[ThorSanchez]

Again, you and a few others seem to think that autonomous vehicles will replace personal cars. I for one don't, for those who are living in a place where you need to "get about" and do personal shopping etc. It is strange to me that you believe that an autonomous car will have the capability of say, a pickup, van or station wagon. Having such large vehicles on demand would be a interesting concept, but it would not really alleviate congestion or reduce the number of cars on the road.

Large vehicles to haul stuff would be a obvious market for autonomy and vehicle sharing. Most people, most of the time drive to and from work with no passengers. They have no real need for a F250 except in special cases. But if they could click on their smartphone app and have an F250 show up for a few hours to haul mulch, or a couple sheets of plywood that would save them vast amounts of money. It wouldn't necessarily cut down on congestion. But it would allow many more people to own one or two much more efficient cars that don't take up 1.5 parking spaces instead of buying massive trucks for the 99% use case.

Of course that doesn't solve the need to be seen in a monster truck rolling coal on your morning commute to Intertek.

[photoptimist]

I doubt that any laws will force the replacement human driven cars with autonomous cars but I do think some people will pick autonomous cars instead of human driven cars either as their personal vehicle or via a ride-hailing service. Some people love to drive and they will buy human driven cars. Some people don't love to drive and they will use autonomous cars. Whether non-drivers buy an autonomous car or hail one will depend on their commuting needs. I'd also bet that some percentage will buy a personal autonomous car but then use an app that rents out their car when they don't need it -- their car will make them money rather than costing them money.

As for congestion, although autonomous cars will likely increase the number of vehicles moving on the road, they will actually reduce congestion. The erratic behavior of human drivers is the root cause of congestion, not the number of cars on the road. In our local mountains, the police have started using pace cars on the heavy-traffic ski weekends. A cruiser with flashing lights pulls into traffic and sets the speed of all the cars for smooth flow. This avoids the bunching waves of stop-and-go traffic in which human drivers create congestion by driving as fast as possible to the next congested area. Likewise, autonomous vehicles can drive a steady speeds, drive safely at very low following distances, and change lanes much more smoothly that human drivers do.

[ThorSanchez]

As for congestion, although autonomous cars will likely increase the number of vehicles moving on the road, they will actually reduce congestion. The erratic behavior of human drivers is the root cause of congestion, not the number of cars on the road. In our local mountains, the police have started using pace cars on the heavy-traffic ski weekends. A cruiser with flashing lights pulls into traffic and sets the speed of all the cars for smooth flow. This avoids the bunching waves of stop-and-go traffic in which human drivers create congestion by driving as fast as possible to the next congested area. Likewise, autonomous vehicles can drive a steady speeds, drive safely at very low following distances, and change lanes much more smoothly that human drivers do.

I've never, ever seen a situation where a cop was on the side of the road helping someone with a flat tire and slowing to a crawl to see what was going on caused a three-mile backup. Never.

[photoptimist]

I've never, ever seen a situation where a cop was on the side of the road helping someone with a flat tire and slowing to a crawl to see what was going on caused a three-mile backup. Never.

These cops never sit by the side of the road. They either drive with the traffic or take an off-ramp to wait at a rest stop or in a small town before taking an on-ramp to come into traffic.

The system works because a road's capacity (in vehicles per hour) increases if all the cars drive at a steady speed.

[PDL]

These cops never sit by the side of the road. They either drive with the traffic or take an off-ramp to wait at a rest stop or in a small town before taking an on-ramp to come into traffic.

The system works because a road's capacity (in vehicles per hour) increases if all the cars drive at a steady speed.

Mr. Optimist it is obvious that you do not drive all that much anymore. Just having a cop on the side of the road will cause a backup, just because everyone pounds the brakes when they see one. It happens in both lanes oncoming and ongoing, even on with roads with barriers. The thing with congestion is that since people go to work and get off work at the same relative time each day, the roads are crowded with people/cars for those hours, hence the term "rush hour", an oxymoron but that's the way it is.

