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WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and so
by batmanturkey 4y ago
WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and social and environmental problem relative to the benefits provided?
I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill?
I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in suburban US locales coupled with maglev capsules being routed around electronically by magnetic field switching, etc…
Or flying jetson mobiles etc…
Why is the current obsession a robotic driver of a boring old car ?
- FL33TW00D 4y agoThose infrastructure requirements are already satisfied - and ~3000 people died on US roads last year.
- darkerside 4y agoThis sounded off to me, and according to Google it is. You are too low by an order of magnitude.
- vanilla_nut 4y agoCars and trucks continuously degrade the roads beneath them. The infrastructure requirement is never satisfied -- it requires constant, very expensive upkeep.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gremlinsinc 4y agoWhat if cars were mini maglev trains (or pods), hovering above buried tracks on the road and can 'convert' into a car for last-mile delivery, and parking. Then you'd still have the asphalt etc, but hovering over it - you degrade it less than actually driving on it. In this situation you could order up any size vehicle you need from 2 seater to 20 seater.
- AtomicOrbital 4y ago30,000+ fatal vehicle accidents annually, not 3000
- JoshGG 4y agoThe National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its early estimate of traffic fatalities for 2021. NHTSA projects that an estimated 42,915 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes last year, a 10.5% increase from the 38,824 fatalities in 2020. The projection is the highest number of fatalities since 2005 and the largest annual percentage increase in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System’s history. Behind each of these numbers is a life tragically lost, and a family left behind. https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-traffic-fatalities https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...
- GaylordTuring 4y agoShouldn’t these numbers _always_ get reported in relation to how many people are driving (and for how long)? This increase in deaths would actually be step forward in death rates if for example people drove twice as much this year compared to last year.
- gizmo 4y agoNot to mention that the upside of self-driving cars is capped at the cost of an uber driver, and even in a world with ubiquitous fully autonomous cars you still want public transportation. Driver assistance on highways is probably the right 80/20 solution, at least for the foreseeable future.
- weezin 4y ago> Not to mention that the upside of self-driving cars is capped at the cost of an uber driver An uber driver that can drive 24/7. Also there are a lot of cars that sit in parking lots 95% of the day that can be used.
- smileysteve 4y agoThe parking lot problem is way far off though, and efforts like Zipcar attacked the utilization problem but have not seen wide adoption
- Ekaros 4y agoParking lot problem is also demand problem. Demand is not sufficiently elastic. How many people would be happy have their commute car available on one day maybe at 6 and then next on 10 or 11 or 12...
- Sahbak 4y agoAutomatic public transportation will solve a lot of issues.
- occz 4y agoLuckily, that already exists in driverless trains.
- painted-now 4y agoI think what looks interesting on the surface for self-driving cars is that "it is just a software problem". The other projects you describe require actual "stuff". Still, that argument doesn't count if the software problem is "impossible" to implement, or if it turns out that you also need "stuff" for it. Edit: typo
- spaceman_2020 4y agoI mean, 1.3M people die every year in road accidents. Real number is likely far higher since reporting isn't uniform across the world. That's at least one reason to warrant the investment.
- bumblebritches5 4y ago
- concordDance 4y agoI dunno, being able to easily get places (to visit or work or have fun) is pretty important. Time is finite and valuable, so things that less us spend time in more satisfying ways are valuable.
- c-cube 4y agoDenser cities and electric bikes would go a long way. But somehow in the US people only want to go places in a deadly metal box, even to fetch bread.
- fooker 4y agoSome people also want to go to places outside cities! ^_^
- int_19h 4y agoNot everybody likes living in dense cities.
- concordDance 4y agoDense cities mean no gardens and no house renovations, both have value too, even if they arent as important. Cars are also nice for shopping and taking things to the dump.
- Keyframe 4y ago- 1.3 million deaths worldwide, annually (94% cause by human error) - existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need to build anything) - reduced traffic congestion (autonomous vehicles can better react/drive) - improved supply chains (autonomous trucks) (can work 0-24) just to name a few off top of my head
- zinekeller 4y ago> existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need to build anything) I think that this is a sunk-cost fallacy. Sure, you would need to build infrastructure for trains, but after that trains are now reasonably automated, can carry cargo, and do other things with the exception of stopping at the exact destination you wanted to (in other words, it requires predetermined stops which people outside the US shrugs and just walk or bike the last feet). Also, they're proven to work: even China (which previously didn't have trains to its far-flung places) and they've done what you've expect. I think that the sole reason that anyone wants to invest in automated (non-train) driving is because trains are boring while AI is oh-so-shiny.
- yreg 4y agoTrains won't do last mile delivery.
- oblio 4y agoCurrent trains? Not directly. But with the levels of investment in cars and roads, we could have mini trains on reduced tracks (think stuff like mine tracks) going almost anywhere, probably for a fraction of maintaining our road infrastructure and cars.
- shepherdjerred 4y agoWe're not going to stop maintaining roads. They exist for military defense as much as they do for road trips and trucks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highway_System_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highway_System_(Unite...
