Nissan Promises Driverless Car by 2020 / Nissan, GM, Google, Who else is on board ? (GPS, brakes)
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The Automakers should fear the self-driving car, not embrace it. I'm glad they haven't figured this out. Once we have autonomous cars, personal vehicle ownership is going to go the way of General Aviation. Only car enthusiasts will bother owning one. Everyone else will just share. The volume of cars sold will decrease and stabilize at the point of just replacing worn-out hardware.
I, for one, embrace this and hope that I've bought my last vehicle. My current car, a manual subcompact, will hopefully last another 8 years/80K miles, and the spouse's new car should go for at least 10, probably 15 years and 120K miles.
With the advent of the self-driving car, I expect the emergence of the driverless taxi, car collective, and ride-summoner smartphone app the very next day. Enter the passcode into my phone app, and viola! Instant taxi service wherever I want to go, no need to own.
When cars can drive themselves from place to place, what is the point of having this huge, expensive chunk of hardware sitting idle in a garage or parking lot for 95% of its life? Vehicle utlization can be near 100%. I expect it will end up as a huge driverless taxi service, but there are tons of possibilities.
If you really want to own your own vehicle, you could have it drive you to work, then dispatch it back home to take the kids to school, then back home again to take your spouse out to lunch. While she's eating, it can make a little money doing local taxi work (all auto-deducted from smartphone accounts, so no stiffing the [non-]driver).
Taking it a step further, a phone-linked automated taxi service could dispatch cars to you based on your planned daily schedule, or instantaneously on demand. Scheduled rides would probably be billed at a lower rate, with off-hours travel cheaper still. Super-budget conscious people willing to rideshare or pick up additional passengers along a route would get even cheaper "fares".
This may be the eventual end of metro bus service as we know it, depending on how cheaply "micro-bus" routes can be run.
I can't wait to convert the garage into a workshop and break up the driveway to plant grass or a garden.
The Automakers should fear the self-driving car, not embrace it. I'm glad they haven't figured this out. Once we have autonomous cars, personal vehicle ownership is going to go the way of General Aviation. Only car enthusiasts will bother owning one. Everyone else will just share. The volume of cars sold will decrease and stabilize at the point of just replacing worn-out hardware.
I, for one, embrace this and hope that I've bought my last vehicle. My current car, a manual subcompact, will hopefully last another 8 years/80K miles, and the spouse's new car should go for at least 10, probably 15 years and 120K miles.
With the advent of the self-driving car, I expect the emergence of the driverless taxi, car collective, and ride-summoner smartphone app the very next day. Enter the passcode into my phone app, and viola! Instant taxi service wherever I want to go, no need to own.
When cars can drive themselves from place to place, what is the point of having this huge, expensive chunk of hardware sitting idle in a garage or parking lot for 95% of its life? Vehicle utlization can be near 100%. I expect it will end up as a huge driverless taxi service, but there are tons of possibilities.
If you really want to own your own vehicle, you could have it drive you to work, then dispatch it back home to take the kids to school, then back home again to take your spouse out to lunch. While she's eating, it can make a little money doing local taxi work (all auto-deducted from smartphone accounts, so no stiffing the [non-]driver).
Taking it a step further, a phone-linked automated taxi service could dispatch cars to you based on your planned daily schedule, or instantaneously on demand. Scheduled rides would probably be billed at a lower rate, with off-hours travel cheaper still. Super-budget conscious people willing to rideshare or pick up additional passengers along a route would get even cheaper "fares".
This may be the eventual end of metro bus service as we know it, depending on how cheaply "micro-bus" routes can be run.
I can't wait to convert the garage into a workshop and break up the driveway to plant grass or a garden.
Airplanes don't cost 20k like cars do.
I don't think ownership will suffer as much as you think. People still prefer the convenience of having something sitting in their driveway, available in a split second when they need, versus having to wait for the ride to arrive.
"5:30pm - Oh shoot I forgot to pickup tampons on the way home from work and I'm on my period and I don't have the car!"
"Due to current traffic conditions, the next available car will be at your residence in approximately 50 minutes. Thank you for choosing GM carshare".
It would change the entire industry if no one at all owned their own cars. Think auto insurance, roads, parking, pricing, availability, dealers being non-existant or simply being a rental dealer. That kind of change would take more than 100 years. While it's not impossible, I don't see it happening anytime in my or my children's lifetime.
Semi-autonomous cars are going to be on the road in the 20s. Fully-autonomous in the 20s-30s.
