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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: 2) by SacredSalt on Tuesday November 14 2017, @05:15AM
Nor would I cede that control to a computer on an ice patch and snow covered road in the hills/mountains under similar conditions. I might be willing to cede traction control (if it works well enough to get me up the hill) rather than the tricky feathering to do it, but I was a medical courier. Medical couriers have to run 24/7/365 all weather conditions, just the same as ambulances and police. I've seen far too much stuff that can get a human driver killed, and certainly would get a human killed with a computer driver programmed on "reasonable" expectations of performance that may or may not exist. Even just thinking of a few hairy spots where I hit a patch of ice and had to use every bit of off road skills to stay alive makes me not want to cede that to a computer. You can learn to drive in those conditions, and a professional will as best that they can; a computer is going to be programed with the assumptions it has on those conditions. While that may or may not be as good as the average driver in those conditions, its not something I want to the guinea pig to test.