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It seems like a mistake to remove manual controls entirely, not necessarily because of safety concerns, but because there are a fair number of times when you ne

• jackvalentine 12y ago
  I agree with you, perhaps in the context of a personal vehicle there does need to be manual control. However I can see these more as a form of private public transit, a fleet of driverless google cars cruising around and anyone with a subscription a la zipcar can hail them and go. Perhaps in this context, Google could operate parking garages where they can be recharged and cleaned while keeping them off the street and out of people's ways.
  • rquantz 12y ago
    That sounds cool, although most cities already have something similar in the form of buses, which are cheaper and more efficient than what you're talking about. In any case, they will probably not start by having a huge fleet, but by selling them as personal vehicles.
    • jackvalentine 12y ago
      I wouldn't compare it to buses, I'd compare it to taxis combined with zipcar. Buses don't have the destination/pickup resolution that a small 2-4 seat vehicle has.
      • Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
        Buses don't need to be on fixed route. In Helsinki some buses are using dynamic routing based on demand. So basically those are shared taxis with drivers. When the driver can be dropped out of the equation service can be cheaper and there can be a lot more of these vehicles. https://kutsuplus.fi/home https://kutsuplus.fi/home
        • jackvalentine 12y ago
          You're going to need to translate some of this for me. How long in advance do I have to signal my intent to get the bus? How frequent are the busses/how long will I wait on average? How close will busses come to me, will they come to my house in a court where it needs to three point turn to get out? Will the bus wait 10 minutes while I load my things in it? I don't think the google car will replace mass transit like busses, trains and trams. They're a far more blunt instrument. I do however see it as a more flexible hybrid of car sharing and taxis. A taxi fleet that doesn't have the overhead of keeping enough drivers active for small demand spikes and can be sent directly to the user. Edit: Weird, was not showing up in English on my phone, does on my laptop.
          • Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
            I assume they're using accept-language. Because it's in Finnish on my work laptop, but on my home desktop and mobile it's in English. Anyway, here's link that goes always to English version. https://kutsuplus.fi/home?lang=en_GB https://kutsuplus.fi/home?lang=en_GB
    • greeneggs 12y ago
      All the signs right now point to Google's self-driving cars being a fleet, not personal vehicles. A few points: * Google has expertise in "big data" and algorithms: running a fleet would fit their expertise. * On the other hand, Google has no expertise in designing or marketing pretty cars. They don't have any dealership or repair network. To release a personal vehicle, they'd have to team up with a car company (and that partnership would have to be in place by now given Google's aggressive timeline). * A fleet lets Google control the deployment carefully. Nobody is going to buy a self-driving car that only works in Mountain View. (Or, worse, they would buy the car, and then complain loudly.) But with a fleet, Google can start on a corporate campus, expand to Stanford, say, then Mountain View, etc. No worries about driving in the snow. No worries about self-driving cars getting in well-publicized accidents after an owner ignored the maintenance schedule.
• Mister_Snuggles 12y ago
  I think the eventual goal will be that most cars will be self-driving and that will negate most of those problems. I imagine that the vision of the future is a giant car-sharing program made up of self-driving cars all coordinated by Google. Think about it - you fire up an app to request a car, one appears at your door within a couple of minutes, takes you to work, then disappears. After work, a different car picks you up, whisks you home, then scurries off to recharge/refuel/drive someone else. I suspect that in the long term the thinking is that things like "parking" and "owning a car" will be less common than they are today. There will still be a place for manually driven cars, like ones pulling a trailer, etc.
  • anigbrowl 12y ago
    Correct. That's one reason I think that Chicago's decision to privatize parking was an inspired one. The city got a great deal of criticism for giving a decades-long revenue concession to a private operator for a relatively low up-front cost, but all the critics assume a constant or increasing demand for parking based on historical usage patterns. I think usage patterns are going to change radically and that we'll see far lower traffic densities in the not-too-distant future.
    • deleted 12y ago
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    • ams6110 12y ago
      It was a desperation move, not an inspired one. Chicago and the entire state of Illinois are in terrible financial condition.
  • timdorr 12y ago
    AAAS - Automobiles as a Service. That could actually be pretty cool. Basically, a ZipCar + Uber that doesn't suck. That would be the dream.
