Computer-driven cars will convulse the automotive industry

http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20131130/AUTO01/311300015/1148/AUTO01/Computer-driven-cars-will-convulse-automotive-industry

by evo_9 • 13 years ago

81 167 13 years ago

detroitnews.com

nakedrobot2• 13 years ago

There is a hint of what a full society of self-driven cars will be like in Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge: there are no traffic lights. The cars all weave through an intersection much like pedestrians do while walking.

The future, at least in terms of the dangers of driving, is bright.

I look forward to the day when every car is a taxi, and the only cars parked on the side of the road are the ones owned by the very few people who can still be bothered at all to own a car full-time, which will hopefully be very few people.

saraid2167• 13 years ago

Is the implication here that pedestrians will simply walk into the street at random and the AIs will handle that? I find myself a little uncomfortable at the thought, and I'm fairly enthusiastic about driverless cars for most of the reasons you stated.

jaggederest• 13 years ago

Yes, that's precisely what happens. You'll be given a safe berth, with cars stopping or avoiding you by at least the distance you could conceivably fall over.

Personally that's already how I cross the street, and my confidence in human drivers isn't anywhere near so great.

jhardcastle• 13 years ago

It is frightening to watch, but the math seems to be somewhat straighforward. http://vimeo.com/37751380

atomcrusader• 13 years ago

I happened to use an open source traffic simulator which is capable of simulating both purely autonomous and human/autonomous traffic scenarios. It is possible to still support traffic lights for the humans who, for whatever reason, still desire to drive (I bet there will be always be reasons for you to want to drive manually.) The team at the University of Texas at Austin has done a great job developing this simulator, AIM4. You can check out the videos and the source code here: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~aim/

frobozz• 13 years ago

Once autonomous cars have saturated the marketplace, I can only think of two reasons to still drive manually:

1. As with people who row or sail, just for the enjoyment. Such usage could be restricted to specific places like racetracks.

2. Because I'm going somewhere I "shouldn't" and I don't want to tell my car (and have it record my journey for someone else to review, or refuse to take me). This may also be the case with emergency vehicles, an ambulance may need to drive along a pedestrian-only street, for example.

Now, there will be a need to mix human vs autonomous traffic on the run-up to that. Obviously, until sufficiently many cars are autonomous to warrant the removal of human-controlled cars, that will need to be the case. Furthermore, early production Autonomous cars may have routefinding flaws, or the computer may break down, meaning that someone may need to drive a normally autonomous car themselves.

salient• 13 years ago

Right now the scariest part about self-driving cars is the corporations making them or governments having access to remotely-controlled "kill-switches" for these cars. In such a future you wouldn't need to "cut the breaks" to "make it look like an accident" anymore, and doing it like this would be far easier, if strong security measures aren't considered from the start.

MichaelApproved• 13 years ago

Yours is a paranoid theory. This future you're worried about is just as possible with elevators and yet we don't see it happening. It'll be just as difficult to get away with because of how unusual accidents will be with self driving cars.

wavefunction2• 13 years ago

The difference, I think, is that the majority of elevators today rely on mechanical systems for control. Sabotaging a mechanical system in secret is a lot harder than sabotaging a computer-controlled system that is networked to the rest of the world.

dredmorbius4• 13 years ago

Elevator accidents are rare (hence: suspicious), people transit them for brief periods of time, usually in the company of others, and it's difficult to known when your intended target is in the elevator to attack them. If you're going to target someone via an elevator attack, you've likely got far more effective and specific vectors which would work.

Cars tend to be assigned to specific individuals (permanently, on an ongoing occasional basis for car-share programs, or for a trip duration in the case of dispatched livery) and, well, accidents happen, even with automation (other vehicles, mechanical failures, road or environmental conditions). Moreover, if your intent is to convey someone somewhere, it's a lot easier to do this via an automobile (which can travel anywhere on a paved road and non inconsiderable options on unpaved roads) than in an elevator, which, with the exception of Mr. Wonka's design, tend to follow a rather predictable and limited course.

