Ford Motor Company issued a report last week explaining its self-driving car program and why it won’t kill pedestrians like the Uber car did in Arizona. Among other things, Ford has two people in its test cars at all times, one watching the road and the other monitoring the self-driving system (Uber’s car had only one person who was watching a video at the time of the accident).
Click image to download this 37.4-MB PDF.
The Antiplanner likes Ford and wishes it well, but I can’t help but think that this “go-slow-for-safety” approach is merely an excuse for being three years behind Waymo and two years behind General Motors in the race to put self-driving ride-hailing systems on the streets. Ford promises to mass produce self-driving cars by 2021, but GM says it will have them by 2019 and Waymo expects to put such cars in revenue service this year.
Meanwhile, TU-Automotive has issued a report titled “Why Megacities Need to Define the Vehicle of the Future.” The report claims that China’s “authoritarian rule” is better at innovation than America’s system of researchers dispersed across many companies in several different industries.
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There is so much wrong with this idea that it is hard to know where to begin. We know where authoritarian central planning gets us: back into the past, because the planners can’t really conceive of the future so they plan for an idyllic nostalgia similar to what they imagine the past was like. Historically, how much innovation has come from centrally planned economies such as Russia and China, vs. how much from distributed economies such as the United States and Japan?
Second, “megacities” are not single entities that can plan anything. In most cases, they are numerous cities and other local governments, each of which are made up of politicians and bureaucrats. This means that, not only will they not be innovative, they will take forever and a day to make any decisions.
The report uses meaningless platitudes such as “interoperable” and “planning streets for people,” explicitly stating that this means light rail (an obsolete technology typical of central planners), not cars. Since streets move far more people in cars than light rail, how can planning light rail be planning for people? This report should be ignored by anyone who supports increased and safer mobility.
I’m not sure about China but Russia wasn’t a centrally planned country by the 1970s. While on paper there were plans, there is ample historical evidence that the soviets, the state owned corporations, were doing whatever they saw fit to survive. On top of the by then the numbers weren’t based on reality; they were largely manufactured.
It’s hard to look at how the Soviet Union actually operated and understand how China will turn out to be any different. Maybe TU Automotive has evidence that a landscape littered with newly built, unoccupied and already decaying buildings in China is part of the central plan?
China’s “authoritarian rule” is better at innovation… yes it’s amazing what you can accomplish when a bayonet is at your back.
Because China’s has historic expertise in innovative agriculture, food programs, environmental programs, public works and housing……
China spent more on infrastructure in real terms than the whole of the 20th century. And that’s gonna come back to bite them in the future. Buildings are being constructed in China basically to fall down and be built again. Most of the buildings going up now in China have lifetimes of just 20 to 30 years, essentially rendering cities virtually disposable. The Three Gorges Dam has plenty of issues, though it generates enough electricity to power Switzerland. It has necessitated the relocation of over a million people, and its construction has come at a huge environmental cost. Lately, a change in the reservoir’s water level has resulted in dangerous landslides and the lack of sediment deposits down river will likely cause Shanghai (a city built on this muck) to sink. Second unless they do something about the sediment it’ll render the dam useless in as little as 50 years.
China has made colossal infrastructure investments over the past decade, but it’s becoming clear that their intentions may have been misplaced. A 2008 stimulus plan allotting $600 billion to infrastructure projects helped China maintain economic growth throughout the recession. But now it seems that not only might the construction have been a bit too shoddy, but national debt incurred by the projects has begun to weigh heavily on China’s shoulders.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/myth-of-chinese-innovation-capacity-by-zhang-jun-2018-07
Many Western observers – in media, academia, and government – now portray China as a fierce competitor for global technological supremacy, with top-down industrial policies that are enabling it to stand virtually shoulder-to-shoulder with Europe and the US. This is a serious misrepresentation.
The report claims that China’s “authoritarian rule” is better at innovation than America’s system of researchers dispersed across many companies in several different industries.
Shades of Thomas Freidman:
Scratch a progressive and find an authoritarian.
Thanks CapitalistRoader, it does leave one wondering what these critically important policies that are needed to move a society forward in the 21st Century? Universal Healthcare / Medicare For All? Nope. China ain’t got that. Women’s rights? Nope. The Chinese government today still literally tells them to go home –> L I T E R A L L Y. Or maybe it’s minority rights? China is literally today still beating the crap out of people for no other reason than being a minority.
But ya, if you ignore all of that, if you are I G N O R A N T like Mr. Friedman, than ya, it’s full of model policy for the 21st century, eh?