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Forum: General Talk
08-01-2018, 09:36 AM
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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 ----------
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.
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Forum: General Talk
08-01-2018, 06:12 AM
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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.
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Forum: General Talk
08-01-2018, 04:40 AM
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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.
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Forum: General Talk
07-31-2018, 07:38 AM
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I propose that we do a study. We take one state, let's call it Oregon. For a period of 10 years there will be no regulations of motor vehicles or their operators at all. You can do anything you want. Drive anything you want, in any way you want. Over these 10 years we'll monitor and survey the population of Oregon as to their satisfaction with the motoring experience in their state. We'll also monitor safety, congestion, and a variety of other automobile related attributes of the state.
Over the same 10 years we'll also monitor California, which we'll assume is pretty close to the (1/Oregon) case.
After the period is over we'll analyze the data and see which state is happier with their situation.
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Forum: General Talk
07-25-2018, 09:22 AM
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I think it's very unlikely that autonomous cars will be a one-to-one replacement for the cars in everyone's garages now. Look at the selections of cars you see on the road. Endless seas of white and gray RAV-4s and CR-Vs and lux-pickups. Corollas and Impalas. Many, if not most, people clearly see their vehicle as an appliance. Can it haul me to work and have room for my family? Check. Does it keep me reasonably entertained on my 44-minute commute? Check. Can I afford the monthly payment? Well... if I get approved for that 7-year loan I can. Can it haul my 48' fifth-wheel camper to the lake? Check. Can it fit that 77-pack of toilet paper from Costco in the back? Check.
Fun? Whatever. Performance. Meh. Enjoy driving? Not since they were 17.
If an average person has a $400 a month car payment and a $150 a month insurance payment and $50 in gas many of them would happily switch to an autnomous car-sharing service for $300 or $400 a month, just so long as the car showed up and took them where they need to go and did what they wanted it to do. They'll go from three cars to one, or one to zero and pocket the difference.
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Forum: General Talk
07-24-2018, 09:36 AM
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The FAA has a 2020 mandate for equipage of ADS-B in all commerical aircraft. Anyone who doesn't have it by that date will be sent to the bottom of the priority list for routing and spacing and access. ADS-B is the key component of the NextGen ATC system that will be fully implemented in two years, and allow closer spacing, free flight for direct routes without air corridors, better collision avoidance systems.
I don't know about the autoland capabilities but an ADS-B equipped transponder is standard issue now. This isn't rocket science, the Mode S system ADS-B is based on was concieved of about 40 years ago and has been slowly rolled out since. You can buy a TSO-certified ADS-B capable transponder that also does legacy IFF/ATC modes for a few thousand dollars from any number of vendors. The vast majority of US, European, Japanese, Australian, etc carriers have had their fleets outfitted for years.
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Forum: General Talk
07-20-2018, 11:35 AM
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I'm sure what will happen is that the pilotless planes will have a pilot on board, in the cockpit for years. They'll hang out, try not to fall asleep, and in the early days will have to take over 1/300,000th of the time just a precaution. Then they'll have a pilot sitting in first class just in case. Then they won't. And that'll probably be a more palatable way to save $400k a year than making the seats in steerage class 8" x 8". Or they'll just do both...
Of course the overwhelming majority are against pilotless aircraft. The overwhelming majority are against everything. It's some kind of miracle that there isn't currently a pitchfork-and-torch-wielding mob in front of Elon Musk's secret lair trying to burn down the place for introducing semi-autonomous cars without an intensive 30-40 year test program and complete metaphysical certainty that the AI will cause zero injuries over the next century.
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Forum: General Talk
07-12-2018, 06:12 AM
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They'll love it. They'll have highest priority in almost every situation, and other vehicles will get out of their way long before it becomes a problem instead of after sitting for 45 seconds behind the guy fiddling with his radio and phone and not noticing the fire truck 8' off his back bumper.
It will be straighforward and little or no additional cost - cars will already be sharing data. The emergency vehicles will have a data field in the stream that says they're in route to an emergency and everyone will get out of the way.
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Forum: General Talk
07-07-2018, 04:36 AM
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You're going to get in your old Buick and drive wherever you want. The end.
Exactly. I'm sure you can find endless quotes from 1800 or 1900 or 1930 or 1960 about the nightmarish conditions the human race will be subjugated to in 2018. By later in life Henry Ford became an unrepentant nostalgist, going so far as founding a utopian community/rubber plantation in the Amazon jungle because he'd grown totally disenchanted with the total insanity of American lifestyle and culture of the 1910s and 1920s. Life would never go back to the idyllic conditions of the 1870s.
Many people have difficulty envisioning a world that is somewhat different than their own, but also wonderful and exciting and challenging and engaging. For hundreds of years the world has constantly changed, but if anything we've increased the opportunities for more and more people to live an exciting life well.