If I were in charge of threat assessment for a VIP/HNWI, I'd very much take this threat into consideration.

alexeisadeski39• 13 years ago

Why wouldn't the kill switch be in traditional, manual control cars as well?

philwelch6• 13 years ago

It already is. Look up OnStar. Built into all GM cars for the past several years.

asdfologist• 13 years ago

Depending on how the kill-switch is implemented, it might not be that big of a deal, e.g. when the kill-switch is triggered, the vehicle occupants are given a 1-minute warning before the car goes from self-driving to manual driving mode.

lazyjones• 13 years ago

In such a future you wouldn't need to "cut the breaks" to "make it look like an accident" anymore, and doing it like this would be far easier, if strong security measures aren't considered from the start.

This future is already here to some extent. All they need to do now is to clean up the evidence (remove a plug, or have it self-destruct) after the event.

http://www.techradar.com/news/car-tech/delphi-s-new-plug-in-...

The OBD2 bus has been around in most vehicles since the late 80's and you can assume that those who need such functionality, have had it for a long time.

saraid2167• 13 years ago

It won't look like an accident when it's the only one that happened in the last year.

tree_of_item• 13 years ago

So there's a political incentive to not make cars entirely safe, even if they're self driving: maintaining plausible deniability for high level criminal activity.

krapp9• 13 years ago

No, the scariest part is the likelihood that they will be hackable, resulting in cars that essentially steal themselves or kidnap people or 'inconvenience' them while someone breaks into their house. Then there's the degree to which state actors can use them for ubiquitous surveillance and suppression of freedom of movement. The kill switches wouldn't be used to kill people, just round them up or lock them remotely inside their vehicles.

quertaciousness• 13 years ago

Imagine having your car drive off and park itself somewhere. You don't even need to know where.

And there are wider and more fundamental social benefits. City centres will become pleasant places to walk in. Cleaner air, less noise and less chance of being run over. Another example, children will play outside more, rather than being confined indoors as they increasingly have been.

wavefunction2• 13 years ago

Less wasted of 3d space for parking structures, parking lots, etc. is a huge one for me.

krapp9• 13 years ago

Imagine having your car drive off and park itself somewhere. You don't even need to know where.

Sounds like a car thief's dream.

VLM6• 13 years ago

Or just the average meth head doing smash and grabs.

pbhjpbhj2• 13 years ago

Why park it. You'd surely want it to earn it's keep ferrying your "friends" to work [depending how restrictive laws are on temporary rental of autonomous vehicles], dropping-off the kids, popping to the drive-thru to get your lunch, picking up your washing, getting your supermarket shopping and such.

ricardobeat• 13 years ago

Railroads, bus companies and short-haul airlines will suffer. If you can move from your home to your destination, door-to-door in the comfort of your car, who’s going to take the train, bus or plane?

Would that be significant? Costs, travel times, risk of accidents/theft, failures, would still be much higher. Not to mention it is absurdly less efficient to travel alone in a car.

I imagine hopping onto a car to the train station, and having another one waiting for you right at the arrivals gate will be the preferred mode of travel.

drivingmissm• 13 years ago

The problem in the U.S. is that the labor unions control rail, and stifle all innovation.

alexeisadeski39• 13 years ago

The US rail system is excellent, actually. At moving cargo.

Rail for moving humans is extremely inefficient almost everywhere on earth.

ams61103• 13 years ago

Have you ever taken a long-distance rail trip in the USA? Outside of a few corridors in the northeast, it's a slow, breakdown-ridden nightmare.

justincormack• 13 years ago

Maybe the OP was talking about the rest of the world, where trains work pretty well in general and this service might work.

VLM6• 13 years ago

I have. The NE is the worst because they have the ancient small passenger cars. Out west they have the cool double decker passenger cars.

As far as slow, I slept most of the way from CHC to NYC for a recent HOPE conference (which was across the street from the station, no $45 cab ride (or whatever it is) from the airport for me).

I find taking the train to be very pleasant, although I prefer the rolling stock west of the Mississippi.

sfbsfbsfb• 13 years ago

It seems like these cars will have to be operable in both the manual and self driving modes. Otherwise the car will become much less flexible.

