Why Email and Cars are heading down the same road

http://blog.frontapp.com/why-email-and-cars-are-heading-down-the-same-road/

by mathouc • 12 years ago

45 46 12 years ago

blog.frontapp.com

A declaration of love to emails! Original but very true comparison. Mail will always be the base and the best way to communicate

raphkomjat• 12 years ago

I've had this exact position about cars for a while, but never took the time to think about emails that way. Makes per-fect sense for me.

cissou• 12 years ago

Are you a genius?

chollida1• 12 years ago

But traffic jams won’t even be a problem anymore: freed from the wheel, we’ll be able to make phone calls, work on a computer, or have a business meeting from inside our car (and maybe a doctor appointment, cf cosmopolis).

This just seems foolish. If i'm on my way home to my daughters birthday party, then traffic is traffic. If I"m on the way to the airport, then traffic is still a problem.

I can already make a call when driving and I can already take Uber or a taxi allowing me to do the things the author mentions any time I wish.

Self driving cars don't solve any of those problems. Self driving cars have many uses, but the author's use cases aren't any of them.

Traffic is still a problem regardless of whether or not i'm driving.

nick2• 12 years ago

Speed limits will be raised with fully automatic cars. The cars will also be able to travel closer to each other. The same roads will be able to handle bigger volume of traffic.

onion2k• 12 years ago

Only if all the cars are automatic...

k-mcgrady• 12 years ago

Won't self-driving cars significantly reduce traffic? They can drive closer together, maintain a consistent speed, and work out the most efficient route. We may also get smaller cars eventually (without such large dashboards, steering, gear sticks etc.) which would also help.

herval2• 12 years ago

One of the biggest reasons of traffic is accidents. If self driving cars can reduce those, perhaps traffic will improve?

Another problem is coordination: one slow driver can cause a huge jam. Perhaps coordinated, self-driving vehicles can reduce those?

Granted, none of those things would work if you introduce one self-driving car in a jungle of meat-based drivers.

jordanpg6• 12 years ago

Much of the enthusiasm for driverless cars assumes that the automated systems will work perfectly.

Here is a fact: the systems will fail from time to time. Maybe a lot.

The reaction to deaths that occur due to automated systems will be like Biblical wailing and gnashing of teeth. It will be utter outrage.

Americans' (perceived) outrage to tragedy seems to be to usually be totally out of sync with the reality of the threat. It won't matter if they are safer statistically. In addition to more efficiency, the driverless cars need to have the best-designed fail-safe systems ever constructed or we will not see widespread adoption within decades, at least in the US.

mmcru• 12 years ago

once self-driving cars become the standard, intersections and merge points can be optimized for much greater efficiency, which will reduce traffic. also, speed limits will be eliminated.

saosebastiao• 12 years ago

Merge points maybe...but merge points are, by definition, bottlenecks. Even hyper-optimized, you are still limited by geometry.

And definitely not intersections...despite what the fancy visual simulations propose. You would have to eliminate pedestrians to even get close to that.

dkrich• 12 years ago

I think that the answers to a lot of these problems lie in extremely complex algorithms and a drastic change in technology. Instead of each person owning and operating a car that operates exactly the same way that cars do today, I imagine pod-like cars that can connect and disconnect with any other car. Then, if every car knew where every other car in the area was headed and could coordinate, they could join and travel together, then disconnect and reconnect until each reaches its destination. So essentially a hybrid between trains and cars.

Yeah, I know, science-fictiony and a stretch of the imagination, and I don't expect to see anything resembling this in my lifetime, but I do think there are ways that self-driving cars could operate in a much more efficient network-based system than with each driver making their own decisions based on what is immediately around them.

philwelch• 12 years ago

The biggest cause of traffic is wrapping each individual person in a 6 by 10 foot steel cage. http://giftrunk.com/gif/public-transit-vs-gridlock

j10t• 12 years ago

"Parking? Solved! Once we arrive at our destination, the car can self-park while we go on with our day."

Doesn't solve the worst part of parking: reserving that much space for car storage.

The author's vision seems to be one in which everyone owns a self-driving car. Why own the car? Just pay for use, Uber et al. can handle logistics. Only the reserve portion of the fleet should be parked, like buses.

visakanv• 12 years ago

Yep. Why should the cars be parked? Why should we own cars? All we actually need is a very high % chance of getting access to a car whenever needed. If it were 99.9%, and wayyy cheaper than owning a car, why own the car?

christiansmith• 12 years ago

Why should we own cars?

In the city, I couldn't possibly agree with this more. When I lived in Boston I sold my car after the first two years because it was a ridiculous expense and hassle for the utility. Taking a cab a few times a week turned out to be cheaper than parking tickets alone.

Given a choice though, I much prefer to live in less densely populated areas (e.g., northwest Montana), and owning a vehicle is really unavoidable. In these places that also means a 4x4 SUV or truck, not a Prius, or else you'd be calling a tow truck every 5 minutes in the winter.

jpollock• 12 years ago

In order to control what happens in the car when you're not in it.

I would expect driverless taxis to end up like public toilets.

weaksauce• 12 years ago

You can build car parks that aren't in super close proximity to you though and underground too. There are problems to overcome but it's possible. You could have an app that connects to your car that beckons it to us at a certain time or now etc. you could hop in a self driving taxi to where your car is. If all you want is the current system but automated, it's not going to work. Just like if you asked what people wanted pre cars... Faster horse drawn carriages would have been the answer. This will take some vision and a paradigm change.

jordanpg6• 12 years ago

This is a fun analogy to think of, but it stops at the comparison of the ubiquity and resistance to change for the things.

