6 ms·

I wonder how Porsche and the alike will adapt to that situation. Sure it will take some years before someone will start pushing it...

netcan 9y ago
Douglas Adams on the internet affecting media in the 2000s: ”It's like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply.” Wide-scale fully automated cars will change everything. First, I think fewer people will personally own cars, perhaps a small fraction. Vehicles will need to be less “general purpose,” if they’re not personally owned. One or two seaters, low speed electrics are better/cheaper if you’re getting around a congested city on your own. If we don’t own our own, we don’t always need cars that can fit a family, handle highways…
- arethuza 9y ago
  As an aside, the Congo and the Amazon used to be the same river before the Atlantic came along... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_River#Geology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_River#Geology
  - knob 9y ago
    TIL! Thanks!
- bitJericho 9y ago
  I'm going to buy a car with a bed, and wake up 1000 miles away for weekend vacations :)
harshreality 9y ago
I don't think they're mutually exclusive. When level 5 self-driving is available, it won't be too difficult to add a wheel back and have modes where the self-driving capability maintains safety for other drivers on the road, but allows the driver to assume some risk for their own car and personal safety. Different modes could allow the driver to accept different levels of risk to themselves and of their car, while still providing automatic protection and avoidance of other drivers on the road. Probably some more... extreme... modes could require posting a bond with the insurance company or government to cover personal injury. If someone doesn't mind risking their car (collision insurance would no longer apply in these modes), and can pay for any injuries they sustain, as long as they aren't risking other people's health and safety, the computer could let them drive how they want, within certain risk limits. I'm not so sure people will bother, though. Once car-to-car transponders are mandatory, creating an intelligent grid of vehicle awareness, what fun is it to zoom around other cars as if they're stationary if they know you're coming? I don't believe people want the actual risk associated with aggressive driving. They just want to beat other drivers. Computer games should take up most of the slack. Even really simple games like Race The Sun offer plenty of adrenaline and reflex development with no actual risk. If you want actual (substantial) risk, go rock climb above your ability, or skydive without a reserve chute.
- gambiting 9y ago
  This here is one of the reasons why I think manual cars will never go away, or at least they won't be banned outright - new cars will have enough systems to stop you from crashing in almost every situation, while allowing you to "drive" - so why ban it?
  - saiya-jin 9y ago
    to give counterpoint to both of you on some topic (ie I think you both are wrong on it :)) why people want fully automated car? simply to do something else then stare blandly for hours ahead - sleep, reading, watching movies, playing with other passengers... basically anything you can do while seated. this will be great improvement for <= average car owner out there. and why people would want manual mode? well if you ever drove a proper car (say bmw/porsche and better - it is not so much function of just raw power rather than overall handling and responsiveness), then you know the experience on non-congested road outside of cities is not comparable with usual mundane driving. Not at all. It is pleasure, it is joy, it is fun and in some cases adrenaline. this might not be strong enough reason for 'premium' car companies to survive, or at least not all of them. but I can't imagine Lamborghini or Ferrari going out of business just because of that. there will be exceptions in one way or the other, that's for sure. Otherwise it means losing 100s of thousands of highly qualified jobs just on EU market.
  - xoa 9y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by "manual cars" there. When there are discussions about future bans on "manual cars" that means cars as we have them right now, without any sort of level 5 automatic control. A theoretical level 5 car that also lets drivers have control for fun as long as some set of conditions are continuously met wouldn't be a "manual car" I think, it'd be a self-driving car with an operator recreation mode as allowed by local laws/ordinances. In that situation the system is always ready to take back over should a condition fail, or for that matter should the driver merely decide they want it to. If you meant though that there would be a mix of manual and self-driving cars allowed because the self-driving ones have collision avoidance, then that doesn't make sense, as a manual car could still create collisions that were unavoidable (even by accident). It's not like self-driving cars have force fields. Having said all that, even if we're talking only about "manual modes" in l5 rather then "manual cars", there are still reasons why they might be banned or at least massively restricted in general, and that's due to infrastructure economics, not crashes. Well developed L5 cars will be capable of operating with a level of precision (in terms of actual road lines and such) and reliability that is beyond the general population, so once all cars reach that level it significantly changes how roads and support infrastructure themselves can be designed. Purely self-driving vehicles simply won't need the lanes to be as wide for example, which directly translates into newly available free space on exisitng roads. That could be used to make them purely thinner (less paving = massive cost savings), gain an extra mechanized vehicle lane for free (higher capacity for the same price), maintain existing numbers of lanes but gain new lanes for walkers/bikers, or some combination. There will be a lot of minor to radical optimizations available with significant economic and quality of life benefits, so long as you don't have to worry about having human drivers at all. That's probably going to tempt a lot of jurisdictions sooner or later.