Having autonomous cars that are independent of transit will only add to the situation since each individual is going to take up space on the road, just like they do now. Note this: Waymo pilot program shows how self-driving cars could boost transit | Ars Technica It is the last/first mile issue all over again.

---------- Post added 08-01-18 at 08:57 AM ----------

Large vehicles to haul stuff would be a obvious market for autonomy and vehicle sharing. Most people, most of the time drive to and from work with no passengers. They have no real need for a F250 except in special cases. But if they could click on their smartphone app and have an F250 show up for a few hours to haul mulch, or a couple sheets of plywood that would save them vast amounts of money. It wouldn't necessarily cut down on congestion. But it would allow many more people to own one or two much more efficient cars that don't take up 1.5 parking spaces instead of buying massive trucks for the 99% use case.

Of course that doesn't solve the need to be seen in a monster truck rolling coal on your morning commute to Intertek.

When I was younger, having the equivalent of a F-150 was a sign of someone who used it in their profession (rancher, farmer, construction worker etc.) now it is a status symbol. To think that the "autonomous car companies" are going to hand out large trucks on demand is to my mind a little ridiculous since most people who use trucks for business purposes have their tools stored in them. The idea of expecting a autonomous F-150 type vehicle to show up at a work site with all the tools necessary for a given job is a pipe dream. The tools are owned by the operators and if you think they are going to load/unload their tools every time the "order up" a truck, well,,,,, that ain't gonna happen. Today I know of several people who brag all about their SUV/Pickup's capabilities but when they do drive off of the pavement, they spend the next two weekends polishing out the scratches. Most commuters would get along just fine with trains for commuting, but the infrastructure for handling on demand out of band does not exist and it appears that that infrastructure is in its infancy. We will also need the public transit infrastructure to get people to work and back to their suburb homes which is going to take decades and demands that Government step in to build it out.

PS - edited entry #330 to add aritcle

[Rondec]

I think it is a tough situation. Any construction zone causes slow downs, any vehicle by the side of the road (regardless of the presence of police officers) and it does feel to me as though having autonomous vehicles would help avoid some of those silly slowdowns. Traffic really only moves as fast as the slowest vehicles on the road.

At the same time, the idea of most of the vehicles on the road being autonomous is unlikely to happen for the foreseeable future. Most of the vehicles are older and the cost of these systems will be a lot. Odds are that there will be a lot more driver helps added in that help avoid blind spot accidents, help slow vehicle down if there is stopped traffic ahead, etc.

As to the amount of accidents and traffic deaths, maybe they aren't high percentage wise, but they do cost society quite a bit and they are reducible, whereas fixing a big cause of death, like heart disease, may actually may be more difficult to take care of.

[ThorSanchez]

To think that the "autonomous car companies" are going to hand out large trucks on demand is to my mind a little ridiculous since most people who use trucks for business purposes have their tools stored in them.

Looking out my window into my parking lot (I work in an engineering and technical organization and none of the people here have trucks specifically for work) almost exactly one-quarter of the vehicles are pickup trucks. And I'll guarantee that each of those pickup trucks was used to carry one person to work this morning, hauling nothing put maybe lunch and a laptop. These trucks are purchased for a) status, b) hauling stuff for home or pleasure.

Yes, Ford, Dodge, Chevy, Toyota sell a lot of work trucks for business. But also very many for folks who need to go to Lowes or Home Depot to get something large two or three times a year, and to get a load of mulch in the spring.

That just made me think... I own an old Dodge Dakota, given to me free of charge by my father in law. I use it to take the trash away. There are going to be autonomous trash trucks. You stick your approved bin in the painted lines by the end of your driveway, the Autotrashinator comes and empties it, then takes it away. All without the inconvienence of having to pay a driver and a trash man or two.

---------- Post added 08-01-18 at 12:44 PM ----------

At the same time, the idea of most of the vehicles on the road being autonomous is unlikely to happen for the foreseeable future. Most of the vehicles are older and the cost of these systems will be a lot. Odds are that there will be a lot more driver helps added in that help avoid blind spot accidents, help slow vehicle down if there is stopped traffic ahead, etc.

