SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 13 2017, @12:46PM (9 children)
I'm fine with moving from petrol to electric - if I could afford $100K+ for a performance electric vehicle I'd already have one, the tech is "out there" but the high performance electric power systems are unreasonably expensive, today.
Giving up human control of the vehicle is the real issue here. Our home is located down a single lane dirt track about 1/4 mile long, shared with 6 other homes. I'd like to see two self-driven cars meet on that and figure out what to do. As for now, Google maps knows the correct GPS coordinates for our home, but doesn't get the routing right - we're closer to a paved street that's inaccessible to us due to privately owned land in-between with two fences, but that's how Google maps tries to route people to our house.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @01:27PM (6 children)
Maybe there's a future when google doesn't own all the maps and you can edit them yourself.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 13 2017, @01:38PM (2 children)
Google maps are fine when you're in the big city. They become useless out in the less-travelled parts of the country. In the West there are vast tracts with roads that Google maps shows as undifferentiated green or gray.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Monday November 13 2017, @01:57PM
I'm fine with this. It's a pretty good filter.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 13 2017, @08:06PM
Or... cities like Jacksonville that are a rural-urban mix. The real problem with Google maps and our house is that the Google mapping car was afraid to drive down our shared driveway, maybe it was the sound of dueling banjoes or maybe it was the rebel flags on the big house, or maybe it just looked too bumpy for them. In any event, since they haven't driven it, it's not a road in their database.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by j-beda on Monday November 13 2017, @01:58PM
http://openstreetmap.org/ [openstreetmap.org]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday November 13 2017, @03:39PM (1 child)
Maybe there's a future when google doesn't own all the maps and you can edit them yourself.
I doubt it.
We already have exactly what you're talking about: it's called OpenStreetMap. I hear it's actually pretty popular outside the US, probably mostly in Europe. However, here in the US, no one knows what it is or cares.
You can also edit HERE maps, but how many people use that? Only people with certain nav systems that use HERE.
Also, the problem with things like OSM is that it doesn't provide the other features that things like Google Maps and Waze do: 1) traffic updates, to route you the fastest way taking into account traffic, and 2) a business directory (e.g. I want to go to the nearest Home Depot, but I sure as hell don't know the street address offhand, and I also want to know what its hours are so I don't waste a trip and find they're closed).
Google seems to be the best at providing all that in a single smartphone app, but they're absolutely awful at letting people correct the data. You can file a correction request, and not hear back about it for a year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @04:00PM
> You can file a correction request, ...
I've filed several, a couple in the suburbs (correcting names) and one in a rural area (dirt road, their "road" was parallel to the actual road, offset about ~100 meters). All were fixed within a few weeks and they sent me a thank-you email for my contributions.
Do you remember any details of what change(s) you requested?
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 13 2017, @04:52PM (1 child)
If your dirt road is like my dirt road, it is actually two lane. Everyone who drives on it feels compelled to drive right down the center of the road, for poorly understood reasons like, "the ride is smoother" or "don't want to scratch the car on the limbs sticking out". A trip or three up and down the road with a weed eater takes care of the scratching nonsense. And, if the full width of the road is actually used, the county employee who grades the road will actually grade the width of the road. Personally, I use one lane when I come home, and I use the other lane when I leave home. Pretty much everyone else only sees on lane, right in the middle.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 13 2017, @08:22PM
Ours is right at 10' wide, dirt tracks with grass on either side and down the middle... half of it is a bit wider, maybe 18-20', but that's quasi-paved and bumpy. There are places where you can pull into the grass to get past each other, turnouts into driveways, and spots where somebody is just going to have to back up.
🌻🌻 [google.com]