    • RaphiePS 12y ago
      See http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/25/uberauto/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/25/uberauto/
• deleted 12y ago
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• gfodor 12y ago
  In the long run, if self driving cars work, people will no longer be qualified to operate their vehicles. Would you let your toddler move the car 10 feet to pick up grandma? That said they will almost certainly have a manual override in these things, it will just be tucked away out of view.
  • lilsunnybee 12y ago
    With approximately 30 thousand road fatalities every year, people today are barely qualified to drive. But with so few viable transportation options in most areas, we make do with a bad situation.
  • teraflop 12y ago
    I think there's room for a control system that gives a human a reasonable degree of direct control over the car's movements, while still having it be able to refuse potentially unsafe commands. Compare it to a microwave oven. The microwave flux inside the oven is high enough to cause severe burns if you were exposed to it, but the system is designed so that it won't run with the door open -- and it's fail-safe, in the sense that any failure (or combination of failures) is overwhelmingly more likely to result in a safe shutdown than in unsafe exposure. It's still possible to burn yourself on hot food, of course, but my point is that nobody thinks of a microwave as a dangerous piece of equipment that you need to be "qualified" to use, in the way that they think of a car or a table saw.
• IvyMike 12y ago
  Just download the Google Steering Wheel app.
• eurleif 12y ago
  If the car's display shows a map of the surrounding area, and that map includes not just static objects like buildings, but also includes other cars, people, etc. (based on sensor information), is touching a spot on the map to make the car go there really a chore?
  • dunmalg 12y ago
    Touch-screen interfaces are inherently imprecise. Ever tried to select a destination on a GPS map?
    • eurleif 12y ago
      Ok, so how about if you can drag a representation of the car to the place on the map where you want it to go? This doesn't seem like a very difficult UI issue to me.
    • ithkuil 12y ago
      That depends entirely on the quality of the touch screen interface. Most GPS navigators are just terrible. The precision you get with a normal tablet or smartphone is just astonishing in comparison. Sometimes I'm pissed because I have troubles aiming a link which is 1/10 the size of my finger (a desktop site rendered on my phone) ...
    • prawn 12y ago
      Ever used the equivalent system built into a 2019 model car where the absence of a steering wheel and other driving instruments mean that the interface could be two feet wide and easily zoomed for precise navigation? Current GPS devices are built to be cheap, compact and work with limited connectivity. I think we'll see amazing things in 5-10 years.
  • gambiting 12y ago
    Have you ever played any 3D game on a 2D screen, where you had to click on a position to tell the on-screen character to go somewhere? Did they always go where you wanted, or did you encounter problems created by projecting 2D points into 3D space?
• anigbrowl 12y ago
  People seem quite comfortable with the joysticks on those electric mobility scooters that are all over the place, and I certainly see more with joysticks than with handlebar steering nowadays so the market seems to disagree with you. I'm not sure why you and a few others think a joystick will be problematic. Of course, there will be a bunch of tasks/use cases for which these cars won't be suitable, but so what? there's many use cases for which bicycles and motorcycles are unsuitable, but lots of people still use them. I can certainly see using one of these things for local get-around driving, because I hate to drive and my wife can't.
• slyall 12y ago
  For manual controls your could just plug in something like a PlayStation controller into a USB port or even a Phone app via Wifi/Bluetooth to control the car. No need to have permanent wheels, levers and pedals cluttering the "passenger" compartment.
  • atwebb 12y ago
    It's always nice to have an actual mechanical linkage to the steering and motion, if the electronics had issues it could just as well affect the BT link from the phone or controller. I'm not familiar enough with all makes and models out today and perhaps there are plenty of examples where wheels are already just "controllers".
    • Phlarp 12y ago
      Essentially every new consumer grade car made today comes with power steering and electronically controlled or assisted "mechanical linkage". To say nothing of the recent high profile cases of large auto makers having faulty engine control software or mechanically unsound ignition systems.
      • jessriedel 12y ago
        It would almost certainly not be worth it for a robocar, but having an assisted mechanical linkage is valuable and very different from a pure electronic linkage (i.e. drive by wire). As emgee points out, drive by wire is essentially non-existent in consumer cars.
    • emgeee 12y ago
      The technical term you're looking for is "drive by wire" and it actually only came onto the market in the last year on the Infinity Q50.
      • jonah 12y ago
        Sure, Steer by wire is new. DBW generally refers to the connection between the accelerator pedal and the throttle. There, DBW has been the norm for many years.
