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Here’s what it would take for self-driving cars to catch on
- ollysb 13y agoOne of the things I'm really excited about with self-driving is that it will tilt the economics towards car pools rather than car ownership. Currently everyone has to buy cars that will be suitable for any journey they might have to make. This means that people commute to work in cars that can take a whole family on holiday. Self-driving would mean you could always get the most suitable car for the journey you're about to make. Perhaps you're feeling tired and want to sleep on the way to work? Maybe you want to do some work so you'd like a desk? Put your feet up in an entertainment centre? Self-driving will become popular because it will mean the end of wasting hours of your life watching the car in front of you. Just think of the ads, what could you do with an extra 3 hours a day?
- k-mcgrady 13y ago>> "what could you do with an extra 3 hours a day?" I agree with everything you've said but the economics will be very important. If the cars are more expensive than ordinary cars getting back 3 hours a day could be enough to justify the cost. But how long you drive per day obviously depends on where you live. Most people I know (and I live in the suburbs) don't commute more than 1 hour total per day. They might not be able to justify the extra cost of a self-driving car.
- Siecje 13y agoI'm not sure it will encourage car pools. People will still want the comfort of having your own car with your personal music, temperature settings, privacy, etc.
- pmichaud 13y agoI don't think he meant car pools in the sense of multiple people for 1 car. I think he meant pools of cars--multiple cars available for 1 person, depending on that person's needs at the moment.
- ollysb 13y agoYeah, zipcar was what I had in mind.
- mavhc 13y agoThey can pay 4 times the cost for that then. Self driving cars mean your house is larger or cheaper, you have no parking fees, don't have to learn to drive, don't need to waste time and money on insurance/tax/testing.
- netcan 13y agoI agree. There are all sorts of economies. For most short drives around a city a 2 person golf cart-like car would be fine. Also, no parking issues. One weird effect of effectively using cheap robo-taxis for all our transport is that it will put the cost of each journey right in your face. I imagine this will have all sorts of weird effects on people's habits. Right now you spend the price of a car upgrade every few years, taxes & insurance once a year and petrol every week or two. You don't really feel the cost of a supermarket trip. If you drive your niece to the airport, you don't think about the cost at all. A drive to the woods with your family counts as free even if you use €20 worth of petrol and €20 in depreciation. Governments might be more inclined to get the full cost of roads from transport companies one step removed from the public than directly from them. The effects of a new mode of transport are hard to predict. Few people would have guessed that family cars would lead to supermarkets & disneyland.
- yk 13y ago> Just think of the ads, what could you do with an extra 3 hours a day? Not sure if this is what you meant, but I read it as: You can bang a lot of 'product information' into someone you hold captive for three hours. So this could be a 'interesting' way to finance self driving cars. You play ads inside the car, and the customer has to pay to switch them off. Addendum: I don't like this future, they promised me rocket ships, and all I get was a cell phone full of spam.
- Daniel_Newby 13y agoYeah, right, like an advertising company would develop a self-driving car.
- j2d3 13y agoThis article is overly focused on cost, which is dumb because they're in development. Clearly costs will not be the same when they become generally available, and the ownership model is going to change completely, too. Car service on demand will largely replace car ownership.
- hawkharris 13y agoAnother issue may be whether or not consumers want to be seen in one of Google's self-driving cars. The vehicles' outlandish appearance doesn't bother me because I'm a long-time advocate of self-driving cars, but it may be an issue for other consumers. Other car manufacturers such as Cadillac are working toward fully autonomous vehicles that look like stylish, regular cars. The computers and sensors are hidden in a spare tire compartment. I wonder if Google is underestimating consumers' preference for traditionally good-looking vehicles. I think about how the company was criticized for underestimating the aesthetic roadblocks involved in the Google Glass rollout.
- andyakb 13y agoI cannot imagine that google wants to rollout the current iteration of their self driver car at scale to consumers. They want they technology sorted out and for that phase of it, they do not care what the car looks like and you cannot assume that's how their self driving cars will always look.
- hawkharris 13y agoGoogle's technology depends on a series of lasers attached a large, spinning rotor on the car's hood. Cadillac and GM's technology does not: http://www.pcworld.com/article/254192/cadillac_self_driving_cars_out_by_2015_.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/254192/cadillac_self_driving_...
- hugh4life 13y agoSelf driving cars are only going to work where not only every vehicle has sensors that communicate with each other but also the roads themselves will have to be retrofitted with sensors. The only two places self driving cars have a future are: 1. Planned communities which ban the use of personal cars inside that community. 2. An interstate highway system where there is a special lane dedicated to self driving cars. If google is serious about self driving cars, they need to buy or build a town... or use this one. http://theweek.com/article/index/219043/the-ghost-town-being-built-as-a-science-experiment http://theweek.com/article/index/219043/the-ghost-town-being... [edit] The best hope for self driving vehicles is as an anti-social public(or public-ish) transportation system.