Autonomous cars will end up just fine, and make life better for many.
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Forum: General Talk
07-06-2018, 05:08 AM
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The economics will work itself out, but you are probably not the typical case for this. I'm in a somewhat similar situation, although I do have 5-6 neighbors within a kilometer.
But even where I live in suburban/rural southern Maryland there are vast developments with hundreds of houses. Right now their only option is for each house to own a car or three or four. With autonomous vehicles owned by some Uber-like company many of them could probably downsize to one general-purpose car and save many thousands of dollars a year. I think there is probably a business case there, and also for all but the most rural ~25% of the US population.
But even among the very rural places there may be a viable opportunity. I have an aunt and uncle who live in the Shennandoah Valley of Virginia. They're about 15 miles from the nearest grocery store, and maybe 30 miles to the nearest city of any decent size and the hospital. They're on Social Security, very limited income. House paid off years ago. They have three major expenses - food, medical, and car. My uncle has medical problems and can't really drive any more. They have a lower-spec Hyundai compact, and it is probably eating up 15-20% of their annual income. All you have to do is come up with a autonomous ride sharing service that equates to 10% of their annual income and they'd be all in.
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Forum: General Talk
07-06-2018, 04:28 AM
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Autonomous driving is going to be the American version of public transportation with some extra perks. In Europe or Japan the train is often cheaper than owning a car, espeically when you figure in gas, maintenance, regular replacement, insurance. We don't have that option unless you live in a select city like New York or DC. Probably 50% of the US population has no real option besides owning their own car, otherwise basic things like going to the grocery store are practically unworkable.
I can see large numbers of Americans in 2030 commuting in autonomous cars that come get them, take them to work, run their errands, then go off doing something else all day instead of sitting unused in a lot with 1500 other idle cars. It has to be cheaper than the $5,000, $10,000 a year or whatever people spend on car payment+insurance+gas+maintenance. We're also an antisocial lot, or have trained ourselve to be in our personal cars for our 90 minutes of commute a day, so this will help solve the issue of interacting with people on public transport.
Instead of a huge tax bill up front to pay for trains we're spreading the cost of our future transport over millions of cars incrementally implementing autonomy.
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Forum: General Talk
07-06-2018, 04:13 AM
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I don't know why there's this strong undercurrent in any discussion like this that eventually the government is going to take away our human-driven cars and we'll all be wearing white jumpsuits as we wander aimlessly into our grey transportation pods.
Obviously there are a substantial number of people who will want to drive their own cars. These people presumably vote. It seems unreasonable that a large number of people wanting to do things that are currently legal will in the next decade or so have that right (and the use of $billions worth of their property) ripped from them involuntarily.
I'm going on record as saying that if in 2055 you want to drive your unmodified 1963 Split Window Corvette you'll have no troubles. Besides the difficulty in finding gasoline, and the high insurance premiums that will go along with unaided human driving. At worst self-driving will be like driving a Tesla Model S today. Expensive enough to be out of the reach of many, inconvienent in some ways, but still very do-able if you really want to.
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Forum: General Talk
07-05-2018, 12:35 PM
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I have a co-worker who accepted the tracking box. They only wanted to sample his driving behavior, and he mailed it back to the company after some period like six weeks that they used to set rates. So he drove very carefully for six weeks, then didn't care quite so much.
---------- Post added 07-05-18 at 03:43 PM ----------
By whom? It's vastly more likely that autonomy will be stunted and driven into tiny niche use cases by litigation and legislation.
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Forum: General Talk
07-05-2018, 10:05 AM
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Aren't there already something like five billion cell phones in the world? They seem to operate pretty well in their allocated bandwidth without cooking us or our eggs.
Also (warning, very back-of-the-napkin calculation here) the sun irradiates the ground with something like 30 million times as much power as all the cell phones in the world transmitting at max power continuously.
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Forum: General Talk
07-05-2018, 09:16 AM
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Is the collision rate of a formation-flying unladen European swallow less or greater than the accident rate of a human-controlled car? Swallows are renowned civil libertarians, so the data is devilishly hard to come by.
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Forum: General Talk
07-05-2018, 07:23 AM
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One car telling another car "I'm right here, don't run into me" doesn't necessarily have to lead you to a dystopian hellscape out of a Phillip K. Dick story.
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Forum: General Talk
07-05-2018, 06:25 AM
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There's no reason it has to squitter out that this is monocrhrome's car, and this is where he lives, and here's his credit card number and SSN. To enable the safety features all it has to do is say here's a anonymous car, here's exactly where it is, and what it's doing. And this information could/should all be encrypted. And there will be cars unequipped with this essentially forever, or you can disable it, which you'll be allowed to drive if you can put up with the higher insurance premiums.
