Self-driving cars?

[adb968008]

54 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

Already being considered. Your last comment is part of the regulatory component of autonomy, not the technology.

 

It is why object recognition is so important in the sensor fusion. Emergency braking (that might injure the passengers) might not be deployed for a squirrel or a cat, but you would want it for a baby in the road. Surprisingly, (or perhaps unsurprisingly) different nations have different liability regulations for human driver behaviour. This is being factored in too.

And cars drive across borders to different countries to.

 

One hopes the designers of the software don t include the legal liability cost, per victim/profile, or indeed the car repair cost into its decision making matrix on deciding if its cheaper to save the driver or the roadside object...

its ok saying they would never do that, but VW and those emissions tests...

 

[Allegheny1600]

9 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

"This can be very disruptive technology."

 

Yes indeed, it could all go off in multiple directions, and probably will until one(or a few) model(s) comes to dominate. 

 

To me, "user not owning" models seem particularly natural for EVs, and especially autonomous EVs, because the major parts (monocoque; batteries; traction package; suspension and steering; interior; software etc.) look almost certain to have different life-spans, so the natural owner is a fleet-operator, who would be well-placed to run cyclic replace/refurb of major parts - a given monocoque could be kept in service almost indefinitely, yet the vehicle presented to the user could be "permanently almost new".

 

But, cars are about a lot more than practicality. They are partly about self-projection (status and/or life-style symbols), otherwise we'd all be driving some sort of genuinely utilitarian (not SUV "utilitarian") vehicles, all the same colour, and that fact will take a long time to work its way out of the system .......... unless self-projection can be wrapped into the dial-a-ride offering. People will spend an awful lot of money to feel one-up on their fellow beings, and a fair bit of money just to feel like an individual!

 

 

I actually think that such a profound change in the way that human beings regard the status of car ownership, would be a massive boost for the planet.

IF the human race could be persuaded that car ownership is as impractical as say, owning a railway locomotive or even a railway carriage but sharing the use of such is entirely practical, it could take off.

HOWEVER, the car manufacturers, leasing companies et al would never go along with this as it would be a sure fire way of going out of business.

Just think though, how much resources would no longer be needed to keep building new cars, no more new roads would be needed, the whole “car” infrastructure would not need to be continuously expanded!

Sadly, as beneficial as this would be, it is very, very unlikely to happen.

[Reorte]

50 minutes ago, Allegheny1600 said:

Just think though, how much resources would no longer be needed to keep building new cars, no more new roads would be needed, the whole “car” infrastructure would not need to be continuously expanded!

 

Just as many roads needed if there's still just as much travel, even if it's not in peoples' own private cars. In fact if you've got cars driving around empty to pick people up you've increased the amount of travel.

 

Increasing road use is down to increasing population and more centralisation. Different models of car ownership will be tinkering at the edges, at most.

 

It may result in fewer cars in total (somewhat questionable, a large proportion of travel needs to be at the same time) but if they're doing more miles then they won't last as long so more will need building. Electric cars are more likely to reduce that demand though, particularly if batteries last long enough - historically it's the bodywork that spelled the end of a car, these days it's the engine, so electric should be the next step along to longevity.

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, Reorte said:

 

Just as many roads needed if there's still just as much travel, even if it's not in peoples' own private cars. In fact if you've got cars driving around empty to pick people up you've increased the amount of travel.

 

Much less land wasted on parking though.

[Michael Hodgson]

You won't need quite as much roadspace if everybody's in self-driving cars.  Tailgating is less dangerous if your reaction time is almost instantaneous.  So autonomous vehicles can run at closer headways because although they still need what the driving test calls "braking distance" they will have a much shorter "thinking distance".   Capacity of the existing roads would be greater.  This only comes about when old people like me are forced to use our bus passes and stop driving ourselves around in conventional cars.

[Reorte]

22 minutes ago, 30801 said:

 

Much less land wasted on parking though.

They'll all have to park up somewhere when not in use, not many people travelling at 3 am.

 

[Reorte]

3 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

You won't need quite as much roadspace if everybody's in self-driving cars.  Tailgating is less dangerous if your reaction time is almost instantaneous.  So autonomous vehicles can run at closer headways because although they still need what the driving test calls "braking distance" they will have a much shorter "thinking distance".   Capacity of the existing roads would be greater.  This only comes about when old people like me are forced to use our bus passes and stop driving ourselves around in conventional cars.

Enough of a difference (and bear in mind the roads still aren't going to be free of pedestrians and cyclists), especially considering the additional driving empty mileage?

 

My suspicion (and that's all it is I admit) is that road capacity issues are primarily caused by the capacity through pinch points, e.g. junctions and vehicle speed differentials, e.g. HGVs and cars.

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, Reorte said:

They'll all have to park up somewhere when not in use, not many people travelling at 3 am.

 

But there's rather less than one car for each person.

[black and decker boy]

15 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

You won't need quite as much roadspace if everybody's in self-driving cars.  Tailgating is less dangerous if your reaction time is almost instantaneous.  So autonomous vehicles can run at closer headways because although they still need what the driving test calls "braking distance" they will have a much shorter "thinking distance".   Capacity of the existing roads would be greater.  This only comes about when old people like me are forced to use our bus passes and stop driving ourselves around in conventional cars.

