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All cars will be required to have dashcams. Either by insurance companies or by governments. All cars will be required to have GPS, and be tracked in real time
by mymythisisthis 7y ago
All cars will be required to have dashcams. Either by insurance companies or by governments.
All cars will be required to have GPS, and be tracked in real time. This is already the case with the majority of commercial vehicles.
Incremental steps in autonomous cars, first starting with 'drone' cars. Cars and trucks that are operated from a remote location. This will be piggy backed on existing technology. Cheap cameras, cheap cell networks etc. Think of delivery car, one person drives a truck from a remote location and one person is inside sorting packages, carrying them to the door. People with kids can work from home as Uber drivers and delivery drivers.
- dclowd9901 7y agoYour last point got me thinking about people sitting in a dark room waiting for autonomous cars to have trouble on the road then alert them to intervene, turning 1 driver:1 car into 1 driver:20 cars.
- mymythisisthis 7y agoI can see that. Or, even simpler, a delivery person hopes out with a package and the remote driver circles the block. Garbage trucks might be the first to have this system installed. You need two people to operate a truck currently, a driver and a guy in the back. It drives slow along the road, very predicable routes. Needs to be driven back to the yard once filled, and another truck to take over the route.
- nradov 7y agoMany garbage trucks have only a driver now. The guy in back was replaced by a mechanical arm that grabs and lifts the garbage cans.
- markkanof 7y agoAlso the ability to drive the truck, at least to some degree from controls at the back of the truck. In my neighborhood there are too many parked cars to be able to let the robotic arm do everything. I often see the driver at the back of the truck moving it forward and hoping off to position trash cans where the robotic arm can pick them up.
- mymythisisthis 7y agoI feel that this was the big trend that people missed; instead of AI we simple rebuilt the system to mechanically function better. First with standardized shipping containers, then progressed to other boring stuff.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- allovernow 7y agoSounds like a soul crushing job.
- tonmoy 7y agoSounds more interesting than driving trucks
- mc32 7y agoThere are all sorts of people. To some art is “boring”. To some being a refuse truck operator is interesting or being a remote crane operator is exciting. I’ve met people who straight up love “cold calling”. I cannot cold call for the life of me. Some people are excited by engaging with strangers and trying to get them excited about a product or service.
- throwawayhhakdl 7y agoSure, some people may find being a garbage man to be even erotically stimulating, but that doesn’t mean the majority of garbage men think it’s all that great. It’s a relatively pointless observation.
- saagarjha 7y agoYou’d need a pretty good AI to be able to detect that it’s in trouble quickly enough for a human to react in time.
- nradov 7y agoOur current cellular data infrastructure isn't nearly reliable enough to allow routine use of remote operated vehicles in public roads. What happens when a construction crew accidently cuts the backhaul fiber and takes out a whole group of base stations? And no, that problem won't be solved by 5G networks or satellite service.
- soared 7y agoThat problem already occurs! How many of us stopped working for hours when github went down? When aws went down? When some construction cut a wire and took out some of the internet?
- Buttons840 7y agoIf this happens, I bet police cameras and trackers are still unreliable at convenient times while all the other commodity cameras and trackers work 100% of the time.
- RivieraKid 7y agoThe GPS thing is unlikely, what would be the rationale of that? This would be a very unpopular policy.
- criddell 7y agoThe rationale is taxation. As more cars go electric they have to replace the gasoline tax.
- aquaticsunset 7y agoWhat country is this intended to be in? I can see it, possibly, happening in more forward minded societies... but certainly not the United States. If anything because there’s no way in hell they can cost effectively retrofit the vast amount of old vehicles we all tend to drive here.
- criddell 7y agoIf I had to implement it, I’d do a two stage system. If you install a tracker you pay ten cents per mile. If you don’t have a tracker you have to report mileage every year and pay twelve cents per mile plus a $40 processing fee.
- dmurray 7y agoThe cash for clunkers program paid $4k to everyone with an old car. A couple of hundred dollars for GPS trackers (and transmitters, which is presumably what is meant) seems well within the collective budget of all parties who pay for cars in the US.
- hanniabu 7y agoI would think it should be the other way around where gas cars would need to pay carbon tax. Or we can just call it even. Or in a hopeful scenario, stop oil and gas subsidies.
- rad_gruchalski 7y ago
- Spooky23 7y agoThe GPS thing is a no-brainer, as we need it to replace fuel excise taxes. As for the rest, no way. The GOP has pivoted to being the rural party, and rural folks can not afford drone cars and will be paralyzed without them.
- andrewem 7y agoI recall a discussion of this point on HN a long time ago, but GPS is only one way to charge taxes based on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) - another, which is less invasive, is just to read the vehicle's odometer on some regular basis, either by hand when doing an annual vehicle safety inspection, or automatically by having the vehicle transmit the data. Certainly those have risks of tampering, but so does GPS.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mrfusion 7y agoOr report your odometer reading every time you renew your registration with steep fines for lying. Or simply add a tax on new cars. Those who drive a lot will have to replace their vehicles more often and pay more tax.
- haihaibye 7y agoTaxing newer, more fuel efficient vehicles is counter productive.
- jayd16 7y agoI really doubt dashcams and gps will be required in the next decade but I bet installing them will get you a discount of some kind.
- buckminster 7y agoThe eCall system - which automatically phones the emergency services with your position after a crash - is already mandatory on new cars in the EU. The GPS is already there. Making further use of it, perhaps to assist self-driving cars, doesn't seem like such a stretch. (Which is not to say I welcome it.)
- LeftHandPath 7y agoI don’t like this. I’m okay with dying in a cold river or a burning car after a crash if it means I don’t have to be worried about being tracked every second of my life. At some point, its going to cost extra to buy cars without GPS trackers, houses without police-force endorses surveillance nets, or phones with an actual “off” button. This is much more pressing, in my opinion, than people buying into heavily processed meat substitutes.
- jayd16 7y agoI think there's quite a gap between, 'built into every car' and insurance companies requiring access to it. GPS is in every customer phone but insurance companies don't require access to that either.
- slipheen 7y agoI'm curious if you happen to know - Is it only mandatory to ship it with new cars, or is it mandatory to have it installed? Would it be legal for me to remove, similar to what I've done with Onstar/Starlink in the past?
- a10c 7y agoI'd be surprised if cars didn't come with cameras built-in as a standard. Think Tesla Sentry mode.
- dionidium 7y agoWhy limit it to tracking? Why do we put these powerful machines in the hands of users that we know with certainty will kill themselves and others at a predictable rate and then just ask them nicely not to do harm? The technology required to geofence, speed-regulate, and otherwise control where, when, and how fast cars can go already exists. Why aren't we using it? We don't need fully autonomous cars. There are all kinds of things we can do incrementally. I have to imagine some jurisdictions are going to realize this, eventually. And once they do the totally predictable savings to life and property will be unignorable.
- mrfusion 7y agoGood point but could get tricky for edge cases. Medical emergencies where every second counts for example or escaping violence.
- chrismorgan 7y agoPut appropriate limiters in the vehicles, with a button to disengage all the limits that also notifies the police that you have done so, so that they can decide whether they need to come help, whether (as they later review the case) there was appropriate cause, &c.
- squilliam 7y ago"appropriate cause" sounds ripe for abuse. Cops will be able to disable this "feature" in their personal cars, naturally. without consequence.