30 ms·
Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars
- icey 15y agoI can't wait to be able to buy one of these.
- wccrawford 15y agoI really didn't expect this to happen within 10 years. I'm amazed that this happened so fast.
- phlux 15y agoMoney. Google has oodles of it - governments only exist to gain money (and power) -- so it was pretty obvious (to me) that this would happen quickly.
- watchandwait 15y agoThis is an example of the beauty of American federalism. The states can push forward with innovation, as appropriate to their local needs.
- nextparadigms 15y agoI did. You know why? Because there's no way Google would announce a technology that they think would be used 10 years from now. I knew it right away that if they announced it now, then they're doing it to get public support and then convince politicians to allow them as soon as possible. They also wouldn't have announced it if it didn't already work pretty well.They wouldn't have announced it if it still needed 10 more years of work.
- esrauch 15y agoI did my Masters in machine learning and I'm honestly not really sure how technically feasible human-level driving is. Particularly things like intersections where traffic lights get obscured by a tree or the power outages, or things where people arrive at intersections at the same time and there is subtle communication between the drivers for who is allowing who to go first.
- amalcon 15y agoWell, the technology has been nearly there for over a decade. The problems are all legal. The obvious part was that automated cars are illegal to begin with. Less obviously, the liability situation is unclear: who would be willing to accept liability for the driverless car? The company that makes it would be at a huge risk at the mass market stage, because there would be many cars. Therefore, they would be unwilling. The passenger has no control over the car, so they would likewise be unwilling. The state could do it, but this is unlikely. The accident victim could be stuck with it, but this is unacceptable. So, who takes the liability?
- jws 15y agoHow about the State requiring each car owner to have insurance which would cover to $X all damage caused by the car AND the State also limit claims to $X.[1] The insurance companies with their phalanxes of clever quants can work out how dangerous each car model is and price it accordingly. Adam Smith's invisible hand can do the rest. If the insurance companies get greedy and "certainly not conspire" to price high, then the car makers would be free to spin up their own correctly priced insurance companies and take the business in order allow car sales. [1] Barring malice and probably a dozen other exceptions.
- mkr-hn 15y agoInsurance companies can see how reliable these things have become, and they know how bad humans are at driving. Insurers will probably start mandating automation (or offering incentives) in the next 5-7 years.
- bh42222 15y agoExactly, if these cars are statistically safer the insurance companies will notice that in a very few years. And then they will strongly encourage drivers, or should I say car owners, to get these. Especially if you are in a demographic the car insurance companies consider risky, you'll get to choose between paying A LOT to dive yourself, or a hell of a lot less to have the car drive you.
- tejaswiy 15y ago"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."
- iqster 15y agoApparently, Google had been lobbying the state of Nevada for this. It's very interesting to read this Scientific American article from late May (mentions Google's lobbying efforts): http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=google-driverless-robot-car http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=google-driv... Edit: NY Times article talking about this more directly ... http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/science/11drive.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/science/11drive.html?_r=1
- cal5k 15y agoThis is great news! Nevada is pretty consistently willing to be the reference case on a lot of forward-thinking ideas.
- phlux 15y agoProstitution, Gambling, 24-hour alcohol sales, Driverless cars, rentable fully automatic weapons! Come to Nevada, we are the FUTURE! EDIT: I was not actually bemoaning any of these, uh, services. I lived in Nevada for a few years and aside from the fact that I was traumatized against it by the game Fallout - actually like Nevada. It is one of those states that actually fantastic to live in if you have enough money/your own business. I plan to retire back to the Nevada side of Tahoe. Lets see how well those driverless cars handle snow.
- dmix 15y agoThey still have some harsh drug laws though.
- ktsmith 15y agoWhile Washoe and Clark counties are the two largest with Reno and Las Vegas being the two largest population centers there's a large rural and conservative population that prevents many progressive laws from passing.