Driverless taxi vs. present day taxi - doesn't really affect how the customer gets around really, while I do agree there will probably be more of them eventually.
And yeah, one day cars could be completely autonomous without having someone in the seat, so people would probably be sending the cars to pickup kids, etc. But that would be more like 40-50s and beyond, when more laws, infrastructure, and technology have come about.
In recent demonstrations, hackers have shown they can slam a car's brakes at freeway speeds, jerk the steering wheel and even shut down the engine — all from their laptop computers.
In graduate school I did a study for a class in GPS design and algorithm development. I drove around my town for a few months collecting GPS data, DGPS data, etc.
The basic idea is that even though GPS has ~2.5 ft accuracy, when you take the difference between signals with similar errors then your accuracy goes into the 1-2 inch range. And it's reliable enough that if you have various ground stations around the country that you know with very high precision and difference that with other positions, then you can have very tight accuracy over hundreds of kilometers in some cases. In most cases you have to train it by driving a few dozen times or load a pre-trained circuit and compare to that data.
So, it's accurate enough for driving, but there's other considerations ... GPS is easily jammed. All you need is a tunnel, operate downtown, etc. and your signal is jammed. Another consideration: some big riggers have GPS jammers on their trucks because they don't want their logistics company knowing where they go sometimes. What will happen when the signal is jammed because some truck driver wanted to visit his girlfriend on company time or something? You will need a backup. The only solution I see is embedded strips in the concrete combined with LIDAR or something similar.
By 2020? I doubt the infrastructure is there. But will a growing percentage do it? Heck yes. I'm glad too. It's patently obvious people would rather stare at their cell phones texting rather than driving.
Before you go off on a bunch of reactionary "what-if" scenarios, how about do some actual research? No one is talking about totally autonomous driving. Someone is still sitting in the driver's seat at all times..
I guess the word "driverless" threw me off.
Using your definition of "driverless", my car is driverless now, and it was made in 1997. It has Cruise Control (I think -- I've never tried it), so it is "driverless" in the sense that nobody has to maintain control of the gas pedal, but it also meets your criteria for driverless, because the driver can step on the pedal if he wants to..
I think the thread you want to be participating in is "At what point do we begin to say a car is driverless?"
Using your definition of "driverless", my car is driverless now, and it was made in 1997. It has Cruise Control (I think -- I've never tried it), so it is "driverless" in the sense that nobody has to maintain control of the gas pedal, but it also meets your criteria for driverless, because the driver can step on the pedal if he wants to..
I think the thread you want to be participating in is "At what point do we begin to say a car is driverless?"
There isn't really a single definition for driverless technology. Cruise control is a type of driverless tech, but of course the car needs the driver's input to steer and keep from crashing into things. There were also experiments with cars that could "follow the leader" automatically on the freeway and maintain a set distance between vehicles, with the first car in the chain driven by a human. I don't think that tech ever made it into production vehicles.
I think the general consensus is a car is driverless when it can do all the common driving functions a car is expected to perform without any input from the driver.
It isn't. Any car that is connected to any kind of wireless network is vulnerable to attacks. Many cars today have collision avoidance systems that can apply the brakes, or lane departure systems that can correct your steering, or systems like OnStar that can turn off your car if you report it stolen. Any of these systems can be compromised. Imagine going at 70 MPH on the highway and the engine suddenly quitting and the car slamming the brakes.
I don't mind having a GPS navigation system or a radio that can stream music from the Internet as long as they do not share the network with the vehicle management computers (engine, transmission, ABS, SRS, ATC, etc...). These vehicle computers should not be accessible from outside the car, period. Of course, that would rule out any kind of vehicle automation.
Interesting, but contradictory survey. The same people surveyed to not want driverless cars also admitted they would spend extra to have the technology associated with it.
Also this survey said adults, but didn't say what age group. The age group they should have targeted is too young to be surveyed about cars since they are just now learning how to drive.
By 2020, the 24+ age group that has money to buy new cars are only 17 right now.
General Motors is supposedly using a driver-less taxi in China. The customer calls on their cellular telephone. The car located the cellular telephone and drives to it. The customer gets in and says the destination and then swipes a credit card and the car takes them there. It has very short range (10 miles I believe). Then it must recharge.
Google also has a long range driver-less car in use. It is not in production, but they have people using them to test them.
I love driving, but I love driving when I want to drive. Frequently I must drive when I want to sleep, or work, or read a book. In those situations I would prefer to have the option of letting the car drive.
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