- w-m 13y agoWhat makes you think that? Self driving cars don't need to communicate with each other to function well, as the Google car shows. Retrofitting all roads with sensors is just not an option. You can't fit all the small dirt road in the country with sensors, and neither can you have a car that refuses to go on because it can't talk to the road.
- hugh4life 13y agoYou're not going to be using a self driving car on a dirt road... and as someone that lives in the country, there is no way I would trust a self driving car in areas where there are jolting transitions between pavement and gravel roads.
- w-m 13y agoYou might have to let go of your belief that humans are any good at driving. What ever humans do - reading the map, studying the surroundings, estimating the pavement/conditions, building on experience - a machine (with the right sensors, carefully designed algorithms and testing) can do much, much better.
- loup-vaillant 13y agoHow do you know where there is gravel? Why do you think software can't know it as well? Actually, how do you face any particular situation X? Why do you think the machine can't handle situation X? Can't handle every situation, you say? Then just put the sensor's on manually driven cars, and build a corpus. It won't be foolproof, but I bet my arm it can be much more reliable than a human being. --- Your objections only work with current technology. One day, you will see that self driving cars have less accident than human driven cars. And soon you will be faced with a tough choice: let the car drive for you, or pay more money.
- martin-adams 13y agoMy gut feeling is that it will take longer that we expect for it to be wide stream. I am extremely curious how far off the technology is to drive on less than predictable roads, such as narrow streets of London during rush hour or in the small villages of Yorkshire in the UK. I love how the article refers to lives saved, whereas I always said, "we will allow computer driven cars when the number of accidents/lives lost will be less than those caused by humans". It goes to show that the nature of driving is now out of anyone's hands and we accept there are fatalities, akin to disease. With this acceptance is the race to save lives, rather than have preventable loss. >> And roughly 40 percent of fatal accidents are caused by alcohol, distraction, drugs or fatigue. Letting robots take the wheel would save lives. The part that I find interesting is that if you are in control over whether to drive with alcohol, distraction, drugs or fatigue (at least for the car you travel in); you can affect your chances of being in a fatal accident. With computers at the wheel, you don't have control and accidents become the lottery of driving. Unless of course, control over your fate is now down to whether you install the latest firmware update on your car. I do believe that mainstream driverless cars will happen and future generations will look back at human driven cars like riding horses - mostly done for recreational purposes and not for long distances.
- papandrinko 13y ago>I am extremely curious how far off the technology is to drive on less than predictable roads I don't know which aspects of roads you are considering, but there are few unpredictable roads nowadays, thanks to street view
- martin-adams 13y agoI'm referring to parked cars on the left with oncoming traffic on the right, adding driveways with vehicles entering and a wall on the right hand side of the road. I'm referring to really tight corners which you can't do it in a single turn and have to reverse back, all while there is potential for oncoming traffic. I'm referring to single lane country roads with passing points every few hundred yards and having to reverse back to accommodate a vehicle or tractor coming the other way. I'm referring to blind corners where the only way to know if it's clear is to watch for no cars between the visible gaps in a hedge or between cars. I'm referring to the guy in the middle of the road with the road works sign saying waving you to go or to stop. I really mean the less than predictable conditions on the roads. Stuff like this: Cars on left: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/preview#!q=holmfirth&data=!1m8!1m3!1d3!2d-1.782294!3d53.567125!2m2!1f328.2!2f83.7!4f75!2m7!1e1!2m2!1shyNnYnK19Ptbn2fzyWAxDA!2e0!5m2!1shyNnYnK19Ptbn2fzyWAxDA!2e0!4m15!2m14!1m13!1s0x487bc4ceed38a29b%3A0x807d7a8131476d90!3m8!1m3!1d100097!2d-1.4004929!3d50.9138216!3m2!1i1920!2i955!4f13.1!4m2!3d53.571744!4d-1.786292&fid=5 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/preview#!q=holmfirth&data=!1m8... Sharp turn: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/preview#!q=laithe+avenue&data=!1m8!1m3!1d3!2d-1.818507!3d53.557762!2m2!1f268.42!2f73.96!4f75!2m7!1e1!2m2!1sBwN7Jici9iUbFzo1gF1oow!2e0!5m2!1sBwN7Jici9iUbFzo1gF1oow!2e0!4m15!2m14!1m13!1s0x487bda9b8e913e43%3A0x7f746b9d85fdf3ee!3m8!1m3!1d23571!2d-1.8124635!3d53.5673161!3m2!1i1920!2i955!4f13.1!4m2!3d53.555649!4d-1.8160425&fid=5 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/preview#!q=laithe+avenue&data=... Pulling out onto this road: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/preview#!data=!1m8!1m3!1d3!2d-1.864395!3d53.495086!2m2!1f244.94!2f82.17!4f75!2m7!1e1!2m2!1sHHMWT0D74ngmWnkdsy1HLA!2e0!5m2!1sHHMWT0D74ngmWnkdsy1HLA!2e0&fid=5 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/preview#!data=!1m8!1m3!1d3!2d-... I'm not saying it's impossible, but I know it's not easy.