- chc 15y agoTo be honest, at least half of those sound like perfectly reasonable ideas. Aside from machine guns, I'm not sure there's a strong logical argument to outlaw any of them.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoPresumably, the machine guns are only rentable at the range - what's the logical argument against that?
- 15y ago
- mkr-hn 15y agoI think driverless cars could be the future of public transportation. Instead of big trains and buses with limited reach, we would have thousands of public vehicles that take you where you need to go when you need to be there. It eliminates the big barriers to public transport--the lack of personal space, timing, and reach. No car? Just hop on the municipal/county dispatch website, request a car, pay your fee, and wait for the nearest open vehicle to bring itself to you. It can even coexist peacefully with private transportation.
- cal5k 15y agoI'll be honest, I'm waiting for commercially available vehicles so I can be the first to order a fleet of them and do just that :-)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mkr-hn 15y agoThis would be a big boon to any of the cities around me (like Athens [GA]). They have limited street parking, so the fees are big and the times are short. This would let you go to where you're going and send your car over to a high-density parking garage across town to wait for you.
- uuilly 15y agoOr you rent your car out to the grid rather than park it. Like air-bnb for cars.
- phlux 15y agoThis should be a feature that one can enable should you have consumed any alcohol.
- baconner 15y agoHere's to the possibility that the era of automobiles being a significant cause of death is coming to a close.
- jmonegro 15y agoMaybe measure your BAC according to your breath or something.
- baconner 15y agoIn fact breathalyzer based ignition locks already exist. http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=2512 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsN...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- allenp 15y agoThis could make road trips a lot more fun.
- chacha102 15y agoI'm guessing that it will be really important to allow cops to disable autonomous cars, or at least force them to pull over and stop. I'm really interested in how they will handle that issue.
- shii 15y agoEver watched Idiocracy? There's a mechanism in the cop cars that forced all cars to pull over and shutdown in that movie. Just hope it doesn't turn into this afterwards: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC_H2s7rMvE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC_H2s7rMvE
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- knieveltech 15y agoHowever they do it it better be secure, otherwise definitely expect a market for illicit little devices that allow you to plow traffic out of your lane on the interstate.
- Hawramani 15y ago[Survey question] What are Google's options for monetizing driverless cars?
- joezydeco 15y agoNon-stop advertising for the entire duration of the trip!
- rgoddard 15y agoWith location aware advertising that pays attention to the current conversation topics and that is capable of dropping you off at a businesses physical location which also gets charged on a CPD (cost per drop-off).
- joezydeco 15y agoEvil...but clever. Get that patent application going.
- minikomi 15y agoCar lowers power of air conditioner, lowers humidity "Mum I'm thirsty! And I want icecream!" 5 minutes - Baskin & Robbins, 15 minutes supermarket, icecream 15% off if you present this qr code identified ticket "Ah, I need to buy some milk. Let's stop by then honey." Geez. Way to make me stare out the window blankly for a few minutes.. Strange days.
- cheez 15y agoIf it's not obvious to you... People will pay for it.
- Hawramani 15y agoMy question was more like a survey. I was wondering what people on here thought were Google's options. [I have edited my question now]
- 15y ago
- cellurl 15y agoIf you have nothing to do this weekend, help us log some speed limits at wikispeedia.org . Advertising is not our model, saving lives is.
- tejaswiy 15y agoCome on guys, no William Gibson references yet? - "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."
- kellishaver 15y agoAs an individual who is legally blind and cannot drive, I very much welcome the day when this technology becomes wide-spread and affordable. It is extremely annoying to be in your mid 30's and have to rely on/inconvenience someone else to drive you around. So whether it were getting my own vehicle or seeing vast improvements made to less-than ideal public transportation systems, either would be great.
- esoteriq 15y agoI was thinking that driverless cars would be a boon for people who cannot drive (for whatever reason -- visual or otherwise). I do wonder, however, if laws will require driverless cars to have a person who is able to drive. (For legal or liability reasons in case of an equipment failure.) I do hope that doesn't happen, but it's possible.