Examples: 1) immediate unplanned stop at a yard sale 2) drive "off road" to get around an obstruction 3) dealing with unstructured parking situations 4) avoiding emergency stops in unsafe locations 5) driving through puddles (is it 2 inches or 2 feet deep?) 6) etc.

And for some significant transition period the road will be populated by both manual and computer driven cars.

How does the hybrid system work? Won't many people take advantage of "dumb" cars. How would you drive if you knew many cars were computer controlled. Would people figure out how to "game" the known computer driving rules? I don't pull out in front of cars that are too close because the human might not stop and hit me. Maybe I don't worry about it if I know the computer is in control of the other car.

Long haul freeway driving does not seem too complicated. But what about high density suburban and city driving?

icebraining• 13 years ago

1 is just a matter of allowing the user to issue real-time commands ("Car, stop here", "Car, go park"). 3 is less of an issue when you can get off and let the car park itself wherever it wants.

2, 4 and 5 are a matter of smarter algorithms, but I doubt they won't be able to do all that way before they become commonplace. Particularly 4, since you can't reasonably expect people to have to take control to avoid an accident. Even professional pilots can struggle with that, let alone regular drivers.

ams61103• 13 years ago

There is currently a lot of talk in the professional pilot community that automation has reached the point where pilots are increasingly unable to fly manually. So when the automation fails, they can't handle it.

manmal• 13 years ago

I imagine that this would make the modularization of cars more feasible, or even necessary. E.g. a long-distance travel power train module could provide enough juice for driving cross-country (e.g. on holidays), while the commuter power train module would be lighter and less costly to rent. The car could drive itself to a hotspot where such modules are interchanged on demand. This would of course only make sense if there still is something like car ownership - if cars are only rented from central entities, then this entity would just send out specialized vehicles instead.

However, I'm not quite sold that people will give up on car ownership. Yes, there's public utilities and public transport, which is not up for individual ownership. But a car in the sense that we have it now is something more personal than a train cabin - a car's body is very close to us and we touch it all the time; we leave personal belongings there; and there is something to the fact that this car is always in front of my house/appartment, especially in emergency situations. This last point could be amended with emergency cars which are available to each apartment block, with which driving is just more expensive. Imagine crying "Help! I need a car!" and an emergency unit comes right around the corner and takes you wherever you want.

trafficlight2• 13 years ago

I don't think we'll willingly give up on owning cars. Rather, it'll become way too expensive for the average person to own one.

Once self-driving cars show a marked decrease in road accidents, insurance prices will rise.

Car-as-a-Service companies will be created, making the cost of riding in a private car much cheaper than outright owning one. I'm already intending to start a car service as soon as the first cars are available.

alexeisadeski39• 13 years ago

Once self-driving cars show a marked decrease in road accidents, insurance prices will rise.

Huh?

Edit: Just to be clear: The world you describe should see incuranse rates for self-driving cars markedly lower, with rates for driver-driven cars probably a bit lower (than current).

Namrog84• 13 years ago

I am sure lots of people said. I'll never give up rising my horse for this weirs automobile. While I agree with you a lot and I love driving. You have to think that while we will continue to enjoy driving. Think of the next generation of children who grow up in a world where they never have to start learning to drive in first place. Where they don't appreciate it the same way. And instead they go to some random driving course for a fun day of driving. Like some people go to a stables or ranch to ride horses occasionally

philwelch6• 13 years ago

Someone already beat you. They're called Zipcar and Uber.

hershel• 13 years ago

I don't think it's that personal in principle. There were plenty of news articles about the current generation not caring much for car ownership.

infinotize• 13 years ago

I don't want a computer driven car.

tobiasu• 13 years ago

Something completely lost on tons of nerds seems to be that people genuinely enjoy operating their cars (and motorcycles).

lamby• 13 years ago

And as status symbols go, they pretty much tick all the required boxes.

tluyben2• 13 years ago

People who enjoy that are also a kind of nerds; I was one and the feeling was about the same as I get now when I switch on one of my 70s/80s computers. I changed nerd-ness as an awful lot of people died around me on motorcycles and in cars.