As to the amount of accidents and traffic deaths, maybe they aren't high percentage wise, but they do cost society quite a bit and they are reducible, whereas fixing a big cause of death, like heart disease, may actually may be more difficult to take care of.

It's inevitable. Seat belts, airbags, crumple zones, autobraking, blind spot monitoring... taken together all of this is most of the reason deaths per mile (at least in the US) are something like 1/3rd of what they were 40 years ago. Despite cell phones and 88-ounce Big Gulps in our laps. Few people pine for the glory days of freedom before the nanny state made us have seat belts and airbags and we died three times as often on the road.

When my wife was seven months pregnant with my 2nd child she rolled her vehicle. With my then one-year-old in a car seat in the back. Everyone was fine. If it had been 1974 with few wearing seat belts, no air bags, no car seats, and little thought to safety in the vehicle design they might all be dead. Autonomy and other autonomy-lite aides will mean a lot more people get to tell a story like mine, and not have their lives ruined.

[PDL]

Looking out my window into my parking lot (I work in an engineering and technical organization and none of the people here have trucks specifically for work) almost exactly one-quarter of the vehicles are pickup trucks. And I'll guarantee that each of those pickup trucks was used to carry one person to work this morning, hauling nothing put maybe lunch and a laptop. These trucks are purchased for a) status, b) hauling stuff for home or pleasure.

Yes, Ford, Dodge, Chevy, Toyota sell a lot of work trucks for business. But also very many for folks who need to go to Lowes or Home Depot to get something large two or three times a year, and to get a load of mulch in the spring.

When I need a load of "stock" from Home Depot, I rent one of their trucks for a few hours or have it delivered. And for mulch, my wife used to fill up the trunk of her X-Type (Jaguar) once or twice a year. Which was a lot cheaper than owning a truck. When my son moves, we rent a U-Haul van for the day. Using the excuse that you need to go to Home Depot/Lowes once a year to buy and maintain a F-150 is the price we pay for letting little boys think that having a big bad truck makes them a man. A barmaid at the Victoria Arms in Oxford England tonight said it best. Men don't grow up, they just get old and their toys get bigger. I added that their toys get more expensive too.

I know all too well that most of the pickups on the road are driven by status seeking people. Back in the day when I was growing up, if you had a pickup that had a leather interior and air conditioning, most of the working cowboys would laugh you out of the bar for being a Urban Cowboy. Now if you have a scratch on your "macho machine" you are failing to keep up your "investment" - don't make me laugh.. a car/truck is just that, not an investment.

---------- Post added 08-01-18 at 01:53 PM ----------

When my wife was seven months pregnant with my 2nd child she rolled her vehicle. With my then one-year-old in a car seat in the back. Everyone was fine. If it had been 1974 with few wearing seat belts, no air bags, no car seats, and little thought to safety in the vehicle design they might all be dead. Autonomy and other autonomy-lite aides will mean a lot more people get to tell a story like mine, and not have their lives ruined.

Make that 1965 as seat belts were mandatory in the front seats of cars in 1996. Now your one-year-old would have been dead as they most likely would have been either standing up on the passenger seat or just sitting there. You may call it nanny state, but maybe you should thank the government for mandating safety equipment that actually saved your family. And believe me when I say that autonomous vehicles will be regulated to the nth degree.

[dbs]

Hi All

Autonomous vehicle what will be first ?
Where I am the first is a bus .
Now here a bus has right of way but a person still needs some judgement of the situation an autonomous bus just has right of way.
What do you think is going to happen in traffic, .....Mayhem during peak hour.

Dave

[Racer X 69]

It is interesting that Uber has pulled out of the truck business, which would appear to me to be a good place to start with autonomous free ranging vehicles. Having a non-human driver haul stuff across the country side would seem to me to be a more attainable starting point than having a personal vehicle replacement. (I am pretty sure that Racer x 69 would not agree)

Pretty sure we don’t want 80,000lbs of truck, trailer and load rolling down the highway without a human being at the wheel, or at least in the truck ready to take control when something goes wrong.