- yichi 15y agoActually once it's been proven that robots drive much better than humans (which is not very difficult), people will want to probably outlaw human driving.
- dkokelley 15y agoYou say that like it's a sure thing. As excited as I am about the potential, I think it's still to be determined how well robots drive in real world environments, alongside humans, at scale.
- esoteriq 15y agoI wasn't really thinking about driving skills, but about equipment failure. There will always be a risk of equipment failure for automated machinery. Also, there's a risk of human error in the code governing driving. One possible workaround is to have several people at some centralized location monitor driverless car performance. A monitorer could override the car and drive the car remotely in the event of equipment failure or bugs in the code. But, maybe that's a pipe dream.
- 15y ago
- alanh 15y agoWe expect people to be frightened of robotic cars for the same reason they are scared of dying in a plane crash: Some deep-seated fear of dying in a manner that isn’t our own fault. Thoughts: 1) Marketing/PR for autonomous vehicles needs to really drive home their safety, so when you hear “robot car,” you think “… saves lives.” 2) Is it hard to imagine the opposite fear in children born 10 years from now? Having seen mostly robotic cars in real life, and human-driven cars getting in accidents on TV and in movies, might the child of the future react with terror when the robotic chauffeur intones, “human driver detected, approaching from rear”?
- arkitaip 15y agoUnfortunately Google is incredibly bad at sales and marketing so don't expect them to understand that their main challenge will be the public perception of driverless cars.
- Simucal 15y agoI think they understand this. What I'm not sure of is if they will have the sales ability to do anything about it.
- joelthelion 15y agoYeah, that's why no one uses their products.
- TuxPirate 15y agoYou mean web search, gmail, android and other crap they produce?
- jeffreyg 15y agoI think they were going for sarcasm.
- mortenjorck 15y agoGoogle is good at entering a market just as it's catching on with a meaningfully-differentiated product, and the product markets itself. See Search, Gmail, and Maps. When Google doesn't do this, they have to rely on marketing. See Wave or Buzz.
- darrennix 15y agoI believe one of the most overlooked benefits of driverless cars is that it makes small-engine, low acceleration (high efficiency) cars acceptable for the American market. Most Americans are currently unwilling to drive a 1 liter engine car because of its no fun to drive, but if you are lounging in the back seat you won't care.
- jessriedel 15y agoAs an American who is exactly as you describe, I agree. This may be a way to sell the idea to skeptical people of certain political persuasions, but the other benefits of driverless cars (greatly reduced numbers of death and injury, huge amounts of human time freed) will dwarf the gas efficiency improvement.
- stevenp 15y agoThis means there's going to be a market for in-car bar equipment! Someone is going to make millions on DC-powered blenders and cup holders that can safely accomodate cocktail shakers. :)
- bh42222 15y agoIn-car big screen TVs, right in front of the windshield! Two seater sized cars, but with only one set of very specious seats/recliners.
- bh42222 15y agoYES! Here is why this is great. As the industrial revolution was just starting up, many places in Europe banned this or that new labor saving invention - to preserve jobs. But not all, many others allowed the new machinery, this quickly forced all other to either also allow it or fall behind economically. Back to Nevada, Google will now start moving cars there. I can't be the only who wants to sleep during the commute to work, people in Nevada will start doing that. At least some old people will use this, and then more and more as they see how great it works and grants them greater independence. Parents could start using it for their teenagers. It will save lives. How long before someone in Nevada starts an all driver-less taxi service? This marks the beginning of an honest to goodness technological revolution, how often do you see that happening in one lifetime? And it's staring in Nevada.
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoSo next: car alarm clock! So you don't end up sleeping half the day away in your work parking lot.
- rdouble 15y agoI'm surprised by the comments that imply we'll solve traffic congestion and be snoozing safely in the passenger seat as our robot cars zip us to work in 10-20 years. I live in a technical world where a team of geniuses can barely keep a system up that exchanges 140 character messages.
