A self-driving car traveling from San Francisco to New York is about half-way through its journey, having reached Ft. Worth, Texas yesterday. The car is an Audi, but its self-driving electronics have been designed by Delphi, an auto supply company. Like Continental and Bosch, Delphi has been developing its own self-driving hardware and software.
This raw AP video gives an idea of Delphi’s plans.
They left Treasure Island, in San Francisco Bay, on March 22 and took the long way around, first going south to Los Angeles where they could test the software in heavy traffic. The goal is to arrive in time for the New York Auto Show, which begins a week from today.
Delphi’s car is tweeting as it goes, or it least its non-driving human occupants are. At least some of the technologies, such as traffic jam assistance, might be available, says Delphi engineers, “in a couple of years.”
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This is the future ladies and gentlemen, rarely can one stare it so squarely in the face.
Wouldn’t surprise me if some deranged government planner (aren’t they all?) lay in wait along its path to sabotage it.
Dunno, still not convinced. Clear blue sky, optimum conditions in that clip.
On Monday I drove 300K from Fernie BC to Calgary AB in a typical Canadian spring storm. By which I mean blizzard conditions with close to zero visibility.
And did I mention that I had to restart Windows twice yesterday and Google up the solution to several Windows self-caused problems, including having the volume icon disappear?
Surely anyone can see that the possibilities for failures and faults grow exponentially with the size and complexity of any system.
And what about the nutjob who intentionally pushed the plane crashing button on that German plane day before yesterday? Some nutjob will figure out how to do that with a self driving car and will the other self driving cars “know” how to respond?
Pessimist? No, just getting old and experienced.
Old man yells at cloud.
It was the human on the co-pilot, a human, on the German Wings flight who deliberately crashed the plane. The computer flight system would have flown the plane safely. So if there was no computer system the co-pilot would have crashed the plane anyway. Therefore a plane with a automatic pilot is generally safer than a human flown plane.
The computer system on planes and cars if far more robust than a personal computer operating system. An average new car now has tens of computer systems on it that can run hundreds of thousands of miles with no problem. Even if they do fail, the car generally stops, which can be built as a safety backup into self driving cars.
Driving in bad weather conditions is much more challenging for both human and computer control systems. However a computer system has much better potential to control a car in the rare event of a skid on snow, ice, etc that it has been programmed for, than a human who has never experienced this situation. Already cars with “Electronic Stability Control” have a lower accident rate than cars without. This shows potential for computer controlled cars to be safer than human controlled cars. Time will tell and a great deal of development work remains. However, the potential is there for safer fully automated cars.
Paul, sorry, I was not clear enough.
Driverless cars will surely assume predictability from other vehicles. A random nut will unpredictably turn his predictable vehicle into an unpredictable kinetic energy weapon. I don’t care about a nutjob killing himself, in fact, I’m in favour of it. Self selected evolution.
But how will the other vehicles react to the nutjob? Well? I doubt it. Also, airplanes do not have the traffic density envisioned for driverless cars. Collisions can propagate quickly in densely packed traffic.
Paul, sorry, I was not clear enough.
Old man yells at cloud.
Old man uses loaded terms like “random nut” and “nutjob” and “nutjob” again. Clearly the old man has nuts on the mind.
Then there’s the use of four forms of “predictable” in once sentence. Predictable? Yes. It’s the way the old man yells at cloud.
It must suck getting old.
Between the inherent problems in any robotic system, and the human reluctance to turn over trust to computers, the day when more than 50% of the cars on the road are driverless is more than 40 years away.
I agree with the Anti-Planner that this exciting new technology, but for “planning” purposes this is just a pipe dream akin to maglev and high speed rail.
Just go to a suburban elementary school at the time that schools gets out. Observe the long line of cars (SUVs), car seats, parent-comparison, glances, stares, etc. that goes into that activity. A “driverless” car won’t be allowed in that important duty for a long, long time. Driving a highway is easy compared to this daily urban warfare.
Wall Street Journal: Ford, Mercedes-Benz Set Up Shop in Silicon Valley – New nexus of car industry emerges as Apple, Uber and Google push automotive ambitions
Four decades ago, Japanese auto companies anticipated U.S. demand for fuel efficient cars and hit the market with vehicles that caught the Detroit Three by surprise, permanently altering the ranks of the biggest auto makers.
Today, the disrupters are bubbling up from California’s Silicon Valley. As software giants and startups rush to make smarter vehicles, established car makers are scrambling to avoid becoming victims of another sea change. The most common response: setting up research offices in the technology industry’s backyard.
The technical transition to a connected car is already under way. Industry researcher IHS Automotive estimates between 10% and 25% of the cost of making cars and light trucks now is linked to software. For decades, much of a vehicle’s economic value was measured in the 1,000s of physical parts—engine blocks and camshafts—that came from a tightknit supply chain. No longer.
Sandy Teal wrote:
I agree with the Anti-Planner that this exciting new technology, but for “planning” purposes this is just a pipe dream akin to maglev and high speed rail.
I must respectfully disagree. High speed rail and maglev suffer from the enormous cost and inflexibility associated with anything that is running on a fixed-guideway. Problems that rubber-tired vehicles (and to a different extent, aircraft) do not have.
Just go to a suburban elementary school at the time that schools gets out. Observe the long line of cars (SUVs), car seats, parent-comparison, glances, stares, etc. that goes into that activity. A “driverless” car won’t be allowed in that important duty for a long, long time. Driving a highway is easy compared to this daily urban warfare.
I think you underestimate the “smarts” built-in to such vehicles. As I see it, it is more likely that those self-driving vehicles will replace the thousands of yellow school buses on North American streets in the coming years.
I confidently predict the skepticism about driverless cars will evaporate almost immediately following their commercial introduction, driven by their clear safety benefits. A simple bar chart comparing real world deaths per million passenger miles human driver (big bar) vs driverless car (small or non-existent bar) will overnight create demand for everyone else to be in a driverless car – mainly because it’s safer, but also because it is more efficient, lower cost, and good for the environment. Politicians will compete to be first to set mandates for driverless market share e.g. completely driverless by 2025 etc. And they’ll have powerful allies in an automotive industry looking for sales. Driving a car will be the new smoking – putting yourself and everyone around you at risk.
Even if a nutjob tries to take out a driverless car, noted in the comments above, it will be a tough target to hit. The driverless software will presumably be able to instantly assess an optimal avoidance strategy taking into account whether there is oncoming traffic or a car too close behind, etc, and take a course of action more quickly and more efficiently than a human.