So much for autonomous vehicles

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Autono ... -Soon.html

So, flying cars (50 years and counting), EVs (cars never ... inner city buses, perhaps), autonomous vehicles, pilotless planes/trains/boats whatever join a growing list of silly ideas that will never get general acceptance in the 20 years and many dreamers will go belly up.

With $500bn being spent by the auto business on EV products that will not sell, I sense an ipace manure spreader in my future. There is going to be some fantastic sales in the coming years and many big names will topple. However, the Paramus NJ Tesla dealership was crowded last Saturday. Big Mercs are going out of style.

BTW, add Apple to that list of stocks to short, another co that is losing focus.

I will be starting to crowdfund a Freetown Corners male review club featuring local native American talent.

Only one of the above ideas will make it ... can you guess which one.

If they were able to remove every human operated vehicle and implement autonomous vehicles they could easily do it right now. It's not the tech that will be the issue but the practicality. The technology will become common over the next decade or so despite the hurdles of dealing with human driven cars.

My prediction is they will mandate it into cars within that time but still have manual drive option. From that point in another 15 or 20 years from then when most cars will be able to be autonomous they take the human driver out of the equation. It may be 30 plus years before this all goes down.

Once it does you open a plethora of possibilities. The biggest benefit is no more stop signs, red lights or even direction of travel on lanes.

So you say 30 years, I say 20.

My prediction is they will mandate it into cars within that time but still have manual drive option.

That I will agree on, those billions will have political muscles to make that happen for sure. The next obstacle for ICE cars will be banned city travel. Congestion taxes like in NYC will be commonplace but they will call it something else. This one was paid for by UBER... where is the screaming?

Such a system will rely on ungodly amounts of high speed data and ELECTRICITY. And with humans designing the software, what could go wrong? Just look at Boeing....

Kevin

KLook wrote: ↑

Sat. Apr. 06, 2019 8:07 am

Such a system will rely on ungodly amounts of high speed data and ELECTRICITY. And with humans designing the software, what could go wrong? Just look at Boeing....

But unlike planes, there will be hundreds of millions doing live "testing" daily. It may be temporarily gruesome, but the bugs should get worked out pretty soon.

Richard S. wrote: ↑

Sat. Apr. 06, 2019 7:03 am

The biggest benefit is no more stop signs, red lights or even direction of travel on lanes.

sorry, I know i'm ancient but I just don't see this as any kind of possibility or positive reality even if every vehicle is full auto. someone is going to have to slow or stop somewhere sometime and you can't have vehicles roaming all over the road way like ants foraging.

besides, i'm pretty sure the time line is considerably optimistic and hope to never see it in my life time beyond inner city surface mass transit.

steve

I'll walk before I ever have one of those. My vote is for the male review club if they have females at least one night a week....

To relieve the congestion...
Major metro areas first...
Think automated uber...
The problem with full auto is...
there will never be 100% failure proof...
Now humans crash all the time so...
if the death rate is below the current human fatality rate...
All is good...
It's just a PR thing at this point...
The computer killed my....
You fill in the family member...
Once the teeth gnashing is over...
It's full speed ahead...
Damn the humans in the way...

It'll only work if all of society decides to become sheep. So, I don't see it taking over for the same reasons that decades of spending billions on expanding mass transit has not replaced personal transportation. People want to be able to have self control over where and when they travel.

If you doubt that, just look at all the bumper to bumper traffic going into cities that have lots of mass transit choices, coupled with all the attempts by cities to get people out of cars and into mass transit.

A lot of technology goes against human nature. Guess which wins.

Then throw in the wise observation from a kid who worked for me - "Everytime they try to make something idiot-proof, somebody goes and invents a better idiot. "

Paul

But think of all the idiots who...
Surf the net, eat, apply makeup, read the paper...
While they drive...
Now they can do that uninterrupted...
Darwin will work on the idiots who press the manual override button...
We will still have the drunk drivers/passengers who press the red button...
In an oh *censored* moment...

KLook wrote: ↑

Sat. Apr. 06, 2019 8:07 am

Such a system will rely on ungodly amounts of high speed data and ELECTRICITY.

There is not a whole lot of data required for the cars themselves or centralized system.

Just look at Boeing....

Most new planes fly themselves these days and can even takeoff and land. While the issues at Boeing are concerning issues with new aircraft they are not new for industry. the aircraft industry has an outstanding safety record compared to other transportation .

rberq wrote: ↑

Sat. Apr. 06, 2019 9:01 am

But unlike planes, there will be hundreds of millions doing live "testing" daily. It may be temporarily gruesome, but the bugs should get worked out pretty soon.

Part of the issue is such small sample size of real world data but these cars are operating on the roads. At worst they may have accident rate similar to humans. That will only improve.

KingCoal wrote: ↑

Sat. Apr. 06, 2019 9:13 am

sorry, I know i'm ancient but I just don't see this as any kind of possibility or positive reality even if every vehicle is full auto.

Making them work when you still have human drivers on the road is a much bigger hurdle because communication is difficult or non-existent. e.g. comouter drive car pulls to stop and human pulls to the other one and waves it through.

Once all these cars autonomous they will be able to communicate with each other and in denser populated areas there will even be centralized communication to manage the flow of traffic. The only signage you would need is for pedestrians, the cars will know they are there and will slow or stop as needed. This stuff is a very long way off but that is gist of it.

besides, i'm pretty sure the time line is considerably optimistic and hope to never see it in my life time beyond inner city surface mass transit.

The technology is available Steve, it's just a matter of how fast the public will accept it.

Sunny Boy wrote: ↑

Sat. Apr. 06, 2019 10:11 am

People want to be able to have self control over where and when they travel.

This would not impede on your ability to travel, in fact it would expand it to many other people. People that can't drive a car because of physical limitations will now be able to own one. There is other possibilities that could even make it more affordable. Suppose you only need a car occasionally and do not want to use mass transit. You may be able to buy just buy the cabin and base shows up on schedule.

When you go to the supermarket today, you drive to the store. Park the car, purchase your groceries and load them into the car and drive home. If the car was autonomous you get into the car and tell it to go the supermarket, while it's driving to the supermarket you can post of the forum complaining about the car. It will drop you off at the front door of the store and go park itself, when you are getting ready to leave it will pull to front door so you can load the groceries into the car. Then you can go back onto the forum and bitch about the car.

If you were really lazy you could just send the car to the store by itself and they will have "Rosie" load it. I'd imagine that would pretty big deal for contractors being able to send a pickup to Lowes. Smaller items will be delivered by drone.

If you doubt that, just look at all the bumper to bumper traffic

When fully implemented this technology is going to greatly improve the flow of traffic. As I already noted lanes of travel will not need direction. You could have traffic going down a street one direction one minute and different direction a minute later. There is a whole lot of things that become available for centralized traffic management if all cars are autonomous.

centralized management of nothing impresses me. hacking, disasters etc etc and it's more chaos than the present.

just sayin,
steve