Will someone hack into the communications system and create occasional havoc? Probably. But we're currently staking our lives on 17-year-olds with a Big Gulp in one hand, an iPhone in the other, and the steering wheel being controlled by their knees.
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Forum: General Talk
07-05-2018, 05:39 AM
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Currently the air traffic control systems around the world are being upgraded to use a system called Automatic Dependent Surveillance (Broadcast), or ADS-B. Every airplane has (or will have) an ADS-B capable transponder that is integrated with GPS, and it "squitters" information on the aircraft's position, velocity, heading, waypoints, etc, etc once or twice a second. The other aircraft and the ground control stations receive all of these squitters and computers use them to create a comprehensive, nearly real-time picture of the airspace for hundreds of miles around. It enables things like collision aviodance, and tighter, more efficient spacing of aircraft, and helps do away with set air corridors in favor of more direct routes. And all of this information is also networked around the world, which enables things like those online flight trackers you can use to see when your friend's flight into BWI is going to land. The international civil aviation organization ICAO publishes the open standard for ADS-B implementation, and although almost any manufacturer can build a transponder they all have to adhere to the interoperability standards, along with software assurance and other saftey-of-flight standards.
This system is currently in the end stages of full implementation and it will supplant the old method of using air search radars and human air traffic controllers radioing hundreds of pilots and manually telling them where and when to go.
Something equivalent to this will eventually be rolled out for cars. Every car will have a certified system squittering out position and other dynamic data multiple times a second to all of the other cars in the area and eventually this will mean dramatically safer driving.
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Forum: General Talk
07-05-2018, 05:21 AM
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Sorry, my fault, I'll stay away from such discussions in the future.
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Forum: General Talk
07-04-2018, 06:01 AM
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If you have a functioning legislature it would control and direct what influence bureaucrats have, and also be responsible for appointing the higher level bureaucrats. In the US our legislature largely doesn't function so they punt a lot of things to civil servants. You won't get rid of bureaucrats, they are necessary. But there are ways to fix the legislature, although they're mostly subject to the same problems that led to the dysfunction in Congress.
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Forum: General Talk
07-04-2018, 04:31 AM
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This highlights how most Americans (and for all I know most people) spec out their cars: for the 95 or 99% use case. 85% of the time I use my car it's to drive 17 miles each way to work with just me on two-lane roads. Most of the people around me are in similar situations. But half of the cars commuting alongside me are 3-row SUVs, crew-cab pickup trucks, Jeeps (many of them modified for heavy off-road use)... all cars with capabilities that go unused the vast majority of the time with their owners often stretching budgets and making long commitments while being underwater on loans to afford these largely cosmetic (for their use case) capabilities. My parents have a large 3-row SUV for the one or two times a year it's slightly more convenient to take the four grandkids in one vehicle instead of two, while getting poorer mileage, handling, stopping distance, cost etc, etc 100% of the time compared to a smaller vehicle.
How many people do you know who'd buy a Tesla as their only vehicle and even occasionally be presented with the case where they're stuck in a raging snowstorm many miles from the nearest town? This has to be a case that an average Tesla buyer encounters once every 10 or 20 lifetimes.
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Forum: General Talk
07-04-2018, 03:58 AM
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I think that was another tongue-in-cheek post warning us of the dangers of, well... not leaving everyone alone to do as they please. At least I hope so, otherwise the apocalyptic-ness of it was a little over-the-top.
---------- Post added 07-04-18 at 07:09 AM ----------
I'd like to see data backing up the claim that cruise control is dangerous. I have to think it's mostly used in uncongested highway driving, which has to have among the lowest crash rates of any driving scenarios. Would no cruise control lower the crash rate in those situations from "very, very low" to "trivial"? Maybe.
I won't argue that some places use speeding, red light cameras, and similar to generate revenues with little regard for safety. The city of Washington D.C. generates $millions from traffic cameras despite overwhelmingly congested, slow, city traffic.
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Forum: General Talk
07-03-2018, 07:31 AM
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I think that's what we're now realizing, that for many people partial automation is worse than no automation because they're very quckly lulled into complacency. The system is so good that they drop their guard, they don't pay attention, and then they're dead under the back of a parked cement mixer. Many people can handle the automation, but enough can't with current setups that many bad things will happen. The systems end up enabling the aggressive and dangerous mulitaskers.
We know that many, many people text and fiddle with things and eat and drink in cars with no automation whatsoever. That level of irresponsibility is magnified when the car can drive itself without intervention 80% of the time. Manufacturers are going to have to be more active in making sure the driver is continuously engaged. And if they're not the car slows, pulls off the road, and turns on the flashers.
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