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The most amazing part is that autonomous cars have completed 300,000 miles at all. Congratulations to the engineering team! Around fifteen years ago, I read as
by kevinalexbrown 14y ago
The most amazing part is that autonomous cars have completed 300,000 miles at all. Congratulations to the engineering team!
Around fifteen years ago, I read as a child with fascination an account in Scientific American about an automated highway project where sensors were to be placed every few feet on the road, and cars would follow them, until a driver retook control at the end. I imagined a future network of roads in which cars read from sensors to determine where they were, and was kind of saddened that governments didn't immediately start putting these sensors into highways. This is such a cooler solution, one that doesn't depend on a parallel development of infrastructure, one that would presumably take lots of bureaucratic steps that are naturally associated with usage decisions on publicly owned land (which makes sense).
What this reminds me of, rather spectacularly, is that if one method of getting to your solution fails, either because those sensors didn't work out, or the bureaucracy didn't, if you come up with a solution, and say "oh by the way I did it already", it's a lot harder for anyone to ignore it.
- saraid216 14y ago> This is such a cooler solution, one that doesn't depend on a parallel development of infrastructure, one that would presumably take lots of bureaucratic steps that are naturally associated with usage decisions on publicly owned land (which makes sense). And taxes. Google isn't being funded by our dollars, except through a series of indirections.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoI wonder if they get a tax credit for this kind of research? Seems possible, and certain kinds of tax credit may as well be subsidies. All speculation on my part, though. I wonder if anyone knows?
- charlieok 14y agoA tax credit for a research project which until very recently was known only to a small group of people in Google's super-secret "project X" labs?
- waterlesscloud 14y agoSo secret it sprang from the government-funded and highly-publicized DARPA challenge?
- powerslave12r 14y agoI think trains/metro rails are just outright much more cost effective, given it's not personal transport.
- andybak 14y agoActually, not when you factor in the need to serve unpopular routes and non-Busyntimes. That's a lot of trains and buses running nearly empty. Small, on-demand personalised mass transit has the potential to be the most efficient transport system.
- lallysingh 14y agoEspecially if you can finally get high-occupancy vehicles right. Something closer to a 6-passenger vehicle with bus-style seating... if we're very lucky, only with people at most one indirect hop away in your social network?
- coopdog 14y agoOr smaller vehicles driving inches apart to get into the slip stream, I imagine that has the potential to be quite efficient (and flexible) too
- thrownaway2424 14y agoThat's really just a negative externality of inefficient suburban development. If the 'burbs didn't exist in the first place, there would be no need to subsidize their barely-used mass transit services.
- sien 14y agoThe Farebox recovery ratio even for big European cities is well below recovery rates for mass transport. Only a few Asian cities get more than their public transport systems cost to run back. This page has more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio