Yesterday, Google unveiled the world’s first fully autonomous car, “complete” with no steering wheel, accelerator or brake pedals, rear-view mirrors, or other accessories needed by primitive human-driven cars. On the outside, the car appears to be a tiny two-seater; insides, it has enormous amounts of interior and legroom.
The car is still topped by an ugly, spinning laser sensor, which joins with infrared and optical sensors to detect lane stripes, traffic signals, and all possible obstacles. Eventually, these laser sensors–which, at about $50,000 apiece, are the most expensive part of the car–will have to be miniaturized. Some have projected that, when built in large quantities, the cost of the laser sensor will come down to around $250.
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The new car is not yet quite street legal, but Goggle expects California to issue new regulations soon that will allow such cars to operate on an experimental basis, after which Google plans to put at least 100 experimental cars on the road. In the long run, the company says, it has no plans to manufacture and sell such cars itself, but hopes to inspire car manufacturers to partner with the software company.
Naturally, there are grousers. Someone comments that the fear that self-driving cars “will become dominant and will perpetuate the road, highway, parking-lot, etc. urban design mode. Air pollution and road death measures will improve, sure, but all we’ll be doing in our lives is working, reading blogs, and travelling between shopping malls and mcnotquitemansions.”
Aside from noting that the person making the complaint just happened to be reading and commenting on a blog, the Antiplanner suggests that this attitude is all-too common. The people who hold these attitudes know how you should spend your time, and if you think differently, you are ignorant, brainwashed, or just plain stupid.
Is it so horrible that most Americans get to actually choose where they go and when to go there? Would it be more horrible if all Americans had this freedom? Those who think so are often the people who like to talk about diversity, yet can’t imagine that anyone who thinks differently from them could possibly be intelligent. Fortunately, the momentum behind self-driving cars appears to be strong enough to overcome these objections.
Antiplanner – “Is it so horrible that most Americans get to actually choose where they go and when to go there? Would it be more horrible if all Americans had this freedom? ”
Me – ‘Where’ and ‘when’ are important freedoms. So is ‘how’. Some people are concerned that the ‘how’ has already been decided for them – the Google car – and if they choose anything else, they are, as you put it, plain stupid. Just like, at the moment, the car is the obvious choice, and if you want to walk, cycle or go by bus, then you must be plain stupid, and you deserve a poor transport experience.
Antiplanner – “Eventually, these laser sensors–which, at about $50,000 apiece, are the most expensive part of the car–will have to be miniaturized. Some have projected that, when built in large quantities, the cost of the laser sensor will come down to around $250.”
Me – I have no expert opinion, but I am skeptical to be honest. If the device is mostly electronics, then it can be miniaturised and reduced in cost, as you say. If it is not mostly electronics, economies of scale will get you some of the way, but it’s a stretch to get from $50,000 to $250. That’s a twenty-fold difference.
I’d like to know more about this thing before I’d ever consider getting one. How do I tell it where I want to go? Can I override its instructions and stop? (Can someone else override them and kidnap me?) And of course there are questions of legal responsibility if the car hits something, or if some prankster forces the car to suddenly stop by jumping out in front of it.
I have the feeling we’ll learn the answers to a lot of these things the hard way, later. So I’ll probably own one eventually, but I’ll let others be the first guinea pigs.
I can relate to worrying about how things will change when technology changes in ways that enable new things. What scares the crap out of me are the number of people who don’t understand the implications of this sort of thing. For example, there are still politicians pushing for things like PRT despite Lyft / Uber let alone the looming driverless car.
http://krocam.com/mayor-ardele-brede-discusses-public-transit-and-dmc/
I believe that eventually the LIDAR sensors will be replaced with vision systems. We drive our cars today without LIDARs, and there’s no reason that robots, with appropriate AI, cannot do the same in the future.
At 6ft 7in tall I’m loving this little dude. More comfortable than a Southwest seat or a Megabus sleeper cabin, at least for me.
The Antiplanner wrote:
Is it so horrible that most Americans get to actually choose where they go and when to go there? Would it be more horrible if all Americans had this freedom? Those who think so are often the people who like to talk about diversity, yet can’t imagine that anyone who thinks differently from them could possibly be intelligent. Fortunately, the momentum behind self-driving cars appears to be strong enough to overcome these objections.</cite?
I am not especially enthused about the ugly (to me) cars shown in the videos above (and I am curious how well they will "relate" to motor vehicles driven by human beings), but I do think this (and not very expensive rail transit projects) is “commuter choice” that a lot of people can and will relate to.
Speaking of transit, does this sort of technology mean the eventual end of urban bus drivers? Long-haul bus drivers?
How about local delivery truck drivers and over-the-road truck drivers?
CP, those are great questions. What does this mean for package delivery? Probably not the end since we don’t robots to drop it off on the front step. But all sorts of forms of transportation are likely to wither _IF_ the technology comes around ( as FrancisKing points out, we don’t know that it will work + prices will come down ).
I wouldn’t limit to buses. What are the main reason most people take transit? Traffic + parking $. But if the car drives itself, finding free street parking ( aka city taxpayer subsidized parking ) isn’t an issue. You just let your car know when to come pick you up. No need to shell out $20 / day, right? Of course once a lot of people start doing it that’ll change the situation a bit.
The other is stuck in traffic. It won’t matter as much since you’ll get to safely do something else than drive while being in your car. Sure, you get that with transit ( rail, bus, etc ) today but why put up with time lost on transfers, waiting for bus, etc.
In fact, I suspect that’s where the most change is likely to occur, on the volume end of the spectrum. The higher the capital costs up front, the more sense they make for volume situations. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some sort of a taxi replacement system rise with a utilization that would be high enough for the service’s costs to be low enough to pull riders away from public transit.
Assuming this sort of technology comes around and works well enough to safely use, I expect there to a be a few changes we didn’t anticipate. For example, I doubt anyone in 1995 that could conceive of the smart phone could foresee company’s like Shopkick would be using it, along with high frequency radio waves, to map the interiors of stores simply by offering people coupons to install their app. In the old days you wouldn’t had to hire professionals & pour millions of hours of work into doing the same thing. Now they just have to build the system and people help them out for practically free.
The way I view this, is that people will end up owning fewer or even no automobiles. I can see massive private fleets of these things tied to an uber type app. You pull up the app on your cell phone and it picks you up and drops you off for a fare. I telecommute. The only time I leave the house, during the week, is to go to the grocery store or to visit a client. I could readily get by without my Honda if a reliable hired car service was readily available.