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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: 1) by redneckmother on Monday November 13 2017, @05:06PM (3 children)
"I suspect that autonomous vehicles will eventually be able to navigate offroad" ...
Not unless the GPS maps improve.
I live in a community of small ranches, with the roads maintained (albeit poorly) by an owner's association.
The private roads have recently shown up on Garmin maps, but are highly inaccurate - roads and intersections are shown that would require crossing a fenced property line, and do not exist. I suppose someone consulted a terrain image on Google, and ass u me d that some trails and driveways are part of the communal road system. Weird.
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 13 2017, @06:24PM (1 child)
Don't be blindered1 by current state of the art. GPS is only an intermediate step. It will be continually useful in "new locations", but in the future (10 years? 15 years?) cars will learn the local terrain the same way people and rats do. They'll remember where they've been and the path they took to get there.
Please note that this is going to take a lot more computer capability than they currently have, but Moore's law isn't dead, it's hit slow points before. And anyway when they need to they can do 3-d stacking of circuits, possibly with laser signaling between the layers to allow cooling, or possibly some other approach. It was done in labs a decade ago, but hasn't yet been needed. (There are already chips with internal liquid cooling, but I'm not sure that's the right answer.)
Remember, technology isn't only advancing along one front, it's advancing everywhere from aardvark management to zebra monitoring. We may not always like the direction of the advance (cheaper rather than more durable is annoying), but it's happening.
1. Blindered: To wear blinders such as those worn by a skittish horse, which prevent distraction by events from peripheral vision.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @06:15PM
It's not advancing fast enough. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608911/is-ai-riding-a-one-trick-pony/ [technologyreview.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 14 2017, @02:31AM
I worked for the Florida Department of Transportation in 1987, at that time the official state maps weren't 100% accurate, even for well traveled paved roads. I found an interesting route home from work on the official map one day, drove there in person to find a canal bisecting my route, with no bridge - not a tiny error, and not the only one like that in the county.
🌻🌻 [google.com]