It's not important though; you are a menace to society if you drive yourself once robot cars are commonplace and thus you need to take your driving pleasures/status symbol to the track.

mgw• 13 years ago

I don't think it's lost on people discussing the subject, but it won't be able to stop this technological trend for several reasons.

Autonomous cars will be safer than human operated ones so they will at some point be cheaper to insure. This will continue until it is either unaffordable for the average person to operate their own car or outright prohibited because of safety concerns.

Driving will become a hobby which people will be able to pursue on dedicated (race)tracks.

crusso3• 13 years ago

Once Congress is shown that at least 20,000 of the 30,000 deaths per year could be eliminated by forcing autonomous vehicles on everyone, it will be illegal to operate a vehicle manually on first the Interstates, then eventually on every public road.

saraid2167• 13 years ago

Remember when people genuinely enjoyed riding horses?

tfigment2• 13 years ago

I was just going to post this but forgot to login and here was your post. The hard part is the initial adoption when most cars are still manually driven and the good stuff comes when none of it is manually driven. How we get there will be and adventure.

gaius2• 13 years ago

This is different. This is a horse you ask nicely to take you there but once you're locked inside it can take you anywhere. The issue is not safety, it's control.

lttlrck• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure there are still people that genuinely enjoy riding horses.

philwelch6• 13 years ago

People genuinely enjoy doing lots of things, and perhaps there will be tracks and courses where they may continue to do so, but allowing members of the public to operate massive vehicles on public streets leads to thousands of deaths and injuries and millions of dollars in property damage. Driving will become like smoking: you're still allowed to do it, but only in isolated places where you can't harm nonconsenting people.

itgoon• 13 years ago

I genuinely enjoy driving cars and bikes. I blow through 40-50K miles a year driving country roads and highways, for no other reason than enjoyment.

I am completely on-board with having my commute automated. If public transportation was an option, I'd take it. This is the next best thing.

VLM6• 13 years ago

One point missed in all the comments about enjoyment, is disruption doesn't care about enjoyment, just dollars and cents.

No one in a position of authority cares if you liked your bank teller or not; you're simply told you're going to be using an ATM now for financial reasons. Ditto office automation vs clerks and secretaries. Did you enjoy getting magazines and newspapers before the web wiped them out, well, no one in a position of authority cares what you enjoyed.

philwelch6• 13 years ago

If people liked bank tellers and magazines more than ATM's and the Internet, they'd still be in business. (Wait, they are!)

rwhitman• 13 years ago

I like the idea that in the future the only people manually operating cars and motorcycles will be doing it for fun rather than for the drudgery of daily life. That sounds like a better place to live. If the net benefit of driverless cars is reducing vehicles on the road and reducing traffic congestion think about how much more fun it will be to drive?

The driverless cars will automatically take the safest action and let you through when doing something reckless like cutting them off on the freeway etc. It kind of sounds amazing, you could be a total asshole on the road and no one would care... Imagine cruising down the freeway at 90MPH in rush hour swerving between drone vehicles and watching as they politely get out of your way. Its a driver's utopia

electromagnetic2• 13 years ago

Yes, and I'm one of those people. However, I basically don't drink because I drive. I have a 6 month old, if he's home I don't drink because I can't have more than a beer and run out if I need to. When he's at grandma's I'll drink, however I'm still conservative because I know I'm getting up early in the morning and can't drive hungover.

I know in my cousins area they have a keys-to-us service. You drive to the party or wherever and they drop off a driver to drive your vehicle with you in home. Why? Because it's cheaper than a cab because you only pay one way, and you can get where you're going on time because you don't have to wait for a cab, which on say New Years Eve won't be on time or even in the ball park.

It's foolish to believe that leisure will beat practicality. People will get automated cars because it means they can work on their commute. Forget the dash it's a desk. Or you could watch a movie. Heck, not only could you predrink for the party, you could drink whilst on your way there.

Or the kids out at the movies and you decided to have a few drinks. They call wanting to be picked up? No problem, just send the car.

