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It is my belief that the most ideal form of truly self driving vehicles will not happen until a time when vehicles can talk to each other on the road to make ea
by robomartin 5y ago
It is my belief that the most ideal form of truly self driving vehicles will not happen until a time when vehicles can talk to each other on the road to make each other aware of position and speed data. I don't think this has to be full GPS coordinates at all. This is about short range relative position information.
A mesh network of vehicles on the road would add the ability for vehicles to become aware of far more than a human driver can ever know. For example, if cars become aware of a problem a few km/miles ahead, they can all adjust speed way before encountering the constriction in order to optimize for traffic flow (or safety, etc.).
Of course, this does not adequately deal with pedestrians, bikes, pets, fallen trees, debris on the road, etc.
Not saying cars would exclusively use the mesh network as the sole method for navigation, they have to be highly capable without it. The mesh network would be an enhancement layer. On highways this would allow for optimization that would bring forth some potentially nice benefits. For example, I can envision reducing emissions through traffic flow optimization.
Remember that electric cars still produce emissions, just not necessarily directly while driving. The energy has to come from somewhere and, unless we build a massive number of nuclear plants, that somewhere will likely include a significant percentage of coal and natural gas power plants.
The timeline for this utopia is likely in the 20+ year range. I say this because of the simple reality of car and truck ownership. People who are buying cars today are not going to dispose of them in ten years. A car that is new today will likely enter into the used market in 8 to 10 years and be around another 5 to 10. The situation is different with commercial vehicles. Commercial trucks tend to have longer service lives by either design or maintenance. So, yeah, 20 to 30 years seems reasonable.