- newsclues 4y agoA) people want transportation as a service without the human of a taxi or driver, not just for cost but comfort and not having to associate with people (of a lower class) B) creating a scalable transportation as a service business for profit and power (data)
- GaylordTuring 4y agoRegarding A): Exactly! I don’t really mind traveling together with people from my own class (I might even prefer it), but I don’t really want to travel with lower class people. That just makes me feel like I’m one of them. I think this attitude is quite common, but people won’t admit it. I would never admit it like I just did if I didn’t have an anonymous account. And I don’t see how technology will change this basic preference.
- awillen 4y agoA hyperloop is a much, much harder problem. Not technically, but practically. Just look at California's high speed rail and how that's gone - with that history, the idea that we could introduce hyperloops in US cities is, to put it only mildly punnily, a pipe dream. As others have pointed out, millions are dying in car accidents now, so a "more compelling vision for the future" is much less important than something that can get done. While we certainly haven't seen the progress many have hoped for/promised on self-driving cars, I'd wager everything I own that we'll see a significant percent of cars on the road in CA operating autonomously before we see that high speed rail finished.
- sgtfrankieboy 4y agoHyperloop is crap, just go with highspeed trains. They get the job done in city corridors. But you can't have a train stop in front of your house... Nor can you build massive tubes everywhere in place of cheap roads. Walking, Bikes, Busses, Metros, Trains, Cars, Planes. They all have a place in how we transport, right now the distribution between them is just out of whack.
- forgotusername6 4y agoHyperloop is still cool because you could have really fast transit over large areas. Mass transit across cities is still quite slow. High speed trains are fine but just not fast enough. Imagine a large city where you could get from one side to the other in only a few minutes.
- wil421 4y agoMusk coined Hyperloop as a distraction to high speed rail. He wanted people to buy Teslas instead of thinking about high speed rail in California. A lot of people fell for his con.
- forgotusername6 4y agoIt is a shame that other partial vacuum systems are not being developed. They seem like a useful concept, fast, less air resistance means less energy use. Surely a technology you'd want to have in a future city.
- gremlinsinc 4y agowhy does it need to be a vacuum system? Couldn't a similar device be a pod-like maglev device that floats above a magnetic track and maybe can temporarily hover albeit more slowly via some drone-like propeller on the bottom when 'off track', or for final-mile portions, could even turn into a car when not in maglev mode.
- Ekaros 4y ago
- jimmytidey 4y agoI think non-human payloads make more sense for virtually every kind of innovation: -- Radically reduced safety margins, if the vehicle itself contains no humans. -- You can often move cargo at any time of day or night, and therefore do a much more sophisticated job of collaboratively load-levelling traffic. -- Doesn't matter how uncomfortable a non-human payload is with in reason. Acceleration, cornering, waiting, daylight, motion sickness are all constraints that are eased for cargo. -- It would be nice if you can move freight anywhere, but even if you can only serve a very limited network its still useful - say between fixed points in major cities. By contrast, a car that can't go almost everywhere is very severely limited. Example: in major cities, all the freight moves in lorries, which are extremely dangerous and polluting. Meanwhile, the humans are packed into trains in underground tunnels. Surely freight should be moving in autonomous underground trains and the humans enjoying lorry free surface travel?
- usrusr 4y agoHumans are freight units that embark and disembark and change vehicles autonomously with very little instruction. Other freight units aren't. Parcel hubs are a hard problem that's far from solved enough to set them up in masses.
- jimmytidey 4y agoYou can have humans 'embark' and 'disembark' the freight, the same way we do now...
- almost_usual 4y agoPeople in the US will absolutely die on a hill for their car. Companies will invest endless amounts of money to convince you cars are the future, their infrastructure isn’t wasteful, and they’re good for the environment. People buy into this because it fits their existing lifestyle.
- amelius 4y agoFunny thing is, with self driving cars we can actually own less cars as you can just hail them. More convenient and less waste.
- amelius 4y agoBecause the current generation of VCs watched Knight Rider as a child?
- EricDeb 4y agohow about robotic driving of an electric bus? I feel like that would be much more useful for cities + no driver cost.
- Paradigma11 4y agoI am excited because then you can have far cheaper taxis -> less people need to own a car.
- SergeAx 4y agoHyperloop is a long range solution. Most of the commute today are within 20km. These are two completely different problems.
- bergenty 4y agoThere’s nothing boring about a car. It’s private, facilitates living outside of cities so it’s not dense and gross and offers the freedom to go anywhere with roads.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- IceDane 4y agoHyperloop has long since been proven to be infeasible to the point of being practically impossible. Please stop drinking the Musk koolaid. It was never going to happen and it never will.
- raydiatian 4y agoDidn’t musk literally out himself (boastfully) as having pursued hyperloop as a way to stifle funding for some other related but competing ventures? I can’t recall, but he literally never believed in it.
- Ekaros 4y agoI never understood how people have so little understanding of basic physics and practicalities of engineering that it even got cursory pass. Like pointing it out to be stupid only takes handful of questions. Could is the question, but should is never asked or answered, same goes to other projects like solar roofs with the shingles.