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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 crafoo on Monday November 13 2017, @02:02PM (3 children)
It's almost like all of these people live in cities and only very rarely venture outside of their metro bubbles. Quite a lot of people in the USA live off of dirt and gravel roads. Many of them are not mapped accurately. What do you do once you've reached your major hub town but now need to travel 50 miles through roadways and terrain an automated vehicle can't handle? There is no way I would cede control to an autonomous vehicle on a gravel road, known for washout and downed trees, with no guardrails and 20 meter+ drops on one side. You think that situation is uncommon? No, sorry, quite common from where I am from.
Human controlled vehicles are here to stay. Maybe in 50 years we can have this conversation again.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Monday November 13 2017, @03:15PM (1 child)
It's not an "A" or "B"- there will be incremental steps. Cars more and more have GPS, LTE, etc., and your back roads will be mapped. That map info will be aggregated and sold.
If you're wealthy or "important", there will be human-less pods which will check road conditions ahead of the human occupied car.
If you're not wealthy or "important", when your autonomous car fails to recognize the road washout and tumbles into a canyon, the automated system will learn and report that info to the central AI, preventing further tragedies. Your untimely demise won't be for naught, and in your final moments you'll learn the meaning of "collateral damage".
Of course evildoers will crack into the system and intentionally send people over the cliff. It will be a horrible breach of security, and there will be congressional investigations, inquiries, execs. resignings, firings, stocks sold, etc. Then something else will pop up in the news and take media attention.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @03:22AM
100% Correct. You win the internets!
(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.