Like when a tire blows out.

Or a deer runs out and the rig hits it.

Or when a million other things happen that will require bringing a heavy truck to a safe stop.

Yeah, Racer definitely does not agree.

[PDL]

Pretty sure we don’t want 80,000lbs of truck, trailer and load rolling down the highway without a human being at the wheel, or at least in the truck ready to take control when something goes wrong.

Like when a tire blows out.

Or a deer runs out and the rig hits it.

Or when a million other things happen that will require bringing a heavy truck to a safe stop.

Yeah, Racer definitely does not agree.

Hence the issue with autonomous vehicles, what do you do when the unexpected happens to either a car or a truck. What does a car do when something "jumps" out in front of it? In the case of Uber it hit and killed it, granted that the built in Volvo emergency stop system had been disabled. However there is a dead person on the road. What happens to a autonomous car has a flat tire or better yet when someone acquires the attention of a autonomous car and it needs fuel and the carrying capacity to get to where I want it to go i.e. Call a car up, and after you get in you tell it that you want to go to Yellowstone National Park from Seattle and have it pull a camper trailer because you are "roughing it this time". Let alone drive by a playground with kids running out into the road to get the soccer (football) ball. Or if I order up a car capable of pulling my camper trailer to Yellowstone, stay with me while in the park (I come from Wyoming and I know there aren't all that many rental places out there) and haul everything back - and the Seattle area's long distance hauling vehicles are all out driving to the Olympic Peninsula (Olympic National Park) or Mt. Rainier (Mt. Rainer National Park) or Northern Cascade National Park, or Cannon Beach, or Yosemite (Yosemite National Park) then what.

To be honest I picked on Racer just to get his reaction. It appears to me that the infrastructure to dispatch trucks is in existence and does not need to be created - step one. The problem raises it self in the handling of edge conditions (which I have mentioned before), getting the vehicle to drive itself down a road and not hit things, stop when it needs to stop, obey STOP signs, traffic lights etc. is the first step part. The next steps is how do you handle breakdowns (flat tires, running out of fuel, rocks hitting the sensors and breaking them etc.). Beyond that are things that are not all that predictable, such as people/things crossing into the road, changing weather conditions (rain -> road grime covering the sensors, snow -> covering the sensors/confusing the sensors, fog, sand etc.).

And finally, who will set the standards and regulations that will govern these devices, Facebook, Uber, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Twitter or various city/state Governments or will it be the Federal Government in the US. Now when I cross into Canada, will the rules be the same? This is going to take a long time and a lot of work. I just hope it happens before I die because it would be cool. (As I sit in a B&B in York after getting off the train from Oxford) It is about time for me to go get a order of onion rings and a warm beer, Gin and Tonic or maybe a wee dram of very old whiskey (OK - a double maybe)

[Racer X 69]

Another thing that autonomous trucks can’t do.

Pre and post trip inspections.

Check fluids, brakes, lights, tires (all 18, or more), load securement.


Load checks.

I pulled flatbed and lowboy trailers. A driver is required by law to stop and check the load and load securement (chains, straps, etc) every few hours.


Hazmat loads.

When hauling a placarded hazmat load, all of the above is required and a driver is required by law to stop every two hours and check the air pressure in every tire.


These are things only a human operator can do.

