Self Driving Cars?!

What do you think about self driving cars, leaving the “if” and “when” question aside? I think that they will have major implications on anything ranging from (public) transportation, house prices, mobility of the elderly and obviously jobs. The self-driving car will kill the radio (it wasn’t the video after all).

It will make cycling a lot easier. Drive to the top of a big hill, cycle down, and then just meet up with your car and have it drive you to the pub.

It’s going to kill MTB e-bikes.

House prices?

I think we’ll keep our current car going until we can buy a self driving car.

Loads more cars on the road. Bigger commutes. More weekend trips. It’ll be interesting to see the impact on traffic. Whether the tech can manage the jams

House prices? – commuting will be much less of a pain, so I expect people will be willing to commute longer and move out of the cities, if it’s cheaper

Loads more cars on the road. Bigger commutes. More weekend trips. It’ll be interesting to see the impact on traffic. Whether the tech can manage the jams

– that’s a good question and has a lot to do with cost. Will the government add a special tax on driving, with excemptions for some groups, like handicapped and old people.

Interesting point about the radio! I can’t wait myself, the roads will be a much safer place! 🙂

Should be less cars everywhere as we switch to hire subscription model. No need for you car to set outside your office all day as it can go off drive someone else.

the sooner the better

Interesting point about the radio! I can’t wait myself, the roads will be a much safer place!

– I think most people listen to the radio while driving, but in the future will they do other stuff, like the guy who was killed in the Tesla crash, who watched a movie.

– That’s definitely the case and self-driving cars will be less aggressive than many human drivers are today.

I had my first experience with one on Wednesday as I cycled past one of the new self driving shuttles they have on the Greenwich Peninsula in London. I did feel a slight frisson of excitement! It was weird and unusual, but I’m sure we’ll all get very cynical about it soon enough lol.

I noticed that they had two stewards in high vis tabbards ten metres further down the way, one of which had a high vis flag which reminded me of the early days of motoring lol 🙂

It’ll start slowly on fixed routes with someone like uber or bus service.

The first benefit will be they’ll stick to the speed limit so forcing everyone to.

Whether the tech can manage the jams

While there will surely be some hold ups caused by driverless systems, I would expect many types of jams to be eradicated. For instance, rear-enders on M-ways/dual carriageways could be a thing of the past. Even if an accident does occur, a driverless car is unlikely to slow down to rubberneck. Driverless cars should always choose the correct lane, so no making the inside lane(s) redundant because of the folk who sit in second-to-right choking the capacity. Driverless cars will observe the variable speed limits, or probably not even need the variable speed limits, that are so necessary to help smooth traffic flow around slip roads and intersections at busy times. I doubt that driverless cars will use the same program to drive as it uses to check Facebook or read/reply to text messages.
Most accidents are caused by inappropriate speed and the failure of the driver to anticipate what is, or may be, about to happen, which is precisely what driverless car development is all about. I reckon the future is bright, and a good deal safer for all.

Will non self driving cars be banned at some point? How will the petrol heads feel about this?

How long will it take for them to be affordable?

Major implications for employment, no taxi drivers, no delivery drivers … Personally I have significant reservations about the technology. There have been 1000s of “minor” accidents not reported (eg test driver has had to grab the controls to prevent a significant crash), video of cars driving through red lights etc. How good is the tech going to be at spotting cyclists and pedestrians ? etc etc I have spent some time with top academics on visual recognition systems and when you see how crude they are relative to human vision you’ll see driverless is a dangerous thing.

Uber have been testing driverless taxis – passenger has to agree to waive any right to claim in the event of a crash 😯

It’ll start slowly on fixed routes with someone like uber or bus service.

no it won’t/hasn’t[/url]

It’ll be interesting when the first person is killed by a self drive car. It will happen, maybe not because of the tech, but because of the other person doing something unpredictable.

Who is Waymo? Is that a Google company?

no taxi drivers

Well, that makes the roads about a million times safer for a start.

There have been 1000s of “minor” accidents not reported (eg test driver has had to grab the controls to prevent a significant crash)

If they haven’t been reported then how do you know this?

I enjoy driving. Is it likely to be made illegal?

Someone has been killed in a self drive car.

There have been 1000s of “minor” accidents not reported (eg test driver has had to grab the controls to p

There have been thousands of disengagements reported. The state of California requires it by law and recently published stats.

Waymo is an alphabet company, same as google.

It won’t be necessary to ban driving since – a recent piece of research showed – even a small proportion of self drive cars can smooth traffic flow and significantly reduce congestion.

Come on guys, keep up 🙂 the futures here!

I enjoy driving. Is it likely to be made illegal?

I think that you will be allowed to drive yourself, but that the system will override your decisions if you do something wrong, like driving too fast (it will slow you down).

no it won’t/hasn’t

Thats a test.

The masters of your universe are already thinking about:

People like driving, its fun.
People like commuting, it me time.
People like commuting it divides works from home.
People like cars, there shiny.
People like cars, they display social status.

These questions are being considered because the change that will come with self driving cars is not just the absence of a steering wheel but that absence of ownership.

not just the absence of a steering wheel but that absence of ownership.

All your cars are belong to us.

I’m going to guess at what you mean until the edit 😉

I think we’ll be taking out contracts with Ford, Merc or whoever in the future for a car to arrive when we click an app. They’ll each be offering different benefits, newer cars, faster arrival times etc and of course some will be able to afford the best service and some of us will have a 5yr old skoda that arrives an two hour after it been ordered.

