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from the I'm-sorry-Dave,-I-can't-do-that dept.
[...] some experts believe as much as 95% of passenger miles could be electric, autonomous by 2030, thanks to some basic economics. Because electric vehicles cost a whole lot less to drive and maintain—but more to buy—and because autonomous vehicles greatly reduce the cost of commercial driving, a combination of the two technologies will make autonomous Transportation as a Service exponentially more cost competitive than either owning a car, or hiring a car and driver. It's also exponentially more profitable for car companies, who have long feared the loss of maintenance and service profits associated with a transition to electric cars.
This question will come up more frequently as self-driving technology advances. Will perfection of that technology make a difference, though, in the face of social behaviors that have been deeply ingrained over the past century?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Wednesday July 26 2017, @07:46AM (9 children)
My thought too..!
And autonomous driving. It has its uses. But I would really not trust it.
Besides by owning the vehicle it's possible to whack the phone-home and by extension the remote killing program of various organizations. They simple can't be entrusted with this capability. Nice coax.. *snip*snip*
Btw, any ideas for antenna detection? using the intermediate frequencies of heterodyne receivers or so.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @10:29AM (2 children)
For now, maybe. You really believe that will keep that way? What makes you think they'll not make the car detect any attempt to disable the phone-home functionality?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 26 2017, @11:48AM (1 child)
The fact that phone home may be legitimately impossible under some circumstances?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @01:51PM
And you think the car is unable to distinguish between being unable to phone home occasionally, and being unable to phone home perpetually (while the GPS indicates that you passed about ten dozen different cell towers last week which are extremely unlikely to have all been switched off)? Not to mention that sooner or later your car will have to go for obligatory maintenance (don't count on being able to do the maintenance yourself!), and then the non-operational connectivity will surely be detected and "fixed".
Not to mention that you'll have to alter something on the car to disable the phone-home functionality. Probably you will open something that you are not supposed to open, and unauthorized opening will disable the car "for safety reasons" until it is reset using a protocol requiring signatures with a valid key from a certified repair shop.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 26 2017, @04:35PM (5 children)
I trust your autonomous car a lot more than I trust anyone to drive safely. Your non-autonomous car puts MY life at risk!
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday July 26 2017, @04:50PM (4 children)
Personal Rapid Transit, not autonomous car is the solution for cities.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday July 26 2017, @06:45PM (3 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday July 26 2017, @09:11PM (2 children)
Actually my thoughts are more in the cabin-switched ground or underground level network for 3-4 people per cabin traveling ~100 km/h on rails.
More people => higher throughout. Some high traffic sections can actually use cabins for 40 people.
Ground level avoids the risk of falling down like the one in Wuppertal, 1999 [wikipedia.org] with 5 dead and 49 injured.
In addition some cabins can be made to take cars such that people can drive to the city and then not need to drive the car inside the city.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday July 27 2017, @07:45AM (1 child)
The problem with the larger compartments is that it reduces the end-to-end nature of PRT, which is one of its key selling points. If I can go to the station near my house and get a pod directly to my destination, that's a lot more convenient than getting one to the edge of town, changing into a large pod for the across-town trip, and then getting back in a small pod for the last hop. It also makes the switching much harder, because the large pods will have lower acceleration than the smaller ones (or need much more powerful motors) and so will not be joining the main track at the same speed. This also increases the number of possible failure modes, unless the large pods are on entirely separate tracks (which dramatically increases cost).
Building the tracks underground is a factor of 10-50 more expensive than the scheme proposed by SkyTran, with a track suspended from lamppost-like supports. It may be safer (though fires underground can result in quite high death tolls and carbon monoxide is a significant risk), which pushes the cost from expensive to infeasible for a lot of places.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday July 27 2017, @08:03AM
Larger compartments will be needed for some high traffic sites, like central station to the city etc. Where people anyway go the same route. Otherwise the capacity will simply be too low. The larger mass can be compensated with more powerful motors, that is not a problem.