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from the who's-gonna-drive-miss-daisy? dept.
The race to bring driverless cars to the masses is only just beginning, but already it is a fight for the ages. The competition is fierce, secretive, and elite. It pits Apple against Google against Tesla against Uber: all titans of Silicon Valley, in many ways as enigmatic as they are revered.
As these technology giants zero in on the car industry, global automakers are being forced to dramatically rethink what it means to build a vehicle for the first time in a century. Aspects of this race evoke several pivotal moments in technological history: the construction of railroads, the dawn of electric light, the birth of the automobile, the beginning of aviation. There's no precedent for what engineers are trying to build now, and no single blueprint for how to build it.
Self-driving cars promise to create a new kind of leisure, offering passengers additional time for reading books, writing email, knitting, practicing an instrument, cracking open a beer, taking a catnap, and any number of other diversions. Peope who are unable to drive themselves could experience a new kind of independence. And self-driving cars could re-contextualize land-use on massive scales. In this imagined mobility utopia, drone trucks would haul packages across the country and no human would have to circle a city block in search of a parking spot.
If self-driving vehicles deliver on their promises, they will save millions of lives over the course of a few decades, destroy and create entire industries, and fundamentally change the human relationship with space and time. All of which is why some of the planet's most valuable companies are pouring billions of dollars into the effort to build driverless cars.
After automation puts everyone out of work, will anyone need to drive anywhere anymore?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday December 16 2015, @04:16PM
It's way more than one person. I'd say a good 5-10% of drivers are selfish, irresponsible assholes. I drive about 50 miles a day, mostly highway, and I see plenty of people swerving around texting on cell phones. I also see way too many Mario Andretti wannabes speeding around, weaving in and out of traffic like it's a race track to shave 10 seconds off their commute. Then you have the young kids who think they too are Mario Andretti's and race each other weaving in and out of traffic.
I knew a guy who almost died in a wreck when his truck (a real truck, Mack R600 flatbed tow truck) was hit by a little Civic during a street race on a busy highway. The Civic driver miraculously walked away but the trucker was in an induced coma for 3 weeks, hospitalized for 3 months and in a wheelchair for a year. He still can't walk properly and suffers from back and leg pain. I saw a few pictures of the wreck and you couldn't tell if it was a truck or heap of scrap metal. And the pain didn't stop there because since he was an owner operator and it was an older truck, insurance only paid the book value which is a fraction of a new truck. He has to sue to get a new truck and was out of work for quite some time. Almost lost his house because of that.
I had a friend who was killed back in August of 2007. Some fucking retard decided that driving upward of 80MPH on a regular 2 lane road was appropriate. He tried to cut around my friend but lost control, hit my friend in the left rear causing his little '89 Nissan Sentra to swerve and careen into a pole. His car hit the pole at the right front causing it to whip around and wrap around large tree that was about a meter in diameter. His body flew so hard from the impact, that his body hit his girlfriend breaking nearly all of her left ribs, arm and nearly breaking her neck. She lived and he died in the crash. The driver of the other car and his girlfriend were unscathed thanks to the newer, safer car. No charges were brought against him as there was no way to prove he was speeding recklessly. He basically got away with vehicular homicide. He was my oldest friend, we knew eachother since the first grade when we were 6 years old. He was like a brother to me and losing him caused me a great amount of pain for many years. The worst was seeing his mother and father and sisters the day after. The agony they were going through is burned into my mind. I still think about him and miss him terribly. Just a month before he died I told him to buy a new safer car and that the Sentra was a coffin. But he insisted that was the greatest car he ever owned and took great care of it. It's like I had a premonition.
We need autonomous cars because of selfish shits like those described above. People won't change. We have to force them off the roads.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 16 2015, @07:39PM
I was in an accident years ago, a head on collision, caused by a young woman applying makeup while making a left turn. She said she didn't see us.
I was a passenger. The seat broke; I was belted in. The seat breaking allowed me and the seat to keep going at full speed, thankfully the dashboard stopped me. If I was not belted in, I would have very likely gone through the windshield. The seat tipped in flight and I was going to go headfirst out, but the seat is a bit bulky compared to a human body, and it gave me enough girth to get caught on other inside parts of the car to allow my legs to hit the dashboard at high speed.
And here it is, decades later, and yeah I have problems. She got a fine.
I cannot imagine how inattentive people are because of cell phones, I so truly wished that they did not become prevalent, but even I depend on one. But I am perhaps more crazy than most about insisting to not use it while driving. And getting belted in.
I see that it is often more important fpr people to check a facebook status update or whatever on the phone than it is to keep an eye on the road; this is no different to me than applying makeup like that young lady did.
I was bedridden for months and narrowly avoided a full body cast. Her parent's insurance probably went up, but she was no worse for wear and wasn't even bruised--I heard that because it was entirely unexpected to her, she didn't tense up and didn't reflexively tighten her muscles or grip the wheel harder. Drunk drivers often are OK in a collision when the people they hit do not; some of that has to do with their not tensing up right before impact. I can assure you, I was incredibly tense. It is hard to describe what it is like to know you are about to get hit at such a high rate of speed and being powerless to do anything about it as a passenger. I remember saying "Please don't do it"--then BANG! metal tearing sure has a high pitch...
And at the same time, I do not want my freedom reduced because of inattentive people. I'd ride my bike (and do my body some good) but the distances I have to go to work are too long to be feasible for that; and even if I did... people seem to treat motorcyclists and bicyclists as irritants, and sometimes are downright abusive. The ones not paying attention aren't even as bad as the ones that resent your being out there with them; if someone doesnt see you, and you know it, you can account for that when riding in the same direction as they are; you can let them pass.
When some idiot that hates two wheelers is out to have fun with you... it's better to just get off the road and wait.
And its a shame that those problems will only likely ever be solved by preventing them from being able to drive to begin with. It's indeed the selfish shits that will make this system worth embracing, but I wish I could be trusted to be able to not look at the unexpected ads on my phone while driving and keep my concentration where it should be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 16 2015, @10:20PM
> It's way more than one person. I'd say a good 5-10% of drivers are selfish, irresponsible assholes.
When people drive well you don't even notice them. If 1 out of 20 drivers really were that reckless we'd have thousands of deaths a day rather than thousands of deaths a years.
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Thursday December 17 2015, @11:27AM
That's only if you count accidents that end in deaths. There's a metric shit ton of accidents a day that result in everything from a scratch to a fender bender to a few months of physio to serious injury to death.
Take the stats from wherever you like
http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics [asirt.org]
https://www.tc.gc.ca/media/documents/roadsafety/cmvtcs2012_eng.pdf [tc.gc.ca]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year [wikipedia.org]
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe