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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: 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?