You'd no longer have to pay for expensive downtown parking, you could either pay for it to park in a cheaper less convenient lot or you could have it drive home if it's a short distance.

Yes I like to drive, but I also like starting fires with a bow and stick... but I normally just use a lighter.

swayvil• 13 years ago

fta : "The avoidance of accidents will cut insurance costs".

Ha ha. No. Any freed-up cash will result in an increase in gas-prices, taxes or whatever. The cost living will continue to be just a bit more than you can afford no matter what. Any "avoidance of accidents" will just translate into profits for somebody, not you. The cost-environment is entirely artificial and is designed to exploit you right down to the bones and gristle. You don't get to enjoy the fruits of progress except in ways that make you a more efficient worker. Sorry.

cortesoft4• 13 years ago

My cost of living is quite a bit less than I can afford. I am not sure what you mean.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

Let them eat cake, right?

tspike• 13 years ago

As pointed out elsewhere in the thread, if computer driven cars become ubiquitous, insurance rates on person driven cars will become prohibitively high or the act of driving a car on public roads will be banned outright.

As someone who enjoys nothing more than riding my motorcycle on mountain road trips, I can't help but dread that. The privacy and liberty implications make me uneasy as well, in much the same way as the NSA's overreach.

nja• 13 years ago

Someone recently mentioned horses as a good analogy. Cars replaced horses; now horses are mostly not allowed on roads, and most people do not own horses. However, horse enthusiasts are still able to own horses and ride them, albeit in certain areas. As someone who enjoys driving, I can definitely see this same sort of thing happening with cars. Fortunately, it gives me hope that manually-driven cars won't become completely extinct.

throwaway0094• 13 years ago

I don't think liability insurance on motorcycles goes up very much. You still can't cause too much damage to a car, even if a human driver is much more likely to crash than computer.

shalmanese• 13 years ago

Why would insurance become prohibitively high? Insurance is priced at the mean probability of getting into an accident * mean cost of restitution from an accident + insurance risk premium. I can't see self driving cars measurably affecting any of these numbers upwards significantly. Especially not by the factor of 10 it would require to make insurance prohibitively expensive.

dredmorbius4• 13 years ago

Low-n probabilities become harder to assess, so if human-controlled vehicles are really rare, risks might be hard to assess.

How human drivers interact with otherwise automated traffic flows might similarly increase risks. Much as largely horse-drawn or bicycle traffic is generally pretty safe, but mixed-mode traffic with cars, trucks, busses, etc., tends to produce (often fatal) accidents.

frogpelt• 13 years ago

Convulse = disrupt, right?

001sky2• 13 years ago

I think the market for trucks will be far more disrupted. The idea of having "drone" containers seems far more easily realized and higher value added than civilian passenger autos. The average A->B distances are longer (miles/trip), the routes simpler (turns/mile) and the roads are less complex (fewer on-grade intersections). It seems an automated "carpool lane" would be a huge benefit. As would the avoidance of speeding and drowsy driving by semi/lorry drivers. Furthermore, removing this rolling stock from passenger car rights of way would itself be an improvement in safety (if for no other reason than > visibility).

purringmeow• 13 years ago

Yep, I always thought that driverless trucks will come before that kind of cars. Better safety, lower costs, faster shipping, because there are no driver breaks.

bjelkeman-again• 13 years ago

I always wonder what the world will be like with thousands of truck and taxi drivers out of work. I know the same could be said for banking clerks (ATM), checkout clerks (automated checkout counters) etc. But I suspect the demographic is quite different.

Maybe we went through something similar when digging machines replaced people with shovels.

VLM6• 13 years ago

An interesting side issue you didn't consider is at least in the initial roll out phase you simply make an automated "train" with ten trucks, and the lead truck driven by human (or at least has a human on board).

huherto3• 13 years ago

This will save a lot of energy since the drag of the truck in front will suck the truck behind. Sorry, I lack the technical terms to describe it.

tfigment2• 13 years ago

I thought they have already been doing this in Australia[1] to some degree. I suppose they are not independent trucks but then I'm not sure what the new advantages are if a person is still involved. With the Powertrain, they can split the trailers apart at destination and use normal cabs for distribution I guess.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train

sien2• 13 years ago

Also trucks are used in adverse environments. In the mining industry remote driven and more autonomous vehicles are already being rolled out:

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/296907,rio-tinto-prepares-mine...