Replacing cars with driverless cars is fundamentally different because it also involves a massive replacement of infrastructure and safety regulation at a level that humankind has never before seen.

Wrapping email protocols in innovative clients doesn't seem like the same thing at all.

cliffbean2• 12 years ago

The argument is that self-driving cars would reuse existing roads, fuel, service, and manufacturing infrastructures that have been developed for existing cars. And, adoption can be incremental. Start with cars which drive themselves highway only, and require a capable driver to be at the wheel at all times. That may be soon. Gradually add more use cases at the speed of engineering, regulation, and social acceptance.

Some of the hard things to change in the world are hard because they require many people to change their behavior in coordination. Cars to self-driving cars doesn't. Email to Email with innovative clients doesn't. Introducing a new communication protocol does (though of course it's not impossible). Of course, this is only one aspect of a complex world.

jordanpg6• 12 years ago

Let's consider just one aspect of this that I see as a show-stopper out of the gate: networks.

Driverless cars, even even in a narrowly adopted context, like a single highway, will need to be networked. Not only will they need to be networked during the time that they are on that highway, for cars in close proximity, it needs to be a network with 99.999999999% uptime. At a minimum, the cars will need to have a transponder with nearly zero bandwidth (like planes); but more likely, this connection will need to send more data than just position. GPS isn't nearly accurate enough unless cars can be spaced 100s of feet apart.

Do you know of any networking technologies that you would trust with your life?

Compare driving on a highway to being in a plane. In a plane, there are usually minutes following a worse-case equipment failure or total loss of communication. In a car, there are seconds or less.

rayiner4• 12 years ago

The optimism surrounding self-driving cars is just mind-boggling to me. Decided to drive to work this morning (usually take the train). Siri totally shit the bed and took me on a 45-minute scenic tour through DC. Took me off the highway too early onto busy local streets, kept trying to take me onto a road that was closed for construction, and tried to get me to turn left at a T intersection of two 2-way roads where only right turns were allowed. Just an utter disaster.

And it's not unusual. Siri loves to take my mother in law on harrowing trips through the ghettos of Baltimore.

JoeAltmaier2• 12 years ago

Yeah what's with gps' and their compulsion to get off the freeway, often many exits too soon? I've experienced this. I don't give in to it, but my wife spent an hour driving 100 blocks downtown and missing her appointment.

cle• 12 years ago

Never used Siri (Android user), but Waze is so good that I barely even bother learning routes anymore, I just plug it into Waze and go. Using Waze makes me excited about the future of self-driving cars.

jordanpg6• 12 years ago

mind-boggling

Agreed. And you're just talking about the charming parts. What happens when someone's driverless car runs over an column of kids exiting a school bus? It doesn't matter that it could happen with or without a driver. The headline will be "DRIVERLESS CAR RUNS OVER CHILDREN, MFR DENIES SAFETY SYSTEMS FAILED" and that will be the end of driverless cars for 10 years.

ser_tyrion• 12 years ago

Using Siri as a counter argument for self-driving cars completely misses the point. You ignore Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication and using a multitude of sensors besides phone GPS. IDK why you think Siri is the epitome of sophisticated trip pathing, there are better options out there and solutions that will continue to be improved.

rayiner4• 12 years ago

I don't think it does. The technology we have for self-driving cars in the near term relies on a known map, and the route-finding core of that technology isn't going to be appreciably better, any time soon, than what's in Siri. You can improve the technology by adding vehicle-to-vehicle communications, etc, but now you're pushing out the "5-6 years" timeline that people keep throwing around.

I have no doubt that in 50 years we'll have self-driving cars. It's not an intractable problem by any means. But I have friends who were researching self-driving cars a decade ago, as part of the DARPA Grand Challenge, and in many ways those techniques were more sophisticated than what's on the table for commercialization in the near-term. It's going to be a very long slough from here to there.

gdulli• 12 years ago

It also fails to address the major problem of low-passenger vehicles vs. public transportation.

dllthomas• 12 years ago

Does Siri rely on Apple Maps?

ColinWright• 12 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8535919

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8536014

Both deleted. It appears this was submitted, then deleted, then submitted again, until finally it got traction. So the item is of interest, obviously, but is this a god thing to be doing?

wylee• 12 years ago

The notion that we don't "pay atrociously high fees" to own and operate cars is a pet peeve of mine. People look at bus fare, for example, and think it's a lot, but compared to the actual cost per mile of driving (payments, insurance, fuel, maintenance, &c), it's often cheaper, even for short trips.

And this doesn't even get into the costs of pollution (including noise pollution), deaths, injuries, and poor health associated with sedentary lifestyles.

ecocentrik• 12 years ago

Self driving email? Yes please.

JNox64• 12 years ago

There's also a bit of pleasure in driving for many, sports cars, convertible's, that pleasure doesn't correlate to emails, there's no sports car email client. maybe not? =/

I've got a feeling that as cars start driving themselves, us motorheads/car-fanatics will be like horse owners, relegated to car farms (tracks with much larger garages and warehouses attached).

acqq• 12 years ago

"Driving in Circles: The autonomous Google car may never actually happen."

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/...

Why Email and Cars are heading down the same road

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