I supported a few district courts in my time. Come on, Travoli, do your patriotic duty.
http://time.com/money/3762033/traffic-ticket-decrease-speed-limits-police/
I've contributed a lifetime's worth.
Imagine how upside down the departments will be once cars drive themselves.
The article mention raised speed limits. I know that's part of it, maybe most of it. But my GPS can nag me if I go over a certain amount (mine is set at 6mph).
>once cars drive themselves
The insurance companies are also worrying about this. What happens if self-driving cars drastically reduce accidents? Actuarially speaking, the rates should drop.
Actuarially speaking, the rates should drop.
Don't hold your breath RC
A self-driving car equipped by GM spinoff Delphi Automotive completed today a historic, 3,500-mile journey across the U.S. from San Franscisco to New York.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/delphi-completes-first-coast-to-coast-automated-drive
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10153168166852801&fref=nf
That was pretty funny. It made me think though, we will probably have cars driving around in circles while waiting for parking spaces -- congesting the roads. I guess there will have to be some type of regulation against empty cars circling the blocks.
>6mph
That's about what I do too, it seems to be close enough to the speed limit that you'll get ignored most of the time.
>will have to be some type of regulation against empty cars circling the blocks
I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, I can see where that it going to be a problem. Some stores may have valet-type customer drop-off areas ...except NO valets. Why not slap the car on the a## and send it off to wait in the suburbs to wait for you? Whistle into your smartphone --which your faithful steed is constantly watching-- when you want it to come get you. You won't have to tell it where you want to meet because it (and numerous governmental and advertising agencies) already knows your every move.
It depends... if there's some universal API for cars to communicate with each other, you'll be able to park cars seven deep with no valet and you'll just push your code on your cell phone and your car will ask the other cars to let it out and they'll all reshuffle.
And many people argue that the personal car will simply become less important and things like Zipcar will be way more convenient, because the car will deliver itself. So if you're an urban dweller who doesn't need a car daily, you'll have much less need to own one (thus more parking spaces available).
And capacity of roads goes way up. Right now ever car has to follow at a distance where if the car in front of you slams on the brakes, you have time to react. When slef-driving cars can communicate and "train up" into a 10-car draft, the brake signal from the lead car gets transmitted immediately to all cars at once, so you don't need nearly as much space.
And then there's the possibility of a parking API in a city where when a car gives up a spot, the nearest car gets pinged and that spot is reserved for it and it goes straight there without circling.
Many possibilities. Self-driving cars, once they become ubiquitous, will change our culture in ways that we can't imagine.
Program the cars to parallel park themselves that will help. Lots of meat (human) drivers can't seem to master this.
Biggest obstacle is going to be changing liability laws and insurance companies.
Also, to heck with cars, what about trucks?
>what about trucks
Mercedes has one in the works. THIS is where we're going to see the rubber hit the road first, IMO. The scenario, at first, will be for large robotic convoys to travel between hubs located along our interstates. Travel will be in off-peak hours and accompanied by a human engineer and conductor in case of an emergency.
>> once they become ubiquitous
the average age of a car in the Uk is 7.5 years, and based on last years record of 2.5 million new cars registered it will still take more than 12 years to replace all the cars on the UK roads, even assuming everyone can afford to trade up enough to get a self driving one in that period.
And that 12 years worth of sftware can speak to each other - there will surely be an IE6 of car software, st some point?
so in the UK, unless there are massive subsidies or huge retrofitting subsidies, I think we may be some way off even after the arguments, insurance calculations and questions about what constitutes being drunk n charge of a vehicle get resolved.
I'd dearly love everyone to have auutomatic parking though. Perhaps that way people could stay between the lines ::)
>IE6
Worse, if I see a talking paper clip I'm bailing out of the car right away!
There is at least one company in the US that's somewhat along the way with developing a retrofit kit. They said that it is cheaper than first imagined, $5k, I think. But it'll take a decade or more for this to get to the masses. That's why I think you'll see hub-to-hub trucking first. Do-able now, big payback.
Quote from: Gurtie on April 04, 2015, 04:07:07 PM
the average age of a car in the Uk is 7.5 years, and based on last years record of 2.5 million new cars registered it will still take more than 12 years to replace all the cars on the UK roads, even assuming everyone can afford to trade up enough to get a self driving one in that period.
Absolutely. I think I cited similar stats for the US when someone posted a link to an article by some pollyanna futurist. If starting tomorrow the only car you could get was a self-driving electric car, it might take 20 years until they were ubiquitous until we got to a point where you could prohibit human drivers from main roads.