[photoptimist]

Hence the issue with autonomous vehicles, what do you do when the unexpected happens to either a car or a truck. What does a car do when something "jumps" out in front of it? In the case of Uber it hit and killed it, granted that the built in Volvo emergency stop system had been disabled. However there is a dead person on the road. What happens to a autonomous car has a flat tire or better yet when someone acquires the attention of a autonomous car and it needs fuel and the carrying capacity to get to where I want it to go i.e. Call a car up, and after you get in you tell it that you want to go to Yellowstone National Park from Seattle and have it pull a camper trailer because you are "roughing it this time". Let alone drive by a playground with kids running out into the road to get the soccer (football) ball. Or if I order up a car capable of pulling my camper trailer to Yellowstone, stay with me while in the park (I come from Wyoming and I know there aren't all that many rental places out there) and haul everything back - and the Seattle area's long distance hauling vehicles are all out driving to the Olympic Peninsula (Olympic National Park) or Mt. Rainier (Mt. Rainer National Park) or Northern Cascade National Park, or Cannon Beach, or Yosemite (Yosemite National Park) then what.

To be honest I picked on Racer just to get his reaction. It appears to me that the infrastructure to dispatch trucks is in existence and does not need to be created - step one. The problem raises it self in the handling of edge conditions (which I have mentioned before), getting the vehicle to drive itself down a road and not hit things, stop when it needs to stop, obey STOP signs, traffic lights etc. is the first step part. The next steps is how do you handle breakdowns (flat tires, running out of fuel, rocks hitting the sensors and breaking them etc.). Beyond that are things that are not all that predictable, such as people/things crossing into the road, changing weather conditions (rain -> road grime covering the sensors, snow -> covering the sensors/confusing the sensors, fog, sand etc.).

And finally, who will set the standards and regulations that will govern these devices, Facebook, Uber, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Twitter or various city/state Governments or will it be the Federal Government in the US. Now when I cross into Canada, will the rules be the same? This is going to take a long time and a lot of work. I just hope it happens before I die because it would be cool. (As I sit in a B&B in York after getting off the train from Oxford) It is about time for me to go get a order of onion rings and a warm beer, Gin and Tonic or maybe a wee dram of very old whiskey (OK - a double maybe)

An autonomous vehicle's reaction will almost certainly be faster and better than most human driver's responses. Autonomous vehicles have long-range sensors, can see in all directions all the time, and have much faster reaction times.

Taking an autonomous car to Yosemite would be just like renting a car. You pick the vehicle that has the features you want (size, towing capacity, etc.), tell the service that you want the car for 10 day, and off you go. Or maybe you don't even need to say how long you want the car but the service changes some rate for every mile you go and every minute you keep the car.

The funny thing about the unpredictable is that with enough data, it becomes statistical. Even the edge scenarios become frequent events with enough data. The Waymo fleet currently has 8 million miles of driving experience. That's 600 years of driving experience (the average American only drive 13,474 miles a year). Those cars have seen (and collected data) on 10 lifetimes of driving experience.

As for flat tires and breakdowns, most human drivers just call AAA, their car dealer, or a tow truck. An autonomous car would make two calls even before it came to a full stop by the side of the road. The first call would be to hail another autonomous car to pickup the rider and the second would be to the repair service. The rider would probably be on their way before the tow truck came.

The standards and regulations piece is the messiest one. No doubt, federal, state, and local authorities will set (and already have set) some regulations. And within those constraints, Google etc can do what they want with one huge proviso -- if any of their vehicles injure any one in any way, a human judge and human jury will be examine the quality of those corporate standards to determine liability. The brilliance of the common law system is that it doesn't have to wait for governments to make laws. The cases and the legal arguments by the two sides will determine the precedents.

[Racer X 69]

The funny thing about the unpredictable is that with enough data, it becomes statistical. Even the edge scenarios become frequent events with enough data. The Waymo fleet currently has 8 million miles of driving experience. That's 600 years of driving experience (the average American only drive 13,474 miles a year). Those cars have seen (and collected data) on 10 lifetimes of driving experience.

I drove 800,000 miles in five years while at the wheel of Monstro and company.

When not employed as a truck driver I average around 35,000 annually.

So far I have driven about 2.5 million miles.

[gaweidert]

So who get the ticket if a driverless vehicle is caught speeding? How does the cop even pull it over in the first place? There is too much money made by too many government entities to ever make driverless vehicles mandatory. Plus modern automobiles are way too easy to hack.