Take Japanese highway system. It is well maintained, has “rest” stations where you can park car for free.
If you could get an app that can drive drunk salaryman, or not even drunk just tired from Tokyo interchange to closest rest area to wherever.. you will win. Nobody will buy a car without that who uses car for highway driving, period. It is a killer app. Get off work at 9pm Friday, get the car to the IC punch the destination, wake up at a rest are 20mins from Ski resort, Onden, parents house etc
Snow, taiphoon coming whatever. Park at closest rest area.
I am very pessimistic about cars without steering wheels. I am quite optimistic about cars that have ability to drive well marked roads. Here is a crazy thing Charge fairs for highways like Japan does, then maintain them.
There’s some in Tokyo as a trial and they are so much more pleasant. Can only be parked on private property (you can sign up to host them at your business), and they are lightweight since they apparently don’t need to be designed to withstand vandalism. They are supposed to only be used on the road, and you need a drivers license to operate them. The only downside is they can only go 15km/h and feel a bit dangerously slow in traffic at times.
I suppose the advantage is you might not be required to have a drivers license or insurance since the vehicle might be classified like a electric scooter or something. Sort of like driving a golf cart around.
I'm really surprised the Japanese mini-trucks havn't taken off in the USA. They would be great for busy city streets where parking and space could be problematic. They also don't cost very much (used 5k USD).
America's standards for road worthy are just that much higher. IF you: start a car company, buy a bunch of them so the NHTSA can crash test them (thanks Mercedes-Benz for that one), fix them up so they meet modern Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) (which includes backup cameras, among other things), fix them up to meet smog standards (for California), which means it'll also need a compliant OBDII port (and a Japanese OBDII port returning Japanese characters instead of ascii codes won't count), then yeah, it can be considered road-worthy and as a bonus, you can sell them.
It's just that all of the above is very expensive and a lot of work, if not impossible. Having to buy a bunch of cars just to get them crash tested is probably the most expensive part, but the rest of that isn't easy either.
Coming back to the kei trucks discussed in the article, there's basically no way they're going to pass crash testing.
So it's not that it isn't a valid solution, just America has much higher standards for "road worthiness".
It's been "done" by MotoRex for R34 GTRs, though there is a bit of fuzziness as to their legality as they got shut down by the government. That's a whole other story though.
But if you're not going to use the vehicle on the road and just as a show car, or drag race car, it doesn't need to be considered road worthy and the import journey is much easier.
No thanks. It would be nice to have the car drive itself (although I doubt we'll achieve true SAE level 4+ capability on most roads in my lifetime). But I keep a lot of useful stuff in my car. I don't want to load and unload it every time. The car also serves as a reasonably secure storage locker at my destination.
But your model might work in shithole cities like San Francisco. No one can leave stuff in their cars because they have to park on the street and auto burglaries are rampant.
Yeah. That's why I much prefer an L4 car that you still own and sit in the driver seat with steering wheel, than a taxi I rent and have no control over.
(obviously there's no such L4 car yet, but I'm sure tesla/mobileye/etc will get there eventually)
If you're not going to have a steering wheel, then you should have a "keep summer safe" mode.
Off a paved road is not exactly off-road. Over here, many roads are not paved - even my home street. Still I would expect to drive any regular car there; if the suspension can't take it, it's faulty.
I live in rural Japan (Aomori, Northern Honshu) and I see these cars daily. If they can survive the awful roads and weather here, I'm pretty sure that they can survive anywhere.
Insane. You've got to at least test drive on a highway.
Some years ago, a Nissan dealer offered to let me take a high-end crossover home for the night without any prompting. Ended up buying it. Would buy again from that dealer if I were still in that area.
They have one if you followed that link. But, to your point, no point trying to sell one without infrastructure!
A friend in San Diego had a Toyota Mirai, only available to lease, and had to therefore refuel at the station off Del Mar Highlands road. There's just no infrastructure.
Absolutely, but those ones will already have pulled in their usual configurations.
In cars, it's more like your airbnb host tosses you the keys & asks if you can park it in the basement quickly while he opens up. Much better a Yaris than a stick-shift V12 monster with no rear window.
Nor do they meet Japanese regulations to be cars proper.
Trying to drive one on a highway (100kmph) strains the poor thing to it’s limit, and if you are ever in a crash with a real car you better prepare to be completely crumpled.
Take Japanese highway system. It is well maintained, has “rest” stations where you can park car for free.
If you could get an app that can drive drunk salaryman, or not even drunk just tired from Tokyo interchange to closest rest area to wherever.. you will win. Nobody will buy a car without that who uses car for highway driving, period. It is a killer app. Get off work at 9pm Friday, get the car to the IC punch the destination, wake up at a rest are 20mins from Ski resort, Onden, parents house etc
Snow, taiphoon coming whatever. Park at closest rest area.
I am very pessimistic about cars without steering wheels. I am quite optimistic about cars that have ability to drive well marked roads. Here is a crazy thing Charge fairs for highways like Japan does, then maintain them.
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