To the folks particularly in US obsessed about driverless cars, why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions of people if you ignore a couple of metro/train drivers per 1000s of people.
The point of a driverless car, from what I understand, is having end-to-end connectivity without the need to drive which is pain.
I live in a place where public transport already has last mile connectivity and I walk the rest of the way. Never owned a car and never plan to.
* Driverless cars means independence for people who otherwise are restricted (elderly, kids, blind, etc).
* Driverless cars are more fuel efficient. Sure, they aren't as efficient as not driving, but, just like driving with cruise control is better than not, complete automation will be better.
* Driverless cars will enable more productive use of the commute time.
There are probably many more benefits as well.
The one thing the author probably gets correct is that this will increase traffic load on the roads, and it is questionable whether it will increase efficiency of roadway usage more than it increases traffic load, but I'm guessing it won't. I can imagine a case where I have a single car, driving me to work, then going back to take my wife, then back to the house to pick up kids, then back to pick up my wife, and so on. In other words, a lot of empty drive time. This would be mitigated by a taxi-like "call the nearest car".
Driverless cars would be very useful; it would mean I can use my time in the car in a more useful way, like reading. Now I have to use the train for that.
But maybe that's also the risk of driverless cars: it would make them more attractive than they should be, because they're really too inefficient to be able to afford them as society's main form of transportation.
I dunno. In well developed cities people used bikes and public transport instead since decades now. Driverless cars sounds so silly, if I ever used a car, it wouldn't be in the city, be to go out somewhere outside the normal infrastructure.
In tipical geek fashion, this discussion is stuck around matters of safety in driverless cars and how can people be made to trust them. How much better they are, how fascinating the tech is. How driverless cars can replace cars entirely.
But do people actually _want_ driverless cars? Will they _ever_ do?
A driverless car is not a driverless elevator or train. People never drove their own elevators or trains, they were driven by other people. A car is another matter entirely. People enjoy driving their own cars, some because of the control it gives them, others because of the act of driving itself. If this weren't so, people wouldn't choose to drive their own cars in situations where taxis or other forms of public transportation are clearly superior.
I want a self-driving car as much as I want self-drinking beer.
I'm not saying self-driving cars are useless. I can certainly see a future with self-driving buses and taxis. However, for that to happen there are a few human obstacles that must be overcome even if the technology becomes perfect. The same obstacles that currently prevent self-driving trains from becoming more widespread: if you need a human to stand watch against vandalism and to react in emergency situations, he might as well be driving the thing, it's cheaper.
I'd agree that the issue is with how we (US perspective) have built our cities and require too much face time. I'd also agree that driverless cars are a stopgap measure. That being said, they might present a way to transition to more efficient models, and in the short term they can relieve the burdens of many. It occurred to me the other day that there are many people who can't drive themselves and have to give up a measure of independence to be reliant on someone else to get them places. Driverless cars could give them back their independence.
the interest in self-driving cars (by anyone except salivating bean-counters and CEOs) has been greatly exaggerated.
Most people seem to prefer driving to being a passenger, particularly the passenger of some broken half-baked tech
(the kind of semi-broken tech all consumer computing systems seem to say is OK to bring to market)
Economically, not everyone can afford self-driving cars. In the near future, they appear to be luxury items.
Trains move more people more efficiently and cheaply. That should remain the case even as driverless cars become popular, at least for another generation - maybe two.
I am not shure. As a european I see the cost of public transport only rising and at the same time I am giving up lots of flexibility. I see the option to buy a cheap self driving for arround 10'000$ as very appealing. Public transport is a tradeoff between cost, flexibility, time losing/saving and freedom. A self driving car can give lots of flexibility which public transport never can and will give. It's where I see the future of owning a self driving car. Also I do not see lots of chances for makers of self driving cars to differentiate between each other except the interour. About what else should I care?
Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead.
Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.
While driverless cars do provide advantages over normal cars, there are two counterpoints I would like to make.
First, there are people who simply will not trust the driverless cars. I was talking to a friend yesterday who said that he wouldn't ride in a driverless car, and he wouldn't want to drive on the same road as one. Uptake is not going to be as fast as people seem to expect once the cars are practical for market.
And second, in the words of Jarrett Walker [1]: "Technology never changes facts of geometry." No matter how small you can make the engines, airbags, and frame, as long as you have each passenger in a separate, self-propelled, hopefully crash-proof shell, they are always going to take up far more space than a bus or a train, and require far more resources to construct.
You're missing one important factor - many people, me included, just like to drive cars and they don't treat them as "transport vehicle only". I would refuse to use a driverless car even if it would be more economic, more safe and would transport me faster.
Those ARE better examples, but unfortunately, they aren't examples that driverless car visionaries are envisioning, as it doesn't represent an advantage to them. They think that their technology will make their commutes faster!
The fact that someone always makes this sort of comment when driverless cars come up is really weird to me.
I've never owned a car, use public transit very regularly, and think the state of it in the US is pretty bad and underinvested in. However, that's due to a huge set of systemic factors (political, organizational, spatial, ...) which nobody seems to have made much progress on, and not for lack of trying.
Yeah, it would be great if we all had amazing public transit instead of self-driving cars. But self-driving cars are making big advances, and transit isn't. In ten or twenty years, self-driving cars might be everywhere, and transit will probably be roughly as bad as it is today. That's why people are excited about one and not the other.
I can't help but think that self-driving cars is the penultimate American thing. They aren't effective or needed in properly built cities (think London) and they won't make THAT much good to the society eliminating taxi drivers. If we dig into the vision of what people want to achieve with them, it's mostly manifestations of American problems (poverty, systemic racism, homelessness, segregation, insular indifference to others' problems, crazy urban sprawl) which people don't want to confront directly, instead opting for "let's spend HUMONGOUS amount of money to keep everything more or less the same".
There is a solution for most problems people try to solve with self-driving cars: more cycling, better public transport, denser cities. Look at London: car use is heavily discouraged (20mph speed limit, congestion charge, expensive parking) and still the whole thing works like a charm.
Ok, driverless cars are cool, because they have this robot touch which is appealing to computer scientists. Furthermore, we will get there eventually, as they will drive saver and (without a driver) will decrease the costs for transport and logistics industries.
But does it affect the average human? It just strikes me how many anecdotes I read in connection with selfdriving cars ala' "calling the car to pick me up from work".
Assuming that most HN users are from the US I can just conclude that public transport is really bad and people do not use their bike there. E.g. most people here (Europe) just do not need the service of a car in their daily life. So in the end it's a logic step, but I do not think that it makes sense to actually buy a self-driving car for yourself.
The first impact of self-driving cars will be much worse traffic. While ride-sharing and public transit are helpful, they are nowhere near as good as self-driving cars.
If you had a self-driving car you'd be able to set up a truly productive or relaxing environment, which you're unable to fully replicate on public transit. For example, stick in a mattress with your favorite pillow, add a shower, have a desk with nice big monitors, a webcam to take video calls, etc. Aside from just being transportation, a car is also a bubble of quiet, cleanliness, and personal security. It is a mini house on wheels, a portable locker, and a refuge.
And since you're not driving, who cares about the traffic?
The point of a driverless car, from what I understand, is having end-to-end connectivity without the need to drive which is pain.
I live in a place where public transport already has last mile connectivity and I walk the rest of the way. Never owned a car and never plan to.
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