I wouldn't be able to drive; that is how it would change my life.
How would Autonomous Vehicles Change Your Diving Habits?
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Yup, accidents will still happen. That what I am saying. humans are building and programming these things so, technically, it will still be via human error.
I'm not saying they will fail at an alarming rate. I'm simply saying some will fail. Will this crack down on auto related injuries and fatalities by a wide margin? We don't know. We will find out if it ever happens.
Do pleasurable things.
If we had an autonomous car "network", operating much like a packet based network, then i'd be happy to let it do all the work.
First thing i'd do? Move further from the city! If I had a 2 hour commute each way, I wouldnt mind, as I could be on the laptop/phone working on my commute, no different than at my desk or from home. Get to work, do a few meetings in person, talk to a client or 3, and take off.
This will all have to be built together though, I dont see a mix and match of autonomous vehicles and "manual" operated ones sharing the roadways with all sorts of different vehicles. I think we'd see dedicated roadways during transition, then large chunks swapped over. Eventually the minority would be manually operated.
Perhaps a better way would be to have personal robots that can do the driving for us? They can link up to each other, drive a wide variety of vehicles, and offer similar advantages. Have an older vehicle retrofitted with various sensors so your Chauffeur could hook up to it, and there ya go!
First thing i'd do? Move further from the city! If I had a 2 hour commute each way, I wouldnt mind, as I could be on the laptop/phone working on my commute, no different than at my desk or from home. Get to work, do a few meetings in person, talk to a client or 3, and take off.
This will all have to be built together though, I dont see a mix and match of autonomous vehicles and "manual" operated ones sharing the roadways with all sorts of different vehicles. I think we'd see dedicated roadways during transition, then large chunks swapped over. Eventually the minority would be manually operated.
Perhaps a better way would be to have personal robots that can do the driving for us? They can link up to each other, drive a wide variety of vehicles, and offer similar advantages. Have an older vehicle retrofitted with various sensors so your Chauffeur could hook up to it, and there ya go!
As others have posted, something intended for convenience would become a burden. People would work on it to get ahead, then everyone would want to work on it to keep up, then employers would expect you to work on it as a normal part of your job. I like driving - it is very pleasurable for me. Luckily the infrastructure to make all this happen is far too expansive and expensive for me to still be alive when it happens.
As others have said this is far far away from happening. Cities will get it first, but just like Zip Car, Taxi's, Uber, subways, buses, and rail it won't be able to replace traditional car ownership.
Don' understand why everyone seems to think these autonomous cars will be on separate dedicated roadways. They will not. They will be sharing the roadway with normal drivers. They will be able to think and react faster than you can and keep track of all vehicles movement in a large radius and know the path/position long before you will. Insurance companies will be all over insuring these cars at a steep discount (or steep premium for manual drivers) as they will almost NEVER be the at fault vehicle and they will be able to easily prove it.
As the mix of vehicles changes to more and more autonomous and less manual, the efficiency of road use will increase as well. IE the autonomous vehicle does not need to maintain the same long following distance from another autonomous car as it does from a manual one. You will see groups of autonomous cars clustered very closely together on the freeway for instance, traveling as one.
As the mix of vehicles changes to more and more autonomous and less manual, the efficiency of road use will increase as well. IE the autonomous vehicle does not need to maintain the same long following distance from another autonomous car as it does from a manual one. You will see groups of autonomous cars clustered very closely together on the freeway for instance, traveling as one.
I disagree. First it will be a novelty. Itll start out as a switch you hit so you can relax on a long drive and let the car drive itself on the freeway, a feature provided from the mfgr as we would have Nav or Cruise control. Then it will become more and more used. Then someone (like google) will create a giant network using GPS, Wifi, etc and interlink multiple cars in a city. Itll be a huge success, as their autonomous car already is.
I believe we will be the last generation that knows only of cars that are human driven. Our children will grow up learning to drive but later relinquish control. Their children will never know of a day that you drove yourself, and it will be seen as archaic, stupid and dangerous.
The only people that will stand against it are enthusiasts. But as long as a vehicle is equipped with a gps and all other cars on the network can see it being there, theres no reason why a person still could not drive manually. You will still be able to drive your 65 Fastback or 53 bel air or whatnot as you will undoubtedly have a cell phone on you that will act as a transponder to all the other cars around you. It sucks but traffic is only getting worse and public transportation is always behind the curve, and this is the only alternative. Well, unless you live in BFE and dont know what traffic is.
Eventually the entire infrastructure will be renovated to adapt to these smarter vehicles. No longer would a freeway have to be divided 6 lanes each way, it could dictate lanes based on demand. Go to 3 north and 9 south. Imagine no more stop signs, because cars would simply adjust their speed to miss another car. Humans need to stop to allow themselves time to look for other cars; a networked system would just do this automatically.
Eh...I'd like to think that some time before we get to this point communications and paperless technology would evolve to the point where you didn't need to physically be at work, thus eliminating a significant percentage of cars on the road in general.
True, though most of the traffic I see are from schools. When school is out, my commute is 15min less each way. I dont know if the jobs that would allow telecommuting would impact traffic enough, maybe in certain areas for a limited time but population growth would soon bring back the congestion/traffic.
Cool ideas!
I think transportation will be a service. TaaS (transportation-as-a-service). You'll subscribe to a service based on what you think you'll consume in transportation, like cellphone minutes. A car will come pick you up, take you where you need to go, drop you off, and go on to service another person. Completely automated. We might not see this in our lifetime, but our kids might.
The exec at google was bringing up this exact point, this is what he sees happening.
With a networked system that controls all vehicles, the necessity for individual ownership of a vehicle is gone.
I dunno how I feel about that, but if its considerably cheaper than car payment+insurance+fuel+maintenance costs, with the ability to go wherever whenever and not be a the mercy of crap public transportation (and not having to deal/sit with other humans) then sign me the **** up.
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TheOatmeal had a relevant post about this today. He rode in Google's test cars.
6 Things I learned from riding in a Google self-driving car
6 Things I learned from riding in a Google self-driving car
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I lost it.
Awesome article.
bingo.
Hahaha, yea! I love his comics and art work. I went to his book signing here in KC and actually got a quick sketch in one of my books!
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