testing. At least they understand that they need the environment mapped to a very fine degree.

olivercameron 9y ago
We are an optimistic bunch, and it will be a slow rollout (constrained by vehicle build-outs), but we also have experience launching such self-driving taxi services. We have a service that's live today in San Jose that serves tons of (repeat) riders daily. We've learned a lot there that we're applying directly to Florida.
- lolc 9y ago
  How autonomous is the service in San Jose then? Do you mean to say that you have cars without drivers that serve ride after ride and come home to charge? If so I'm far behind the curve.
  - olivercameron 9y ago
    We still have Test Drivers behind the wheel as a last resort, but we regularly give passenger rides with zero or low disengagements. As a real-world example: we have a couple who uses our self-driving taxi service multiple times a day every day (The Grims), and their rides are ~95+% autonomous.
    - lolc 9y ago
      You mean 95% of their rides are entirely autonomous or their typical ride is 95% autonomous? I remember how voice to text got to 95% in the nineties. It's used for a lot of things these days, still not for safety-critical tasks.
      - olivercameron 9y ago

dhruvp 9y ago

Pretty cool idea to go to private, well constrained areas so that it scopes down the problem and allows for quick iteration. Good luck! Excited to see autonomous vehicles in these environments.

olivercameron 9y ago
Thank you Dhruv!

propman 9y ago

I think this business model has a far greater chance of succeeding than something like Tesla's. It's easier to just focus on a small averagely populated area than high density urban cities or in Tesla's case, the entire country. It's safer to deal with construction/road issues, unique quirks present of each city when you're only focusing on one community at a time. It's far less of a headache dealing with one set of regulations for a community that has few, impressionable decisionmakers than trying to scale while trying to meet ever-changing individual regulations from each state/city and an uncertain national landscape. Only Google and the big automakers have the available influence to push for federal regulation standards and even those can be scrapped if some major incident happens or morons refuse to follow proper safety protocols to chase profits (uber). If Tesla pushes level 4 or 5 autonomy, they need to consider every circumstance (rain, snow, dust storms, tornadoes, ice, and so many other random unique Mother Nature quirks), every road construction issue, hazards, fallen trees etc. all at once. It just isn't feasible. You need city employees to report fallen trees, garbage truck routes, area with frequent deer or animal crossings etc. They can't just say it's autonomous in one particular area where maybe only 100 Teslas are present, it's just not economical. I think this route of small community adaptation is the most likely and it's great to see most players shift to this model. This means that automakers aren't going to be the big players in this space for another decade or so. It's not economical for big beuracratic, slow moving businesses like Ford to enter into this landscape. Small companies and startups pushing into this has its advantages and disadvantages however.

alehul 9y ago
I'd just like to point out that Tesla as you're speaking of it is a car manufacturer, whereas Voyage is a car service. Tesla is apparently planning to launch their own car service, which from an economic standpoint may be poised to win. It will involve Tesla owners being able to add their car to a public fleet and essentially have their car make money for them. It's plausible the Tesla model will win out because, in the majority of hours, only about 20% of the fleet is used in a car service. RideAustin, as a nonprofit, has publicly available ride data to support this. So with a dedicated fleet, you'll often have a lot of unused cars that will be quite inefficient. With the Tesla model, however, the money-making portion is a secondary purpose for the car's ownership, with the primary one being the owner's own convenience when needed. Hope this is explained accurately!

alehul 9y ago

I haven't heard of Voyage before, but this is interesting. Would it be accurate to summarize that while most autonomous car companies are going for gradually higher levels of autonomy nationwide/worldwide, Voyage has the opposite strategy of starting at a higher level of autonomy in one controlled community and will aim to expand geographically from there?

olivercameron 9y ago
Correct! We think people would be surprised at how big some of these private communities are, and how many places look like them other than retirement communities.
drcross 9y ago
In robotic terms it's called a constrained environment.

