Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

Deathwing_sl said:

That self-driving car parks sloppily.

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No worse than the average moron parking job in your random super market or Walmart parking lot where they take up 2 spots parking crooked.

I guess I could google this but what fun would that be. I'm assuming these vehicles use a combination of cameras and radar. How is that gonna work in extreme cold and in rain, snow, freezing rain etc? Testing in ideal conditions is nice and all but that shit just isn't realistic for 90% (made up number) of the roads out there. Also how exactly can they program these to deal with Asian woman drivers?

As for the drive thru. How is it gonna know which window to go to and when to skip the first one when you have multiple?

Makes sense. Sell it as a "Car part" and if the car maker installs it wrong, takes some shortcut or messes up, hey not our fault, our shit was fine when we sold it to you. Though I don't see how they can absolve completely, especially if its something like a code glitch, security of the software etc.

I'm all for taking the steering wheel out of the hands of people. People are idiots and the roads would be infinitely safer without them in charge. I love to hop in my little auto drive car, and play on a tablet/laptop/phone or read a book while the car drives me where I want to go. Not sure I could get my mind to shut down enough to go to sleep knowing its software driving me around, maybe after I got used to it. Then have another car or maybe motorcycle when you want to drive yourself on the roads that allow it, since sometimes its just fun to go driving.

Big Phoenix_sl said:

How uncontrolled are the google driverless cars now? I would assume that all their testing has been done on private roadways under very controlled conditions.

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I'm not sure about the cars in the video; but the retrofitted models, the ones in the testing, were driven on normal roadways without any control (but they were monitored by Google remotely; but the computer did all the driving). Their first iteration asked the drivers to take back over when it recognized road work--but the latest ones don't even do that, they can easily navigate it I believe.

Big Phoenix_sl said:

How uncontrolled are the google driverless cars now? I would assume that all their testing has been done on private roadways under very controlled conditions.

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Controlled conditions? Absolutely. Private roadways? Nope.

The wiki page is reasonably informative.

I think I would still trust a machine to drive in snow/rain/fog etc then a human. Guess its a matter of making the instruments immune to weather if possible.

I can imagine being late to work because I had to update my driver driver. This could be nice for good weather climates as basically a johnny cab or to automate buses and other forms of public transportation.

Google cars are perfect now. There is only one thing they absolutely cannot fix, no matter what they do it causes crashes whenever they drive near them.

Big Phoenix_sl said:

How uncontrolled are the google driverless cars now? I would assume that all their testing has been done on private roadways under very controlled conditions.

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Dude, they've driven hundreds of thousands of miles on Californian public road ways.

Official Google Blog: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

Our vehicles have now logged nearly 700,000 autonomous miles, and with every passing mile we're growing more optimistic that we're heading toward an achievable goal-a vehicle that operates fully without human intervention.

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I don't understand why the automobile industry would even fight this at all, every single person in the country would essentially need a new car to be current. The people that need to worry is your local LEO who can no longer pull you over for bullshit traffic violations and automobile insurance companies are the ones that should be shitting themselves for fear of lost income.

I look forward to the cops giving tickets to a driver for being intoxicated while in the drivers seat of an antonymous vehicle.

BurnemWizfyre_sl said:

I don't understand why the automobile industry would even fight this at all, every single person in the country would essentially need a new car to be current. The people that need to worry is your local LEO who can no longer pull you over for bullshit traffic violations and automobile insurance companies are the ones that should be shitting themselves for fear of lost income.

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The insurance companies would also have massively reduced costs. Overall the car insurance industry would shrink, sure, but there'd still be money to be made.

khalid_sl said:

I look forward to the cops giving tickets to a driver for being intoxicated while in the drivers seat of an antonymous vehicle.

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If theirs no steering wheel, all seats can be the drivers seat!

Eomer_sl said:

The insurance companies would also have massively reduced costs. Overall the car insurance industry would shrink, sure, but there'd still be money to be made.

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Same could be said for single payer in the US as well but you see how that has gone over, money to be made isn't the same and industries no matter how fucking useless and no longer needed don't like to shrink if they can help it.

mkopec_sl said:

Insurance companies stand to make bank on this, especially in the beginning stages when everybody switches over. You will still want insurance on the property (self driving car) you own, and the banks will still require it. But now since the technology itself will make accidents rare or even obsolete, they will be doing more collecting rather than paying out. Win/win for insurance.

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Liability insurance makes up the lions share of the market when it comes to automobile insurance, how can a passenger of completely autonomous vehicle be liable for any accident that may occur? The banks may force you to have insurance to cover the property initially while you pay it off but that ends as soon as the bank note ends, eventually the numbers will even back out to what they are today without the need for liability insurance which cost the insurance companies a fuck load of profit.

It'll be interesting to see how that actually works, and how they will try to encourage adopting the new tech from a insurance/regulatory/legal standpoint.

Because I do not doubt that if it is not yet safer it can be -made- safer. And a little bit of logistics planning can go a very long way into making traffic more effecient. 30 lane freeways are just absurd. San Diego traffic is juststupid.

I also don't really expect that it'll have to be one or the other. There is probably a point that you hit where costwise it just doesn't make sense to convert the entire transport system. Long distance gomobiles, commercial transport gomobiles, but if you're in a rural area or the 'burbs and just want to go down to the grocery store, maybe it doesn't make as much sense. I am assuming that there will have to be changes to infrastructure. Like Tuco said, you can't have a team of 6 google engineers fail safe the device and the environment every time you want to go down the street 5 miles. And I can't imagine that the first iteration/generation of production will be so perfect as all that, even if there has been 20 solid years of good research and development behind it.

Not to sound too spoiled or anything. Auto-automobiles is pretty fucking future-tech and neat. But since when has anything come straight out of the box absolutely perfect.