The Future of driving

alfadriver wrote: BTW, this whole discussion comes up again and again, the result being a lot of, well, lets just call it back and forth bantering. But IF YOU WANT TO BE INVOLVED- there are job openings. Ford.com, GM.com, and I think FCA.com for the domestics. I'm sure Toyota has jobs at their tech center south of Ann Arbor. Come help. Be part of the process.

For the record, I thought about doing exactly that last night, and then I came here to see your post.

Also for the record, I used to own my own driving school teaching people to drive, including emergency control clinics and volunteering at street survival and autocross schools.

I am serious about finding a realistic solution to the problem that is worldwide commuting. Think of how many man hours are spent each day worldwide driving a car? What if we (as humans) could do something else with all that time? What about all the lives that could be saved?

For the last record, I am not trolling you guys (or not trying to). I genuinely appreciate hearing the concerns posted by other members here. I may happen to believe that nothing posted so far here will prevent automated driving, but that does not mean they are not valid concerns or serious hurdles that have yet to be solved.

I'm not paralyzed by waiting for the perfect solution, I'm interested in discussing and considering any and all possibly better solutions.

Kreb wrote: But that's getting off topic. Rural living will always have its place. My only concern is that its become more hostile than it used to be, between the drug faction, the anti-government types and other anti-socials. There are many rural places where I feel more ill-at-ease than in the city - and I live in Oakland, CA.

You have a way different experience in the rural areas then I do...

I don't see a "forced" switch to self-driving cars happening. The issue initially discussed about rural areas was the idea of having to making infrastructure changes to support self-driving cars. What is more likely to happen is the self-driving cars will be able to drive on any road, anywhere.

In more populated areas, there could possibly be dedicated lanes for self-driving cars. Sort of like HOV on steroids. Lanes that would allow some of the advantages self-driving cars linked together could provide. Close-coupled drafting, for example. In rural areas without high density commuting, this wouldn't be needed.

In reply to Ian F:

Not trying to be disagreeable, but that wasn't the core of oldopelguy's rural comment:

oldopelguy wrote: Automated cars; yet again city people will make life more difficult and expensive for rural America who will get zero benefit from it. No automatic car will ever be able to drive down the gravel road to my house because of the soft spots that change with the moisture in the ground, random wildlife, and SD snowstorms. Beyond that, if the road needs modifications for automatic cars it would bankrupt my county for just the paved roads, let alone gravel. Traffic is something you only have to deal with in cities, and if you don't like it move. Those of us who don't live there shouldn't have to subsidize your convenience.

The only thing he said about roads and infrastructure was "IF the road needs modifications..."

As he noted, they WILL make life more difficult and expensive for rural America.

And, as others have noted, there are some fabulously interesting opportunities coming.

I agree with your assessment of the opportunities, but also agree with his assessment of the negative impact on rural America with minimal benefit.

In reply to Ian F:

And, as far as "forced"...

There will never be a law forcing people to use them. There will, however, be economic and societal pressures that essentially accomplish the same thing, and strongly limit the ability to choose any other option.

I really shouldn't have wandered off topic, and I apologize for that. Some of my issues with the country are probably somewhat unique to California. When I lived in Ohio it was a different kettle of fish. One thing worth mentioning is that in adjusted dollars, I'm not sure that today's pimped-out trucks are more expensive than yesterdays stripped-down ones. In 1950, the average car cost .47 of yearly family income. Now the average family income is $52K, so the ratios are similar.

But anyway, sorry for the E36 M3-stirring.

In reply to Kreb:

The dealership I have been working at for the last 6 months has F-150s on the lot that are north of $70K. They don't have anything there under $42K.

.47 of $52K is $24,440.

I respectfully disagree.

SVreX wrote: In reply to Kreb: The dealership I have been working at for the last 6 months has F-150s on the lot that are north of $70K. They don't have anything there under $42K. .47 of $52K is $24,440. I respectfully disagree.

Average new car is $33.5k, so it's not exact, but seemingly closer than the average ford truck. I would guess that the average new car today lasts a good bit longer than the average new car in 1950, bringing the benefit/dollar closer still.