But my training is as a historian of the sixteenth century, so I see that as a fast cultural change. Much faster (though much less important) than the transition to the wheeled plow ;-)
Still, there are technological changes that affect society in ways that we do not expect in advance. Two of my favorite examples are reliable matches and refrigerators. When matches became widely available, this had a profound impact on village life for women in Europe. Before matches, "going to fetch fire" was a common reason for women to socialize with their neighbors. Women became substantially more isolated once matches became available. At the same time, destructive fires become less common as women were not running back and forth among thatch-roof houses with hot coals.
Refrigerators had a similar effect (Lawrence Wylie, Village in Vaucluse documents this for the south of France). Basically, prior to the fridge, perishables had to be acquired daily, sometimes twice daily, which meant people were out and about walking around and seeing each other. Older French friends confirm that when they were kids they went to the market or farmer 2x per day.
We expect that cars and televisions had huge disruptive effects on social life, but it's not obvious when looking at the history of technology to think of the disruptive effects of matches or even the effects on daily social life resulting from home refrigerators.
I expect that self-driving cars, which will have a profound social impact, but it's not clear what all the impacts will be and at what level of penetration.
Found it. In the US it's actually 11.4 years for the avg age of a car.
http://th3core.com/talk/water-coolerextra/bedtime-story/
Quote
QuoteWithin two decades, we will have almost unlimited energy, food, and clean water; advances in medicine will allow us to live longer and healthier lives; robots will drive our cars, manufacture our goods, and do our chores
Let's start with the obvious... In two decades....
-- "robots will drive our cars" --
The average age of a car on the road today is 11.4 years[1] and that number has been generally rising as cars last longer (remember when it was a feat to get 100K miles out of a car). If ALL new cars become robot-driven 8 years from now, that means that two decades from now at most half of the cars on the road will be robot-driven. Do I need to say that 8 years from now, few if any production cars will be robot-driven. Verdict: utter fantasy.
>In the US it's actually 11.4 years
>the average age of a car in the Uk is 7.5 years
They have Fiat. That brings their average waaaay down.
Than what must the avg be in France? They have Peugeot!
It may be lost on the eurotrash that we're only half-joking.
hey, Mr-most-disposable-society-in-the-world....we don't get old cars because the old ones are still good, we get old ones because we're poor and new ones cost a lot. that's also why we still walk places occastionally ;D
anyhow - we have other issues in the UK. Cruise control, for example, not so common - we don't trust cars to drive themselves. We'll be very polite about it but boy will we want an off button. And we won't want cars driving themselves on roads on which we are driving. And it takes us 20 years to get planning permission for a new road - we're looking at longer than 2 decades here. Also retro fittng to a manual sounds a lot harder than to an automatic?
There's going to be a hell of a long overlap period either way - our landrover is, er, probably 30 years old and unless we win the lottery it'll be running for at least the next 10. If we get a new one then it'll be running for another 40 years. And the chances of my dad relinquishing control to a robot is zero. He thinks his laptop is out to get him ffs.
The increased road speed and automated parking space scenarios are great, but not the easiest to achieve with a mix of robot cars and humans. Perhaps somewhere like SF will be brave enough to introduce it first but I can't see it being the norm for a very long time.
I think we will get a lot of safety overrides first before we get truly self driving cars. Things like cutting the throttle if you are too close to the car in front. Etc.
Change in car driving will be generational like most things are. We had seat belts for decades and nobody used them but after a couple of generations we were able to make them mandatory. Same with self driving cars or otherwise automated cars.
We, in the US, also need to sort out the automobiles position in our society, right now we build everything to be dependent on the car. If you don't have a car you are a second class citizen, but will that continue to be true in the future as we become a more urban culture? Right now we can't afford to maintain all the roads we have already built, yet we keep building new ones as if we are going to keep expanding to the suburbs like in the past.
>UK
Crickey, they still use buildings that are 400 years old! In the US we are bulldozing Walmarts that are only 15 years old. The Brits won't give up their Humblers for at least another 30 years. ;D
>retro fittng to a manual sounds a lot harder than to an automatic?
Good point. I wonder how the Mercedes robotruck is tackling that?
>land rover >30
One of my best friends is (US) nationally acknowledged as the 'God of Land Rovers' (Series I & II). He's currently converting old LR's to run on Mercedes 300 diesels. They're getting 25mpg and running on veg oil. I'll let you know when his robo-conversion kit is available, hhh.