- georgemcbay 15y ago"Robot cars" don't need to deal with the sort of scale or coupling that causes systems like the one you described to fail (the system you reference itself doesn't really need to be that way, technically... it is that way for the purposes of centralized control). The "robot car" I may be sleeping in doesn't have to worry about what the other 300 million cars on the road are up to, only the 10 or so that happen to be immediately around me. Yes, there are real problems to be solved in this area but they are very different sorts of problems than scaling and at the current rate of progress I wouldn't be too surprised if automated driving were available as a high end option on some cars within 15 years.
- saool 15y agoWe already have robots designed for games that drive cars, even besting most of the people skill-wise, and we have a nice traffic congestion example out of the network and medium access protocols too in the telecommunications science. so I guess that those problems are already almost sorted out. Video-game bots are a nice research field for artificial intelligence which can provide solutions for the real world. Unrelated: Check this out if you're interested in the topic, it's a nice read http://www.cs.rochester.edu/research/quagents/QuakeIII.pdf http://www.cs.rochester.edu/research/quagents/QuakeIII.pdf
- hollerith 15y agoIt would be more difficult for an innovation like driverless cars to get a start in a country like France where almost any change in the laws requires the involvement of the national government. (In the U.S., most legal cases, including the laws of the road and most serious crimes like robbery, rape and murder, are handled by the individual 50 states.)
- esrauch 15y agoIt's worth noting that the US is so significantly larger than France that it's not really directly analogous to compare Nevada with something like Lorraine in France. California + Texas together have about the same population as France, the two combined have a significantly higher GDP than France, and Texas alone is more land area than all of France. I suspect that it would actually be harder for something like Marijuana legalization to actually occur in California and Texas than it would be for it to occur in France, because the lumbering Federal government exists where there isn't really a close analogous overriding body in France (perhaps the EU to some extent).
- rmason 15y agoMy state of Michigan is known as the birthplace of the automobile. We had the first stretch of paved road in the world as well as the first stoplight. But we've abdicated our leadership in the automotive industry by turning our back on this development. Michigan rightly should have been the first state to legalize this technology. It seems as if the auto technology breakthroughs are coming from Silicon Valley. Bob Lutz said the Chevy Volt was developed in response to the Tesla's embarassing us. Now its Google's turn to embarass and challenge Detroit's engineers.
- callahad 15y agoCan anyone comment on the state of autonomous vehicles with regard to their ability to operate in mixed, human traffic? I would think that human drivers would be dangerously erratic and thus extraordinarily difficult to account for. And what do you do, as a passenger, when your driverless car induces road rage in a human driver?
- corecirculator 15y agoGoogle has tested their autonomous car for >10000 miles on US roads and highways over the last few years. So yes, they handle human driver traffic.
- callahad 15y agoOh wow, I missed that those trials were on actual, trafficked roads and highways. Thanks for pointing that out, corecirculator! Cite: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html
- jarek 15y agoMy other driverless car is a subway
- monkeypizza 15y agofrom an open letter to the French Parliament in 1845: "We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us." "We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat." from "A PETITION From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting." source: [http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html]
- ciphergoth 15y agoNB to the casual reader: the above was always intended as satire.
- rmrm 15y agounfortunately I get car sick. A robot car means either extreme boredom or sickness, I cant look away from the road. But I will be happy to be the last human driver, surrounded by safe robot cars.
- zaidf 15y agoAnyone else think this thread may be linked to 10-20 years from now when this thing begins to take off?
- roundsquare 15y agoInteresting that the limited the law to highways (edit: the law limited the use of autonomous vehicles to highways) (section 2, paragraph 1). I suppose it makes sense since highway driving is more predictable but its also higher speed and thus accidents are more dangerous. Also, this limitation would require the presence of a human driver to get the car to the highway.