I do chuckle at the guys that are completely against computer driven cars, but that is the way of life, I suppose (I hope you guys don't complain about terrible drivers ). 60 minutes mentioned in a short preview clip that driverless cars have already logged 1 million miles. I've read in an article that said there have been only about 3 accidents with them. All of them were due to human driver error. This will save around 30,000 lives a year, and likely 60,000 injuries caused by car accidents, saving billions of dollars in healthcare, not to mention pain and suffering from losing a loved one. It will also make riding a motorcycle safer, along with bike riding to work. This is perfect for the masses, since driving is a chore for them, and since more expansive public transportation is supposedly not feasible.

Mr_Clutch42 wrote: It will also make riding a motorcycle safer, along with bike riding to work.

Those are next!

How will loud pipes save motorcyclists when automated cars are the norm? I'm all for a self driving car if it gets rid of the unmuffled Harley.

I've said this before, as have others. Every action of an automated car has to be programmed. There will come a time when a car needs to make a choice, when there is no good option. Let's say, a baby carriage rolls in from of you, and the choices are hit the carrige, or drive you off of a cliff. Who gets to make that decision, and does the "driver" have any say in how their car is programmed? What happens after the fact, and who is responsible?

Ironically, I think the insurance industry will be a sticking point for automated cars. Because if all goes as planned, an automated car won't need insurance. The manufacture would be responsible for its operation. The insurance industry would fight that to the end.

The tech problems are the easy part, and why companies like Google and Apple think that automated cars are a near term solution. The legal and moral challenges are not so easy, with no clearly defined objectives. It's a completely different game when your product can kill people.

I know this will bother some people, but from a risk management perspective, it is not actually a different game when your product can kill people. It's just a part of business, and when you get right down to it, all products can kill people.

Drywall joint compound buckets come with warnings on the side telling consumers that they could fall in the bucket and drown.

But yes, I agree with you, the biggest challenges to implementation are the legal and moral challenges, not the technical ones.

Automated cars will happen, and much sooner than the skeptics think.

Here's why...

Every time this discussion comes up, public transportation is discussed. The problem is that public transportation IS NOT a solution. Every mile that a rail system must be expanded is new infrastructure that must be developed. That is prohibitive.

But the cost of abandoning infrastructure is much worse.

As a nation, we have spent a hundred years investing trillions and trillions of dollars into a highway system. Land aquisition, paving, bridges, traffic control systems, parking decks, signage, curbing, storm water systems, regulation systems, traffic laws, law enforcement personnel, tax revenue collection systems, tort systems, accident response equipment, the list is endless. Literally trillions and trillions of dollars. There is no way we can afford to abandon all of that infrastructure. Ever.

Plus, part of the reason we chose that system is that it serves our cultural needs well. We want freedom of movement, and access to everything. It's in our DNA.

The beauty of automated vehicles, is that they UTILIZE EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE. Nothing else can do that.

Automated cars preserve our cultural freedom, and utilize existing infrastructure. Plus, the degree of automation can be modified for individual preferences. Want door to door service? They can do it. Want to read while driving? They can do it. Want to drive yourself? Turn it off. They are perfect.

And every single negative concern is a wonderful opportunity for new business growth. Vehicles can't read difficult terrain? Build a software business with sensing and computing capability to address the problem. Vehicles less useful in rural areas? Build a business that sells franchises of companies that rent automated shared pickup trucks designed to network in rural areas. Concerned about baby carriages getting hit? Build new actuarial tables and sell insurance products to address the concerns.

Those problems will not be the death of the industry- they will be the creation of the new business paradigm.

Morals are a touchy subject with too many personal opinions. The possible legal and insurance issues are valid points. Personally, I'm more interested in the technical aspects right now. Build the tool, then we can figure how best to use it. Maybe it won't work. But we won't know until we try.

The possible financial ramifications are not limited to rural areas either. I live in a very blue-collar suburban area. Some sort of mandatory change in driving requirements would have a significant impact here as well.

They will also change the way we think about ownership.

The beauty of automated vehicles is that they will remain privately owned. They will never become "socialized transportation" (like a train could conceivably). This does not, however, mean individually owned. They could conceivably hit price points of $150K one day or higher- so what? This will be prohibitive for individuals, but will create opportunities for Uber-esque automated shared vehicle methods.

Consider taxi medallions. A NYC taxi medallion costs more than $1,000,000. How can that be?? It can't possibly be worth that much to own a vehicle! It can if the vehicle generates $350,000 per year- the payback is only 3 years. That's a pretty good investment.