> Mr-most-disposable-society-in-the-world
Here ya go, Gurtie. See, we're struggling to keep those old clunkers viable while we lounge by the poolside awaiting our robot bartender to give our drinks to our robot butler. Keeps the immigrants employed, too.
http://www.gasvalet.co/
That's a 408 area code -- San Jose, Southern Silicon Valley. I can't tell if this is a joke, clickbate or the real deal. Looks like the website was slapped together in 5 minutes.
FWIW, I am driving a 15 y.o. sedan with nearly 1/4 million miles on it.
The World's First Self-Driving Semi-Truck Hits the Road
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/worlds-first-self-driving-semi-truck-hits-road/
While I'm at it, I might as well tie this in to the coming Jobs Apocalypse:
Somewhere along the way the U.S. became a nation of truck drivers
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/keep-on-truckin-in-a-majority-of-states-its-the-most-popular-job-2015-02-09
If I were a young truck driver, I wouldn't worry that much about automation. My neighbor is retiring this year after 30+ years of driving a semi and as near as I can tell, few make it to 65. He got lucky because we haven't had any real winter the last three years of his career and the winter before that he started saying he wasn't sure he could drive a semi through another winter.
Anyway, the point being that as automation steps in, attrition will thin the ranks and the roads he drives with curves and snow and erratic pleasure drivers and animals are a long ways from being automation-ready.
Meanwhile, if I were a young airline pilot, I'd be shaking in my boots. That's a more controlled situation and most of the time I think planes could fly themselves and the military and spooks are turning out highly-trained drone pilots who have no need of being in a cockpit to fly. I think it will be a long time until there's NO pilot in the cockpit, but I can't see the sense of a pilot and co-pilot (sometimes plus a navigator). And after the German pilot incident, I expect we'll see planes have the ability to be controlled from the ground for safety reasons.
>military
I read a news story that said the F-35 will probably be the last manned fighter plane the US Navy will buy. Future Navy fighters and bombers will be drones eventually robots.
Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck
massive disruption, but this article is "reporting cannibalism" (media disaster reporting joke)
https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-going-to-hit-us-like-a-human-driven-truck-b8507d9c5961
That article links to this:
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state
It is really telling that the #1 job in America is trucking in the majority of states. I don't understand how there isn't more outcry over the TPP treaty being rammed through. Between globalization and technology killing all the low skilled jobs I don't understand how the general population isn't freaking out right now. Is it that the vast amount of people just aren't paying attention? I have four kids and these thoughts keep me up at night.
>I read a news story that said the F-35 will probably be the last manned fighter plane the US Navy will buy. Future Navy fighters and bombers will be drones eventually robots.
I sort of think that we will have robot planes in the future, but then we may end up back in a time where we have humans combat flying again. There will be a time when drones will be vulnerable to hacking -- may be sooner than we think.
> I don't understand how the general population isn't freaking
The general population consists of mouth-breathers, LM.
>freaking
Eventually they will. It is not a good long term prognosis for political stability.
<time warp>
>>what about trucks
>Mercedes has one in the works. THIS is where we're going to see the rubber hit the road first, IMO. The scenario, at first, will be for large robotic convoys to travel between hubs located along our interstates. Travel will be in off-peak hours and accompanied by a human engineer and conductor in case of an emergency.
A fleet of trucks just drove themselves across Europe
"About a dozen trucks from major manufacturers like Volvo and Daimler just completed a week of largely autonomous driving across Europe, the first such major exercise on the continent."
http://qz.com/656104/a-fleet-of-trucks-just-drove-themselves-across-europe/
Was a big deal here recently as they basically drove across the country. Made a LOT of news.
I'm not sure I like the sound of this: huge columns of even more trucks on the roads. Roads are expensive to build and maintain (if we bother to maintain them) and require massive subsidies. I'd rather see more goods transported in the US by rail and then via truck the last 100 miles.
Personally, the whole idea of self driving cars creeps me out unless I get too old to drive myself safely, and even then the automated car probably won't let me keep the turn signal on all the time. ;D
>goods transported in the US by rail and then via truck the last 100 miles.
I'm with you, but I don't see that happening. A drone road-tax, I do see. And trucks already pay a sh*tload of the highway taxes for weight licensing and fuel taxes. ...But the single largest cost is the driver, and his job is toast.
<time warp>
Going down that slippery slope to traindom.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a21510/sweden-builds-the-worlds-first-electric-highway/
This is a surprisingly interesting article - a law professor who challenges traffic cameras' constitutionality and why he sees them as a threat.
I think he just changed my mind on traffic cams.
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/01/18093/