netcan 9y ago

Douglas Adams on the internet affecting media in the 2000s: ”It's like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply.” Wide-scale fully automated cars will change everything. First, I think fewer people will personally own cars, perhaps a small fraction. Vehicles will need to be less “general purpose,” if they’re not personally owned. One or two seaters, low speed electrics are better/cheaper if you’re getting around a congested city on your own. If we don’t own our own, we don’t always need cars that can fit a family, handle highways…

arethuza 9y ago
As an aside, the Congo and the Amazon used to be the same river before the Atlantic came along... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_River#Geology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_River#Geology
- knob 9y ago
  TIL! Thanks!
bitJericho 9y ago
I'm going to buy a car with a bed, and wake up 1000 miles away for weekend vacations :)

harshreality 9y ago

I don't think they're mutually exclusive. When level 5 self-driving is available, it won't be too difficult to add a wheel back and have modes where the self-driving capability maintains safety for other drivers on the road, but allows the driver to assume some risk for their own car and personal safety. Different modes could allow the driver to accept different levels of risk to themselves and of their car, while still providing automatic protection and avoidance of other drivers on the road. Probably some more... extreme... modes could require posting a bond with the insurance company or government to cover personal injury. If someone doesn't mind risking their car (collision insurance would no longer apply in these modes), and can pay for any injuries they sustain, as long as they aren't risking other people's health and safety, the computer could let them drive how they want, within certain risk limits. I'm not so sure people will bother, though. Once car-to-car transponders are mandatory, creating an intelligent grid of vehicle awareness, what fun is it to zoom around other cars as if they're stationary if they know you're coming? I don't believe people want the actual risk associated with aggressive driving. They just want to beat other drivers. Computer games should take up most of the slack. Even really simple games like Race The Sun offer plenty of adrenaline and reflex development with no actual risk. If you want actual (substantial) risk, go rock climb above your ability, or skydive without a reserve chute.

gambiting 9y ago
This here is one of the reasons why I think manual cars will never go away, or at least they won't be banned outright - new cars will have enough systems to stop you from crashing in almost every situation, while allowing you to "drive" - so why ban it?
- saiya-jin 9y ago
  to give counterpoint to both of you on some topic (ie I think you both are wrong on it :)) why people want fully automated car? simply to do something else then stare blandly for hours ahead - sleep, reading, watching movies, playing with other passengers... basically anything you can do while seated. this will be great improvement for <= average car owner out there. and why people would want manual mode? well if you ever drove a proper car (say bmw/porsche and better - it is not so much function of just raw power rather than overall handling and responsiveness), then you know the experience on non-congested road outside of cities is not comparable with usual mundane driving. Not at all. It is pleasure, it is joy, it is fun and in some cases adrenaline. this might not be strong enough reason for 'premium' car companies to survive, or at least not all of them. but I can't imagine Lamborghini or Ferrari going out of business just because of that. there will be exceptions in one way or the other, that's for sure. Otherwise it means losing 100s of thousands of highly qualified jobs just on EU market.
- xoa 9y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "manual cars" there. When there are discussions about future bans on "manual cars" that means cars as we have them right now, without any sort of level 5 automatic control. A theoretical level 5 car that also lets drivers have control for fun as long as some set of conditions are continuously met wouldn't be a "manual car" I think, it'd be a self-driving car with an operator recreation mode as allowed by local laws/ordinances. In that situation the system is always ready to take back over should a condition fail, or for that matter should the driver merely decide they want it to. If you meant though that there would be a mix of manual and self-driving cars allowed because the self-driving ones have collision avoidance, then that doesn't make sense, as a manual car could still create collisions that were unavoidable (even by accident). It's not like self-driving cars have force fields. Having said all that, even if we're talking only about "manual modes" in l5 rather then "manual cars", there are still reasons why they might be banned or at least massively restricted in general, and that's due to infrastructure economics, not crashes. Well developed L5 cars will be capable of operating with a level of precision (in terms of actual road lines and such) and reliability that is beyond the general population, so once all cars reach that level it significantly changes how roads and support infrastructure themselves can be designed. Purely self-driving vehicles simply won't need the lanes to be as wide for example, which directly translates into newly available free space on exisitng roads. That could be used to make them purely thinner (less paving = massive cost savings), gain an extra mechanized vehicle lane for free (higher capacity for the same price), maintain existing numbers of lanes but gain new lanes for walkers/bikers, or some combination. There will be a lot of minor to radical optimizations available with significant economic and quality of life benefits, so long as you don't have to worry about having human drivers at all. That's probably going to tempt a lot of jurisdictions sooner or later.