The US military is also pushing remotely driven supply vehicles.

Then the next market is trucks on highways.

It's a bit like rail. People are obsessed with passenger rail but tend to ignore freight rail. For instance, how many people know that the US freight rail system is excellent?

huevosabio• 13 years ago

There seems to be a lot of excitement about self-driven cars, but somehow, except for a handful of local lines, there has been no real automation on the operation of trains, even if they are much easier to make completely autonomous. How are self-driven cars not going to face the same fate as self-driven trains?

ghaff• 13 years ago

There are fairly automated trains but only in very controlled and low-speed environments. (e.g. "people movers" at airports).

But, to the broader point, I can't help but feel that a lot of people are conflating "able to tool down 280 with a human on board who is fully capable of taking over control--albeit not instantaneously" (or a next gen cruise control, if you would) with "a robot chauffeur who can drop the kids off at soccer practice." The second problem--which includes dealing with all the unpredictable things that happen on secondary roads--would seem to be enormously more difficult than the first.

hrkristian• 13 years ago

Except trains are largely autonomous, it's about wanting a human element in the operation, not requiring them. I see the same applying to a self-driven car, the human element is always present there in the form of passengers, who undoubtedly will be able to assume control if need be, that is how the Google cars are designed.

loup-vaillant5• 13 years ago

I have discussed with guys doing train software for a living: http://prover.com/ From their experience, automating trains in an otherwise human environment is very hard. Probably as hard as automating cars.

I expect the ubiquitous automation of trains at around the same time at the ubiquitous automation of cars.

joshuaheard• 13 years ago

Unions prevent the firing of train operators

conductor• 13 years ago

Computer-driven cars will introduce tons of new hacking possibilites from the malicious actors, some possible news headlines:

The car unexpectedly accelerated and killed 5 people, an accident or a murder?

A new ransomware demands 1 BTC to start your car

Google keeps all the history of your car's movements

LAPD is testing a special device to remotely stop cars instead of chasing them

vl2• 13 years ago

LAPD is testing a special device to remotely stop cars instead of chasing them

This is already a reality, watch commercial for OnStar, this is exactly what they do.

ihsw• 13 years ago

Can't forget insurance fraud. I foresee a future where insurance companies will impose additional fees to cars that are "assisted" rather than fully autonomous.

What is assisted? A car fitted with the self-driving computer, but rather than driving the car it instead compares your actions with one the computer would normally do. What is this comparison for? To determine whether you are a safe driver -- a Safe Driver Rating (SDR).

Self-driving cars will become the new gold standard for determining who is a safe driver -- and failing to meet that standard will result in higher insurance rates.

What does this have to do with malicious hackers? They can fudge the self-driving computer to silently and gradually increase your insurance rates by misreporting your SDR.

What about cars that are neither fully autonomous nor "assisted"? Simple: they don't get built/sold anymore due to being unsafe.

VLM6• 13 years ago

One interesting side effect of a safe driver rating is you need to balance the cost of having to pay higher insurance with having to find a new job.

Or another interesting problem is how do you push a self driving car beyond its performance boundaries to save your life? "I'm sorry dave, but I can't let you drive during a hurricane/tsunami warning" "hey car, shut up and drive, the storm surge is rising and unless you get moving you're about to transform into a submarine"

If you get fired from your job because your self driving car decided its not going out in 1 inch of snow, how much do you sue the manufacturer? Or the other way around, your self driving car permitted you to go out in a 24 inch blizzard and it got stuck and you died, how much does your estate and survivors get to sue the manufacturer?" Obviously the proud american tradition of screw the little guy means the mfgrs can do anything they want, but the PR implications mean all self driving cars will shut off whenever the chance of precip is above 0%, or the temp is below 32F, etc. And THATs why I don't want a self driving car, it'll be useless in order to be legally intrinsically safe (only valid operating conditions will be 70 degrees, sunny, daytime, etc, which is about 2 weeks per year where I live.)

loup-vaillant5• 13 years ago

Something I don't get: what is assisted driving for? I can see it being used in a transition period, where we want to assess the reliability of computers, get a corpus… But once the car can drive itself, why not let it? That way, no matter how unreliable you are, it won't influence the car.

