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Bob Lutz, former General Motors Vice Chair, opines:
It saddens me to say it, but we are approaching the end of the automotive era.
The auto industry is on an accelerating change curve. For hundreds of years, the horse was the prime mover of humans and for the past 120 years it has been the automobile.
Now we are approaching the end of the line for the automobile because travel will be in standardized modules.
The end state will be the fully autonomous module with no capability for the driver to exercise command. You will call for it, it will arrive at your location, you'll get in, input your destination and go to the freeway.
...
The vehicles, however, will no longer be driven by humans because in 15 to 20 years — at the latest — human-driven vehicles will be legislated off the highways.The tipping point will come when 20 to 30 percent of vehicles are fully autonomous. Countries will look at the accident statistics and figure out that human drivers are causing 99.9 percent of the accidents.
Is he right? Is the age of the automobile coming to an end?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by t-3 on Monday November 13 2017, @12:12PM (10 children)
Governments all around are pushing for backdoors - they will be legislated into these new driverless vehicles. If boats/ships and planes become completely driverless as well it's even worse. Someone who figures out how to access those backdoors can remotely shut down 99% of global economic activity by blocking a few canals (eg, Suez, panama, Sault st Marie, and I think one or two more major ones I'm forgetting), runways (probably a lot more targets, but the system as a whole is more easily panicked into paralysis), and highways (the hardest as things are currently, but I imagine a driverless world would be more centralized and therefore more vulnerable) or even just taking out the traffic coordinating systems and letting the system fail on its own.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 13 2017, @12:34PM
Yea of little faith.
Some more Republican govts, some more deregulation and security race to the bot... err, sorry, it's called "capitalistic efficiency" now... and your comrade hackers from Russia will have something to do over the long Siberian nights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @01:29PM (2 children)
Don't worry, you'll still be able to shit your pants and buy more guns.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @03:08PM (1 child)
Translation - you're losing freedom hand-over-fist on daily basis, how are those guns working for yea?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @08:04PM
europeans: the original self righteous, know-it-all, yankees.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday November 13 2017, @02:21PM (5 children)
Forget the hacking - though that will undoubtedly be fun. How much rejoicing will there be in police departments, when they have this power?
Need to stop a criminal? Why, just stop all traffic in the whole city, lock people in the cars, and start searching! Who cares that you've just inconvenienced a million people - it's for the children!
Seriously, police departments already fail to do any sort of cost/benefit analysis. Just this week, my wife spent ages in a traffic jam, along with thousands of other cars. Why? Because the police randomly decided to shut down a fricking major highway, just to see what they could find. Result: 300 tickets for various exciting things like broken tail lights, and one kid with no license joy-riding in his dad's car. Tens of thousands of peoples time wasted, but the police got to issue a few $thousand in tickets. If they get backdoors into autonomous cars, it will be even easier to pull stupid stunts like that.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @04:26PM
what city? not a great place for new businesses to move to, sadly
(Score: 5, Informative) by mhajicek on Monday November 13 2017, @04:37PM
The car will know the identity of it's occupants through some security measure or other. The government will edit an approved list of destinations for each occupant. If you're a known political dissident you'll be kept away from protests. The lower classes will be kept out of rich neighborhoods and away from anyone with power. If you have a warrant on you, are wanted for questioning, or sometimes just for a random search and a dose if intimidation, the car will bring you right to the police station.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @04:38PM
Q for bradley13 --what city is this near? I want to make sure and not visit anytime soon.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Monday November 13 2017, @05:35PM (1 child)
I've been pulled over for 'I don't like the way you look' citations in the 30 years I've been driving. (Wish my dashcam was available back in the day)
I can't believe speed trap cash is going to be given up easily. So, what will the ticket trap for a self driving car look like? Pop up speed limit signs/changing limit signs? Signs disguised in a way that humans see but that don't meet the car AI standards for a limit sign? Contradictory signs? Tickets for arbitrary 'unsafe for conditions' where the only arbiters are the agents of the municipality that wants the cash?
There better be some sort of protection/cloud copying of data or cars will be impounded and returned only once the trip data was wiped. (as happens to photographers now - along with a resisting arrest and assaulting an officer charge - once the photo evidence to the contrary is destroyed naturally - I've seen it done in person in NOLA, + a night stick to the head for trying to document police hippy beatings) The end result may be making every road a toll road since it will be so easy. It'll probably start as a 'congestion zone' tax and spread.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @03:11AM
No, they'll ticket the non-autonomous cars that exceed the speed limit by 1 MPH, since the autonomous cars will refuse to. Even with 75% autonomous, there's still 25% non- , and they can hit that 25% 4 times as frequently. And it will make sense, too, since the insurance companies will have the stats to show how the 25% are the unsafe ones.
It's a lot like smoking, in that regard.