And that I believe is what Highways England & DfT are relying on for our motorways and strategic roads. 
Large scale new road building and motorway widening is very much now off the agenda with only local improvement or Smart Motorway to add capacity. The thinking then is that technology will come on stream in the next decade or so that solves the next capacity crunch without widening schemes.

 

getting joe public to adopt autonomous driving will be a long hard slog. Even simple & established technology such as cruise control doesn’t seem to get adopted by many even though fitted as standard. Will people want to trust a computer? Probably not. Legislation may be needed in my view.

Edited May 17, 2021 by black and decker boy

[Reorte]

16 minutes ago, black and decker boy said:

getting joe public to adopt autonomous driving will be a long hard slog. Even simple & established technology such as cruise control doesn’t seem to get adopted by many even though fitted as standard. Will people want to trust a computer? Probably not. Legislation may be needed in my view.

Another unpleasant vision of the future IMO!

[Nearholmer]

2 hours ago, Allegheny1600 said:

Sadly, as beneficial as this would be, it is very, very unlikely to happen.

 

If I could add ten "agrees" to your post, I would.

 

The whole "motor industry" has been tied-up to a significant degree with wasteful status projection from the outset, but then that is true in a much wider way about the whole of "consumer culture", and it has very deep roots in human psyche, somewhere around the time when we got ejected from the Garden of Eden.

 

I'm not hugely hopeful that we can learn our way beyond all this nonsense, but I do retain the tiniest bit of hope, because without it ..........

 

 

[Reorte]

5 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

 

If I could add ten "agrees" to your post, I would.

 

The whole "motor industry" has been tied-up to a significant degree with wasteful status projection from the outset, but then that is true in a much wider way about the whole of "consumer culture", and it has very deep roots in human psyche, somewhere around the time when we got ejected from the Garden of Eden.

 

I'm not hugely hopeful that we can learn our way beyond all this nonsense, but I do retain the tiniest bit of hope, because without it ..........

Hope's something I lost a long time ago although I also suspect that we'd be hoping for rather different worlds anyway.

 

Car ownership is often criticised as a consumerist show-off thing, and whilst it is for some I do believe that for most a car is just a tool, and like most tools that are regularly used it's generally far more practical to have your own. If anything tinkering around with car ownership is the wrong thing - it's the practical necessity of needing car use that's the real issue there; many of the claims about self-driving cars just appear to be trying to come up with ways of keeping up the current trajectory of increasing car dependence rather than look at the underlying causes.

 

 

[Nearholmer]

16 minutes ago, Reorte said:

I also suspect that we'd be hoping for rather different worlds anyway.

 

Just ask; you might be surprised by the answers.

 

What about starting a Utopia thread - I reckon that on RMWeb there would at least be agreement that Utopia should have a lot of railways.

Edited May 17, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Reorte]

19 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

 

Just ask; you might be surprised by the answers.

I've done enough grumbling about it over the years that I'd have though you'd all be sick of hearing of it!

 

Ideally - and without any regard towards the practicality of it - a less developed, less technology dependent, quieter, slower-paced world with human interaction being a fundamental part of everything we do (Covid pandemic excepted!) More hands on without all the rough edges being smoothed away. I place a massive amount of importance on the aesthetics of my surroundings - that's hugely important to my mental health. That doesn't necessarily mean pretty and twee everywhere, but an utterly 100% individual subjective view of what and what doesn't feel right. Changes there depress me immensely, and are possibly the main reason for my complete loss of hope. Obviously I can't expect to be the sole arbiter of what goes and what doesn't but that doesn't change the effect.

 

When the world was more like that there were of course a lot of serious downsides that I'm glad lie in the past; I'd hope for a world that uses its advances primarily for keeping them there (and for entertainment); being told I've got to have a machine do things I can do I find pretty insulting.

Edited May 17, 2021 by Reorte

[Michael Hodgson]

15 minutes ago, Reorte said:

I'd hope for a world that uses its advances primarily for keeping them there (and for entertainment); being told I've got to have a machine do things I can do I find pretty insulting.

I'm a lazy sod so I'm all for an easy life.  I've got a dishwasher to save me doing the washing up, an answering machine to save me answering the phone and a video recorder to save watching telly.

[Reorte]

4 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

I'm a lazy sod so I'm all for an easy life.  I've got a dishwasher to save me doing the washing up, an answering machine to save me answering the phone and a video recorder to save watching telly.

 

I know all about laziness - suffer from plenty of it myself! But I'd be very disappointed with myself if I resorted to getting machines to do things I can easily do myself, like washing the dishes. I have limits of course, I like to keep a reasonable level of hands on but there are pressures from the other direction, which is why I have a washing machine for the clothes (but prefer the extra effort of hanging them up to dry than chucking them in the dryer).

[caradoc]

2 hours ago, Reorte said:

They'll all have to park up somewhere when not in use, not many people travelling at 3 am.

 

 

Indeed, where do they park when not in use ? My car is parked at my home, as are my neighbours; There is no other parking area anywhere near, certainly not for the large number of vehicles necessary to replace today's user-owned fleet. 