Higher insurance rates will be only for people who insist on driving their cars. I believe this would be a very good thing.

huherto3• 13 years ago

I would imagine that critical systems will be kept isolated from the rest of the systems.

nyarlathotep• 13 years ago

This may interest you: http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf

stormbrew• 13 years ago

It's not as if it's particularly difficult to tamper with traffic flow now, as it stands. Take down a stop sign, mess with traffic light signalling (popular in movies about terrorist madmen), just plain go up to a car and hijack it.

The crackdown on people doing this, however, is enormous. It makes it very unprofitable to do any of these things.

Brakenshire• 13 years ago

The potential for centralized surveillance and control which exists in all digital systems will become a more and more important issue as these devices progressively become ubiquitous.

The same applies to driverless cars as to smartphones, electronic medical records, reading of news articles, social media, etc, etc.

vl2• 13 years ago

Congestion avoidance will speed traffic and save fuel too.

Perhaps we live in different worlds, in my world self-driving cars will create more traffic jam, lead to higher road-use taxes and to harsher economic times due to people in trucking/delivery/cab driving losing jobs.

loup-vaillant5• 13 years ago

Traffic jam: the infrastructure may eventually change. Have a first car drive to to a nearby train or subway station, and a second car to your destination from the train. In the meantime, you may have more traffic jam.

Energy: when you don't need to own your car, you can use the best car for the job. A commuting car doesn't need to be able to carry 5 people around. It can be much smaller. Again, the transition period likely won't look good.

Harsher economic times: this is good old technological employment, where productivity rises faster than demand. My 2 cents: self-driving cars will significantly contribute to technological unemployment, and that's good, provided we manage it well. An obvious measure would be to generalize a 32 hours work-week, over 4 days. It would mean less unemployment and less overwork. Workload will reduce anyway. We might as well share this reduction, instead of giving it all to the unemployed.

maxerickson3• 13 years ago

You just bill people (more) for driving into a congested area.

It would work just fine (as long as the rates were adaptable). But that is orthogonal to whether people will appreciate it.

richforrester4• 13 years ago

and they will be ubiquitous by 2025.

aaaand you've lost me. Apologies for the snide remark, but there's no way we'll be there by that time. The industry won't let us.

Apologies for not having much reason in this post, and only stating a personal opinion without much detail to back it up, but I'm just curious to see if there's anyone that feels the same.

loup-vaillant5• 13 years ago

The industry won't let us.

How? Because the way I see it, they will have to form a cartel to prevent one of their own from selling self-driving cars and make a huge profit at the expense of everyone else.

The various legal obstacles look bigger.

dsugarman2• 13 years ago

that's what they said about PCs

richforrester4• 13 years ago

I know, and it's also what they said about holograms, personal flying machines etc. Teleporting. And yes, some of those have happened or will happen sooner or later.

I'm not saying it's not going to happen, I'm just saying that this particular thing, I don't believe in.

But fair enough, I didn't provide any decent information to back up my statement, so I won't ask you to either.

crusso3• 13 years ago

"Ubiquitous" is quite a strong word. Maybe "available" would be a better word for 2025.

There are just too many technical, cultural, and political unknowns to think that you'll see more than prototypes and a few early adopters within 10 years.

richforrester4• 13 years ago

Elaborating;

The optimal (most efficient, safest) way to get computer-controlled cars to work;

- All drivable areas mapped (Not just the roads - EVERYTHING, since you might want to go off-road. What if; landslide, earthquake, someone digs a hole somewhere, leaves a brick on the street, etc.)

- Knows where everyone is (going) at all times (privacy issue)

- Has everyone on the same system (not happening within 12 years)

Since I don't see these three happen, they have to be dealt with somehow. The bracketed issues are fully remedied only by the solutions written before them. Anything less will be fighting the symptoms, not the disease, and be a never-ending battle.

