Enjoy your manual control cars. The car world is changing fast.

[Gargamel]

I don't see this working out as planned any time soon:

1. So everyone buys a car "subscription".... and everyone wants the car from 7 AM to 9 AM in the morning and 4 PM to 6 PM at night. Going to be some very unhappy people...

2. The logical self driving cars will need to share the road with very illogical people. Even with "dedicated" and guarded lanes I can see things getting very dangerous very fast. AI, while awesome at chess, will need a very different skill set for this.

3. This may work out for city dwellers, but I could see suburban and rural areas not doing too well with this.

Color me skeptical in the short term.

[cool cat]

Damn millennials fuckin it up again

This is true. There are a lot of kids/younger people that have no interest in driving. They either use a rideshare service or their parent's drive them around when they need to leave the house.

[quikag]

I don't see this working out as planned any time soon:

1. So everyone buys a car "subscription".... and everyone wants the car from 7 AM to 9 AM in the morning and 4 PM to 6 PM at night. Going to be some very unhappy people...

2. The logical self driving cars will need to share the road with very illogical people. Even with "dedicated" and guarded lanes I can see things getting very dangerous very fast. AI, while awesome at chess, will need a very different skill set for this.

3. This may work out for city dwellers, but I could see suburban and rural areas not doing too well with this.

Color me skeptical in the short term.

There are issues for sure, but if the profit paradigm model can be dramatically shifted for the better with car makers building fleets of this cars and printing money off of them, they have and will continue to pour billions into the technology and infrastructure needed to make this happen. It won't be overnight, but it will eventually be the next "cool" thing to have. An autonomous vehicle (AV) to shuttle you to and from work/home/school and not have to deal with shi**ty traffic. Instead, you can watch TV, nap, read, play on your phone, etc. It will start out as a luxury good and eventually move downmarket. It will also start out, as you said, in dense urban areas and over time, move out to more rural areas.

[yellowstang]

Just use the autonomous car to get people to a Dart Rail station, then let mass transit do it's intended job. Except in Arlington.

[svauto-erotic855]

Just imagine dumping a couple of buckets of caltrops into the self-driving car lane. 4 or 5 people could lock up traffic in an entire city every single day for a budget of under a fifty bucks a day.

Also try to imagine what would happen once hackers get into the self-driving cars operating systems.

If you shot a person in a self-driving car it would damn near be impossible for them to figure out when and where the person was shot.

I can think of so many deadly and or mischievous things to do once self-driving cars are commonplace. Police departments will have to add tons of manpower just to handle the so-called trouble-free self-driving cars.

Also try to imagine a hacker using ransomware on the entire transportation grid.

[Craizie]

Would your first idea be less effective on non-self driving car lanes?

[svauto-erotic855]

Would your first idea be less effective on non-self driving car lanes?

Yes, people can deal with variables easier than a computer can. An autonomous car may understand that all four tires have been deflated but it's unlikely to be able to understand that it was a deliberate Act.

[Craizie]

Yes, people can deal with variables easier than a computer can. An autonomous car may understand that all four tires have been deflated but it's unlikely to be able to understand that it was a deliberate Act.

It doesn't need to understand if it was intentional or not. It just needs to take itself off the road.

[svauto-erotic855]

It doesn't need to understand if it was intentional or not. It just needs to take itself off the road.

You just made my point. Think about 30 to 40 of them trying to get off of the road at the same time and the ones following up not knowing to stop to avoid damage. At best the cars will be able to "Think" 3 or 4 moves ahead while not being able to make cognitive leaps of logic in unique circumstances.

A person knows to stop if the bridge ahead blows up but that would be an incredibly difficult thing to program.

[Ruffdaddy]

You just made my point. Think about 30 to 40 of them trying to get off of the road at the same time and the ones following up not knowing to stop to avoid damage. At best the cars will be able to "Think" 3 or 4 moves ahead while not being able to make cognitive leaps of logic in unique circumstances.

A person knows to stop if the bridge ahead blows up but that would be an incredibly difficult thing to program.

No it's not. Most of the recent proposals plan for the cars to be networked so they will undoubtedly be capable of communicating road hazards. That's a push that already extended into telecom and isnt just with the automakers.

[svauto-erotic855]

No it's not. Most of the recent proposals plan for the cars to be networked so they will undoubtedly be capable of communicating road hazards. That's a push that already extended into telecom and isnt just with the automakers.

60mph is nearly 90 feet per second and there would be at least 4 to 5 cars per lane damaged before they could even figure out that something was amiss. The best thing to program in is that all cars default towards safety by stopping in their tracks. Grid lock could be accomplished by a single person causing problems in a strategic area like the High 5. One person can't really do that now because other drivers are alert and watching the road. People in self driving cars wont even be looking out the window.

The autonomous cars programing wont exactly be a secret and monkeying around with things to fuck them up will become a hobby of mine. I seriously can hardly wait.

Edit: If autonomous cars share the lanes with regular cars it would be even more fun. Just imagine 3 to 4 people in separate cars driving side by side and all coming to a complete hard stop in the middle of the highway over and over again for a few miles. I wonder if you could cause brake fade in a few hundred autonomous cars at the same time.

[yellowstang]

Wonder if you installed a big mirror on the back of your car and an autonomous car coming up from behind would think it was about to get into a head on collision!
Or, better yet, that semi that has a front of a semi painted on it's rear cargo door.



We could get all sorts of false positives in a lot of ways!

[Ruffdaddy]

The sensors are not nearly as stupid has human eyes. Even the current renditions run Lidar and/or Radar...so a mirror will just look like a wall.

There are certainly going to be some challenges (see Tesla) and itll be a few decades at least before its widespread...but yall are fantasizing about problems that have already been solved to an extent.

[Captain Crawfish]

My lawyer is drawing up my lawsuit as we speak! I’m gonna be rich

[mardyn]

While I'm not a big fan of the tech right now, I don't see how a self driving car could be much worse than the current crop of idiots on the road out there now...

As pointed out above, any event that caused a mass shut down of the systems would cause chaos on the roadways, and deliberate sabotage to snarl the traffic pattern (perhaps to delay Law/Fire/Emergency response) should also be factored into the decisions before implementing such a system on a grand scale.

mardyn