 

And is there a guarantee that a vehicle will be available, immediately, every time we need one ? An autonomous vehicle could perhaps be parked on my drive, only for me to discover two minutes before I need it that someone else has booked it and it disappears down the street ! 

 

 

[billbedford]

24 minutes ago, caradoc said:

And is there a guarantee that a vehicle will be available, immediately, every time we need one ?

 

Yes, in cities it is already there, it's called Uber. 

[Nearholmer]

1 hour ago, caradoc said:

And is there a guarantee that a vehicle will be available, immediately, every time we need one ? An autonomous vehicle could perhaps be parked on my drive, only for me to discover two minutes before I need it that someone else has booked it and it disappears down the street ! 

 

 

My guess is that it will be like everything else: you will be able to choose service levels and pay accordingly.

 

Owning a car, or leasing one as an individual, is the top service level: 364/365 available to you at a whim, and it costs a ruddy fortune per mile/hour for most users.

 

Calling a minicab is another service level, and maybe a bit more like membership of an AV club: available 365/365, but with variable wait times according to demand and, in the case of cabs, the number of drivers who have opted to go into service at that time. For very many users, it would actually be cheaper to call a cab for every trip than to own/lease a car, but relatively few outside big cities do so, because wait times can be unpredictable and long, and cab drivers can decline trips to the dump, muddy dogs, etc.

 

Catching a bus or a train is an even lower service level. It doesn't even come to you; you have to go to it!

 

The objective with an AV fleet would be to get closer to the personal car service level than the minicab service level, and if you tot-up the amount of time most personal cars spend parked (a huge %) that surely must be possible with a far smaller total fleet size than exists currently. 

 

Cars are strange things, in that we don't spend such huge sums of money on anything else that we then use so little of the time ........ we sure as heck place high value on the convenience of having one sitting around depreciating, while waiting for us to need it.

[Reorte]

2 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

What about starting a Utopia thread - I reckon that on RMWeb there would at least be agreement that Utopia should have a lot of railways.

I suspect it'll probably end up with the usual bickering; one person's utopia is another person's dystopia, and the usual insistences that any preference for anything past is rose-tinted specs and a bunch of explanations about how things were and how they are, operating under the assumption that someone couldn't possibly have a markedly different preference in reality and it must be down to ignorance.

 

Personally speaking whilst even if I wasn't so depressed wouldn't expect my utopia to ever become a reality, but would regard it as a guide to the perception of change - does it nudge the world towards or away from it?

[Reorte]

1 minute ago, Nearholmer said:

Cars are strange things, in that we don't spend such huge sums of money on anything else that we then use so little of the time ........ we sure as heck place high value on the convenience of having one sitting around depreciating, while waiting for us to need it.

A cost that'll have to be borne however we travel. The car that gets used twice as much wears out twice as quickly; once you get past the big drop from driving the car off the forecourt how much of the depreciation is from time unused rather than mileage used? Particularly now that they don't turn into a heap of rust after the first passing shower.

[Nearholmer]

2 hours ago, Reorte said:

Ideally - and without any regard towards the practicality of it

 

Youtopias really do need a thread of their own.

 

Every time I think of something that Mytopia would feature, two further toughts arise:

 

- it would possibly make a hell on earth for the next chap; and,

 

- a necessary condition for its existence would be the absence of something else that I want to include.

 

[giz]

This video of a ride in a Waymo self driving taxi is interesting. It does well until caught out by some cones set out for construction work:

 

 

He also has a number of other videos of more successful journeys.

 

 

[Nearholmer]

10 minutes ago, Reorte said:

A cost that'll have to be borne however we travel.

 

I don't think so.

 

Assuming that we all travel by road vehicle exactly the same amount in future as we do now, and at exactly the same times, on exactly the same trips, achieving that with a smaller fleet of vehicles, which is what "total pooling" would achieve, would reduce overall costs.

 

The minimum reduction in vehicles achievable would be the number of vehicles that are currently not in use at the very busiest time, less a small percentage to allow for some vehicles making trips empty to collect passengers.

 

Hugely unlikely that things would ever alter to that extent, but its no different from the way gas, water, or electricity production and distribution works, which is around diversity factors.

 

 

[Reorte]

6 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

 

Assuming that we all travel by road vehicle exactly the same amount in future as we do now, and at exactly the same times, on exactly the same trips, achieving that with a smaller fleet of vehicles, which is what "total pooling" would achieve, would reduce overall costs.

But since those vehicles would be getting used more (assuming there is a saving in the total number of vehicles - probably won't be as big as some think, since a large proportion are in use at rush hour) they'll just wear out quicker and need replacing quicker. Add in the journeys running without anyone in them and all you've done is reduced the useful lifetime mileage per vehicle. An all electric fleet will wear out more slowly than a conventional one but that's a change that's coming anyway, human drivers or not.

 

Admittedly that assumes that current vehicles keep going until they're beyond reasonable economic repair and makes no allowance for losses due to accident damage and any change in the amount of that there'll be (a small proportion of vehicles but a less insignificant proportion of cost due to insurance).