nathan_f77 9y ago

I had no idea that retirement communities could grow to the size of cities. This place is amazing [1] [2]. Peter Thiel and Y Combinator talk about building cities or planned communities, but it looks like it's already been done. And now they're adding fully autonomous vehicles. I think this is also the perfect place to test fully automated grocery stores, restaurants, and home automation. You could set up automatic payments for everything via facial recognition / GPS / bluetooth. I never considered that the "city of the future" would be a retirement community with lots of elderly people. I wonder if they have security cameras covering every street, similar to the UK. You could set up some facial tracking across all the cameras, and a centralized security system in every house, and it might become the safest city in the world. It could also make a great episode of Black Mirror. I work remotely on my laptop, and my wife and I have a lot of hobbies, including yoga, ballet, archery, art, music [3]. We're living in Chiang Mai, and many of the archery club members are retirees from the UK. So we're already interacting out with some older people, and don't have any qualms about it. All residents of The Villages must be over the age of 19, but 20% of the houses can be owned by younger people who live by themselves. Not saying we would want to live there, but it's not too hard to imagine. This would also be a great place to build home automation startups (or even city automation), just like Voyage is doing. For example, many of the residents might be able to afford robotic chefs [4]. The system could automatically order your groceries, and they'd be delivered by a self-driving Voyage car. Then another robot in your house could receive the delivery and store the food in your smart refrigerator. It also makes me realize that a blockchain might be unnecessary. You trust your neighbors, you trust the people who manage the community, and you trust the legal system, lawyers, judges, and prisons. So there's probably no need for a trustless payment network in a community like this. The Octopus card works fine in Hong Kong, and it's just integers in a database. Lots of people are working from home these days, so I think this might lead to more planned communities. The digital nomad lifestyle is great for a while, but it gets exhausting after a few years. Hopefully there will some communities that are geared towards younger people and people with families. I've also been following the High Street Cohousing Project [5] in New Zealand. Would be very interested to hear about other cohousing projects and planned communities. [1] https://www.thevillages.com https://www.thevillages.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida [3] https://www.thevillages.com/calendar/ https://www.thevillages.com/calendar/ [4] http://www.moley.com/ http://www.moley.com/ [5] http://highstreetcohousing.nz/ http://highstreetcohousing.nz/

jknz 9y ago

Congratulations. Especially if there are serious competitors in this space, governments could enact laws that speed up safety requirements (and maybe speed up innovation too). One thought: Governments could force driverless companies to share their data, in some inter-operable format (think a 3D map, or 6D if you had speed information?) that could be read by other cars nearby. For instance if there is a stroller with a baby in front of the car in front of you, or if an accident happened in the street you are about to enter, you would be able to read it from the information emitted from cars that are closer to the danger/obstacle. Current technologies allow this. My guess is that sensors will gain substantially in terms of robustness. (Imagine what you can do with one set of lidar/thermocamera/visial cameras; now imagine what you can do with data from 10 of these sets from different locations!) Smaller players (such as Voyage, although it seems you got there far already!) would probably benefit from this and it would benefit competition/innovation. Governments would likely be happy to force this into law because if it makes sense for safety. Anyway, congrats for the real-life launch

lovemenot 9y ago

This sounds really a great project. Good luck. I wonder there was any consideration given to just adding automnomy as a module to the golf-carts that are currently widely used in these communities. It seems that could allow for faster deployment, lower legal barriers and lower capital investment. The autonomous vehicles in Black Mirror's recent Hang the DJ fits this concept.

Animats 9y ago

This was what Google was thinking for their little 25MPH bubble car. The one they discontinued in 2016.[1] The great thing about a 25MPH speed limit is that slamming on the brakes deals with most problems. You don't have a stopping distance long enough that you have to steer out of them. Good idea, still too expensive per unit. Votage has a huge upfront cost spread over very few cars. Plus human drivers, which means "it doesn't really work yet". This is a "can we get market share before the money runs out" play. It worked for Uber. Things like this will be in retirement communities everywhere around 2025, once the sensors are in volume manufacture and cheap. When I was working on self-driving (2005 Grand Challenge) I saw two initial use cases - this one, and airport rental car pick-up and return. Both require only slow-speed driving in reasonably controlled environments, something which can be made to work. Neither is yet economically feasible. [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603126/google-puts-the-brakes-on-its-autonomous-bubble-car/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603126/google-puts-the-br...

akira2501 9y ago
> The great thing about a 25MPH speed limit is that slamming on the brakes deals with most problems. Might still not be that great if your clients are elderly.
- dx034 9y ago
  On suburban roads, nearly all obstacles will be seen early enough to allow for slow breaking. It's very different in cities where people can appear between parked cars.
  - akira2501 9y ago
    I meant as passengers. Restraint systems are designed with healthy bodies in mind, and they wreak havoc on the elderly. "Slamming the breaks" is not a valid strategy in this environment.