There are so many obstacles to be overcome, so much politics to be done, so many technical challenges, so much bureaucracy ... 12 years really isn't that long.

maxerickson3• 13 years ago

The actual bar for deploying self driving cars is that they are safer than some (large?) portion of humans that we already allow to drive. We don't have to do it the safest way or the most efficient way.

I agree that ubiquity is unlikely, but because of cost.

(A high end Mercedes can already keep itself in a lane, slow down the cruise for a slower vehicle and will override the driver trying to crash into things. These systems are environmental, they don't depend on detailed maps. http://www.mbusa.com/mercedes/benz/safety

And they are one of several, not way out in front.)

discodave3• 13 years ago

Remember that the iPhone was released in 2007.. how much has the smartphone market changed since then. Billion dollar companies like Instagram and Snapchat have sprung up utilising that platform in only 6 years.

I see what you're saying but a lot can happen in 12 years.

To think about it another way, the time between the first dotcom crash and now is only 13-14 years.

vincie2• 13 years ago

Yeah, but they are still just cars. They will still need valuable real-estate for roads and parking and storage. What these are starting to sound like are trains and buses, which have existed for hundreds of years.

discodave3• 13 years ago

No. A self driving car can move itself somewhere where real estate and parking are freely available and cheap. Also, if people can utilize them like taxis then the total number of cars registered at any one time can drop dramatically.

The difference between a self-driving car and a bus/train is that the car goes wherever you want, just like a manual car.

krapp9• 13 years ago

What leads you to believe the owners of those properties or law enforcement will allow self-driving cars to park themselves just anywhere?

vincie2• 13 years ago

If the most significant difference between a bus/train and a self driving car is the ability to deliver you to your doorstep, I will take the bus/train. Think of the benefits - you don't need to buy and maintain the self-driving car, and hence all the other things like insurance, parking etc. The city doesn't have to build more and more roads. Get a bit of exercise walking to your door. Really, I think these self-driving cars are just the auto manufacturers trying to extend the lifetime of their products.

michaelfeathers• 13 years ago

The thing that the article didn't touch on was the fact that many municipalities derive significant income from fines related to parking and traffic violations. It will be a big transition for them also.

dsugarman2• 13 years ago

I wonder how the economics of owning cars will change when everything is computerized. In logistics (specifically trucks), it would incredibly reduce the total cost of shipping if you eliminate Less-than Truck Loads (LTLs) and empty back hauls. I imagine it is similar with transporting people, if there was a "taxi" like company that could maximize the use of an automated car, the total amount of cars necessary in the world would go dramatically down. Right now most cars spend most of their lives idle. Great side effects include no auto insurance and much less emitted greenhouse gasses.

The number of millennials buying cars is already extremely low, computerized cars would most likely continue to reduce the number of new car owners.

jdhendrickson• 13 years ago

An aspect of this that I have yet to see examined is the rapid decrease in paint and body repair, as well as replacement parts needed on both a mechanical and cosmetic front. Many mechanical failures are due to driver error. Once again shrinking the pool of skilled manual labor with no new industry for the workers to transition into.

jleyank• 13 years ago

Unless these car systems are programmed at the level of rigor of the Space Shuttle or other "screw up and they all die" environments, the only group that's going to "convulse" from computer-driven cars will be lawyers. And they'll convulse laughing. Is this how it should be, no. But it's how it is in the US at the moment, possibly in other countries as well.

As people mention, if they don't behave as the rider wants or if they can't deal with unexpected situations (or mechanical failures) or if they're required to be always-connected and the net goes down… And I'm sure all sorts of privacy types would love being carted about with no control on their environment. Unless the net connection's also amazingly robust, the computer-driven kidnapping possibilities are endless.

Oh, I didn't think computer vision's a solved problem… It's easy to lose the GPS signal in cities, and you can probably jam or spoof it without too much difficulty. Doubt cities are going to spend lots of $$ installing all sorts of "helpers" to deal with all that rebar.

Computer-driven cars will convulse the automotive industry

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