• jessriedel 12y ago
  Note that all those examples are very low speed uses (< 5 mph). It would be completely acceptable to control the car with a handful of dashboard buttons no larger than the buttons to roll the windows up and down. (As mentioned by other, pedals and a steering wheel would be overkill for these rare situations.) And there's really no need for Google to have mentioned it in this blog post, nor would you have seen it in their rendering, so the post is completely consistent with your concerns being addressed.
• skierscott 12y ago
  Not to mention snow/ice. The software might be able to handle the nasty Minnesota roads, but not for a while (and what if people don't trust the cars in those conditions?). As far as I know, they've only been tested in sunny California. That statement was probably a bit of a jump.
  • leoedin 12y ago
    What is it that you think makes handling snow and ice more difficult? Feedback control systems can respond an order of magnitude quicker to loss of traction/unexpected behaviour than people can. Icy conditions are different, but not necessarily more complex than "ideal" road conditions. From the point of view of a driving control system it just requires a slightly different control law. Certainly there will be testing required, but I'd be surprised if it presents a major issue. Adverse conditions are one of the more obvious applications of driverless cars.
• wamatt 12y ago
  Another option might be to use a collapsible steering wheel. It could neatly and automatically retract into the dash, when not needed.
• mentat 12y ago
  How about something simple like telling the car, "back up 10 feet" or "move to the spot across the street". This is dead simple short range routes...
  • threeseed 12y ago
    How does one "tell" the car what to do without controls ? I hope you're not suggesting voice recognition because anything less than 100% accuracy will guarantee accidents and possibly deaths.
    • amock 12y ago
      The car needs to know what's safe regardless of whether or not the instructions are via voice or another method, so inaccurate voice control does not guarantee accidents.
      • ithkuil 12y ago
        yep, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
    • ceejayoz 12y ago
      A smartphone app would probably suffice, given that I can control a drone aircraft with one already.
    • qbrass 12y ago
      The same way you tell it drive anywhere else without controls.
    • GotAnyMegadeth 12y ago
      I'm pretty sure current cars with controls guarantee accidents and deaths
      • krapp 12y ago
        How sure are you that cars without controls guarantee neither?
• Bluestrike2 12y ago
  It's always possible that the end result will be a hybrid one that's somewhere in-between the two visions (particularly with other variants, as it seems like Google's primarily targeting an urban environment). There are already concepts for retractable steering wheels [1] that could be combined with retractable pedals to handle situations that require manual control. Hell, the movie Demolition Man had them way back in the 90s alongside with plenty of cheesy acting. [1] http://www.webdev.trw.com/sites/default/files/TRW_OSS_SWS%20RetractableSW_English_2013.pdf http://www.webdev.trw.com/sites/default/files/TRW_OSS_SWS%20...
• deleted 12y ago
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• Brakenshire 12y ago
  These sort of low speed manoeuvers are in my opinion quite awkward with traditional control and viewing systems, which is presumably why there has been so much development of parking sensors and cameras, and now automatic parking. I think many people would prefer being able to set where they want the car to go on a top down schematic/plan and let the automated control systems wrangle the car into place.
• tonylemesmer 12y ago
  you could just plug in a joystick
• deleted 12y ago
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• Sanddancer 12y ago
  When you try to paint this as a beta of a marketable vehicle, yeah, it doesn't make much sense. However, this seems much closer to the long history of automotive concept cars, which have traditionally been impractical and designed to definitively show off certain features that may or may not make it to the final cut. By building a vehicle from the ground up without a steering wheel, they're much more readily able to get people asking the questions as to what's really needed in a car of the future.
• melling 12y ago
  No one said that there won't be cars with manual controls in the future. There are certainly use cases for both. The market will decide which cars are more popular. There's no need to play pundit on the Internet.
• orky56 12y ago
  I would not associate the interface with the functionality. Even without a keyboard, a smartphone with a touchscreen allows one to use a virtual keyboard to type in a similar fashion to an actual keyboard with some definite compromises. With cars when the manual controls are removed, we have a chance to have even more robust functionality with opportunities to map a whole new set of controls to a fallback interface.
• 33W 12y ago
  Some alternative input systems can be useful for this type of maneuver, such as a gamepad or smartphone via app. Perhaps this is done from inside the vehicle, but in the case of attaching a trailer, this could be done from outside the rear of the vehicle to guide it precisely.