So, an individually owned automated vehicle may be cost prohibitive, but a company with a decent scheduling capability could dispatch one 24/7 and get 5 times the usage an individual could, which could make it budget friendly for consumers.

There could be coop ownership, fleet rentals, any number of variations.

We used to own our music. We used to own our videos. We used to own our software, and our vehicles.

There will come a day when owning our vehicles just doesn't seem as important to us.

There will never be mandatory changes in driving requirements. It won't be necessary.

Just like it wasn't necessary for anyone to require people make their personal information available to the public. Facebook got people to do it voluntarily.

I already love my partially self driving car, and when the real deal comes online I can't wait to have hopefully a % of the people (including me) who don't want to/care about being involved when it's simply A to B work commuting. There are times I want to enjoy driving, every morning and evening in traffic is not one of them.

I wonder if the self driving cars can have some of the same benefits found with motorcycles

"The study, which was presented at the Association des Constructeurs Européens de Motocycles (ACEM) 2012 Conference in Brussels, found that if 10 percent of all private cars were replaced by motorcycles in the traffic flow of the test area, total time losses for all vehicles decreased by 40 percent and total emissions reduced by 6 percent (1 percent from the different traffic composition of more emission-reduced motorcycles and 5 percent from avoided traffic congestion). A 25 percent modal shift from cars to motorcycles was found to eliminate congestion entirely."

People having less experience actually driving may result in more problems when they actually have to pilot their cars. Seems like when it's in automated mode everything would be hunky-dory, but is it possible that accident rates might increase for the time that they're being driven manually? It may still be a net gain in safety, but raising a generation of people that lack the skillset of piloting a vehicle themselves, and a lack of knowledge of "rules of the road" seems like it could backfire down the line. We just get one step closer to the machines running things

In reply to Jaynen:

I think that motorcycle study is probably tragically flawed. They are taking a human dynamics and social science and trying to reduce it to a math problem.

The flaw probably looks like this:

Areas are congested because people want to live there, and are willing to live with a particular level of congestion.

Removing 10% of the cars would reduce congestion. The desireable area would become more desireae when the congestion level drops lower than the level people are willing to accept.

This would create a vacuum, attracting more people to the area.

Growth would rise until the congestion level returned to the maximum acceptable level.

The unintended consequence could a a net GAIN in congestion and emissions., and INCREASED strain on the resources.

Besides, people don't want to drive motorcycles!

SVreX wrote: The beauty of automated vehicles is that they will remain privately owned. They will never become "socialized transportation" (like a train could conceivably). This does not, however, mean individually owned. They could conceivably hit price points of $150K one day or higher- so what? This will be prohibitive for individuals, but will create opportunities for Uber-esque automated shared vehicle methods.

Autonomous vehicles will certainly never be that expensive. I think the most expensive automated car prototypes driving right now are carrying about $90k worth of extra hardware on them, and that's specialized, sometimes custom stuff, and it's getting cheaper rapidly - those LIDAR sensors were about $70k each a few years ago and are now about $30k. They'll have to be under $10k to go on a production autonomous car and I don't think that will be a problem, there's a new kind of LIDAR sensor that isn't in production yet that has far fewer moving parts and is much cheaper.

I'd expect the first production autonomous cars to cost maybe $10-$15k more than an equivalent human-driven car, and the cost would fall from there.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

Doesn't matter. My point was there is a lot of room for ridiculously high price points (and associated technology) the minute a different ownership model and dispatch system begins to unfold.

They could still be profitable at $300K.

This seems relevant to our conversation: http://www.autoblog.com/2015/10/07/volvo-accept-liability-self-driving-car-crashes/

Will drivers still be required to be licensed? Could I send my self driving car to the Mickey D's drive through without me and have it go pick up some of that all day breakfast? Could your driverless car pick up junior from school and drop him off at soccer practice then get Susy from her karate class while you sit at home?

It seems to me that self driving cars are coming whether or not we like it. It reminds me of how any job that can be performed remotely is in danger of being off shored where the cost of labor is lower.

As technology marches forward, anything that we can design a machine to do, they will do and humans will only be needed to do the things that machines can't. I work remotely as an engineer and realize that other than language and quality issues (perceived or real) I could be replaced by some person in Bangalore at a lower cost.

This is why I think long haul truckers, taxi drivers, delivery people and the like should be more concerned with the rise of self-driving cars and not driving enthusiasts.