- loup-vaillant 13y agoSo: Bad press. Being killed by a machine is soo much worse than being killed by a fellow human. This won't be a problem. Yes, it will make the news, but if self driving cars turn out to be more reliable than human drivers, the numbers will show, and the insurance companies will follow. (Funny how talks about not controlling your car will die out in the face of monetary savings.) Liability. Self driving cars are not the only thing that kills people when it goes wrong. Think airliner software. I think we'll get over it. Also, current cars already face similar challenges. I recall a sticky pedal problem that caused some Japanese cars to speed up until death ensues. As far as I know, unlike some unlucky drivers, the company is still alive. Law. Not a big problem, as long as self driving cars are legal somewhere. Once they have demonstrated their worth, other states and countries will follow very quickly. Privacy. It kinda sucks, but it won't matter one bit. If people really cared about not giving away their trip data to some for-profit corporation, they wouldn't be using Facebook in the first place. Or Gmail. Price. It will inevitably go way down. Self driving is a software problem. A human driver could manage with only a couple web cams. So will programs, as they get better. Not to mention economies of scale. Unemployment. Here be Unions. But they won't stop the advent of self driving cars. Driver-less companies will simply drive the Driver-full companies out of business. Unlike rail-road companies, they don't own the tracks. Now this will raise unemployment unless we do something about it. (Enforcing a 4 day work-week would be a good start.) Overall, I expect all those problems to set us back about a decade, 15 years tops. But they won't even arise until we actually start selling those cars.
- sergj 13y agoYou are oversimplifying a lot of the problems. And saying that the problems won't even arise until we start to sell these cars is just nonsense. Also enforcing a 4 day work-week? How does this lower unemployment, except on the paper? And keep in mind this solution would come with it own bag of problems, like administrativ overhead for more employees etc.
- Siecje 13y agoAnd each employee making less money but cost of living not going down. With more administrative overhead wage would decrease or the cost of living would increase in order for companies to keep the same profit margins.
- EGreg 13y agoOkay some thoughts: 1) Some roads can have sensors embedded in them. People would have to get an account to drive on them (eg EZpass or SelfDrivingCarID). The sensors would recognize a self-driving car and allow it on the road. Those roads could have 200mph speed limits. Cars attempting to enter the road which arent self-driving, or too old of a version, would not be able to pass the tollbooth, and will be fined for attempting to and wasting everyone's time at one of the booths. 2) Parking tickets and metermaids should go the way of the dodo. Cars can easily be detected at the side of a curb, and the money deducted from the EZPass or whatever account. Instead of parking, though, you'd just timeshare your cars in a demand based marketplace (type of car, time you need it for, what the demand is for those hours etc) and then clean them up when you get out. They'll go on to pick up the next passengers.
- Daniel_Newby 13y agoThe lower economic class will use the self-driving self-cleaning taxis. The middle class will have their own cars and use high-efficiency parking. It will be no hardship to use a short, tight slot six blocks away. The upper class will have their own cars and good parking. Some will even have "drivers", because babysitting a fancy car is one of the less unpleasant ways for the "driver" to earn his negative income tax credits.
- EGreg 13y agoBy the N I T are you talking about Milton Friedman's proposed system?
- Daniel_Newby 13y agoMuch of a car's weight is safety cages and crumple zones. Leaving out all that superfluous metal will save lots of money.
- mavhc 13y agoBuild cars out of airbags, with 4 wheels attached, each with their own battery pack, accidents would be almost fun
- betawolf33 13y agohttp://lesswrong.com/lw/gfv/notes_on_autonomous_cars/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/gfv/notes_on_autonomous_cars/
- steveplace 13y agoAll I want right now is a "traffic jam" button, where driving in congested traffic (speeds under 30 mph) on a straight road are taken care of by an AI. This is a much simpler problem to fix and can help with a transition rather than some sort hard switch.