Either way they wont sit on our drives for 90% of the time like the cars we rent now do.

Most cars in the road these days seem to be driving on autopilot as it is.

It’ll put me out of a job!! Which I’m not happy about as it’ll mean I’ll have to get a ‘proper’ job which I really don’t want. Although for all the proclamations of companies saying they’ll be here in 5 years, listening to a debate on the radio a couple of weeks ago many experts believe it’s at least 15-20 years before we are at a point were they really are replacing human jobs rather than assisting or tackling motorways.

How much will it cost? Isn’t it going to be just in the high end cars? I’m not sure if it will make much difference to car ownership in itself.

It’ll be interesting when the first person is killed by a self drive car. It will happen, maybe not because of the tech, but because of the other person doing something unpredictable.

On some level it has already happened. Someone was killed behind the wheel of a Tesla when it ploughed into something it failed to see…

The Tesla is technically not fully autonomous but the driver was killed when they put their trust in an autonomous system.

I believe this is one of the reasons companies like Google are focused on full autonomy and nothing less, because their research shows that people place trust in technology very quickly and pay little attention to the road when using driver assist systems.

Which is a bit of a worry really. Because until we reach full autonomy, there is all this growing technology to get there. And with drivers plugged into smart phones, and smart phones being output to screens in cars, there is a serious scope for error when driver assist systems fail, or simply reach the limit of what they can do.

I’m looking forward to full autonomy though. I like cars and can be a bit of a petrolhead, and have been an active member of car clubs in the past. However, too many drivers have a complete disregard for anyone’s safety on the road. People are killed and it’s like, “yeah, shit happens…”

many experts believe it’s at least 15-20 years before we are at a point were they really are replacing human jobs

They may well be right but it feels closer than that when you read about the pilot schemes that have been taking place in the States for the last 6 months! 🙂

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/14/12900982/uber-self-driving-car-pittsburgh-launch-hands-on

http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/14/13921514/uber-self-driving-car-san-francisco-launch-volvo-xc90

On some level it has already happened. Someone was killed behind the wheel of a Tesla when it ploughed into something it failed to see…

The Tesla is technically not fully autonomous but the driver was killed when they put their trust in an autonomous system.

I don’t count the Tesla as self drive for the point you make. I wouldn’t trust anything less then something like the google system.

I noticed that they had two stewards in high vis tabbards ten metres further down the way, one of which had a high vis flag which reminded me of the early days of motoring lol

How old are you ?

Lolz 🙂

uber are sailing rather close to the wind IMO, in a umber of ways.

waymo used to be google self-driving cars.

There have been 1000s of “minor” accidents not reported (eg test driver has had to grab the controls to prevent a significant crash)

accidents, or the drivers intervened and there was no accident? as is so often the case, citation required.

How good is the tech going to be at spotting cyclists and pedestrians ? etc etc I have spent some time with top academics on visual recognition systems and when you see how crude they are relative to human vision you’ll see driverless is a dangerous thing.

‘top’ academics, no less? well then, it’s probably a good thing that the tech is a bit more spohisticated than that. they are not totally reliant on image recognition and are also using lidar, radar, ultrasonics, etc. etc.

36000 people a year killed or seriously injured on the roads in the US every year. how many have to be killed before you’re prepared to forgoe your ill conceived ideas of ‘dangerous’?

in the UK:

In reported road traffic accidents for the year ending March 2016:

there were 1,780 road deaths, unchanged from the year ending March 2015
24,610 people were killed or seriously injured
there were 187,050 casualties of all severities
motor traffic levels rose by 1.8% over the same period
sauce

I enjoy driving. Is it likely to be made illegal?

Not in our lifetimes. We need to wait for the technology to mature, for a start. Assuming, for the sake of argument, the law is passed (once of a time I’d have said “no chance” but with this government nothing would surprise me any more), what then?

We mandate that all new cars are driverless, fine, the existing fleet will slowly die out over time, on the whole. That’ll take, what, twenty years? More maybe, as I’d expect a large percentage of the population aren’t going to run out and buy one unless they absolutely have to. It’ll be corporates leading this charge – IIRC, the lease market accounts for something like 80% of all new car purchases.

What’s to stop people hanging on to old driveable motors rather than picking up 4yo ex-lease vehicles? They’re still about, I saw a Peugeot 205 on the road today. So perhaps we say all existing cars must be converted, but then what happens to the guy with the 1969 E-type? To those with vintage cars, and older still? To the chap restoring traction engines? Modifying those vehicles would be an act of vandalism. So what then, you can keep those cars, but never drive them again?

Not going to happen.

Agreed, I find it hard to believe that they will be mandatory, I think that they will be popular though- who would drive instead of watching a movie or reading a book? Oh hell no! 🙂

I think it will make the roads safer if they are recording footage as well, as everyone tends to behave themselves when there’s a camera!!

Not going to happen.

Hardware is only part of the cost of running a car. Self drive cars are going to be so much safer that the insurance cost for manual driving will soar. I think human drivers will just be priced off? the road.

The Tesla system is only a driver assist, and users are explicitly instructed that they remain in control of the car The driver who died was not using the system as intended.

I don’t think we will ever get proper cycling infrastructure in this country. Switching to driverless cars could bypass that problem and make all roads safe for cycling.