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This is already happening in the trucking industry. Self-driving trucks are being developed to be able to drive 99% of the trip that's on highways and then hum

This is already happening in the trucking industry. Self-driving trucks are being developed to be able to drive 99% of the trip that's on highways and then human drivers take over for the local 1%. To make it easier, transfer hubs are being built near cities off major highways to make everything easier and non-disruptive. The same thing could be done with cars without the need for the transfer hubs and it basically is already done.

frankharv 8y ago
I can't beleive they would do a trail run with an automous truck weighing 80,000lbs barreling down the freeway. This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Vehicles that move slow on a predefined path in the night. Then advance to faster moving objects like taxis. Just like the DARPA Grand Challenge that started this mess. Many of those vehicles were industrial usage, not consumer.
- chris11 8y ago
  > This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Honestly I would think that automating a slow moving vehicle in the city would be a much harder engineering challenge. City driving can be a lot messier than driving on the freeway.
  - 0x00000000 8y ago
    The stakes are much lower though. A standard car drifting into the oncoming lane is basically death. If it can't handle city driving, the methods are probably too immature to put people's lives against.
    - mrep 8y ago
      Pretty much all interstates have barriers between the directions to prevent head on collisions.
      - oldgradstudent 8y ago
        Hitting a barrier in highway speeds is quite dangerous, even without hitting a car in the oncoming lane. As the recent Tesla crash showed, even on a divided highway there are plenty of opportunities to cause death and mayhem to the autonomous car and the surrounding vehicles.
- Sangermaine 8y ago
  >This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Vehicles that move slow on a predefined path in the night. Then advance to faster moving objects like taxis. No, you've got it backwards. The point of all of the above comments is that driving in cities and densely populated areas is a much more difficult challenge than driving down a straight open highway in the middle of nowhere. That's the easy part, the hard part comes when there are humans and all sorts of obstructions and road/land features to deal with.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Or when there's a random tire or mattress lying in your lane. I see that kind of stuff on the interstates all the time.
    - jethro_tell 8y ago
      There's no way 'object in road' can even get close to the amount of variant situations you find yourself in during urban driving. Freeway driving is pretty straight and forward. If you can't keep from running into a stationary object, you probably can't drive in the city either.
    - vilhelm_s 8y ago
      But as this accident shows, that's still an easier problem: if there an object in your lane on the freeway, you should pretty much always avoid it. On a city street, it's more difficult to decide which objects should or shouldn't be ignored.
    - kolinko 8y ago
      Autonomous cars have an advantage here compared to even the best human drivers - a persistent 360 degree awareness of the surrounding. If an object appears on the road, the autonomous vehicle can easily calculate whether it's safe to steer left, or right, or hit the breaks. A human will make a roughly random choice.
      - 8y ago
- usrusr 8y ago
  > I can't beleive they would do a trail run with an automous truck weighing 80,000lbs barreling down the freeway. Fast driving necessitates predictability. Unrestricted stretches of the autobahn are not killzones because the speed breeds discipline: lanes are changed with indicators on more often than without (barely, but still..), passing lane rules are followed almost religiously, compared to what you see in America (even though drivers constantly complain about imperfections) and so on. The fastest roads of any jurisdiction would its easiest for a robot car or truck. Slow environments on the other hand are full of ad-hoc improvisation and weird traffic participants like the occasional flock of sheep, horse team or a biathlon squad on rollers.
- fredoralive 8y ago
  > This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Garbage trucks are big and heavy, so if things go wrong they can go badly wrong, such as the incident in Glasgow that killed six people[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Glasgow_bin_lorry_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Glasgow_bin_lorry_crash
- icebraining 8y ago
  This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. It has. The EasyMile EZ10 (a passenger shuttle) has already been deployed in a lot of places, for example.

frankharv 8y ago

I can't beleive they would do a trail run with an automous truck weighing 80,000lbs barreling down the freeway. This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Vehicles that move slow on a predefined path in the night. Then advance to faster moving objects like taxis. Just like the DARPA Grand Challenge that started this mess. Many of those vehicles were industrial usage, not consumer.

chris11 8y ago
> This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Honestly I would think that automating a slow moving vehicle in the city would be a much harder engineering challenge. City driving can be a lot messier than driving on the freeway.
- 0x00000000 8y ago
  The stakes are much lower though. A standard car drifting into the oncoming lane is basically death. If it can't handle city driving, the methods are probably too immature to put people's lives against.
  - mrep 8y ago
    Pretty much all interstates have barriers between the directions to prevent head on collisions.
    - oldgradstudent 8y ago
      Hitting a barrier in highway speeds is quite dangerous, even without hitting a car in the oncoming lane. As the recent Tesla crash showed, even on a divided highway there are plenty of opportunities to cause death and mayhem to the autonomous car and the surrounding vehicles.
Sangermaine 8y ago
>This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Vehicles that move slow on a predefined path in the night. Then advance to faster moving objects like taxis. No, you've got it backwards. The point of all of the above comments is that driving in cities and densely populated areas is a much more difficult challenge than driving down a straight open highway in the middle of nowhere. That's the easy part, the hard part comes when there are humans and all sorts of obstructions and road/land features to deal with.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Or when there's a random tire or mattress lying in your lane. I see that kind of stuff on the interstates all the time.
  - jethro_tell 8y ago
    There's no way 'object in road' can even get close to the amount of variant situations you find yourself in during urban driving. Freeway driving is pretty straight and forward. If you can't keep from running into a stationary object, you probably can't drive in the city either.
  - vilhelm_s 8y ago
    But as this accident shows, that's still an easier problem: if there an object in your lane on the freeway, you should pretty much always avoid it. On a city street, it's more difficult to decide which objects should or shouldn't be ignored.
  - kolinko 8y ago
    Autonomous cars have an advantage here compared to even the best human drivers - a persistent 360 degree awareness of the surrounding. If an object appears on the road, the autonomous vehicle can easily calculate whether it's safe to steer left, or right, or hit the breaks. A human will make a roughly random choice.
    - 8y ago
usrusr 8y ago
> I can't beleive they would do a trail run with an automous truck weighing 80,000lbs barreling down the freeway. Fast driving necessitates predictability. Unrestricted stretches of the autobahn are not killzones because the speed breeds discipline: lanes are changed with indicators on more often than without (barely, but still..), passing lane rules are followed almost religiously, compared to what you see in America (even though drivers constantly complain about imperfections) and so on. The fastest roads of any jurisdiction would its easiest for a robot car or truck. Slow environments on the other hand are full of ad-hoc improvisation and weird traffic participants like the occasional flock of sheep, horse team or a biathlon squad on rollers.
fredoralive 8y ago
> This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Garbage trucks are big and heavy, so if things go wrong they can go badly wrong, such as the incident in Glasgow that killed six people[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Glasgow_bin_lorry_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Glasgow_bin_lorry_crash
icebraining 8y ago
This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. It has. The EasyMile EZ10 (a passenger shuttle) has already been deployed in a lot of places, for example.