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posted by martyb on Monday November 13 2017, @11:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-prefer-the-Age-of-Aquarius dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Monday November 13 2017, @07:29PM

    by Aiwendil (531) on Monday November 13 2017, @07:29PM (#596395) Journal

    It depends - for people just doing the common A to B on well-maintained major roads and in cities it will probably come soon.

    However for those living out in the countryside or where roads are temporary manual control will last a bit longer...

    And even longer where roads are truly seasonal (being flooded, being thick ice and so on)..

    And then we have those that actually works with doing the survey for installing infrastructure and for those manual cars are a requirement.

    And then we have emergency workers - being able to override can save lives.

    And finally we have the oddballs like military and those that need to interact with other mobile heavy machinery for whom anything without manual modes are paramount to suicide machines.

    If any of you never has been near where they build new infrastructure - let's just say that online maps lag to the point where they are useless at times (tends to take a few months for them to be updated with that a hill suddenly is missing and such, or that a bridge has been built, or that it is railway track there, or that you are in a tunnel that isn't accessible to the public).

    And for that matter - how to automatic cars deal with simple boom barrier? especially when the traveller needs to get out, open it it, and then close it behind the car?

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